I have been asked what some of my self-care practices are as we move deeper into crisis. I would like to take a few days to share some of these. Every morning I wake up and ask my body what it needs. This begins to determine how I structure my day. If I’m tired I pull back, if I have energy I push forward. I work at the speed of my body.

Be careful not to justify cruelty by calling it boundaries. Cruelty is easy. Real boundaries are harder because they are about freedom, healing, and compassion not just for ourselves, but also for those we are needing to refrain from. I’m seeing so much cruelty not because we are inherently cruel but because we are all struggling to tend to what is becoming overwhelming personal and collective trauma, grief, and anger.

An informal thread on anger and hate.

To begin with, though they have similar felt energies, anger and hate are not the same emotion. However, we could also say that anger does energize hate. I understand anger to be the tension we experience between being hurt and our deep desire to tend to that hurt. Not knowing how to tend to the hurt we get swept up in the tension and start reacting to it. That reaction is the experience we call anger.

A thread about sorrow.

My sorrow is old and familiar. My practice has made it possible to slowly began holding and metabolizing not just my sorrow, but the sorrow of my ancestors, my community, the earth, and even the sorrow of my descendants. This is imperative work for me. By metabolizing I mean practicing noticing the sorrow, naming it, owning it, experiencing it, and finally letting it go and floating it back into the spaciousness of my mind. I call this process SNOELL and can be found in my book Love and Rage.

A thread if u need support right now:

As we enter into this fall, we have to take time to do our mourning. Lean on & into our spiritual supports, our practice, our loved ones, our communities. Remember that you are not the only one hurting, afraid, and feeling lonely. Let yourself cry. Imagine that you are crying with and on behalf of the world. Especially imagine crying for those who have forgotten how to cry. Cry for those who do not know how to cry, who let their unmetabolized pain turn into violence against themselves, u, and others.

I am praying for the light today. When I say that I am praying for the light what I mean is that I am deciding to become the light. I also accept that there is darkness in the world. I understand that the darkness I see in the world is also the darkness I see in myself. #Diwali There is no darkness in the world that does not also abide in some form in me. When I acknowledge the dark, I am also acknowledging that I could not know the blessing of light without first naming the darkness. #Diwali

These are what my prayers sound like today: Blessed Mother, though I understand the nature of the relative and know this world to be like an uncomfortable dream, it is not my true home. Please bless me that I may survive the violence and trauma of trying to wake up and may I endure the violence of helping others to wake up as well.

The thing about Serena WillIams and how she took a stand is how much emotional labor she was doing on behalf of so many of us who feel emotionally shutdown, powerless, and/ or apathetic to challenging our own suffering in oppressive conditions. At least for me, she mirrored all the frustration that I experience in a field/community that was not created for me. And she reminded me that my anger and rage are justified responses to the ways systems attempt to policing me into silence and consent.