Caveat before we begin. This is not exhaustive and doesn’t look at every facet of how Modern Western Culture causes harm. It’s not my intention to gather all those threads. This is just the lens I am looking through today because i am a fallible woman who is learning to use her voice and not the oracle at delphi.
 
Modern Western Culture (MWC) is a collection of forces that unconsciously shape our social landscape. MWC has a central theme that tough and hard is good. We see that in the honouring of the warrior archetype, the ruthless businessman, the go get ‘em entrepreneur.
 
The be the best, winner takes all, no prizes for second, go hard or go home mentality is the air we breathe.
 
If we try to navigate life  in MWC without a critical eye, we can think the world is a pretty hard place. We learn quickly that neediness and vulnerability are considered weak and undesirable, that rest and disability and failing are not. an. option. We should just Do It ®. In relationships, news media, social media and current popular political movements we are encouraged to go hard regardless of suffering, regardless of the impact on others (aka the weak) and the planet.
 
To be human is to fail, it’s always going to mean stumbling and falling. It’s always going to be messy, painful, embarrassing, but this MWC thinking has us repelled by our own softness. It teaches us to be disgusted with our wobbliness as we learn, our own hurt and emotional response to the inevitable tender and difficult aspects of life.  .
 
We are always going to need things aka be needy and if we are growing and learning we will always make mistakes. When we believe that these very human responses to life are things to hide and be ashamed of we begin to make maladaptations.  In these mal-adaptations we attempt to shut down our neediness and instead try for invulnerability. We shut down to our failures and stop trying. We learn, for fuck’s sake, to think we have done well if we don’t cry at a funeral.
 
In a world where it’s not so much who we are, rather what we make that matters, we begin to jettison our innate humanness.  We value how we appear and what we produce over our truth and experience. We become the ones who say what we do rather than who we are. We are repelled by the very things that encourage us to belong; things like story-telling, vulnerability, connectedness and nurturance.
 
 
Nurturance.
 
The world nurture has its root in the word meaning to suckle or to nourish. A nurturing relationship then, is one in which we are nourished and where we are safe to bring our innocence and child-like tenderness.
 
In the view of the polyvagal theory regulating our system and coming into a sense of safety requires two things;
1. we need to make sure we are not under threat – there’s no sabre toothed tiger in the room and
2. We are able to connect and cooperate with trustworthy others.  This connection is predicated on the need for nurturance, we have to be safe to be vulnerable and to receive nourishment.
 
Despite it being the central quality for a sense of safety which is the bedrock of development and coping for all humans MWC would have us dispise nurturance.
 
In a dog eat dog world there is little place for nurturance.  
 
One of the biggest signals of value in MWC is where the money is. When you look at roles that are by nature engaged with nurturance you see the truth; parenting, childcare, teaching, nursing, death-work, all of these nurturing roles are low paid work. They don’t have value in MWC.
 
The impact of devaluing nurturance
How does this lack of value of nurturance impact us. Does it show up in our undervaluing of self-knowledge, the so called navel gazing of self-reflection? Does it show up in how self-care is considered a mani-pedi and a haircut or buying a bigger car? Does it show up in our vicious inner critic who has no limits on how cruel it can be if we stumble or fail? Does it show up in our rigidity, lack of rest and addiction to busyness? Are we lead to believe we are like a machine and drive ourselves into suffering while neglecting the signs along the way?
 
How does it show up in our relationship? Does it show up in our desire to give someone who is crying a tissue and a platitude, to hurry them into happy? The shiny impenetrable glaze of “think positive” and “look on the bright-side” that’s offered to people who are suffering? Does the nervous system, get what it needs? Is that need over-ridden so many times that we begin to feel we are intrinsically wrong? What does that do to a nervous system? To our wellbeing? To our ability to connect with others?
 
What does the social devaluing of nurturance do to the family system. Does it teach us to value pushing ahead and the striving into the outer world rather than the resting with and tending of nurturance. Does it have us stay busy in our outer lives rather than taking time to be with each other. Does it have us turn away from the vulnerabilities of ageing? Does it make people who are just mothers or just fathers or just guardians shrink or become invisible? Does it mean that the broken relationship to nurturance in a family system becomes a burden? Are children taking on the thinking that despite the neurobiological imperative, the fact they are missing nurturance means they are bad/faulty/not enough or too much? Does that mean we go into life trying to disguise our neediness and faultiness and doing so by not listening to ourselves and perpetuating the cycle?
 
What if on a global scale neediness is discouraged and shamed? Does it misshape neediness and the call to interconnectedness into entitlement?  Does the denial of our own natural neediness twist into greed. Does it turn up in the behaviour of the “weak” being exploited by the “strong”? In the powerful taking what they want and damn the consequences?
 
 
 
What if we repatriate neediness?
 
Chris Zydel an expressive arts therapist in San Francisco and general glorious human encourages her students to be

“needy greedy and proud of it.”
 
This invitation opens the door to self-acknowledgment. As that long-shut door creaks open, often what rushes in is hunger, grief and confusion. How long have we been waiting for someone to tell us it’s ok to want and to need? How do we learn to understand that which we have taken such pains to deny?
 
This invitation is the beginning of a quiet revolution. It’s in this nurturance that we start to uncouple from important parts of the harm-making of modern western culture.
 
It’s in the living into the acknowledgment of this woundedness that we begin to come into clarity; clarity about what we long for, clarity about what works and doesn’t work for us, clarity about what is true.
 
It’s in this state of clarity that we can begin to resource ourselves and fill our cups with what works, without having to grab everything, we learn what is enough.
 
It’s in this well nurtured, replete state that we begin to understand ourselves, that we begin to humanise. We learn to listen to our bodies, we learn to rest, we learn when to leap and when to wait. We learn about who is with us and who is harmful to us, who to trust and who to turn away from. We build healthier connections and respectfully see ourselves as part of the ecosystems of our lives. We learn to connect to meaning and our sense of purpose and live into that in a respectful way.
 
It’s within the gentle holding of nurturance that we learn to respect. When we see ourselves as worthy of respect, through the nurturing eyes of another, we come into a new relationship with enoughness. When we respect ourselves we learn to behave in honourable ways;  we learn to respect ourselves, our limits, of others, of the system around us.  We come into an interconnected and respectful relationship that acknowledges if we cause harm to ourselves, we cause harm to the interconnected system we are a part of.
 
It’s in this right relationship with nurturance and respect that we undo the imperatives of dominance and control that MWC is predicated on. It’s in this right relationship that we can begin to find solutions to the challenges of this broken paradigm. It’s in the arms of nurturance and respect that we become free to be human.

So fuck harden up. let's go soft. let's nourish and nurture. let's create a rebellion of tenderness. 

Are you in?

I want to talk about human Threat response and covid19.
The other day, I listened in dismay to a supermarket worker talk about the hideous behaviour of some people in the shop. The day before, I was waiting in a patient and well distanced line at the pharmacy, when a white man came into the queue and pushed in and started swearing and generally being belligerent.
I felt scared. I felt sorrow for the workers and others who are doing the best they can in really difficult and scary conditions and did not deserve that treatment. And I felt aghast for my fellow pharmacy queuers who felt intimidated and upset.
And now I am feeling for the angry people. That's not some spiritual bypassy nonsense. That's after a lot of reflection on my distress and leaning into the principles of Somatic Experiencing and the Polyvagal theory.
I will attempt my simple understanding of the way it works... here goes...
Our nervous systems have developed to respond to a threat in several ways. These all happen unconsciously.
Firstly, we try to think/negotiate/create our way out of it (this is the ventral/front or "newest" part of our brain).
If that doesn't work, or we have not had good experience using this, we go to the next level (the sympathetic nervous system or more ancient part of our brain.) This part of us is ready to respond to the sabre-toothed tiger. It's the fight and flight part of the brain. If you think you can take the threat on, you will fight and if you think you can outrun it, you will flight (or run).
If that doesn't work, or again, you have lived through experiences that have taught you that you don't have a lot of skill with threat, or, in the moment you are overwhelmed, you use the most ancient part of your brain the dorsal/hind-brain at the back of your skull. This is where you freeze or go into shut down.
I hope you are still with me.
Back to the shouty man in the queue. People are scared. This virus thing is out of our lived experience. (I could go off on a tangent about the lost art of story and how if we had kept alive the stories of the Spanish flu we might have navigated this differently but, I digress.)
We have been raised to think we can be the masters of the planet. We have learned to take what we want, when we want it, in the way that suits us. We don't have experience of our own puny place in the real scheme of things except for bushfires and tsunami and earthquake and something in our psyche convinces us that was a one off and we move on with the relentless entitlement that seems endemic in our culture.
At the moment, we are faced with this unfamiliar threat. It’s a threat that we can't see, it's minute and yet powerful, that is taking people out despite their status, power or wealth; aka all the things we have been taught to believe, matter.
We are all having to do things we don't want to do, live a way we don't want to live. We are having to curtail, cut off, submit. We don't like it. It's a threat. And that threat makes us respond. Remember this is not conscious.
Some of us are to the threat responding from our ventral system. We are connecting, being creative and community minded, building new ways to stay safe and strong. This doesn't mean we are not scared or feel the loss. We just respond by learning, connecting and being thoughtful and creative. To respond like this we have had to have lived pretty safe, well supported lives, be well resourced, have done some inner work to resolve trauma etc.
Some of us are responding from the “sympathetic” part of our systems. We are wanting to run and we can't. In Aotearoa NZ right now, because lockdown for a month, this means just that, no hanging with whanau, sauntering and jaunts to the beach or the bach or the fishing trip.
We are reacting from the fight part of the sympathetic response. In many cases this is a well-worn path honed by finding relief in intimidation and aggression; if you roar loud enough most things will run away.
Sometimes the fight response is heightened as a result of our own trauma and learned behaviour. And, right now, many people who otherwise wouldn’t, are acting from this fight response through stress and complete overwhelm.
We reach this place of being driven anger in an attempt to get the threat out of our faces.
These are the people who are angry in the supermarket and in the pharmacy queue. They are also the usually mild mannered person who snapped at us, the mother with her kids on lockdown losing her cool, the father crying in the car before he comes inside.
Does it excuse anger and intimidation? No.
But knowing there are people out there who are likely to be on a short fuse is important.
How do we manage this? We are wise to pay acute attention to our own feelings, not deny or avoid. We can try to be self aware, self reflective. We can try to build safe connection that will allow us to talk things out. This will often help us move into the frontal part of our brain, bring it back on line.
We can run or do exercise to release some of the pent-up fight/flight response we are all feeling. We can shout into a pillow. We can rip up paper (not toilet paper coz that's gold apparently - an attempt at humour). We can dig the garden. Movement will help us mitigate that flight/fight response. All things we can feasibly do in lockdown.
We have a responsibility for taking care of ourselves. That means navigating things with care. Trying to pay attention to how we are feeling. Asking for help. Taking breaks. Talking to people. Being kind to ourselves. Noticing something that is growing, like a pot-plant, or changing, like clouds.
None of which is encouraged by modern western culture (as you will know if you have been following my work for any time at all!) #smashthepatriarchy.
There will be many people who are unable to do this moderating or mitigating. Who are angry and lashing out. If you are one of those people or stuck in quarantine with one of those people, please contact agencies listed below for support. You deserve to be safe.
As for the third response from the dorsal part of our brain? That's shut-down. That's when we can't think, or feel. When we curl up. And sweet human, we need you with your heart light on to make a way in the darkness. If you find yourself in shutdown, please rest. Please ask for help. Please be gentle and please return. Many people use alcohol and substances to maintain this state and it's going to be harder to isolate and continue with this, again if you can please get help.
Not everyone has the resources to cope during this time. Not everyone can just get through. Not everyone has the capacity.
So, dear one. When we tend to ourselves kindly and with understanding and generosity we are more likely to be able to navigate our way back to the ventral part of our brain, think cogently, understand, learn, be creative and connect with others.
When we drive ourselves beyond our capacity we are less able to hold that place of thought and conscious decision making. We respond to threat in ways we are not proud of. And some of us are doing the best we can and it's not enough for us to cope.
So, what am I trying to encourage you to do? If you have the resources; be kind to yourself. If you don't please ask for help.

I am the kind of person who has a face that looks like I am sour or mean or hard or displeased when I seldom am.
I am a person who often gets misinterpreted.
I am the kind of person who walks around noticing shapes and colours and thinking about the ways they might work in a painting.
I am a person who gets inspiration in inconvenient places and sometimes has to stop and tend to that. 
I am a person who regrets the many creative acts she didn’t do for fear of failure.
I am the kind of person who spends energy just staying in a noisy space. A lot of energy.
I am a person who spends time translating what I am thinking into my approximation of non weirdness. 
I am a person who can be nutting out a problem in my writing or my course creating, as I do groceries and be oblivious to other people walking by.
I am a person who may be seen as unfriendly because of that.
I’m a person who seldom follows threads of friendship , not because I don’t want them but because I am engaged in loving what’s right in front of me and needing refill, so that I am seldom available for anything else, as lovely as that might be.
I am also a person who believes that people don't really want to spend time with me and that shrinking away is safer and kinder.
I am a person others turn away from. 
I am a person who loves big and likes people but has a tank for interacting that needs constant refills. (See translation comment above). 
I am a person who is learning about themselves, has been oblivious to harm making and is learning another way, trying to undo and mend.
I am a person who is grieving.
I am a person who who knows what I experience is not what everyone else does and who gets confused about what to leave in and what to leave out sometimes. 
I am a person who can cry at a colour or a bird song or kindness and a person who gets enraged at meanness. Particularly my own.
I am a person who values being understood.

,i was listening to this podcast about the world's smartest animals

it was funny and thought provoking.

One of the contestants, and eventual winners, was the sperm whale.  

Sperm whale won on the basis of being thought to have a "we consciousness," which meant that they thought and felt as a unit. If one sperm whale was suffering they felt that suffering and responded collectively.

I started to think what it might be like to live in a community where we truly felt as a we.

How difficult it would be to experience your fellow human's distress and humiliation, as if it were your own?

Would it be so easy to hurt each other?  To incarcerate children on the border? Leave them to suffer indignity and humiliation? 

And what about the planet? Imagine if we could feel we-ness with the earth. With the air's pollution, the river's choking, the fire's burning, 

If we felt the we-ness of this place, I imagine things would be very different.

I wonder if part of us remembers being inextricably linked with each other, with our surroundings. I wonder if that is either our default setting; something that we knew in the days when we began to hunt and had ritual to engage with gratitude for the spirit of the deer that we were about to kill. 

I wonder if that part of us knew just how to treat the land and the water we depended on because we were in relation with it. We had a "We consciousness".

I wonder if that part of us was selected out as we became more aggressive with each other, more territorial?  If we began to lose the we consciousness as a defense against feeling too much when we got greedy or murderous with our neighbours?

I wonder if we are living in a we-consciousness deficit?

If our systems are struggling to cope with the lack of connection and belonging we are experiencing?

If the world around us is showing the result of this lack of we?

Is that why so many of us are living in a state of constant fight or flight? Why anxiety is rampant?

I wonder if that is why children are coming into this world in neurodiverse ways?  Is the presence of young ones so averse to the noise and busyness, the harshness of chemicals and pollutants a readjustment to our we-ness?

Are we so biologically far from what it looks like to live in connection with our life support system - the planet and each other - that our systems are sounding the alarm?

I wonder if we are beginning to experience the end of the I-ness?

It's been a while.

Instead, I find myself furiously posting on Facebook in an effort to call out the Emperor's new clothes.  It feels like trying to shout into a hurricane.

But it's one of the ways shout anyway.

And part of my shouting out is in doing my own inner work.

In turning towards my own contribution to the harmmaking in the world and doing what i can, being responsible for my part, I  become the change agent in my own life and in this way changing what i contribute to the world. 

A big part of that is my commitment to shadow work.

I have been doing shadow work for about six years now.

Facing the Minotaur is the biggest body of work i have completed and something i am immensely proud of.

My immersion in shadow work leads me to see the world through the lense of shadow, which is particularly helpful at this time where so much unbelievable destruction and dissension is becoming common place.

In a world where we are now so desensitised by a barrage of bizzare and harmful things that we watch in stunned horror at the Amazonian rainforest and its people being destroyed, the Sonoran desert being irrevocably harmed for a wall that will do nothing, the English economy tank, the American economy be 'ordered" to invent new markets... and that's just this week.

So i look at shadow.

In shadow work we understand that we have a persona or a face we present to the world. This usually, in a effort for us to succeed in the world, to find love and belonging, persona is a mixture of "good" qualities like friendliness, hard working, family oriented, kind, ambitious and a few "bad" qualities  greed, selfishness, meanness.  

Usually the "good" outweigh the "bad". Usually we think we are pretty good people. 

This persona is brittle. It's often easily cracked in defensiveness or stress and through these cracks, the other contents of our being come through.  Often these contents are likely to be "bad"; rage, viciousness, destructiveness etc and they come pouring out through the cracks and cause havoc.

Often we blame the "other" for the presence of these "ugly" things - we find ways to quickly disown them, find some scapegoat or some one "less" than us to be the owner of these disgusting traits.

But the truth is we are like the ocean.  The surface of the ocean is vast and we can think we see the ocean; we watch it change from glassy smooth to storm whipped waves and we can think we know it.  But underneath is a huge and complex ecosystem that contains huge life force. We can't afford to dismiss this in knowing the ocean of self.  The leviathans and predators that live there will "get us" if we ignore them and are unwilling to take them into account when we are out swimming around.

We have to understand the hidden and alive aspects of the self and we have to do it in a hurry.

Otherwise we run the risk of not taking responsibility for the things that we can change.  We will get drawn into the seductive power of following someone who let's us off the hook by blaming "the other" for our woes.  We will be righteous in defense of our own blamelessness and perfection and this, in its most vicious form, gives us permission to destroy.

We have to learn to abandon our defense of persona in favour of understanding our own hidden and harmful characteristics. 

We can reclaim our own drive to destruction in order to stop it being expressed outside ourselves.

But we have to do it now.

Stop believing it's all "their" fault. 

Start seeing our full selves; the sharklike self and the glorious dolphin - we need to SEA ourselves into responsible action.

I have been thinking about justice and fairness most of my life.

I think being raised in New Zealand implants the idea of fairness as part of your basic understanding of right.  Well maybe it's having a working class coalminer Grandfather, but i understand the New Zealand psyche as having a deep connection to a sense of fairness. Our socialist style of governance has been taking a battering over the last decade or so but it's an underpinning principle of our country.

One day, when i was working as a nurse in the surgical ward with a wonderful woman i sat on her bed, at the end of the day with tears in my eyes.  We had gotten to know each other.  I used to steal her out of the ward in my lunch break and wheel her down to sit in the sun with me.  We'd talk about life and laugh and sunbathe with our uniform and nightie respectively hiked up.
She had a painful and hideous condition that wasn't going to get better.  And the day i sat on her bed was one where i had had to perform a very painful dressing change on her.  She saw the tears and said "What's wrong?"  I said "It's not fair.  You are a good person and this (waving my hands at her failing body), is just unfair."

She got a steely look in her eye and jabbed her finger through the air in my direction.  'The sooner you realise, my girl, that life is not fair and that no one promised you it would be the happier you will be."

I have never forgotten that conversation but i find myself veering into the it's not fair lane more often than perhaps i would like.  Ok i would like never to veer into that lane.  Whining about things not being fair never gets me anywhere.

And yet i do.

There are situations, i have come to see and know intimately, that fairness will not be possible.

I am in one of those situations right now.  

I feel a deep yawning chasm of fairness in me and i often stand and look into it with longing... wishing it could be filled.

But it won't be filled in the way i want.

The fairness will never come.

I can mourn that and i can complain about that.  i can get angry about the loss and the injustice.  i can try to pretend it doesn't matter to me and it's all good (actually i can't do that very well because it feels like such complete bullshit to be so avoidant.  it does matter. No question)

But i cannot get the fairness from the place i am longing for it to come from.

So i prayed over it and what i got this morning from prayer was

"Justice is mine to create."

That's it.

I get to supply the justice i need. i get to supply the fairness for myself.  i get to tend to the things that do and don't. 

I get to make it fair with my own tools, my own understandings,  my own understandings, my own values, my own capacity, my own desires.

I don't have to outsource justice.  

I get to provide it.

Instead of being hungry looking in the window at the food i wish i could have and will never be invited to share, i can walk away and create my own feast.  I will do this with good grace and in ways that really meet me where i need to be met.

I will create my own justice and it will nourish me deeply.

Tell me what justice you need to create.  Let me make a blessing for you - just leave a comment below and i will make a blessing to meet you in your justice needs.

with love


j

When we are hurt our first reaction is to draw away.

This is the kind of wisdom that has kept us here on the planet (for better or worse). It makes evolutionary sense to know when we must learn that something is dangerous or potentially so.  

When we feel pain we get a chance to withdraw and make a better decision.  We get to choose another action, another path.

We may learn the lesson for ourselves, and pass it on to those we love.

"Don't touch the flame you will get burned."  "That is sharp, be careful".  "Those are poisonous. Don't eat them"

There are times though, when our instincts either don't serve us or we over-ride them - both causing more harm than we need to endure.. 

There are versions of hurt; a broken heart for example, where our instincts tell us to run.  We want to run from the pain, distract ourselves, avoid the suffering.  This means that our hurt is buried out of sight and we are blinded to the root cause or to any potential we have to learn from it.

Couple that with situations of psychological harm, emotional harm, where our instincts tell us to run away and our hurt is so overwhelming that we get frozen.  We stay when we should run.  Or we avoid looking at what is really happening because the cost of discovering what is really happening is too great. 

When our patterning, our cultural mores, our understanding of what is ok, colludes with harm making - a good woman is compliant and makes the peace is a good example, we are bound to the harm making in ways that set us up, if not for diminishment then for deep wounding.

It takes a step out of both our cultural paradigms and our instinct to avoid hurt to come face to face with the harm making we are experiencing.

If you have a broken heart there may be some things that will help you tend to the harm without making you feel like you have been smashed by it.


"When i look into my heart what do i believe?"
"Whose voice does that remind me of?"
"Where can i turn for insight and wisdom on this ?"
"How can i be kinder to myself in order to allow the shy truth to reveal itself?"

When you are hurt the last thing you need is to hurt more with an unkind internal voice, all you are doing is colluding with the harm maker.

Find a way to speak to yourself kindly, take responsibility for your part in things and take action to mend.

Turning towards your pain is a way of ensuring the future will be different.  Turning away will make the same lessons more insistent. 

If you are interested in doing work that will help you turn towards yourself in suffering you might like Facing the Minotaur. Please go here to find out more about it.

with love
j

This quote fills me with hope.

When i first began my enquiry into the world of shadow i was shitting myself and in truth, hope-less.

I knew that i was a hideous person - a martyr, a weakling, a liar, avoidant and o so much more.  I sure as hell didn't want to engage with any of that shit more than i had to.

Give me the shiny and the sweet any day.

But i knew, at the bottom of my sinking heart, that i had to look at those things in order to resolve the struggle i was constantly finding myself in - the seemingly unending ways my arseholery would turn up and leap into the spotlight.  

I knew it was underneath my exhaustion.  I knew it was underneath my imposter syndrome, my self sabotage, my volatile relationships.  I knew that underneath all that was growing heavier by the day, were my failings and faults. Holding them down was becoming more and more arduous and I felt that if i kept dragging them around as i tried to walk in the world i would fall.  Maybe for good.

I'm telling you this because i want to tell you i understand how shadow work can feel like the last bloody thing you want to do.  When trying to hold onto the light is like a lifeline into the world you want to have, into the space where you are able to breathe, not drowning in the hard stuff.

It's my experience though that clinging onto the light, it gets more and more brittle.  It's like the pressure of the unexpressed shadow robs the strength out of the experience of the light.  It's like osteoporosis of the soul.  The strength of your light is leached by unexpressed shadow and it is more and more easily fractured.

That's why this quote gave me so much hope.  

If by approaching shadow "it becomes softer, more pliable, more gentle", then perhaps i too will become softer, more pliable, more gentle?

Although i didn't believe it, i began the work which has become Facing The Minotaur.  This work, the gleanings of a 5 year process of enquiry, intuition, experimentation, learning and practice, has proven the veracity of this quote.

What once scared me shitless is now the ground for my recovery, my strength and my growth.

It is not a quick fix and is a dedication to wholeness that will call on your courage and commitment and it has changed my life.  I am truly honoured to share it with you and if you have any questions or thoughts about shadow or about Facing the Minotaur i would love to connect with you about it.

With love and gratitude

​Jane