A few years ago when I was a little more active in climate organising, I was part of an affinity group with a penchant for dance actions. We held space with dance and music, channelling our emotions into action, publicly declaring our intentions for a more just and regenerative world.
We used our joy as part of our resistance.
I love this method for so many reasons.
One, my experience matches that of Monica Hunken, who said “I’ve done a lot of actions and a lot of blockades and we always have more time in the space … with theater or dance or music,” before the police break up the scene. Sometimes, she says “the security guards might even enjoy it.”
And secondly, with influence from Kazu Haga’s wisdom, I believe that our movements can and should be spaces for healing. Healing and art, in my experience, go hand in hand.
My calling to devote more time to art and activism is getting stronger again. As I dip my toes back in, I’m conscious to call on the tools I teach in my burnout to thriving course, Internal Revolution.
(Yep – I need them too, and created this course for a reason).
For activism – and any form of changemaking – to be sustainable we need spaces that infuse and inspire our joy, as much as our rage. That fill us back up.
Because I’m not interested (and I suspect, neither are you), in just ‘avoiding burnout’. I care about thriving. Flourishing. Living my most meaningful, exciting and impactful life.
I’ll be giving away one free spot at that workshop to my longer program, Internal Revolution starting in August, but whether you want or can join that, you’ll get lots of value from this workshop alone.
Hey reader – how’s your heart today? For many of us, I know this week has been painful and frightening.
From the overturning of Roe v Wade in the US, the shooting at an LGBTQ+ nightclub in Norway, to the continued raids and crackdown on climate protests in Australia – It’s been a heavy week.
Considering all this, I’ve been reflecting on sentiments from friends in the US who said that the Supreme Court had been bought, and therefore was for sale. Similar sentiments were made – on a different issue – back here in Australia, suggesting money was the answer we need.
These sentiments have merit. There is little doubting the influence of money in politics (no matter the country), and the role it has played in the rise of the far right.
The problem is in the solution though. As Audre Lorde famously wrote, “For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”
Genuine change is not buying back our options. It’s a total revolution of values and systems.
To be clear, money isn’t a bad thing – it’s not the root of all evil, wealth is not the same thing as capitalism, and wielding it with power doesn’t lead to corruption (more on that in another email).
But we’re not dealing with a broken system – we’re dealing with systems that fundamentally were not designed for the wellbeing of all, and ‘buying’ our way to power is not enough.
We’re not looking to tweak the system – we’re looking to revolutionise it.
So, this week, while we find our footing, I want to offer some guidance to finding your most meaningful path to change.
1. Feel.
Love is a powerful foundation for activism. It is the essence of social healing, the heart of transformation.
But love without the containers of grief and rage is merely platitude.
Love engages all of our emotions – grief, wonder, joy, rage. There is no bypassing the messy, uncomfortable or painful parts.
Our grief and rage this week offer us a compass to where we best act, and we benefit from time to feel them.
Rushing to action – reacting to our emotions, and not responding to them – not only contributes to stress and burnout, but also to ineffective action. The compass, after all, can orient us to our journey, but it doesn’t tell us what to pack.
Take time to be present this week. To return to your body, to the wisdom of feelings, to let them guide you to response.
2. Vision.
We live in a world shaped by someone else’s imagination, and – very often – our wellbeing was often not included in that vision. It’s time to change that.
For too long the lie has been sold that “this is just the way the world is”, “people can’t change”, “power only corrupts”.
For too long we have been trapped in hustle culture, exhausted by capitalism, with little time to vision and dream of different ways.
Dreaming can also feel painful when it butts against the reality of the world.
Visioning, however, is a form of sovereignty, of conjuring, and resilience.
As you honour your feelings, trusting their compass, ask yourself: what is the world and outcome I desire here?
3. Organise.
The more just, regenerative world – the one that calls us from the stretches of our imagination – is not born through our purchasing power.
It requires collective organising.
Some of this organising will be in the form of mutual aid, to create support networks for those in need.
Some of this organising will be to disrupt – to vocally, publicly and courageously stand against injustice. To stop the machine in its tracks and empower others to join them in the disruption.
And some of this organising will be to build – to create the systems that stand when the current structures fall (and they will – history teaches us that all structures do).
Where is your compass guiding you?
4. Revolution is an Inside Job.
For all we work to change the structures and systems around us, we must also work to unpack our internalisations of the system (read: patriarchy, capitalism, supremacy culture). The inner work is where we learn to put down the masters tools.
As we rage, grieve, vision and organise for a better world, let us tend and heal the wounds these systems have left behind. May we plant tiny seeds of revolution within us, so that we embody the change we seek.
There’s no one way to change the world, and we should and can use our money to influence change. But the world we want isn’t for sale, so let us also use our head, heart and hands in offer this week.
As always – reach out, let me know how you’re doing.
Queer is a word I didn’t always feel comfortable using. Sometimes I still don’t, its other meaning being ‘strange’.
Growing up, it seemed that queerness was something okay for other people, but less so for myself. It took a long time to accept and embrace my queerness – to see it as a gift.
Pride Month started as a way to commemorate the US Stonewall riots, which occurred at the end of June 1969. (How often we celebrate or remember protests of the past, while rejecting movements of the present…).
Pride is born out of rebellion and rage. It’s born out a refusal to conform, to ignore the truth of our experiences and feelings. A refusal to lay down in the face of injustice. It is a commitment to radical and inclusive joy, an honour to the wholeness of our experiences, and a refusal to diminish them in the presence of others.
Queerness, beyond my sexuality, is my ability to orient to a world that I cannot see yet. Toward wholeness, toward truth, and away from what culture has conditioned in us. To see beyond who and what I am supposed to be or do, to who and what I am actually called.
Queer – and particularly trans – activists have a long history of envisioning a new, more imaginative world, before it is born to reality.
This month, as we celebrate queerness in our communities, friends, children, *ourselves*, let us also honour this through playing and discovering new ways of orienting to a more beautiful world. Orienting toward wholeness.
And of course, let us support and celebrate the LGBTQ+ activists who continue to fight for liberation in the many parts of the world where queerness is not yet celebrated.
“Power is not brute force and money; power is in your spirit. Power is in your soul. It is what your ancestors, your old people gave you. Power is in the earth; it is in your relationship to the earth.” –Winona LaDuke
I’ve been writing power this week as Business for the Revolution comes together (more coming soon!), but it’s also been front of mind as I’ve made some big decisions, grappling with fear, doubt & what it means to own my power.
One of the struggles we hold with power is often the idea that power means power overor power under.
We equate power with domination and control.
We hold stories that power is dirty, that power needs money, or that people power is fine but it’s not something we can wield individually.
It’s no surprise that cultural stories of powerful women tend to fall on a spectrum from the Lolita femme-fatale to the ‘nasty woman’, who perhaps holds power but, you know, lacks connection, friendship & warmth.
These stories all imply that power is bad – that power is corrupt, and cannot be trusted. And of course in some cases this is true – when it perverts itself into domination.
But these stories also all uphold the status quo, they all perpetuate business as usual.
To pretend the status quo is not deeply invested in our belief in our powerlessness would be naive.
So this brings us back to the question – what does it mean to own our power?
The natural world is filled with power – just consider the elements – that wields itself without domination.
Our power in co-creation is in our unity, not our separation.
And power – whether we believe it or not – is something we all have more of than we think, because we all have agency.
So who would you be if you trusted your power? What would you do if you knew yourself to be powerful?
What possibilities would you hold that you now consider to be limited?
What limitations would you reject?
What would power look like to you, if it wasn’t over or under anyone else?
I talk about capitalism a lot. Whether it’s healing internalised capitalism or seeding business beyond capitalism, its transcendance is at the core of this school’s purpose.
But, what actually is it?
Capitalism is an economic system that has social, cultural & political threads to it. Its most common definition is a system in which trade and industry are controlled by private owners, rather than by the state.
But it’s also based on three, less-talked-about and detrimental principles:
1. The pursuit of infinite growth on a finite planet.
2. The artificial production of scarcity (to fuel said growth).
3. The devaluation of complex, living systems to lifeless resources
It’s these principles that lead to the climate crisis & inequity we see today (along with other crises), and ask us to imagine a world beyond capitalism.
But here’s the thing. This system is so ubiquitous – so all encompassing – that it can be hard to imagine a world beyond it.
We’ve also internalised it to a degree that it shows up in our belief systems, values & habits. (you can learn more here,)
This means to vision & seed a world beyond capitalism – one with less burnout, stress, hustle, extraction, not-enoughness – we need to look first to the ways the system lives through us and as us. The ways we unconsciously assume “this is just the way things are”, or “the way the world works”.
We need to look within, to see how we can untangle it from our minds & hearts, before (and during) we do any work of changing the system ‘out there’.
Otherwise we might transform it, but not transcend it.
I want to offer you two reflection prompts today:
1What would a world without scarcity feel like, in your body? What emotions & sensations come up when you imagine this?
2How might you generate that feeling of aliveness this week? That sense of energy, wonder, possibility & life? (note: this space is where some magic happens).
With the right conditions our minds & bodies are capable of tremendous healing.
A decade ago I would have questioned that. I remember feeling that something was irretrievably broken inside me – physically and emotionally – that despite my best attempts, was unable to be fixed.
And I was right – fixing was not possible. However I learnt with the right therapy, the right tools, the right conditions, we can heal. (fixing and healing are two very different things, but that’s an email for another day).
And so it is with our world. The fault lines that exist. The fractures that occur between us. The ruptures that tear at democracy and civil society. With the right tools, the right conditions, we heal.
What are these conditions though?
John Paul Lederach, a Professor of International Peacebuilding, talks about a concept of critical yeast. So often in changemaking (or even entrepreneurship) we focus on ‘critical mass’ – that critical number of people we need to reach before a movement or idea takes off exponentially.
John Paul, however, suggests that more central to change is the idea of criticalyeast. These few improbable and persistent people, who through their quality of relationship create the conditions for new possibilities to emerge, shifting and transforming generations to come.
So what lessons can we take from yeast as changemakers?
Yeast is the smallest ingredient, yet carries the potential to grow all others. The small, the relational, matters.
We know that yeast is sensitive to the light, and works best in the dark – the unknown.
Alone, yeast has little capacity to create growth. It needs to move and mingle to have impact.
Yeast cannot be mixed in directly and quickly. Initial growth must be cultivated carefully.
Yet yeast, after the initial phase, does well to be mixed and kneaded. It requires pressure to work to its potential.
This time holds opportunity for us all to be the critical yeast of change.
Social healing isn’t about numbers.
It’s about the quality of our relationships – our ability to listen, to hold space for nuance and complexity, to think imaginatively, to embody our values, to allow conflict to be the deepening of our relationship and not the end.
So I invite you today to consider what social healing could look like in your industry or community, and how you can activate a little yeast like energy into your work.
I came across a passage by Martin Shaw recently, the mythologist and storyteller, where he asked “What if we reframed ‘living with uncertainty’ to ‘navigating mystery’? There’s more energy in that phrase. The hum of imaginative voltage.”
This reframe has stuck with me as I work on some (exciting!) news and offerings (stay tuned!).
We live in a time of great, beautiful, unsettling uncertainty. Reframing this as mystery – for me, at least – adds an element of adventure. In mystery lies possibility and imagination, two seeds of change.
This reframing also ties in nicely with a poem I want to share, written by Ayisha Siddiqa, titled On Another Panel About Climate, They Ask Me to Sell the Future and All I’ve Got is a Love Poem
What if the future is soft and revolution is so kind that there is no end to us in sight.
Whole cities breathe and bad luck is bested by a promise to the leaves.
To withstand your own end is difficult.
The future frolics about, promised to no one, as is her right.
Rage against injustice makes the voice grow harsher yet.
If the future leaves without us, the silence that will follow will be an unspeakable nothing.
What if we convince her to stay?
How rare and beautiful it is that we exist.
What if we stun existence one more time?
When I wake up, get out of bed, my seven year old cousin
with her ruptured belly tags along.
Then follows my grandmother, aunts, my other cousins and the violent shape of their drinking water.
The earth remembers everything, our bodies are the color of the earth and we are nobodies.
Been born from so many apocalypses, what’s one more?
Love is still the only revenge. It grows each time the earth is set on fire.
But for what it’s worth, I’d do this again. Gamble on humanity one hundred times over
Commit to life unto life, as the trees fall and take us with them.
I’d follow love into extinction.
Today I want to leave you with two questions: are you willing to gamble on humanity? And how can you navigate the mystery of your life – today – with courage, imagination and a sense of possibility?
4000 weeks. That’s the average amount of weeks most of us have in a life. It’s such a startling small number. When we think in years, the length of each one can feel longer than we actually have. The average age so distant from where we are now. As days, the time passes fast, with a large number that feels unrelatable. But as weeks – 4000 is a beautiful, small & timely number. My question for you today, is how would you like to spend these 4000 weeks?
For me, I would like many of them to be in service to a more beautiful world. But I also want my experience of them to be pleasurable, meaningful, joyful – a lived experience with awe, wonder, ease (interspersed of course with the less pleasurable experiences, that offer wisdom none-the-less). Sometimes though, life & changemaking – whatever form we do – feels more like struggle. In some contexts, the words are even synonymous. For anyone in activism or change-work, the level of crises we face, the injustice that takes place, the inequity around us feels heavy. For every time we dream of something beautiful, we’ve surely experienced sadness, despair, anger, hopelessness at the world as it is. Plus – we all live in the world. There’s jobs, bills, health issues, families – a million things demanding our attention. This feeling of struggle can be an easy one to spend our 4000 weeks in, dipping our toes in and out. There’s a beautiful Naropa University commencement speech from Brenda Salgado. She suggests we are called at this time to release the word struggle from our attitude and vocabulary. It’s a bold statement, & it doesn’t pretend that there an’t challenges or hardships.
But our attitude and our vocabulary can also have more power than we realise. What would it be like for you to release struggle from your attitude and vocabulary this week?
To face your challenges with an attitude of ease or trust? And what you like to experience with what remains of your 4000 weeks?
If you’re holding big emotions for the world with climate change at the moment, come along to the workshop this Wednesday onEco-Anxiety. We’ll be using a mix of somatics & storytelling practices to help you make sense of this time, and find your most meaningful response. You can still joinhere.
This week I want to share an excerpt from John O’Donohue’s. book, To Bless the Space Between Us. He writes, “At any time you can ask yourself: At which threshold am I now standing? At this time in my life, what am I leaving? Where am I about to enter? What is preventing me from crossing my next threshold? What gift would enable me to do it?
A threshold is not a simple boundary; it is a frontier that divides two different territories, rhythms, and atmospheres. Indeed, it is a lovely testimony to the fullness and integrity of an experience or a stage of life that it intensifies toward the end into a real frontier that cannot be crossed without the heart being passionately engaged and woken up.
At this threshold a great complexity of emotion comes alive: confusion, fear, excitement, sadness, hope. This is one of the reasons such vital crossings were always clothed in ritual. It is wise in your own life to be able to recognise and acknowledge the key thresholds: to take your time; to feel all the varieties of presence that accrue there; to listen inward with complete attention until you hear the inner voice calling you forward. The time has come to cross.”
We collectively stand on a threshold. What lies on the other side, I believe is still up to our choosing. Our collective response to this time, our desires, our values, our decisions and how we find meaning are all part of this choice. Whatever this threshold holds though, I know I am not alone in hearing the call that the time has come to cross.
This crossing requires – at least in our imagination – rejecting the boundaries, limitations, binaries & impossibilities that lay within our current world. It asks that we allow “our heart to be passionately engaged & woken up”.
So I want to ask, where does your heart lie right now? Can you feel what it asks of you in this time?
if you’re wanting to explore our thresholds more deeply, join me on Wednesday for the eco-anxiety & climate grief workshop, and let’s see what threshold we can collectively cross together.
“You’ll smash it.” “You’re making a killing“. “Shoot over an email”. “Find your target market”. “Just keep banging it out”.
How often in business & life do we use the language of violence?
It might seem silly, but the way we work matters – and that includes our choice of words.
The way we speak is reflective of the way we think, the way we feel, the conscious & unconscious ways with which we view & make sense of the world.
If our language of celebration is reflective of destruction – you’re killing it, you smashed it, you owned it, we crushed it – what does that say about visions of success? Must it always come with a cost to someone else?
If our language of operations is reflective of pain – shoot an email, target this audience, find the right execution – what does this say about our work? Is it a place of service or a place of conquer?
The same applies to activism. Words like struggle, resist, strike, fight; how are they then reflected in our approach & embodiment of work?
What would it be like to step beyond the language of violence?
To embody the language of beauty, creativity or regeneration instead?
What phrases would you change?
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Hey reader – how’s your heart today? For many of us, I know this week has been painful and frightening.
I came across a passage by Martin Shaw recently, the mythologist and storyteller, where he asked “What if we reframed ‘living with uncertainty’ to ‘navigating mystery’? There’s more energy in that phrase. The hum of imaginative voltage.”
“You’ll