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Shodo Spring's avatar

I've occasionally read your writings, but this one told me we are on the same ground and with the same values. I'd love to share my work with you - a book rather than a blog - Open Reality by Shodo Spring.

Shodo Spring's avatar

Here's a link to a lot of stuff about it: https://mountainsandwatersalliance.org/open-reality/. And if you send me your email address I can send you a pdf. Those are the ways without spending money or asking your library.

Isabelle S's avatar

Love it! While looking for solutions to some health issues, I found it very easy to fall into that "thinking/perspective". So thank you for writing this!

This brought me so much clarity: "It attaches itself to real grievances, then redirects them towards private purification and social hierarchy."

Brook Woolf (they)'s avatar

The vows removed names what my entire Lineage of the Heart series is circling. White wellness culture extracting practices from their ethical and communal ecosystems and selling the feeling without the roots, without lineage respect, without non-erasure, without accessibility for practitioners as much as participants.

We co-steward 60 acres of permaculture land in Michigan and these questions are not abstract for me. What makes a healing space accountable rather than extractive? Who holds me to what I said I believed when the circle ends?

The conflation of wellness with religion, politics and capitalism keeps pulling these spaces further from the healing that was intended. No clear solutions yet. Just questions worth keeping alive. I think that’s why you find that my writing usually is bits of this essay examined. I do want to create these containers where we are rooted in community healing and support in all ways possible.

La Brea's avatar

This reads as a powerful call for balance, clarity, and convergence. Reconciliation of apparent contradictions. Thank you!

One thing I tripped over is ‘How do we cultivate an inner practice without turning suffering into a private self-improvement project?’

I understand the criticism, especially the privacy aspect. But the overcoming of suffering is, to me, very much a process inherent to life as we know it. The framing takes away from the privacy that this process inhabits to some degree.

Nonetheless I found you adress this quite beautifully throughout your essay, and the call is evermore important: Gain empowerment, act with clarity to bring forth change you find necessary. Don’t isolate and tolerate, connect and act!