Unlearning as a spiritual practice
White women can be so fragile. Lately, I keep coming back to this thought. Amid the Black Lives Matter movement and critical moments of 2020, it kept coming up how complicit white women are, and I am thinking of that now.
What I notice in my work is a theme of how much they avoid the real work. And also how assumption and judgment make up most of the white woman’s energy. In December, my focus for my Declutter the Mind group sessions was the concept of unlearning. Truly, unlearning is such a necessary practice. Typically I would refer to unlearning as “shedding” or “release.” For me, unlearning is an unnecessary step in some ways, but what I notice in my day-to-day work is that the common theme is that if one must let go or release something, that thing must be replaced with something else. And let me say that if there is anything to unlearn, it is the idea of needing to replace when something is released. This thought process is distorted.
How can we ever experience a lighter state of being if we need to replace every emotion, thought, or circumstance with one that better suits us? Encompassing a higher vibration best serves us when we can understand the source of our lower vibrational energy, shed it, and redirect our energy in a way that will support us energetically and purposefully.
Our relationship with ourselves is the one that is the most screwed up. As of late, I notice that our internal reality is so chaotic and unreliable that we don’t desire to be present within. One of the questions that I get most of is, “how”? Other variations are:
How do I move forward?
How do I replace this energy?
How do I stop taking this action?
Our how starts with being present. But, through our incarnation, we have learned to depend on external satisfaction and have over time disregarded all aspects of ourselves that cannot be validated externally. So, we are our problem. Those of you reading this are in the group sessions and often read my posts; yes, I repeated it. I keep saying it because it is not going away. It’s still present because we are focused on hearing instead of profoundly listening. The takeaway here is that listening requires presence within.
Unlearning is the most challenging aspect of the journey for the ego and the soul react based on their experience with a particular circumstance both emotionally and spiritually. I hope telling you this will help you connect with the idea that we are all currently operating in survival mode at this moment in time.
We are surviving the pandemic, the political climate of the United States, and our personal circumstances. Survival mode is universal because our woundedness is universal. One of my lessons in 2020 was that talking about trauma helped me understand other people’s relationship with it.
Trauma and white women don’t go together. I spent my entire childhood in Northern Alabama, and if someone could have troubled themself to tell me that single fact, I might not have internalized so much of the racial commentary growing up. This means that because white women have deemed themselves void of the occurrence in their lives, they are incapable of understanding how their energy impacts others. Now some readers may be asking themselves why I am using the lens of white womanhood to express the concept of unlearning. That’s because they continually pursue opportunities “to heal.” They are also a group that has traditionally defined their victimhood and trauma both vocally and universally. Other groups have silently suffered while devoid of the privilege it often requires to demand more. This has created an understanding of the world that crowds out other narratives of hardship and unconsciously illegitimizes others’ trauma.
Why is all this important?
Because here we stand, a day after MLK Day, and a couple of weeks off from black history month, in the year where people stormed the US Capitol building to preserve the policies and the rhetoric that keeps racism and the concept of otherness in place. All the while, I am talking to white women that have signed up for intuitive coaching, trying to convince me that their internal reality is merely my perception.
Elevation is 2021’s mandate.
Unlearning is a must spiritually. You must shed and release not just things but habits and traits that do not work and are not appropriate for moving forward in your circumstances. This is the problem with all forms of survival mode. When we adopt ways of being for one single occurrence in our lives and do not release the behaviors once we are beyond that experience, we create trauma and adverse outcomes for ourselves because our energy calls the energy we are forward.
Unlearning is complicated because we exist to learn to seek. But, we must realize that in seeking, we must always seek. In a constant state of seeking, we should be prepared to release often to have both physical and emotional space to continue the journey of seeking. We must learn to speak for the sake of seeking as it pertains to our purpose, our divinity, and our connection to the Source.
If you feel blocked along your path and need a bit of guidance to make your internal reality more tangible, please schedule time with me.
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