The Practice of Decision-Making

This is the first in a series of articles about The Practice of Decision-Making – 
situating the experience of decision-making in the context of healing.

Decision making. OH. There is that feeling in my solar plexus – tight, full, dense. My shoulders squeeze up along my back in hopes that if they could just cover my ears then I wouldn't hear all the voices of doubt in my head. 

My heart races to match the pace of my thoughts.

My heart races to evade the claws of commitment, each choice threatening to define and confine the rest of my young limitless (until now) life.

I’m standing still but I’m panting from the loops my brain dances.

Decision making. That shit stresses me out.

I’ve noticed that a lot, and by a lot I mean all, of my friends have had to deal with anxiety around decision-making. I think there is something generational about this – we do live in an age of endless options and infinite information, after all. Many folks nowadays are over-educated, over-informed and over-whelmed by the possibilities of existence. If this is going to be a theme then we better start developing our decision-making skills accordingly. And let’s not settle for simply reducing anxiety. Let’s actively thrive. I mean, we might as well while we’re alive and whatnot.

I recently faced a deep ‘ol decision making experience with all the trappings of a Big Decision – time commitment, monetary commitment, potential commitment to career and life path. Dear Ones, I came through, and I’m damn proud of my decision. Not because I think my choice is so awesome, which it is, but because I feel so empowered through my process of decision-making. I got to know myself better, especially the parts I usually try avoid. Through this experience I’ve singled out some tools and approaches to decision-making. I hope they will help others find healing and clarity as they navigate their own juicy, possibility-filled lives. This advice is mostly geared towards life-path style decisions – where to live, where to work, where to learn, etc. If the tactics I mention don’t resonate with you, great. The main point is that we deserve to feel empowered and inspired by our decision-making processes, and we can be. Figure out what works for you; then tell me about it.

Decision-Making as a Practice

People have yoga practices and meditation practices. I’d like to talk about developing a decision-making practice. That was the big switcheroo for me this time around – as I realized that a big decision was going down, I took a deep breath and some wiser voice deep down inside reminded me that this was just one more opportunity for self-healing. The narrative went something like this –

“Well A-Ro, we didn’t see this one coming, but for today’s self-healing exploration, we will be 

investigating how we deal with decision making.”

Cute. Don’t get blindsided by the decision on hand. It might appear that the biggest deal in your life is figuring out the right way to turn, but that’s a decoy. The biggest deal in your life is your life, and this moment is an opportunity to get intimate with your own unique anatomy of big-decision-navigation. Say “yes” to this learning, let it be valuable in and of itself, and the immense pressure on your decision will lift and all that ensues will be caste in the light of self-love and healing.

So now we have two co-developing processes – the process of the decision itself and the meta-process of you, beautiful holy and complex creature that you are, making that decision. The tools I am offering address both processes simultaneously. In other words, the very way that we go about making decisions should be self-reflective and healing, while supporting clarity and good, solid decisions. One hand washes the other, eh? But actually. It’s true. You will make a better decision through holding a healing lens over the process. This is pretty standard knowledge. Has anyone ever told you to “just follow your heart?” Yeah, easier said than done. It’s not like you can knock on your chest and ask if anyone’s home. Listening to our hearts means radical self-acceptance - accepting our truths, our unspeakables, our vulnerability. It requires grounding and meditation, even if that is a 2-second meditation. When someone tells you to follow your heart, they are asking you to engage in a self-healing practice. They intuitively know that our healthiest wisest selves speak from that still place, and that’s the self we’d like to enlist in decision-making. Please. Thank you.

So then what?

The next few posts will go into a handful of aspects I’m currently finding important for decision-making. I have too much to say for one post. Some are tools and some are perspectives to hold on to throughout the process. The whole practice is always spiraling back, reflecting on itself. So I’m not posting in order of “steps,” but rather in the order of my own natural flow of awareness through the process. Mix and match, jump in and out, develop your own story. Here’s what’s up in the posts to come:

Yo’ Body – Centering and re-centering the body as home-base throughout the Decision-Making Practice.

Writing Is So Awesome  - Game-Plans and Personal Reflections. Utilizing the written word to articulate our underlying needs, dive into the bigger truth of the situation, and alleviate stress.

Play All Day – How approaching your Decision-Making Practice with an attitude and expectation of playfulness transforms the experience, motivating you and honoring your dignity.

I’m looking forward to hearing others’ experiences of decision-making and the approaches that have helped them. Please share! We’ve got lots of big ol’ decisions coming up on in the world, what with the need to protect the planet and liberate the majority of people from massive marginalization and oppression. Here’s to walking our truth with every step and loving the crap out of ourselves. May this practice and all practices serve all beings, sentient and not, through space and time. Bless it and be it. MMmmmmm.

yes yes yes, there is a home for this! Earth and Activism and Spirit orbit with Starhawk and the Earth Activist Training Permaculture-Palooza

there is a home for this!
yay yay yay!

those words kept landing with a thud in my stomach throughout the 2 weeks of Earth Activist Training. They landed like comfort, like warm tea on a cold day. Mmmmm, relax, spread out, there's a home for this and you're inside it.

I've had a funny hunch that permaculture is an important lens for me. I've worktraded on permaculture sites, tried (unsuccessfully... so far) to get permaculture classes started, written articles about queer permaculture (more on that some other time). But honestly it was all a hunch - my own experience was my greatest proof that permaculture and real liberatory social justice are one in the same. we can talk about composting our poop into fertile soil one moment and then discuss effective methods of direct action the next? we can talk about dealing with police brutality in the same breath as rainwater harvesting? oh wow oh wow yes!

Starhawk's E.A.T. course, which she taught with Charles Williams, is freaking amazing. As she went over the syllabus each item lodged itself in another nook of my brain, found a fold yearning for exactly that flavor to chew on. There was already space for this knowledge, all i needed was the content to fill in the corners and expand the edges of this now-huge space.

this approach to permaculture constantly examines the human relationships that go down alongside the earth sustainability work. we spent 2 nights talking about non-hierarchical organizing and methods to make a meeting functional fun and effective. we talked about magical activism. baby we even devised some magical activism.

On the activism front, this shit is potent. After so much analysis, heartache and headbreak over Occupy, I came to quite a few conclusions about what makes organizing work. It all aligns with permaculture principles. Observe first.  Value the marginal, the edges, those with less power. Form coalitions that can thrive autonomously, not with constant leadership from outside. I could go on. Permaculture extends these ideas into physical realities. It explains through a lens of natural systems that makes these abstract concepts so much more tenable. Diversity isn't just a cute thing people think theyre supposed to want. it is the core essential necessity of a healthy reality. Blam. If you look at something as if it's a problem, it will stay a problem. if you look at something as if it's information, than it's a solution. Blam.

Also, the intergenerationality of the group was as important as the course content. I have been hungering for relationship with my elders. Here i found many generations interwoven and conscious of how important this fabric is for any future progress. We talked about the struggle to expand the narrowing confines of gender binaries, how to talk about a goddess who is not only a goddess, what earlier feminist movements have to teach youth today and what healing needs to take place. Many new questions, and damn it felt good to sit with people who aren't within 15 years of my age.

Permaculture is as ancient as humanity. This word encapsulates a whole history of people living together with the earth. These past 2 weeks I felt for the first time that I was honoring the ancestors and indigenous peoples of this land in a way that was authentic and active, not guilt-ridden and defeated.

this is the beginning of something.  Spirit and magic can be manifested and harnessed to increase human capacity for love and creativity. this is no joke, no subtle thing. This is the power ritual holds for the transformation of life. I'm telling ya. I've held such a distance between myself and spirituality for so long, the vestiges of scientific conditioning clinging to me and hissing "that doesn't make sense!". But here i found that the things that inspire me about science can be the wellspring from which my spirituality gushes - i can marvel at cells and water and star dust and pound the earth in ecstatic frothing. Woopee!

Some bitty thoughts on Resisting Racism: Queer Liberation is Collective Liberation Workshop

Jenna and Damien (facilitators of the workshop) and Ian (Provdience-based queer organizer and artist extraordinary) celebrating the warm feeling of "woah, we talked about some heavy shit" after the workshop.

Traveling organizers!
what a thought!
what a dream!

Last weekend Jenna Peters-Golden and Damien Luxe blew in to town for a weekend of doing. The two bad-asses facilitated a refreshingly (not being sarcastic! truthfully!) 4 hour long workshop about how racism manifests itself and what queer liberation has to do with all forms of liberation.
It was refreshing cause it didn't have to end as soon as we got started.
15 people came, which is wildly wonderful considering the time commitment. It speaks to the hunger of people to connect the queer movement to broader struggle.

We almost had enough time to and enough detail to get really specific with our dreams. One exercise had use imagine the collaboration of two historical activist groups who never actually had anything to so with each other. I was in the group combining the American Indian Movement and the Boston Women's Movement. This was surprisingly fruitful, but so rushed that we couldn't get very creative and I felt anxious the whole time about getting a chance to speak or about one person talking the whole time. So, note to all facilitators: give lots of time to the creative side of things! I felt like most time was spent on clever tricks for understanding racism, taught by the folks in the front of the room to the folks in the back of the room. Because it was an audience of activists, I think more time could have been spent sharing our own opinions and experiences, and spent on building alternatives. Remember y'all, i'm in a hyper-action-ey mood lately, so i guess take this criticism with a grain of salt. or don't.

There were almost only white people in attendance, which we didn't mention, but I just mentioned, so there. Is there a growing attempt on the part of white activists to get real about their anti-racist work? Is this just guilt? Is this just a tiny subsect of people who were already convinced that there's such a thing as modern racism? Where is this coming from and where is it going to?
My hope is that more folks are waking up to the pervasiveness of racism in the United States, that more folks want to figuring out how they can DO something about it versus comment on it often, that folks are increasingly seeing how racism operates at every level of society and identity.

What is the conversation around race in organizations and communities that you are a part of? What are the actions people are taking? 

I'm particularly interested in groups that aren't explicitly anti-racist, such as feminist groups and queer groups - are y'all organizing around race?

Detroit: Squatting like it ain't no thang

I showed up at the spot I would be couchsurfing at for the rest of the AMC.
It was already dark and it was far out there. I didn't know anything about where I was going, except for that a few Detroiters said various "mmmmmm..." sounds when I told them where I was staying. Driving up (thanks person who so kindly gave me a ride so I wouldn't have to wait 2 hours for a bus!) we passed one and another and again burned out houses. I had already google-mapped the spot, so I knew what to expect. Right?

 

 Turns out my couchsurfing host lived in a community of 9 (NINE!) squatted houses and lots, all on the same block of Detroit. Say whhhaaaaa? Like it ain't no thang. Most of these houses were off-grid. Ok, lots of squats are off-grid cause they haven't gotten the electric company to turn their juice on. But in this case they were taking the opportunity to install rainwater catchment systems and build cobb ovens. Yeah, there were chickens. And that sad looking house I'd seen on googlemaps? 

It's been transformed into a free bike shop for kids called Red Planet Bikes. Running on the regular, teaching workshops and giving away tons of bikes. For freez.

 

That night I fell asleep in the attic of the first unlocked city house I've stayed in in years. 

And that was what hit me the hardest about this space - people were out on the stoops, in the street, constantly talking and sharing food, ideas, lighters. The street was poppin, and this in the middle of blocks of burned-out depression. 

The amazingly sparkly room I stayed in

I have hesitations with squatting - who's doing it? Isn't there already a word for middle class white people moving into a community of color without adding economically to the people who already live there - gentrification? (total disclosure - i didn't think of that zinger, it was read somewhere else on the ethersphere). But there seemed to be real community involvement, many of the people involved had lived around there all their lives. I wasn't there for long enough to really understand the complicated dynamics that usually go along with squatting, but I know that the block felt really welcoming. 

They used glass bottle and cobb walls to fix burnt out city walls! Notice the light coming in through the bottles.

The history of the place is even more wacky.  The ecovillage got started as a part of Tumbleweed University, which is now wrapped up in the Goldengate Restoration Project. Basically, Occupy Detroit took all that momentum and all that heady theory and did what so many occupations talked about - squatted the hell out of foreclosed houses. So now this is also the Occupy Detroit epi-center.

Making a front yard garden in some serious sun

 Interestingly, almost no one around here knew what the Allied Media Conference was. I suppose Detroit ain't tiny, but still, with folks coming from around the world, you'd think they'd manage to take a trip around town and see if anyone who doesn't happen to work for a not-for-profit might be interest.

This place was such a delicious balm from the incessant concept crazy of the AMC that I was choking on. I do think that I'm actually over-reacting to the AMC and it was way more skills based than most conferences, but my own experience was surprisingly frustrating. Point is, here I was on accident, just looking for a couch to stay on, and I tumbled into the welcoming lab of a block of squatting community building self-sufficient DO-ers.

Maybe all I want to do is hang out with plants. 

Allied Media Conference Thoughts: Pragmatism, Buzzwords and Metaphor

note: this advice and rant is so deeply happening because, of all people, i live in abstract theory land and this is my struggle on the regular. i've noticed that my advice is generally stuff i'm trying to believe in myself.





Skills vs. Discussions. Workshops need to be labelled clearly skillshare, discussion, lecture, or performance. Have you ever gone to a workshop expecting some skills and it turns out everyone's sitting in circles theorizing about what the word "skill" means? Point is I have learned something important about myself at the Allied Media Conference.

I have no patience for metaphor.

I have no patience for theory. 

I want to learn what you tried yesterday, how it went, and what you are going to try today.

Display from the Maine-based Beehive Collective

The AMC is a conference full of Radical Activists (note the capitals). A lot of these folks know the language and the grammars of this community. I swear if I hear another buzzzz word.... liberation. oppression. I don't even know what liberation means! I don't even know what oppression means! Don't just drop that as though you're saying something when in fact you're saying everything/nothing!






Mind you I drop that shit like an exhale. I'm all "feminism"-this and "liberatory community practices"-that. Cause I'll admit it - it's useful. I need these words so I don't have to talk all day just to explain the first sentence I said when I woke up in the morning. But nah, nah, nah, ENOUGH.






Being in the high-density-buzz-world of the AMC has convinced me that this language is dangerous. We can talk in circles all day about the word accountability, but if I still have no idea what tactic you tried out last time there was an assault in your community, if I have no idea what that conversation looked like and what steps were taken, then what have I learned?
I've learned that a lot of people think accountability is important.
Cool. Check. 




Of course education is extremely important, but let's be conscious of our audiences and our opportunities to move into action-mode. DOING is more important than theoretically-doing-but-it's-cool-cause-I-have-a-list-of-references-I-can-google-later.







Have our brains been so academicized, so made to privilege intellect, that that is the inherent mode in which we operate? We slip unblinkingly into analysis, criticism. & yes, that is essential. But at a certain point it rings hollow. What are we talking about? Are we too afraid of making mistakes? of being remembered negatively? of speaking for others? So we stick to abstraction. Better that than allow the vulnerability of giving a single detail. Our vocabularies are so bulked up, our brains so used to filling out multiple choice surveys, that all description,  all experience, all detail have fallen to the wayside. I think it also has to do with not trusting that our experiences are truly worthwhile and relevant.




This happened so much in femsex. Big ideas, suggesting at experiences, got traded around like abstract playing cards. We sat inside a flurry of hints forming clouds of people that I maybe knew something about. It took months and one much-needed conversation about masturbation to put some spine into our concept clouds. Some intimacy. Yes darling, imagine for a moment that you're truly around friends. Tell them what happened. They'll try to understand. You don't have to convince the room that your head is in the right place or that you read the right zine.


Pragmatism. I'm taking about what makes us do things.
How we spend our minute of our days is not besides the point. Are you trying to guess at how best to change the world? Or are you trying shit out on the daily to see what sticks?

Reflections from Day 2 in Detroit: Parkour is Possible, Couchsurfing Rulez, AMC = AMCrazy

Day 2 in Detroit.

Again, I'm feeling slightly overwhelmed by the sheer newness of this all. I arrived at the AMC to get my name tag and everyone there looked like someone I'd like to meet, organize, or make out with. Generally they were triple threats.

So of course I ran away, and now I'm in a cafe a couple of blocks away, drinking (overpriced) coffee and dog-earring every single page of the AMC Program Guide. Should I pick one track and stick with it, doing deep with a few key ideas ? Should I take some of everything, pushing myself to try some things that don't even look any good?

But reeeeeewiiiiiind, last night I couch surfed for the first time! Let's talk about that, that feels more stable than the rest of the unknowns of my life. Wow, couch surfing is the most stable thing in my life right now. Interesting.

So, last night my awesome couch surfing host Kris brought me to hang out with her friends in Ann Arbor. We stopped along the way to do some parkour. That's right! We were having a conversations in which I was mourning how on the one hand parkour is crazy cool because it reclaims space, but on the other hand it is so competitive and exclusive because it's all about badass tricks. Kris was like "Nahuh! Everyone starts off small! You only see the very best on youtube, but everyone started vaulting over low walls." So we did. At the first gas station we passed. I even scraped my knee!




When we had been sufficiently pummeled by the concrete we got back in the car and she lay the rest of her philosophy on me. My hang-ups about park our, she said, are exactly what keeps most people from trying new things. People don't want to try karate cause they're not already black belts. They won't touch snowboard cause they might fall. Kris had snowboarded about 3 times when she decided to go snowboarding at the fancy Italian slope in the Alps. Did she notice that everyone else was wealthy as hell and had grown up with all the fancy ski lessons one could buy? Sure, but she didn't care. She was there and she wasn't going to let anything sep her from getting hers.




In her opinion, exclusivity exists only in your mind, not in institutions themselves. I disagree on some levels - I don't think that the onus of inclusivity should fall solely on less privileged/experienced/fit people. But her outlook is a very inspiring and useful personal philosophy that I'm going to return to again and again. Who's fancy hors d'oeuvres at a black tie event we weren't invited to? OUR fancy hors d'oeuvres at a black tie event we weren't invited to!







Last thoughts -  the family in Ann Arbor we were visiting - really big, really bonded, really loving, really involved with cool social justice projects, real conscious of privilege, really Christian. These things are all connected. The community they had, their values and their drive all grew from their religious structures, more or less. I'm confused. Can we create this without god?

my first (of probably many)  Parkour injury

for more pics of detroit, visit my flickr
more conversation about the AMC to come. that shit was cray.

Bus to Detroit Reading: As a Weapon In the Hands of the Restless Poor

Sunset on the first of three buses to Detroit: 3 hours down, 15 hours to go

"Numerous forces—hunger, isolation, illness, landlords, police, abuse, neighbors, drugs, criminals, and racism, among many others—exert themselves on the poor at all times and enclose them, making up a “surround of force” from which, it seems, they cannot escape. I had come to understand that this was what kept the poor from being political and that the absence of politics in their lives was what kept them poor. I don’t mean “political” in the sense of voting in an election but in the way Thucydides used the word: to mean activity with other people at every level, from the family to the neighborhood to the broader community to the city-state."


This is a quote from an article sent to me by the ever-learning Sam Tarakajian in Harper's article "II. As a Weapon in the Hands of the Restless Poor." by Earl Shorris

I'm thinking about this definition of "political." Does the commonly understood bounds of the "political" mean that all emphasis is put on raising engagement with voting booths? could an expansion of our understanding of where the political takes place = an expansion of civic engagement? work with people where they are, in the many arenas in which life takes place, instead of this already-too-abstract-and-precious sport called electoral politics? 

I'm also finding it breathtaking how unflinchingly Shorris claims a direct link between poverty and political (all sorts of political) alienation. Don't know why, it's just hitting me hard to see it stated almost like a math equation. 

Also also, this casts a whole new light on the feminist project to reclaim the "personal" as "political."

Every space in which humans interact is a political space. Every moment we think or act we are inventing society, inventing political climates.  In lieu of this article, the lines are drawn ever more clearly: gender liberation IS class liberation. The sort of arguments that have kept women from playing economic ball are deeply linked to the behavior that keep all poor people poor. Discounting everyday life. Waiting and trusting and believing only in electoral politics. Denying the possibility of a politics that involves those not already privileged enough to have a seat on the ballot. 

Noooooooooow, as for other thoughts on this article... complicated. The article is mostly about an experimental class program where people in poverty took a rigorous course in philosophy, the idea being that learning about how to think, how to reflect, is the real first step out of poverty. Let's just say I have a problem with the curriculum. And the analysis. A curriculum based solely on and taught solely by wealthy white men? Yeah, that has defined culture for a long time, but only in the eyes of the elite. They missed out an a great opportunity to expand past this reverence of the same power structures that have confined societal thinking for so long. To connect with the roots of the people IN in the class, not continue demanding that everyone lay aside their histories and learn that value and knowledge is something that somebody else, somebody with money and skin privilege, gets to make up. 


Also, I think there was a major flaw in the conclusion of the experiment. There seems to be a lot of back-patting at the end - this many students are attending college, that many students are employed. But was that just due to the thinking ability these folks gained in philosophy class? Could it be the connections they formed to people in the system (most students ended up attending Bard, the college that partly sponsored the program)? Could it be that they were treated as scholars, as worthwhile, as more than society's burden? Could it be that what this class did was simply not treat them as poor and give them the same inside loopholes that folks already attending college prep schools automatically have? I think that the author needs to do a bit of a privilege analysis on the things beyond the textbook that happen for most kids who don't live in poverty. I think this experiment was still a total success, cause it does seem like the participants are doing well, but the factors of success need to be reconsidered.


 But I will let y'all read for yourself and maybe we can talk about it more on this here blog. The last sentence sent chills all through my body though, so try and make it to the end.