feeling myself: the unexpected portal of self-centeredness

let's dive into the unexpected power of self-centeredness. seeing it not as a negative trait — dominant culture narrative be damned! — but as a liberatory tool that can help dissolve (and uphold! oh, the brilliant paradox!) personal boundaries and cultivate deeper connections.  introspection as a catalyst for personal and collective transformation. dana shares her story as a burned-out activist, full up with punk damage, and how she found a healing portal through the self...and ultimately others, and trees, too.

we talk about deepening your relationships, living systems ontologies, animism, burnout and brain drain, the power of agency, dissolving the self while honoring the self, releasing the cultural binary of 'right' and 'wrong', and how you can connect with the desires of trees!

• leah garza's living systems (http://crystalsofaltamira.com/classes)
• "sustainable activism" by dana b for ravenous zine (https://danabalicki.com/sustainable-activism/)
• we got issues (the book)
• centering practice (strozzi institute)

/// podcast art ~ natalee miller, theme song ~ kat ottosen, soundediting/design ~ rose blakelock,  production support ~ softer sounds studio ///

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

So why am I a proponent of self-centeredness? Not just because I'm an only child though that might have something to do with it and not because I want you to be, you know, some sort of boss bitch no one puts baby in the corner kind of operator, but because I believe in the liberatory nature of self-centeredness and the expansiveness that it can give us access to. I don't think most people think of self-centeredness as a gateway to expansion and connection and even a dissolving of the self, or, I'm gonna take it a step further a realization that the self doesn't even exist.

Speaker 2: 0:58

Yes, you heard this correctly. This is an episode on self-centeredness, where we might just also play with dissolving the boundaries of the self. Let's get weird. Crying in my jacuzzi.

Speaker 3: 1:17

Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. Crying in my jacuzzi. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. Crying in my jacuzzi.

Speaker 1: 1:37

Crying in my jacuzzi. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh oh. Welcome back to crying in my jacuzzi, the ebbs and flows of living an examined life. You already know what we're doing here today. I mean, I sorta know what we're about to do here today and, as I put forth in the very first episode, making sense is not my highest priority, but making sensation is First of all.

Speaker 1: 2:18

I think we get some real twisty programming around the self, around self-centeredness. We've all received so many different messages about how we are supposed to be in relationship with ourselves. We've got this absolutely incoherent spectrum of selfishness and the sin, the great mortal, original sin of selfishness on one side, right, and then on the other side, we've got the rugged individual, the exalted, rugged individual. We've got the sacrificial, selfless mother, a self-made millionaire, billionaire. Don't be too navel-gazy, but don't be an energy vampire, don't take up too much space.

Speaker 1: 3:20

I want to tell you a little story. Shocker, shocker, I know, but I spent over a decade as a full-time political organizer and activist, really involved in the anti-war movement. Ugh, and I recently just saw an article about Carl F Rove Speaking at some conference about abortion bans and what I want to call a national consensus. I such a slimy piece. I did almost arrest him once. I mentioned it in the first episode. I know that's some carceral shit and I'm not really about that now, but I do feel like that would have been satisfying. Also, a friend of mine just recently saw him in an airport and yelled shame on you really loud a bunch of times until he was just like shame on you, oh God, okay. Moving on, I'm very, very involved in the anti-war movement and Occupy Wall Street all sorts of things like that.

Speaker 1: 4:31

Okay, many, many other aspects of activism and organizing, but very left of left and lefty left left, and everything was very collective, based through this very specific social justice lens. Amazing humans. I worked with tons of amazing humans and we were also just humans who had our own stuff, our own programming, our own ancestral lineages of trauma and triumph and all the things in between, with our own families and our own experiences. All the work we were doing as a bunch of individuals. Together it would get really messy. It was not about any individual work. There wasn't really room for that. I know that things have changed a lot over the past 10 plus years and I'm so grateful for that and I'm so grateful for the healing justice work, for the centering of our own personal experiences and how important those are inside of collective spaces and how that absolutely comes from indigenous teachings, so important.

Speaker 1: 6:01

It was the thing that I saw most missing inside of collective organizing spaces. It was definitely something that contributed to brain drain, to people getting really burnt out and leaving organizing spaces to go then do their own healing. I had to do the same thing. I got super burnt out to the point where, outside of my relationship and my job, I had lost sight of what was important to me, what I valued, what I liked, what I wanted, and I had to pull back and go on my own personal healing journey. I mean, I did do it in a small group with other young women, artists and activists.

Speaker 1: 6:56

Long live the now defunct. We got issues forever in my heart, forever shaping who I am, though I'm going to continue to become, but inside of this story is why I hold self centeredness with the appreciation and love and respect that I do, because I've seen and this started in my own life how individual existence can be a portal for transformation. So I did my own work, going deep in there to understand how I had gotten to this, that place of burnout and not knowing myself. And in the not knowing, in the disconnection from this place of not understanding myself and not understanding how I was making decisions and why my relationships were the way that they were and why I was showing up the way that I was and why I felt what I felt and why I thought what I thought.

Speaker 1: 8:15

I took the path of understanding, getting curious because I had to, I felt like a survival skill to know myself, to learn my patterns, to understand my patterns, to understand what was happening in my life, all around me and how those patterns, especially those really really sticky ones, were access points ooh, portals, portals, portals, portals, portals, pretzels to my deepest beliefs about myself and the world and myself in the world. And as I peeled back the layers, of course there were only infinitely more layers. That's how that goes. But that curiosity, to that understanding, to accepting, to appreciating, to loving, turning into trusting and that trusting, that self-trust, turning into connection, turning into ah right, if I trust myself and I understand all of these patterns and I see that we are all just doing this together in these wild, funny, awkward little meat sacks on this gorgeous rock, hurtling through space Alright, we're in it together. There was a level of connection that became available.

Speaker 3: 10:11

Hi, it's me Janet. Over here at Crybaby headquarters we like to plant fondle to stay connected and grounded. Dana did some plant fondling at the end of episode 3, go back and listen. So this is not an ad. There's nothing to buy, just plants to fondle. It's really quite nourishing.

Speaker 1: 10:29

I also gonna say there's some, you know, deep nervous system work. That happened, it was happening through that time, consciously and unconsciously. That allowed me to really take up more space in that, you know, if you polyvagal, nerd at all, ventral vagal, that connection part of the nervous system, as opposed to just being in sympathetic, parasympathetic, on-off hypervigilant all the time, and so that connection then turning slowly over time now into a dissolving of boundaries, a dissolving of needing to hold so tightly onto, like my own experience and honestly, just seeing that I'm no different than that juniper tree outside my window or that little quail family scuttling across the desert oh god, they're cute, you know. Did you expect me to go there? But yeah, that's where I went because that's where I'm at.

Speaker 1: 11:44

What I'm saying is that I had a very unconscious non-identification with myself for many, many years and look that you know that goes even older than the story I'm telling you now. But there are more stories to be told than to worry. But in that sort of collective space that I lived inside of for so many years and the ontology, like the way that I understood existence in the world through that lens and how I was so ultimately ungrounded and untethered from my own sense of self and ultimately from, in some ways, like real connection with others, like I know that I had beautiful relationships and was a part of some really beautiful movements that did powerful work, that shaped in some ways like where we are today in terms of activism and needles that have been moved in movements, and I felt very sacrificed. And so when I then pulled in and was held by an incredible group of humans, by the grace of the goddess, to do the deep work of understanding myself and tending to all the wounded parts of me and the bold, funny, weird, courageous, awkward parts of me it's all the parts of me that I learned to be in relationship with and how to have a relationship with myself then gave me, over time, permission, access granted to release the unconscious gripping I was doing. It's like, oh, why is this happening? And it's victimhood, why is this happening to me? And like, why did it end? I tried so hard and this didn't work and that didn't work.

Speaker 1: 14:00

In these stories I was telling about my life and the ways that I was seeing the people around me and such small little boxes as I didn't really know how to listen. I didn't know how to listen to myself. My inner critic was so strong, so intense, and I just knew how to sort of be like cowering or resistant to it. I didn't know how to be in relationship with it. I was operating under so many other people's imagination for me, and so, as I got more settled, grounded you know I love grounding Comfortable, loving all the things, trusting with myself. It allowed me to then start to see beyond myself, but because I was really seeing right, it's different than that sort of unconscious operating I was doing before, even though I wasn't really oriented around myself.

Speaker 1: 15:08

Now I've, like, traveled through the portal this is the work that I really do with my clients Traveled through the portal of years of understanding myself and learning how to hear my own needs and my clients' desires which, by the way, all in the same playing field, no hierarchy there really has helped me.

Speaker 1: 15:33

Look out at the world around me, yes, definitely, with people to trust that their experiences of their realities are as real as my experiences of mine, which has just blurred all the edges, which is what I meant earlier about like dissolving boundaries right the edges, dissolve the boundaries of binary, of like right and wrong, in these ways that I feel like we've all received through the dominant culture that we all grown up with. Dissolving that, blurring that edge around like what is you know who is normal, what is normal, what is the right way to be or the wrong way to be. So the self-centeredness praying as an altar of selfishness, of being of the self which I know, whatever. If you look up definitions online, it's all about like disregard for others. I'm using it in a different way because I also think that all those definitions are really like coded and loaded and full of programming that I'm no longer taking on or participating in. But that work has now really like let me be free.

Speaker 2: 16:59

Let me get free, and whether we call it animism, Animism is the belief that objects, places, animals and even words all possess a distinct spiritual essence or soul, as well as feelings, intentions and emotions. There's also a belief that various kinds of spirits exist and affect the lives of humans. This is a foundational thread of indigenous ontology.

Speaker 1: 17:26

Or living systems ontology. Ah, bless my dear, dear friend Leah Garza. She's crystals of Altamira on Instagram. She runs a beautiful course every year called Living Systems. Get hip to it.

Speaker 1: 17:43

But understanding that all things have agency, which I've really always known and always felt and always believed. It's why I've plant, fondled and talked to plants and dirt and all sorts of things and bugs and imaginary friends since I was young. Why, if you know me that everything's a friend, like that cloud friend right out my window, tumbleweed friend, they just roll right through but they're delightful. I used to say goodnight to all of my stuffed animals every night and had a lot of stuffed animals, but I it was because I believed they were all alive and all had agency, but I also thought they might kill me. So that's maybe a longer story for another time.

Speaker 1: 18:39

And as the work I do with my clients and our unmet needs as humans, as individuals yes, and this is real common ground here, this is for all of us. But that really drives Everything that we do. It drives our behavior, drives how we show up in the world, and so, as we Do the work With ourselves, we learn to tend, listen to those needs, hear those needs, feel what it feels like, be aware of them, cultivate awareness, and Then learn and practice tools to meet our own needs, to listen to ourselves, to then listen to each other, to use those same tools to listen to each other, to see each other, to see that we do Belong to each other, and then to move beyond just that anthropocentric, just that, like humans are the only Measuring, and to then see, like, where we're at and where we live, not just as some thing the environment that we're impacting but as a thing that we are absolutely a part of and are not separate from. And to consider the needs of all things around me, the desires of all things around me, the desire of that mulberry tree I know we're getting weird, but that's what you signed up for him.

Speaker 1: 20:11

All right, I'm sure I've learned that that Mulberry tree desires water and sun. Right? Those are things that I know about plants, and maybe it's. You know. The color of its leaves, the pallor of its little leaves will Tell me something about whether it means more or less water. Whatever it is, I mean always more water because I am in the desert, let's be real. But that tree could have Desires. I'm gonna assume it does. I do assume it does, and are those desires more important than my desires? Most days I definitely operate that way.

Speaker 2: 20:50

It's not like I walk around thinking about all the time about the desires of that mulberry tree believing that all things have agency is not very popular in capitalism or any ontology that centers humans or Dominance over the natural world. So it will seem very weird, but your imagination is adored to magic. As Tom Robbins writes in his book, even cowgirls get the blues. Disbelief and magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business.

Speaker 1: 21:19

I'm opening up the space here to get a little weird about Self-centeredness and centering in the self the understanding of the self. There's so so much expansion available. And Look, you don't have to get to the like considering the mulberry trees desires. That's just the kind of weirdo I am and like I mean, I roll with a lot of other weirdos who also considered that kind of thing and I find it a delightful way to live. We'll do more of it here together. You might be like that's so weird, dana, but I believe in the power of weirdness. I'm committed to a Wonder mystery the magic of existence, now the magic of non-existence.

Speaker 1: 22:14

Whatever you took from this, whether it was oh yes, I got some serious old selfishness, selflessness, pathologizing my own Desires and knees and wants and all that stuff like, oh, yeah, that's there. Okay, I'm gonna look at that. Great, I'm glad. I'm just like, yes, here for here, for that little chew you chew on. That Next episode will probably give you some Something, something nice to work with, some digestion, or maybe you're somewhere in that. Oh, I'm getting into, I'm doing that in a record.

Speaker 1: 22:52

Now I'm in this self sort of acceptance. Ah, I'm like, oh, what's next? Oh, maybe there's like I'm starting to build Some appreciation. There's some love, there's some trust there. Oh, that's what, that's what's next? Beautiful, keep being curious there.

Speaker 1: 23:10

Maybe you just feel yourself sort of releasing the grip of these old unconscious programs that have been just running yet running you, running your ragged, and you're starting to imagine what else could be possible for you. What else, what else, what else, what else could be possible for you is possible for you. I Love you. I'm gonna close this out With all of this love, from the mulberry tree, from the center of myself, to the center of you, down to the center of the earth.

Speaker 1: 24:06

Oh, you just spent all this time together in self centering and I want to offer a A centering practice now. This is a short one, but even a small practice is a practice. Centering is a somatic practice, which means we're gonna center here in the body. So take some nice deep breaths, in through your nose, out through your nose. Your center is a place that lives in you. Bring your attention to your center point in your body. It's going to be a few inches below your belly button, so put your hand right there, just cupping it lovingly or tenderly, or even just with some presence and consciousness. Bring into your hand and the palm of your hand.

Speaker 1: 25:06

You can also bring your other hand around your back and cup your sacrum and just really feel your body and feel the center between your two palms. I'm coming to this practice over and over again. When you're not in the swirl, when you're not activated, just keep practicing, coming back to center, so that you can draw on it when those other moments do come. Breathing without judgment, without fixing, without the intention to fix, noticing what's going on in your body temperature, sensations, your breath, your mood, the pace you've been moving about all day. The pace you're moving at now You're just noticing, scanning your body from the top of your head all the way down, all the parts. And in centering in this small practice here today, we'll look at the dimensions of length and width and depth and overall dimension of presence. So in length, breathing, feeling the length of your body, feeling the extension of you and if that means breathing and extending yourself, your energy down into the earth and then extending up into the sky and the stars, almost like you're being just gently pulled. No effort, no performance here, but feeling the length of you, feeling the length in your muscles and your bones and the spaces between your muscles and bones and all the spaces between your heads and your shoulders and then your hips down to your knees and your feet, doing whatever you need to do. You don't need to be perfectly still here to just feel length. Experiment, play with the length, taking up space with your length, feeling that sense of presence. And now taking up space from your center with your width. Imagine fern frond unfolding from your spine outward, just unrolling, unfurling out to the outer edges of your being and beyond, feeling up your lungs, your chest, your belly with breath, widening your hips, feeling the width, noticing how that makes you feel, any way you feel is just right. Shaking out anything that needs to be shook out, feeling those outer edges of the boundaries of your skin, the cheeks on your face, the cheeks you're sitting on, and just letting them all soften, reach out around you, just energetically feeling that width, feeling that taking up of your space.

Speaker 1: 28:28

And now let's center in depth. If there's anything you're holding tight, relax it. Just feel deep inside of yourself when you've come from, how you've gotten to this moment, the known and the unknowns, your lineage, everything that has brought you here. Just breathe in, feeling that balance of all that's led you here, all of the journey you've traveled, all of what's behind you, what's here in you and then what is unfolding out around you, your depth, your multi-dimensionality, your longings, your dreams, your visions, your love. Take a deep breath in, let it out, take up space. Thank your body for this capacity to center, to take up just the perfect amount of space and to be playful. One more nice deep breath and, on the exhale, send out a hum. Just feel the resonance of the hum, of the vibration of your voice, of your throat, throughout your body. Let whatever sound wants to pour forth the pour forth, relax into it, let it out. Maybe you've just been holding something in. If it's a song or a fart, take up space. You're doing it just right.

Speaker 3: 30:41

Hold onto your hats and glasses, not just because they are actually alive, but because we are about to do something brand new. And, yes, technically everything is new because this podcast is new. But still, just trust me, this will be fun.

Speaker 1: 30:56

I'm gonna make a part two of this episode or I'm gonna dig in on an exercise. That's another angle of self-centeredness that I like to play with around. Prioritizing yourself, like putting yourself at the center. That's work that I do with my clients all the time, and there's often that discussion of where are you on your own priority list? Do you want, do you take up space in your own life? Do you give yourself the grace of of your own precious time or are you giving it away to everybody else?

Speaker 1: 31:34

And again, that's why we do the work of tending to those unmet needs, tending to that deep, old, unconscious Programming, those core, limiting beliefs and the patterns, like where those came from, and all of that inner work, all of that like emotional resonance work and learning to work with your emotions in new ways and energy work, all of it, so that we can answer some of those questions, understand why we do what we do, especially when we're so tired and we know that what we're doing is unsustainable, but we don't know that there are other ways. We haven't even imagined that there are other ways and there are other ways. I'll figure them out together. Stay tuned. If you enjoyed what we did here today, go over to wherever is that you are listening to this podcast and Give us a rating this many stars five as your heart desires.

Speaker 1: 32:55

Five stars though the music and other musical bits by the very talented cat autism Sound, designed and editing by the effort of us and Rose Blake long. Thank you, thank you. Thank you so much for being here. I look forward to playing with you more in my jacuzzi. That sounded dirtier than a man tip, but you know what I mean.