After speaking with Cathy, I said goodbye to my wife, Erika and my daughter, Estella, and drove to Oxford, MA for a weekend retreat with the ManKind Project. Over two days, I confronted and named the parts of myself that, for years, had been doing harm and preventing me from doing my best work.
I saw that I had been living in a stream of judgment, and I saw how this stream of judgment had beaten me into accepting as fact the toxic idea that a person with privilege doesn't have the right to feel suffering.
I had absorbed this idea from many sources, many people's voices and cultural assumptions that I have marinated in. I see now that although this idea is most often heard from voices from the left, it is actually rooted in the capitalist belief that attaining material comfort is the key to ending suffering.
The more I rolled this idea around my head, the more I realized that this line of thinking makes me a worse person, and makes the world a worse place. By unconsciously accepting as fact the idea that I didn't have the right to suffer, I wasn't valuing my own experience, which is the one thing in the world I can know, and the only resource I can draw on to inspire myself to action.
This inability to bear witness to my own experience was a cloak over my eyes, coloring the way I see the world and my role in it. If I want to go out into the world and make things better, I have to know and accept every part of myself and my experience. Otherwise, I am not fully realized as a person, and that will infect everything I do, no matter how well-intentioned.
With the revelations of this retreat, I realized that I would need to radically shift the way I had been thinking about my role as an activist in the world. (click here to continue)
I saw that I had been living in a stream of judgment, and I saw how this stream of judgment had beaten me into accepting as fact the toxic idea that a person with privilege doesn't have the right to feel suffering.
I had absorbed this idea from many sources, many people's voices and cultural assumptions that I have marinated in. I see now that although this idea is most often heard from voices from the left, it is actually rooted in the capitalist belief that attaining material comfort is the key to ending suffering.
The more I rolled this idea around my head, the more I realized that this line of thinking makes me a worse person, and makes the world a worse place. By unconsciously accepting as fact the idea that I didn't have the right to suffer, I wasn't valuing my own experience, which is the one thing in the world I can know, and the only resource I can draw on to inspire myself to action.
This inability to bear witness to my own experience was a cloak over my eyes, coloring the way I see the world and my role in it. If I want to go out into the world and make things better, I have to know and accept every part of myself and my experience. Otherwise, I am not fully realized as a person, and that will infect everything I do, no matter how well-intentioned.
With the revelations of this retreat, I realized that I would need to radically shift the way I had been thinking about my role as an activist in the world. (click here to continue)