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| Photo by Molly |
The roots of all living things are tied together. Deep in the ground of being, they tangle and embrace. This understanding is expressed in the term nonduality. If we look deeply, we find that we do not have a separate self-identity, a self that does not include sun and wind, earth and water, creatures and plants, and one another.
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| Photo by Molly |
There are so many huge changes and profound benefits — subtle and obvious, large and small, tender and sweet — that I experience on this path of heart that I've now long been rooted in. These sacred blessings continue to grow and evolve and deepen with each year that I am alive.
And sometimes I find them in the simplest of moments.
Like yesterday at the carwash. The handsome young black man who took my $10 was slender and had short dreads. He also had a most lovely smile. When our eyes locked into one another's and I returned his bright smile with my own, his smile widened as he said, "I like your style." I responded, "And I like your style." For another couple of moments we just smiled at each other. Such a precious gift, this heartfelt connecting with another human being. This Namaste moment.
As I've come to recognize, embrace, heal, and transform the ways that I had experienced separation from within myself and with all others — as I've been increasingly unburdened from carrying the weight of deep ancestral and cultural pain and trauma — I'm freed to experience more and more of the sacred, the beauty, and the sweetness of life.
Today my gratitude overflows with how amazing the shifts in conscious awareness are as the old patterns of repression, denial, trauma triggers, and shame continue to slip away and lose their grip on my life. Today I am blessed with embracing more and more of life as it is without the old judgments and fears and trauma that once plagued me. I get to feel and hold with compassion both the joys and the sorrows of what it is to be human.
Connecting with the heart of who I most deeply am empowers me to transform generations of trauma and loss and disconnection into an endless stream of healing and resilience, preciousness and gratitude, wonder and wisdom, and beauty and love. Because today I can recognize the sacredness within you and within us all. Because now I can love. And love is always the greatest medicine.
My husband and I have registered for this event on May 17th. On the west coast in the United States, it will begin at 10am on Friday. Please check the links to find the time in your area.
I am so excited to listen to the combined wisdom of Gabor Maté and Angela Davis! And I am so grateful that this is being made available worldwide. So needed and such a gift to us all.
There is a suggested donation of $25, but it also appears that any amount of donation will be accepted. They want this to be made available to vast numbers of people everywhere. The time is also easily accessible no matter the country anyone is living in. This event is that important. Please consider registering if you can and also spreading the word. Thank you.
And deepest bow of respect and gratitude to Angela Davis and Gabor Maté. There are peacemakers, truth-tellers, wisdom-keepers, visionaries, activists and authors, poets and artists, and more among us. May we listen and be informed and inspired. Another world is possible. Especially within the hearts and minds of each of us.
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Introduction to the Course
Join us for a discussion with legendary activist and scholar Angela Davis and Dr. Gabor Maté, physician and author, to explore the intersections between the Palestinian struggle for freedom and broader global movements for justice, equity, and human liberation.
Drawing parallels between the oppression faced by Palestinians and the systemic injustice confronting marginalized communities around the world, Angela and Gabor will shed light on the common roots of violence, occupation, and dehumanization. They will examine how trauma, both individual and collective, perpetuates cycles of conflict and how healing these wounds is integral to achieving genuine liberation.
We will explore:
Angela Davis has been a political activist at the cutting edge of the Black Liberation, feminist, queer, and prison abolitionist movements for more than 50 years. First published and edited by Toni Morrison in 1974, An Autobiography is a powerful and commanding account of her early years in struggle. Davis describes her journey from a childhood on Dynamite Hill in Birmingham, Alabama, to one of the most significant political trials of the century: from her political activity in a New York high school to her work with the U.S. Communist Party, the Black Panther Party, and the Soledad Brothers; and from the faculty of the Philosophy Department at UCLA to the FBI's list of the Ten Most Wanted Fugitives.
Gabor Maté, M.D. is a specialist on trauma, addiction, stress and childhood development. After 20 years of family practice and palliative care experience, Dr. Maté worked for over a decade in Vancouver’s Downtown East Side with patients challenged by drug addiction and mental illness. For his groundbreaking medical work and writing he has been awarded the Order of Canada, his country’s highest civilian distinction, and the Civic Merit Award from his hometown, Vancouver. Gabor is also the creator of a psychotherapeutic approach, Compassionate Inquiry, now studied by thousands of therapists, physicians, counselors, and others in over 80 countries. Website: https://drgabormate.com/
This is such an excellent interview with these three amazing human beings and, I believe, definitely worth posting again. There is a paradigm shift occurring in how addiction is viewed and treated — addictions of all kinds, both substance and non-substance alike. And, to one degree or another, it is my belief that we are all impacted by addiction. No exception.
Here it is illuminated what was missing in the many early years that I had sought help for my own multiple addictions and trauma. And it is clear why, and despite my very best efforts, the legacy burdens that I had inherited — from both the generations before me and our culture — continued to unknowingly and tragically be passed on to my own beloved children.
Gratefully, as the understanding of trauma deepens and evolves, so too is the understanding of the need to dismantle the longstanding and ultimately harmful narrative of addiction as disease.
Pathology, genetics, judgment and shame are now increasingly being replaced with the wisdom of how it is that pain underlies all addictions. Pain is at the root of addictions to alcohol and other drugs — not character defects. It is at the root of all of our other addictions and compulsions — to gambling, shopping, the internet, sex, religion, caretaking, cleaning, food, exercise, work, etc. Pain is also at the root of the epidemics that we see all around us and within us — of depression and anxiety, autoimmune diseases and other illnesses, suicides and other deaths of despair, loneliness and isolation, ruptured relationships and violence, and on and on.
The essential need then is to identify, heal, and transform the pain and trauma of the legacy burdens that we’ve been blindly handed by our ancestors and by the culture at large.
Another chilling, raw and real, heartbreaking and horrifying, illuminating and incredibly needed voice of truth. Thank you, Chris Hedges! We must, we absolutely must!, stand up in every way humanly possible to the brutal insanity of our own President and the American government which is funding this sadism, this utter psychopathic madness, this obliteration of a whole people and their homeland. — Molly
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| When You’re Smiling - by Mr. Fish |
By CHRIS HEDGES
Run, the Israelis demand, run for your lives. Run from Rafah the way you ran from Gaza City, the way you ran from Jabalia, the way you ran from Deir al-Balah, the way you ran from Beit Hanoun, the way you ran from Bani Suheila, the way you ran from Khan Yunis. Run or we will kill you. We will drop 2,000-pound bunker buster bombs on your tent encampments. We will spray you with bullets from our machine-gun-equipped drones. We will pound you with artillery and tank shells. We will shoot you down with snipers. We will decimate your tents, your refugee camps, your cities and towns, your homes, your schools, your hospitals and your water purification plants. We will rain death from the sky.
Run for your lives. Again and again and again. Pack up the pathetic few belongings you have left. Blankets. A couple of pots. Some clothes. We don’t care how exhausted you are, how hungry you are, how terrified you are, how sick you are, how old, or how young you are. Run. Run. Run. And when you run in terror to one part of Gaza we will make you turn around and run to another. Trapped in a labyrinth of death. Back and forth. Up and down. Side to side. Six. Seven. Eight times. We toy with you like mice in a trap. Then we deport you so you can never return. Or we kill you.
Let the world denounce our genocide. What do we care? The billions in military aid flows unchecked from our American ally. The fighter jets. The artillery shells. The tanks. The bombs. An endless supply. We kill children by the thousands. We kill women and the elderly by the thousands. The sick and injured, without medicine and hospitals, die. We poison the water. We cut off the food. We make you starve. We created this hell. We are the masters. Law. Duty. A code of conduct. They do not exist for us.
But first we toy with you. We humiliate you. We terrorize you. We revel in your fear. We are amused by your pathetic attempts to survive. You are not human. You are creatures. Untermensch. We feed our libido dominandi – our lust for domination. Look at our posts on social media. They have gone viral. One shows soldiers grinning in a Palestinian home with the owners tied up and blindfolded in the background. We loot. Rugs. Cosmetics. Motorbikes. Jewelry. Watches. Cash. Gold. Antiquities. We laugh at your misery. We cheer your death. We celebrate our religion, our nation, our identity, our superiority, by negating and erasing yours.
Depravity is moral. Atrocity is heroism. Genocide is redemption.
Jean Améry, who was in the Belgian resistance during World War II and who was captured and tortured by the Gestapo in 1943, defines sadism “as the radical negation of the other, the simultaneous denial of both the social principle and the reality principle. In the sadist’s world, torture, destruction, and death are triumphant: and such a world clearly has no hope of survival. On the contrary, he desires to transcend the world, to achieve total sovereignty by negating fellow human beings – which he sees as representing a particular kind of ‘hell.’”
Back in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa, Netanya, Ramat Gan, Petah Tikva who are we? Dish washers and mechanics. Factory workers, tax collectors and taxi drivers. Garbage collectors and office workers. But in Gaza we are demigods. We can kill a Palestinian who does not strip to his underwear, fall to his knees, beg for mercy with his hands bound behind his back. We can do this to children as young as 12 and men as old as 70.
There are no legal constraints. There is no moral code. There is only the intoxicating thrill of demanding greater and greater forms of submission and more and more abject forms of humiliation.
We may feel insignificant in Israel, but here, in Gaza, we are King Kong, a little tyrant on a little throne. We stride through the rubble of Gaza, surrounded by the might of industrial weapons, able to pulverize in an instant whole apartment blocks and neighborhoods, and say, like Vishnu, “now I have become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
But we are not content simply with killing. We want the walking dead to pay homage to our divinity.
This is the game played in Gaza. It was the game played during the Dirty War in Argentina when the military junta “disappeared” 30,000 of its own citizens. The “disappeared” were subjected to torture – who cannot call what is happening to Palestinians in Gaza torture? – and humiliated before they were murdered. It was the game played in the clandestine torture centers and prisons in El Salvador and Iraq. It is what characterized the war in Bosnia in the Serbian concentration camps.
This soul crushing disease runs through us like an electric current. It infects every crime in Gaza. It infects every word that comes out of our mouths. We, the victors, are glorious. The Palestinians are nothing. Vermin. They will be forgotten.
Israeli journalist Yinon Magal on the show “Hapatriotim” on Israel’s Channel 14, joked that Joe Biden’s red line was the killing of 30,000 Palestinians. The singer Kobi Peretz asked if that was the number of dead for a day. The audience erupted in applause and laughter.
We place "booby-trapped" cans resembling food tins in the rubble. Starving Palestinians are injured or killed when they open them. We broadcast the sounds of women screaming and babies crying from quadcopters to lure Palestinians out so we can shoot them. We announce food distribution points and use artillery and snipers to carry out massacres.
We are the orchestra in this dance of death.
In Joseph Conrad’s short story “An Outpost of Progress,” he writes of two white, European traders, Carlier and Kayerts. They are posted to a remote trading station in the Congo. The mission will spread European “civilization” to Africa. But the boredom and lack of constraints swiftly turn the two men into beasts. They trade slaves for ivory. They get into a feud over dwindling food supplies. Kayerts shoots and kills his unarmed companion Carlier.
“They were two perfectly insignificant and incapable individuals,” Conrad writes of Kayerts and Carlier:
…whose existence is only rendered possible through the high organization of civilized crowds. Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings. The courage, the composure, the confidence; the emotions and principles; every great and every insignificant thought belongs not to the individual but to the crowd; to the crowd that believes blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and its morals, in the power of its police and of its opinion. But the contact with pure unmitigated savagery, with primitive nature and primitive man, brings sudden and profound trouble into the heart. To the sentiment of being alone of one’s kind, to the clear perception of the loneliness of one’s thoughts, of one’s sensations – to the negation of the habitual, which is safe, there is added the affirmation of the unusual, which is dangerous; a suggestion of things vague, uncontrollable, and repulsive, whose discomposing intrusion excites the imagination and tries the civilized nerves of the foolish and the wise alike.
Rafah is the prize at the end of the road. Rafah is the great killing field where we will slaughter Palestinians on a scale unseen in this genocide. Watch us. It will be an orgy of blood and death. It will be of Biblical proportions. No one will stop us. We kill in paroxysms of excitement. We are gods.
Please go here for the original article and the podcast read by Eunice Wong: https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/israels-willing-executioners-read
