The Fascists are Coming: Let’s Get Belly to the Ground
To lower my belly to the ground. It is a survival posture, yes, but also a wise one. Belly to the ground means yielding to the reality of impact while conserving energy, sensing the earth, and discerning how to move.
This is not trust that everything will be okay. It is deeper and more sober than that. It is trust in the body pressed close to the earth, sensing what is wise, finding the response that does not feed the fire but helps life endure.
- Tuesday Rivera
tldr: Here is an invitation not to panic but to lower our bellies to the ground. An invitation o meet this moment with courage, calm, and connection. When we tune our nervous systems to steadiness rather than reactivity, we remember what is most human: the wisdom of our bodies, the endurance of our ancestors, and the power of moving together with care.
Since Tuesday’s wisdom inspired this post, I just have to share her recent, bold, and courageous podcast episode inviting us to claim that which is true: Claiming Your Spiritual Authority. (In case you needed any more proof of why I live wildly in love with this woman!)
Before we start, I want to remind you that our first of three [free] Sensemaking Sessions in October is happening this Thursday, October 16 from 3PM to 4:30PM East. We will gather around the film Leviathan. An invitation to confront the shadows lurking at the heart of our systems. Alexander Beiner, producer and director, will join us for the beginning of our conversation. Register here.
You can also become a paid subscriber to support and participate in the ebook that I’m writing on what is Beyond Psychedelics.
Back to our scheduled programming:
Where is the Red Line?
I don’t know if there is a “final” red line that tells us: this is now a fascist state.
I know that masked agents of the state are coming for brown people wherever they might be. And that they disappear into cages without any semblance of due process.
I know that even the oligarchs, the privileged and powerful are punished for dissent. Corporations, comedians, intellectuals. Anyone who steps out of line is at risk.
This is not a time of freedom.
I’ll let political historians debate where this red line is. When it was crossed. Or when it might be crossed.
But for me, the recent conclave of the military’s top brass was definitely a moment that brings us into the next phase of this terrifying and unfolding process.
The event was mocked as expensive and meandering campaign style showmanship. There was certainly al lot of babble. But to me, this is the line that matters:
“We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military, National Guard, but military. Because we’re going into Chicago very soon, that’s a big city with an incompetent governor. Stupid governor.”
What parts of Chicago do you think he’s talking about? Which neighborhoods in what other cities? What do the people look like there?
Look, I have promised you that I don’t want to be alarmist with these missives. You have plenty of media making lots and lots of money by extracting your attention and hijacking your limbic system. I refuse to be a part of that. But I also refuse to put my head in the sand and pretend nothing is going on.
Forward-Facing Remembering
I refuse to be one of those spiritual people who pretend that by being well inside themselves, they no longer have a need to be in full engagement with the suffering of this world.
I want this work to be about: Forward Facing Remembering
About facing life in these times, when and where our souls chose to be born. And about doing so with the wisdom of the millennia. With the wisdom of ancestors who endured one apocalypse after another in order for us to be here.
That’s really what I want to get into.
How are we supposed to meet these times?
The Ways of Our Nervous System
Understanding the patterns of tyranny is not enough. We must also understand the ways of our nervous systems.
I believe that when we turn towards adversity the wisest to do is to take note of our state and of our posture.
At the beginning of this year, I wrote a piece titled Fear and the Inauguration.
I made a distinction between fear and anxiety.
Fear is helpful. It is necessary. It allows us to take immediate action to protect ourselves.
Anxiety is unhelpful. It is a generalized anticipatory state. Anxiety keeps us from that centered, grounded, embodied state that gives us the agility to act wisely and strategically.
In that piece, I also proposed that we never know exactly what is coming. That no one among us knows the future. I invited us to write down all of our terrified predictions, put them away somewhere, and then come back some years later so that we could see which came true and which have not. I wrote weary of hysteria. Aware that the future is always unknown.
But I confess I am stunned by the pace and strategic coherence of this authoritarian takeover. It is all happening faster than I imagined.
Yet we still do not know the future. Because the future cannot be known.
My dear friend Rachel Plattus refers to the arrogance of despair. She reminds us that we do not and cannot know the future. And that therefore there’s something arrogant about a pessimism that presumes only the worst.
The discourse of inevitable collapse can feel sober and mature, but it also invites the arrogance of being the one that knows.
Julian Norris, my brother from another mother, just wrote a brilliant piece that gets at the right balance: The Art of Dying: Notes on Collapse and Transition.
Byung-Chul Han reminds us that both optimism and pessimism seek to shut down the future. But that hope is different. Hope emerges from suffering. It challenges and directs us toward novelty. Hope does not know, and in not knowing, it makes room for something new.
Viktor Frankl came out of the pit of darkness of genocidal fascism and invited us into:
A posture of tragic optimism. The capacity to maintain hope and meaning in life despite the inevitability of suffering, guilt, and death. It is not naive positivity. It is the belief that one can find meaning even in the face of tragedy
And here’s where I want to get to what Tuesday says about how to turn towards this moment..
I am completely paraphrasing the wisdom I gathered from her Rooted in Light podcast episode with Dr. Gabrielle Donnelly:
Belly to the Ground
In the midst of unraveling systems, there is still a birthright that has not been taken from us: wellbeing, connection, the aliveness of our animal bodies. Even as the world burns hotter for some than for others, we can protect and tend this ground of being. It is what Meg Wheatley names the work of warriors of the human spirit. Defending what is most human.
The temptation is to match urgency with urgency, violence with more heat. But I have come to believe that adding my fear, my revving up, contributes nothing. Instead, I practice a different stance: to turn my face toward what is happening without getting swept away, and:
To lower my belly to the ground. It is a survival posture, yes, but also a wise one. Belly to the ground means yielding to the reality of impact while conserving energy, sensing the earth, and discerning how to move.
This is not trust that everything will be okay. It is deeper and more sober than that. It is trust in the body pressed close to the earth, sensing what is wise, finding the response that does not feed the fire but helps life endure.
We have been living under the limbic hijack of algorithmic media. The anxiety epidemic came before this latest attack on democratic possibility.
And yet: the best place to strategize from is a state of grounded, wakeful calm. From there we take our most agile, creative posture.
This isn’t easy. Anxiety has a grip. But our task is to meet what’s coming in a way that lets future generations have another go at it. It is time to act.
But we don’t want to just react.
Let’s keep coming together to build trust and friendship, to connect and co-regulate. Let’s practice bringing our bellies to the ground. Let’s practice returning to the felt sense of being human animals on a living planet. Let’s remember that our cells, stories, and songs carry the wisdom of millennia. That our ancestors endured the unimaginable so that we could be here.
This awareness isn’t a luxury. It is a discipline. There are practices that return us to our bodies and cultivate calm and discernment. They are essential now. They are not an alternative to action, but the very ground of wise action.
Try this, here and now: feel your feet; place a hand on the earth or on your belly; lengthen your exhale; look at the nearest face with warmth; say one true sentence. And ask for the wisdom to take the next right step.
Belly to the ground. Eyes wide open. We move in attunement to the greater life force of this vibrant planet.
We move with care.
We move with courage
And we move together.
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