What Cancel Culture and a Bath of Rage Taught Me.
I find myself smiling quietly at this culture we have of cancelling and shutting down or silencing voices and opinions of others.
It is not a popular reaction; so I wanted to explore it.
Getting told to shut up, doesn’t actually shut us or anyone up, does it?
It actually, more often than not, has the opposite effect.
What we are trying to shut off, shut down, silence, bursts forth out even louder, even angrier, over-riding our graces and pouring out in unconscious and inconvenient ways.
Control
Have you ever told a young inquisitive child not to do something, like play with a knife or electrical wires? They look at you and consider your command; and then proceed to do the exact thing you just told them not to do?
They aren’t doing it because they are horrible disobedient runts.
Usually, they are trying to find their balance of safety and freedom, curiosity and rules, inner authority and outer authority. Kids have this amazing ability to learn life by living it, actually experiencing it.
This, more than our commands, informs their budding sense of Self, expression and place in the world.
I didn’t grow up around a lot of young children. So, when little cousins came into my life, I had a really hard time with them; likely because my own sense of Self was still forming.
I would take their disobedience personally. It didn’t matter to me that they were between the ages of 3 and 7 and I was in my early 20s - they were unpredictable and I couldn’t control them. This made me feel like I couldn’t ‘figure things out’ around them and it caused waves in my sense of self.
When they would ask me random questions that came from their pure child’s heart, I would get flustered and was often quick to shut down their line of questioning if it made me uncomfortable.
I eventually realized that I had very little capacity to allow for things outside what I knew in the world - which wasn’t much. As such, I was threatened by almost everything in my world; it seemed to form a direct dagger into my carefully crafted identity structure. This is why I needed to control and curate myself and life situation.
It was a need, masking my inability to allow.
I wasn’t a confrontational person, so my choice of action was avoidance. I would hide behind situations, offer up diversions while I shut myself down in my personal relationships. When confronted, I’d try to blame, distract or silence the source as much as I could.
The more I shut down and off things within me and around me, the more intense and unavoidable they become. I lived here for years. I did not know a way out.
We are all taught language skills and social graces as ways of communicating with our fellow humans.
What we are not taught is how to converse, debate, agree and disagree with love and respect for ourselves and our fellow humans and for Life and Creation.
Well into my adulthood, I had to learn how to do this. And the way for me was learning and living through extremes.
The Bath of Extremes
I’m not sure why things happen on particular days, but they do.
It was some years ago, and something wild was happening in the world. It was all over the news and there were a hundred opinions for and against the happening. I truly do not recall what it was, but I remember it evoked very personal emotions for me. I did not know what to think, who to believe, what the actual truth even was and why it was affecting me and on such a personal level.
People were quoting opinions as facts and arguing with each other on both sides, slandering each other’s reputation based on half-read opinions and fully formed assumptions.
It was exhausting to witness and talk about even in the company of wonderful friends.
In times like this, if you have experienced them, you just want to scream at the entire world to shut up and leave you alone. But it keeps on.
It is an annoying part of knowing and having Oneness experiences; because in Absolute Truth, everything happening in the World is alive within the Self, and our Self is pulsing in the World.
It is felt, sometimes like pain, despair, rage, exasperation, frustration or paralysis.
On this particular day, I was exhausted and not functioning very well. So, I drew a bath and poured in Epsom salts.
Salt water is an amazing conduit for emotions that have the habit of wrecking us. I don’t think I remembered that at the time, but some part of me, quietly and intuitively drew me to what was healthy for me - a Bath of Rage Release.
It is really important to feel safe and be in a space where we are undisturbed and undistracted as we are facing these long shut away parts of ourself. We do not know exactly what they are - but we all have a clear sense that they will be awful.
In this bathroom, lit only by candlelight, on this particular day, I let it out.
Hearing My Own Rage, Hate, Pain and… Forgiveness
In the bath, I let my thoughts and emotions wander to the news happening. Alls the sides of the argument bubbled up along with my confusing and I grew angrier and angrier.
Then, other unrelated things in the world, in my life, in the lives of others that held the resonance of great anger, also rose up.
At first I was silent. But then, on the steam that rose up from the my bathwater, so did did my voice and words.
I let out base and horrible rage-full thoughts that I had justified rationally (because the world and people sucked).
I included names of evil people that deserved to die because I hated them; ideas and scenes of my of vengeance on people I knew and people who didn’t know me played out.
All my entitlement, my pain, my betrayals, my denied expectations, my rage and hatred, my upset all poured out in the space between the shower head and torrid water level in the bathtub.
I spoke conflated ideas of personal injustice with collective injustices, giving my inner victim a bigger story.
Eventually, a lot of what I had shut off or shut down, intentionally or from ignorance/ denial within myself came pouring out - salty tears met salty tub water.
An emotional tornado, contained in this bathtub.
When we very angry, we do not make a lot of sense. So, then we try rationalize to calm ourselves. This experience was not that. This was the allowing of raw, wild, unabashed chaotic emotion to just be what it was.
A lot of memories and stories came up as well, like images. There was a personal link to some, but they were also larger than just me.
Where love was tainted and used.
Where creativity and care was co-oped.
Where power and pleasure were usurped.
Where wealth, health and youth was stolen.
They were feelings felt in the world. The World we are all a part of.
In this place, I uttered statements I would never speak to another human.
I heard my voice of pain and intolerance, reinforced by my perceived injustices.
I felt the voice of my own hatred and rage in my throat and in my ears. As the texture of the words left my mouth, I was blanketed in my own shame for thinking, feeling and saying all this.
This is the epic grace of water and salt. They heal and wash us, of ourselves.
In what felt like the longest bath in history, for the first time in my life, I let my hatred, fears, rage and entitlement wash over me. I gave these dark emotions voice in the safety of my own presence, guided by candlelight, held by salt and water.
I may have believed pains to be my truth, and justified my intolerance and entitlement at one time. But I realized quickly that these weren’t my truths. And that I was learning what Truths actually feel like to me.
I wasn’t quiet. I wondered, what my neighbours would think and if they heard my multi-hour outburst. But, I was already all in. There was no stopping now.
When my skin was thoroughly pruned, I thought I was at an end.
I had the sense to know that some forgiveness needed to be asked for and given. I wanted forgiveness for all this awful stuff I had spoken into my bathroom. And I knew I carried old and ancient pains that I needed to forgive as well.
This did not happen easily.
Underneath our anger, intolerance and rage, lies deep pain. It isn’t always available to be labelled. Sometimes we cannot pin-point to the cause, the person or situation. We just feel so hurt, that we clutch ourselves and grieve.
This was the first time I felt my anger as a cover to the pain beneath. It was as if it served the purpose of the scab to an un-healing wound.
True Forgiveness, from the Heart, is a miraculous salve.
I had tried to forgive before, and I didn’t have this same profound experience. Likely because, I was coming from my mind, my ego, my experiences.
This time, there was a rawness to it. The scab of anger was pulled off and the medicine of salt was healing the actual pain and the actual wound.
As if Forgiveness had waited for me for an eternity, I started to heal up in my emotional body.
It was palpable.
I felt myself forgive, forgiven, forgave.
Without intending to do so, gratitude poured out of me, like rushing tap water. I was thankful for nothing and everything.
The rest of the evening was a bit of a blur. I imagine that I blew out the candle, drained the tub, dried myself and crawled into bed, but I don’t remember doing any of those things. I was tried, but not in the same way I had been the days preceding.
As if Forgiveness had waited for me for an eternity, I started to heal up in my emotional body.
It was palpable.
I felt myself forgive, forgiven, forgave.
I do remember the waking up the next day with a mind uncharacteristically quiet. I started my day, and the same news happening appeared on my media feed.
I remember looking at it, somewhat blank as feeds and posts scrolled through my screen. There was an understanding of something that I can sadly not articulate in words. The words out of my mouth in that moment, as I sighed were ‘Yes, and this too’.
It would be years before I understood what those words actually meant, but I had come to a place of accepting myself and world around me and the manifold opinions I was seeing, in that moment.
‘Yes, and this too.’
In a long instance, I saw how everyone, myself included, was practiced in speaking without listening. I saw how most of us are trained to converse from the mind, and so we have little capacity for emotions and feeling in discussions. I realized how we value the Self so little that we have no choice but to place weight on external validation to prove ourselves to Ourselves. I smiled because I saw that we were all figuring our Oneness and Separation within us and through each other.
I saw how intolerance masks deep fears.
I saw how angry outbursts cover wells of pain.
I saw how inadequacy in the self is exacerbated by opposing views to what we hold.
I saw my Self in the World and I saw all the places in one moment where I was all these things - like shattered glass fragments reforming a mirror.
Cancelling and Allowing
Through this Allowing of extremes, this listening to what I did not want to hear within - I had found my centre, my balance, my place, for the now, at least.
And all the feelings and thoughts I was efforting to push down, shut up and keep away, had drained with last night’s bath water.
New Truths revealed themselves.
These days, when I hear that a platform, website, organization or random person on the street has shut someone (of a group of someones) up, I have a bizarre feeling about it.
The bizarreness makes me smile - from awkward anticipation.
It is hard of course and I wouldn’t wish that experience on anyone, and yet I also know that the ethers scream what we silence.
That there is a weight to what we cancel after having judged it from our separate-from-Source self.
Only the egoic mind believes that as tiny humans on a Conscious plant in an ascending galaxy, we have the power to make something not-so, by cancelling it.
We have done this whenever humans have judged and commanded an execution of a person, opinion or idea based on what we think we know.
It has led to the collective unconscious screaming and shaking the Earth beneath our feet, at our presumption.
It has and will always lead to messy change.
And so, the cost of silencing - by cancelling, gaslighting, trolling, deleting, virtue shaming, invalidating, staying silent and hidden - is to be shaken by a source unknown.
This is singularly terrifying, unless you evaluate the cost within yourself first, preferably held by your own Love and the Love of the Waters of our World.
Because the Universe has a bizarre sense of humour, alongside the talks of cancelling opinions, we also hear a lot about inclusivity and celebrating diversity - sometimes from the same people.
While we may think this is hypocrisy, I believe we are enhancing our discernment here a little, by learning now to move beyond the words on screen.
It is subtle.
There is a difference between self and Self, truth and Truth, for example.
There is a tone behind repurposed chatter on the subject of inclusivity which is superficial, compared to deeply entrenched understanding or experience of both division and inclusivity and how it is expressed without denying anything.
It can be as physical as hearing something really out there and getting a chill down your spine, knowing that somehow this is Truth, even though we do not have the all the facts just yet.
Maybe we are learning to tell if a comment on social media that is rude and gaslighting us, is created by a bot or an actual person.
We have been learning to feel our feelings. Especially the vile, uncouth and uncomfortable ones.
Now, once felt, we are learning to allow duality to be exactly what it is, and feel our way through. This is needed as a pre-requisite to the learning of transformation - indeed a pupation.
If your goal is to find the middle way, then consider that you may have to bathe in both edges to even recognize what the middle is. This is not achieved by telling yourself and others to shut up and shut off what feels extreme. It is also not achieved by verbose challenges from the mind and ego and going down rabbit holes of opinions.
Allowing Ourselves, enables us to allow for others.
This doesn’t mean that we let hate-speak pour itself onto our world. It means that we recognize pain - ours and theirs - for what it is.
The words that we then utter, are revealing and transformative - for us and them.
For now, may we all be blessed with an increased capacity to listen, love, understanding, hear and speak.
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