Cure-ations for This Hard Time

My enemy helps me in my conduct of awakening.
— His Holiness The Dalai Lama in Healing Anger by His Holiness The Dalai Lama

Welcome to The Dancing Center. If you are part of my BIPOC community, queer or know the trauma of crossing borders to save your life, I want you to know that my love and prayers start with you each day. Nothing more should be asked of you. I wish I could offer you relief. Instead you might have to be protective like I imagine I will as a woman. I offer you the highest regard for your knowledge about what we are dealing with at this moment. Any guidance you have, I want it for what lies ahead.

It feels like we’ve just been diagnosed with a life-threatening illness that will take our time, resources, and maybe our lives. It could alter everything. Or will it?

The election revealed America to itself and the world. We know better who we are as a people. I won’t say more about who I think we are right now.

I will say I’ve banned the words “Unbelievable!” and “I’m shocked!” from my utterances. Believe what you experience, Cynthia! The voters made it clear repeatedly.

I feel called to the spiritual practices and the kind of community that white folks rarely embody. What is needed goes much further than being woke. More than smarts. More than communication with words. More than self-care. I am grateful to have been on a path my whole life that seeks the health of body and soul, individually and collectively. I’ve found a great deal of what I was looking for and want that for others. It doesn’t look like what we think it's supposed to look like. For me, it’s in the improvisational communal dance I find in the Hidden Monastery, Dance Chapels, and Art of Ensoulment spaces. Dancing helps me metabolize the big hits so that I don’t get stuck stewing.

As a highly sensitive person facing an epidemic of tyrants and righteous bullies, I seek clarity. If you read my last substack, Embodied Evil 101, I see evil as a trance that is the opposite of Love. Though I can't pin it down, dissect, correct, or master it, I need not be blind to the fact that evil offers present-time comfort in exchange for a soul tax. Always has, Always will. Many don’t realize we are paying our soul tax right now.

I am not clueless or confused about my next steps. As one danced by Life, I rededicate myself to love those with whom I dance and to choose wisely how to create in this world. I will be diligent in the arts of psychic grooming, breaking out of collective trances, and helping reboot our Dynamic Soul Health and Original Brilliance. I will offer spaces to mobilize grace and freedom so that we may heal from histories of oppression and rejoice in new waves of hope and humility. I plan to show up as an artist and a spiritual teacher.

For now, I’ve curated a list of things that have most helped me this week.

This article from Waging Nonviolence: 10 Things to Do If Donald Trump Wins, by Daniel Hunter, Global Trainings Manager at 350.org, curriculum designer with Sunrise Movement, and author of "Building a Movement to End the New Jim Crow.”

Music

A Playlist for Election Anxiety from InterHelp.

And Wiyaala and All I Need, thanks to Barbra Weiner and Marla Durden

Poem: May Sarton’s The Angels and the Furies

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The angels, the furies
Are never far away
While we dance, we dance,
Trying to keep a balance
To be perfectly human
(Not perfect, never perfect,
Never an end to growth and peril),
Able to bless and forgive
Ourselves.
This is what is asked of us.

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It is light that matters,
The light of understanding.
Who has ever reached it
Who has not met the furies again and again?
Who has reached it without
Those sudden acts of grace?

Words from Wise Elders

From Cornel West 

“ I cannot be an optimist, but I remain a prisoner of hope,”

"You have to be a hope to really have hope."

“Is love enough?  Justice is what Love looks like in public.” 

Despair and hope are inseparable. One can never understand what hope is really about unless one wrestles with despair. The same is true with faith. There has to be some serious doubt, otherwise faith becomes merely a dogmatic formula, an orthodoxy, a way of evading the complexity of life, ratheLifean a way of engaging honestly with life.” CornLifeest, b. 1953

Robert Reich–”Think of the common good as a pool of trust built up over generations — a trust that most other people share the same basic ideals. This pool of trust has great value. It makes everyone’s lives simpler and more secure. “

Simone Weil– “Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.”

Reinhold Niebuhr–“Groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Lutheran minister executed by Nazis– “The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil.”    

Olive Moore –”Hatred is a passion requiring one hundred times the energy of Love. Keep it for a cause, not an individual. Keep it for intolerance, injustice, stupidity. For hatred is the strength of the sensitive. Its power and its greatness depend on the selflessness of its use.”

Richard Rohr in Hope Against Darkness: “Don't waste any time dividing the world into good guys and bad guys. Hold them both together in your own soul -- where they are anyway -- and you will have held together the whole world.”

STOP HATE Murmuration

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f you seek a gentle yet strong and playful community, the Hidden Monastery Dance Chaplains and Art of Ensoulment Coaches honor people’s longing to be in body and soul. We uniquely listen to our community in a way that celebrates their creative birthrights and validates with deep regard the inner wisdom and intuition of others. Visit cynthiawinton-henry.com to learn more.

Taking a deep breath and letting it out with sighs too deep for words.