The panel was moderated by Gabor Mate, a renowned trauma therapist, and included Bayo Akomolafe, Pat McCabe, Tara Brach, V, and Matthew Remski. I listened to it twice and am living with the reverberations. I would like to share how they touched me.Gabor posed questions for rounds of response. “How can people known for sharing great truths and inspiring many followers also demonstrate patriarchal, abusive behavior? Do we discard the teachings and sit with our blame, or do we accept that all of us may encompass both these qualities?” “Why are so many silent in the spiritual communities in which these issues arise?”
The panelists are all highly developed practitioners in this context. Bayo Akomolafe, Ph.D., is described as a mytho-poetic spiritual teacher from Africa. Pat McCabe (Woman Stands Shining) is a Diné mother, grandmother and voice for peace and healing archetypal wounding. V as a Tony award winning playwright who wrote acclaimed Vagina Monologues. Tara Brach is a meditation teacher, psychologist and author. Together with Jack Kornfield co-founded Banyan and the Mindfulness Medication Teacher Training Program, serving people in 74 countries. Finally, Matthew Remski is a writer and podcaster writing about spiritual delusion and the shadow of capitalism.
Trapped in English
It was an odd feeling to hear such mature and thoughtful people try and express a non-dual orientation to reality with the English language, whose very subject-object structure bends toward dualism. They used story and personal reflections that circled the questions instead of pointing right to answers.
I personally felt the trap of dualism in language most strongly in journalism school when I tried to write editorials advocating one point of view. I preferred writing features that were stories containing multiple points of view. I credit this bias to being raised as a young person in vast expanses of the Eastern Sierra, where my father was minister of a young church in Bishop, California. He read Thoreau and Witman and was eager to get to the mountains after church as we were. No surprise that Pat McCabes grounded assertion that we need to remember that Mother Earth is not dual. Everything is related. Everything interacts with everything else. Species do not survive by practicing power over but working with. And within this confidence she carries the deep pain of being part of an “almost successful” genocide of Native Americans. I’d heard this before but was shocked again to hear Pat say that there is no official record of missing Native American women.
Systems and Parts
When Gabor offhandedly complemented the group for all reflecting that the system and its individual parts are inherently interconnected, I was moved at a personal, reflective level about how he could say so much so quietly and economically. Another part of me was fascinated with Matthew’s intellectual perspectives, making a persuasive case for the non-accountability of spiritual leaders, using Chögyam Trungpa, a known alcoholic and womanizer, as a case example. He went on to argue that we should appreciate the interdependence between spiritual leaders and devotees, and that much of the “truth” of their work arises from the collective, not the individual.
V’s long history with personal abuse and her work in the arts to understand it, has left her with an indelible sense of not being separate from the system but a part of it, and the omnipresence of patriarchy is part of her. It has clearly catalyzed tremendous energy on her part and freedom from easy answers.
Tara’s response to Gabor’s question about embracing both the contribution and the abuse of many leaders led me back to my own understanding of this. I experienced my father in being kicked out of the church for adultery and deceit after entering into a secret affair that eventually blew our family apart. I had little appreciation before that for the power of the personal unconscious and what some would think of as a demonic power that can erupt. I now lead a deeply reflective life and do much personal work as a result of this shock.
The Power of Relational Fields
The panel ended with Gabor honoring the many ideas that were shared but more importantly the field of energy that the group exhibited together. They all had pointed in various ways to their experience that it takes a community to process the kinds of structural abuse they were considering. They pointed to the people of Minnesota as a hopeful sign of new way of working with power over. There are no singled-out leaders there. In its place is a concept of “neighboring” as a response.
Gisela, my wife, was so moved by experiencing this presentation that she convened a small group of us to watch it and have our own round of reflections. As a result, I watched the video a second time, and was moved, as Gabor was, by the field that was created just in our small group.
In this second listening I noticed the number of different ways that the panel talked about the inner and the outer world of our experience both needing to be considered. Matthew talked about how the exhaustion of 1960-70 activists turned to self-development, and some of that drives the silence. But they ended up feeling that the outer structures must also change. That was what was hopeful about the Minnesota example, for neighboring is a form of organization.
I personally don’t experience silence on the many news feeds I read and friends I talk with but is deafening in the corridors of power. The widespread complicity in corruption and domination has numbed and muted too many. Only slightly are we beginning to hear about the real human suffering in Iran, Gaza and Ukraine As I read these things I ask myself, can I feel this suffering without turning to “othering” and blame? Can I feel these things in my heart and also work openly to support communitarian ways of working? Can the silence be broken by a contagion of relational awareness and love for each other and this incredible planet (which thanks to Artemis II I can again see whole)?
