It’s not your fault, but it is your responsibility. A note on survival.

Responsibility: loosely defined as the state or fact of having a duty to deal with something.

What are you responsible for?

In other words, what do you have to deal with on a daily basis, week after week, month after month, year after year, to ensure you can keep on living your life?

This is, in its simplest, most materialistic terms, what it means to survive. There are other theories of survival that bridge the metaphysical and spiritual, positioning survival as an eternal practice and state of being. In other words, when you die you never die. I LOVE those theories, and I’m responsible (no pun intended) for coming up with a few of them myself. What I want to talk about here is another component of that particular type of survival. Another layer, if you will.

In my multiple practices, it’s important for me to never give the impression that certain aspects of reality cancel eachother out. On my own journey, and my journey supporting hundreds of clients and community members, I’ve learned that it’s never actually a helpful or healing intervention to tell someone what they’re experiencing or perceiving doesn’t exist. I’ve found the most value — that is to say, the most potential for connection, love, transformation, and growth in a way that serves all parties involved — emerges from my ability to view and teach about reality as a delicious, tiered cake.

In my vision of reality, every part of our experience constitutes a layer. And get this - we can have as many layers as we want! Your reality cake can be 2 tiers high, 5 tiers high, or maybe more like mine at a staggering 230498234098 layers high…okay that’s an exaggeration - but my point is this: all layers of reality can (and do) exist.

I love using this metaphor of a reality cake because what is our favorite thing to do with a cake once the baking is done?

Take a bite! Which leads me to my next meditation:

Can you digest reality?

Can you taste each layer, discern for resonance and dissonance in your body?

Can you chew and swallow and be present with your experience as the cake travels through your body’s systems and pores?

Eating a cake is like being present with reality. In my practice atleast :)

What I love about this metaphor is that there is no contradiction, cancellation, or need for your mind to get all wound up in a neurotic fit. Once you notice another layer of reality, just add it to the top of your cake and move on. Keep looking at your cake, noticing its colors and flavors. Then, be sure to take a bite from time to time.

Today, I want to talk about the layer of reality that is our sole responsibility. And that is the layer of material survival. The daily decisions we make and don’t make to ensure our lives continue on in a particular direction. Preferably, in the direction of more life.

I notice a whole lot of people struggling to come into relationship with this aspect of reality, particular in socially and politically conscious spaces. Because we know how violent and systemically rigged most of the material world is (hellllooo racial capitalism, white supremacy, ableism, etc.), we often feel resentful that we have to survive in the first place. It’s not fair that we have to face these conditions and it’s not fair that it’s easier for some people than it may be for us. We shouldn’t have to spend so much time worrying how to eat, how to feed our families, how to care for our communities, and how to keep ourselves and others safe. We should simply just have access to everything we need — including dignity and protection.

I 100%, even 1000%, agree.

Every single aspect of this sentiment is true.

What is also true is that if we choose to live our whole lives from this place, we will absolutely die sooner. We will have less and less to give, and we will even have less and less energy to receive.

And I want you to live as long as a life as you want to.

I want you to give all you came to give.

I want you to receive all you are owed — all you deserve to receive.

Showing up for your own survival is sometimes a daunting task, I know. Going to the grocery. Figuring out how to nourish yourself. Balancing your checkbook. Coming up with creative ways to take care of your body while paying the bills. Tending to others while still tending to yourself. Paying taxes, and/or choosing war tax resistance. Making time for your spiritual practice.

Material survival requires a lot of will. It shouldn’t, but in the conditions we incarnated into, it does.

So my question is — are you connected to that will? If so, are you channeling it in service of your life force energy and the life force energy of the world?

And if you’re not — what can we do to get you more in touch?

This concept of “it’s not your fault, but it is your responsibility” may be one way of resolving the tension you feel between wanting to continue on with your most abundant, purposeful life and wanting to completely surrender to the design of the systems that exist. Those systems, as grim as it may sound, are designed to kill you.

So the question each of us face everyday is: will we surrender to our own slaughter? Or will we never give these systems that slaughtering power over us again?

When faced with this question, so many of us go into a freeze state. We don’t want to believe we may be streamlining our own dying, even as we take each and every breath. Breath, in many cultures, traditions, and frameworks I admire, is a sacred expression of life, of our audacity to “be.” And yet, it is also true that underneath that breath — or perhaps, right beyond it — are the choices that having continued access to breath makes possible.

In partnership with breath is the reality of life.

From some perspectives, breath is life.

Again, I 100% agree.

And, to add another layer to the cake, while breath may be our survival, it is not the only thing that constitutes survival.

There are actions we can take, some as natural as breath, to keep our beautiful lives going. To give staying here our best.

In this particular iteration of human culture, I’d argue that is all we can do. Our literal best, whatever that means, as we each awaken and face a rise in crises and terrorism towards our bodies, hearts, minds, spirits, and communities everyday.

We don’t have to love it. We don’t have to like it. But we do deserve to give it our best try.

When I tell my clients — and also, myself — it’s not your fault, but it is your responsibility — what I mean is:

Please don’t be immobilized by the big-ness of everything that has to change.

Please don’t get so overwhelmed that you consciously or unconsciously give up your will.

Please don’t absorb the energetic frequency of that which is beyond your control, that which has been in place for lifetimes, because your one tiny body will be debilitated by it. You won’t be able to take any movement that serves you or all life.

Contrary to popular belief, our purpose is not to save the world.

Our purpose is to be the world, be of the world, be in the world, and be with the world, as world.

And even if we do want to take that save-the-world analogy even further (I don’t believe in saviorism so I really don’t…but still….just to illuminate my point here…) no saving can happen if you don’t exist.

Do you exist?

As silly of a question as that may sound, take a moment and ask yourself this.

Are you here?

Can you feel it?

Do you know what it’s like to be gone? And do you choose it?

It’s not your fault, but it is your responsibility — is my way of saying this:

You, yourself, didn’t create this.
But you, yourself, are here.
What will you do now that you’ve made it?

Curious about finding new ways to fortify your survival in a world on fire? I can help.

Talk soon,

M.