Healing America’s Narratives: What’s Love Got to Do With It?

Posted on November 7, 2023 by Reggie Marra

[Part of our ongoing exploration of Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow, this essay explores Chapter Twelve’s inquiry into the role of love — and its lack — in American culture. The book is available here.]

Regarding the subtitle’s question, the answer is, well, just about everything.

Over the course of some twenty years I paid attention to others’ views on love. I listened to friends and family, read fiction and nonfiction including scripture from various religions, and did my best to understand what I felt through my own direct experience. Three particular views among many spoke to me personally, and I “assembled” a working perspective on love that lives at the intersection of the three:

According to Br. David Steindl-Rast, Dr. M. Scott Peck, and Marianne Williamson’s reflections on A Course in Miracles respectively, love is “the joyful acceptance of belonging,” “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth,” and the absence of fear.¹

Throughout, amid, beneath, within, and above America’s collective national Shadow lurks a lack of love. Not that love doesn’t exist in the United States — it does — but where it is not lacking it most often manifests as an exclusive, conditional, qualified, and group-centric love.

We are willing to joyfully accept belonging with or to extend ourselves for the benefit of selected, but not all, others. Those other others we fear — sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly, but fear them we do.

Where this leads, has led, and will lead us is toward a deeper, truer, more inclusive, and less conditional — if not unconditional — love. Within the developmental shorthand that points to our increasingly inclusive, balanced, comprehensive, and complex movement through it’s about me, it’s about us, it’s about all of us, and it’s about all that is perspectives, an it’s about me orientation is the earliest and least inclusive view available to us.

But without a healthy iteration of this view, which allows each of us to love our self and makes it possible to look in the mirror and authentically say, “I love you,” to the essence of our reflection (give it a try), self-love remains repressed as part of our Shadow — and this repression inevitably limits the fullness of our love for any other(s). In Teachings on Love, Thich Nhat Hanh made it clear that, “Until we are able to love and take care of ourselves, we cannot be of much help to others.”²

Choosing to extend one’s self in order to joyfully accept belonging as, to, and with the perfectly beautiful, blemished being each of us is strengthens our will to extend our selves on behalf of the perfectly beautiful, blemished beings you, they, all of us, and all that is are. Both the foundation of healthy self-love and the expansion beyond it are essential.

In, Outlaw Culture, bell hooks expressed being puzzled by folks who authentically confront one “domination” while often passively supporting or ignoring another. She pointed specifically to black men who fought against racial discrimination but ignored the plight of women, and to white women who were on the front lines of gender discrimination but ignored the racial discrimination against their black sisters. She observed that many activists act on behalf of self-interest, attempting to end “what we feel is hurting us,” rather than on behalf of “a collective transformation of society, an end to politics of dominations.” She concludes:

“This is why we desperately need an ethic of love to intervene in our self-centered longing for change. Fundamentally, if we are only committed to an improvement in that politic of domination that we feel leads directly to our individual exploitation or oppression, we not only remain attached to the status quo but act in complicity with it, nurturing and maintaining those very systems of domination.”³

She clearly states the necessity for a love that moves from embracing what concerns me or my particular us to the wider embrace of all of us and all that is. Sound familiar?

Consider the words of Siddhartha Gautama, passed down by many, including Gandhi and King: “For hatred can never put an end to hatred; love alone can. This is an unalterable law.”⁴ Remember the words attributed to Jesus Christ: “Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.”⁵

In Across That Bridge, John Lewis acknowledged the roles of faith, patience, study, truth, action, peace, and reconciliation in his vision for change in the United States. He also made it clear that for those who studied, trained in, and practiced nonviolence, “not simply as a tactic, but as a way of authentically living our lives — our sole purpose was, in fact, love.”⁶

In response to a question from Krista Tippett in 2020, author Jason Reynolds defined antiracism in this way:

“…[it’s] simply the muscle that says that humans are human. That’s it. It’s the one that says, ‘I love you because you are you.’ Period. That’s all…. That element of ‘I love you because you are you’ should be the most human thing we know. It should be a natural thing to say, ‘Look, I love you, because you remind me more of myself than not.’”⁷

While simple on the surface, those last eight words are subtly sophisticated and quite challenging when engaged beyond the conceptual — in the everyday world with other human beings. The prospect that you remind me more of myself than not recalls Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s recognition that our work is not so simple as separating all the good folks from the evil. It is more complex in that each human heart — each of us — carries the potential for good and evil.⁸

With whom and what do you joyfully accept belonging? For whom are you willing to extend yourself? How does it feel — or might it feel — to live a moment, a day, a year, or lifetime in the absence of fear?

_____

The “joyful acceptance of belonging,” is from Br. David Steindl-Rast, Gratefulness: the Heart of Prayer, (Paulist, 1984), 167; “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth,” is from M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled, (Simon & Schuster, 1978), 81; and ‘the absence of fear’ (not a direct quote) is based on Marianne Williamson’s reflections on A Course in Miracles, (Foundation for Inner Peace, 1976, 1992) in A Return to Love, (HarperPaperbacks, 1993).
Thich Nhat Hanh, Teachings on Love. (Parallax, 1998), 21.
bell hooks, Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations, (Routledge Classics, 2006/Routledge 1994), 243–44. In making her case for love, hooks also cites Peck’s “the will to extend one’s self…” view and King’s “I have decided to love,” 247.
Eknath Easwaran, trans., The Dhammapada, (Nilgiri Press, 1985), 78.
John 13:34, NIV Study Bible, (Zondervan, 1973, 1995).
John Lewis, with Brenda Jones, Across That Bridge: A Vision for Change and the Future of America, (Hachette, 2012), 183.
Jason Reynolds, “Imagination and Fortitude,” On Being with Krista Tippett, June 25, 2020, https://onbeing.org/programs/jason-reynolds-imagination-and-fortitude/
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago. Accessed via https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/13750-if-only-it-were-all-so-simple-if-only-there

Healing America’s Narratives: The Race for Violence — 2023

Posted on October 24, 2023 by Reggie Marra

Photo © by Gayatri Malhotra on Unsplash

[Part of a series, this essay looks at some current events in the context of Healing America’s Narratives: the Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow — Now available]

The context of each of these “Healing America’s Narratives” posts is the collective national Shadow of the United States, as explored in detail in the book by that name. Briefly, America’s collective Shadow carries at least nine traits: ignorance, arrogance, fear, bigotry, violence, greed, excess, bullying, and untrustworthiness.

These nine traits can be observed throughout history, beginning with America’s three foundational subjugations — of women, Native Americans, and African Americans — and continuing up to the present day with the Vietnam War, post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, expanding inequality, the power of the insurance-pharmaceutical-medical-government-financial-lobbying industry (IPMGFL), patho-adolescent political polarizations, equal opportunity “otherings” of those “we” feel are not enough like “us,” and ambivalence about the planet — which may ultimately render all the other issues moot.

Today’s post focuses on the intersection of three stories that have emerged in March and April 2023:

The shooting in Kansas City, Missouri of 16-year-old Ralph Yarl, by 84-year-old Andrew D. Lester: According to the Washington Post, Yarl mistakenly rang the doorbell on the wrong house in an attempt to pick up his siblings, who were visiting a friend. Lester, who is white, who is described as being “visibly upset” and “concerned for” Yarl, and who is being charged, claims to have been “scared to death” when he saw Yarl at his door. Yarl, who is black, was shot twice and is now recovering.
The shooting death in Hebron, New York of 20-year-old Kaylin Gillis by 65-year-old Kevin Monahan. According to the Washington Post, Gillis and her friends accidentally pulled into the wrong driveway while they were looking for a friend’s house. Gillis and her friends never got out of their vehicle and were shot by Monahan from his porch while they were backing out of the driveway. As I post this, Monahan, unlike Lester, has expressed no remorse for his action.
According to the Washington Post, Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt called for the resignation of four McCurtain County officials, “county commissioner Mark Jennings, Sheriff Kevin Clardy, sheriff’s investigator Alicia Manning and county jail administrator Larry Hendrix,” who, while speaking after a public meeting without realizing a reporter’s recorder was still on, “lamented about how they could no longer yank Black people out of the jail, ‘take them down to Mud Creek and hang them up with a … rope,’ according to McCurtain Gazette-News, which later published a recording online.”

To keep this simple(ish), we’ll focus on violence, guns, and race — each of which plays a direct role in two of these three stories.

Much of the media- and lobbyist-generated rhetoric concerning the two shootings has been on “stand your ground” and “castle doctrine” laws, which does need attention and is fine as far as it goes, albeit in a superficial, ignore-both-the-details-and-the-larger-context kind of way.

Here are some details: Kaylin Gillis was shot and killed because the car she was in mistakenly turned into the wrong driveway. Remember the days of sorry to bother you — we’re lost — can you direct us towards… Ralph Yarl was shot because he mistakenly rang the wrong doorbell — thinking it belonged to his siblings’ friends. Remember the days of hi, I’m here to pick up my brother — oh, sorry, wrong address…can you tell me where… Kaylin Gillis is dead and her family and friends will live with the trauma of her death forever. Ralph Yarl and his family and friends will live with the trauma of his shooting forever — as will, it seems, his shooter.

Here’s a larger context: Everyday violence, including, but not limited to, gun violence is America’s normal.¹ Ring the wrong doorbell, pull into the wrong driveway, walk home, go shopping, go to your place of worship, go to school, go dancing, go to a concert, go to work. Risk getting shot.

That’s the guns and violence piece.

I’m a five-foot, six-inch, white-bearded, bald-headed, Italian American. Some would reduce me to being an old white guy, but Ta-Nehisi Coates and I know better. Had I mistakenly rang Andrew Lester’s doorbell, do you think he would have shot me? While I can’t know for sure, I’m pretty sure he would not have. Next question: was it Ralph Yarl’s youth, his height, or his skin pigmentation that most scared Andrew Lester? Some well intentioned folks might actually debate that — with obviously he shot because Yarl was black on one side and because of his age, he might have shot any tall, young stranger who appeared at his door on the other. Enjoy that debate.

Here’s the question we need to explore: what is it about the United States of America, and about the specific lives of Andrew Lester, Mark Jennings, Kevin Clardy, Alicia Manning, Larry Hendrix (and “others like them”)such that Lester would shoot a young, black stranger at his door, and that Jennings, Clardy, Manning, and Hendrix would find it appropriate to share or find meaning in their racist, violent imaginings — especially in the context of their roles in local government?

We need to own our individual and collective Shadows. Land of the free? Home of the brave? A beacon of democracy? Peace loving? Toward a more perfect union? Each of these can be true, especially if followed up with a sincere question and exploration: For whom?

_____

¹A small sample regarding America’s normal: 2014-2019: 14,515 gun deaths/year avg. (not suicide) = 40/day avg; 23,094 suicides by gun = 63/day; 37,609 total annual gun deaths = 103/day: https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/ 2014–2019: 45,835 suicides/year avg. = 126*/day: https://webappa.cdc.gov/sasweb/ncipc/leadcause.html Accessed September 28, 2021. Search criteria was: 2014–2019 / all causes, races, genders and ages. *Due to rounding, the suicides per day on the two sites differ by 1. I used the lower, 125, in the text.

Neil MacFarquhar, “Murders Spiked in 2020 in Cities Across the United States,” New York Times, September 27, 2021,https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/27/us/fbi-murders-2020-cities.html

Reis Thebault and Danielle Rindler, “Shootings never stopped during the pandemic: 2020 was the deadliest gun violence year in decades,” Washington Post, March 23, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/03/23/2020-shootings/ Accessed September 28, 2021. Gun violence ties directly to the unhealthy masculine: Mike McIntire, Glenn Thrush and Eric Lipton, “Gun Sellers’ Message to Americans: Man Up,” New York Times, June 18, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/18/us/firearm-gun-sales.html

Healing America’s Narratives: Moving Toward Collective Healing

Posted on August 15, 2023 by Reggie Marra

[Part of a series, this essay continues our turn toward the collective in our ongoing exploration of Chapter Eleven of Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow. Now available.]

In the previous essay, we introduced M. Scott Peck’s stages of community-making: pseudocommunity, chaos, emptiness, and community.

Here, as we continue our turn toward the collective, we’ll look briefly at Theory U, a book and methodology by MIT professor and founder of the Presencing Institute, Otto Scharmer, who invites leaders — that’s all of us at some level — to explore their “blind spot” — the “inner place” and “quality of intention and attention” from which they operate.

Scharmer engages a developmental approach that navigates individual, group, institutional, and global dynamics and structures, with a focus on the collective. “Presencing, the blending of sensing and presence, means to connect with the Source of the highest future possibility and to bring it into the now.”¹

The process invites leaders to connect “to the deepest source, from which the field of the future begins to arise — viewing from source,” by first recognizing habits and patterns (compare with Peck’s pseudocommunity and chaos) and then seeing with fresh eyes, letting go of preconceptions, connecting with the stillness of source, and “letting come” what is yet to emerge (compare with Peck’s emptiness).²

Theory U engages open minds, hearts, and wills, deeply explores self and work, and embraces the collective energies of co-initiating, co-sensing, co-presencing, co-creating, and co-evolving. Scharmer is playing an infinite game³ at organizational, institutional, and global levels: “The real battle in the world today is…among the different evolutionary futures that are possible for us…right now. What is at stake is…the choice of who we are, who we want to be, and where we want to take the world… The real question, then, is “What are we here for?”⁴

In Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating Our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds, Thomas Hübl, after several decades of engaging large groups in collective trauma integration and healing, works through what is now known as the Collective Trauma Integration Process (CTIP).

The process includes three stages: Cohering the Group, Inducing the Collective Wave, and Meta-Reflection. The second stage unfolds through four waves: processing group denial, group eruption, discerning the collective voice, and group clearing and integration.⁵ Hübl’s work also includes Trauma Integration Processes for individual trauma (ITIP) and Ancestral/inter-generational trauma (ATIP).

These two synopses, along with Peck’s in the previous essay, just scratch the surface of Peck’s, Scharmer’s, and Hübl’s respective offerings, which differ in content, context, scope, scale, and intent. Amid these differences, however, they share a trajectory that moves generally from old or current ways of being, making believe, and denial, through chaos, resistance, and disruption, then through emptiness, presence, stillness, and openness, and into true community, co-evolution, integration, and healing — these last four being ongoing processes, not static end points.

Peck, Scharmer, and Hübl all emphasize the importance of the collective; the need for each member therein to do individual work as well; and the need for those who lead or facilitate community, presencing, or healing to embody the energetic, spiritual, psychological, and mental competence and clarity to guide others.

Our American polarizations have us stuck in denial, disruption, chaos, and resistance to growth. Until enough of us engage the will and the available means to move collectively into emptiness, stillness, and deep listening, we’ll neither own and integrate our national Shadow nor heal our individual, ancestral, and collective traumas. Such owning, integrating, and healing won’t be legislated, trickled down, or magically cast upon us. Peck, Scharmer, and Hübl present opportunities for intentional engagement, practice, love, and discipline.

_____

Otto Scharmer, Theory U: The Social Technology of Presencing, (Berrett-Koehler, 2009), 163.
Ibid., 38–39.
James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility (Free Press-MacMillan, 1986), 3. According to Carse, a finite game is played with a limited number of players whose intentions are to win and bring the game to an end (i.e. conventional American history); an infinite game is played by an unlimited number of players whose intentions are to invite more players to play and to keep the game going (i.e. what we need to do if we are to survive).
Scharmer, Theory U, 20.
Thomas Hübl, Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating Our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds, (Sounds True, 2020), 119-42.

Healing America’s Narratives: Moving Toward Community

Posted on July 31, 2023 by Reggie Marra

[Part of a series, this essay turns toward the collective as we continue our exploration of Chapter Eleven of Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow. Now available.]

As we continue to explore America’s narratives and collective Shadow, it’s essential to remember and pay attention to the interrelationships among individuals, groups, and systems — with systems, as used here, including all of our natural and human-made environments — from the planet itself to big cities, to belief systems, to the technology you’re using right now to read or listen to this essay.

From among those abundant possibilities, we’ll focus here on individual human beings as they come together in search of, or because of, community. One deceptively simple and wonderfully useful approach to community emerged through M. Scott Peck’s work after the publication of his groundbreaking book, The Road Less Traveled, in 1978. He and some colleagues set out to explore what they called community-making, and after some years of experience-based practice — convening groups of individuals to make community — he published The Different Drum: Community-Making and Peace in 1987.

The result, as shared in the book, was the observation, facilitation, and refinement of four stages of community-making—pseudocommunity, chaos, emptiness, and community — during six years of intentional experiments.¹

Briefly, in pseudocommunity, individuals are nice, friendly, and polite — as they try to fake community.

When the facade falls apart, chaos emerges, characterized by attempts to control and fix each other; chaos feels frustrating, exhausting, and further from community.

Eventually, a facilitator suggests the possibility of emptiness, which Peck describes as the hardest, “most crucial stage” — “the bridge between chaos and com-munity” — that requires participants to “empty themselves of barriers to communication,” many of which they have just experienced in chaos. The barriers include expectations, preconceptions, ideology, and attempts to fix, solve, or control.² It is common for individuals to ignore the initial invitation to emptiness, unwilling to let go of what they know and to surrender to the process.

Emptiness requires both the “little deaths” and rebirths of each individual and the larger death of the initial group. “When its death has been completed, open and empty, the group enters community. In this final stage a soft quietness descends. It is a kind of peace. The room is bathed in peace.”³ Peck is clear that true community is not magically permanent; it must be maintained.

Consider your own current relationships and “communities” — in the more common meaning of the word. What stage — pseudocommunity, chaos, emptiness, or true community — characterizes your experience of each? To what extent do the stages emerge and disappear and reemerge during the days, weeks, months, and years of your life?

In light of your, my, and our discrete experiences, how, then, in the name of all that is good (and possible), might we scale such an approach to affect a nation — or even effect a new version of a nation? No easy task, that amid our current chaos.

As we’ll explore in coming essays, large groups of people around the world are already convening and building community, albeit using different language and with very specific focuses. Readers familiar with the work of Otto Scharmer and Thomas Hübl might already see the parallels with Peck’s four stages.

We’ll explore all of this further in coming essays. For now, your homework is to notice the comings and goings of pseudocommunity, chaos, emptiness, and true community in your own life.

Be kind to yourself and others.

M. Scott Peck, The Different Drum: Community-Making and Peace, (Touchstone-Simon & Schuster, 1987), 86–135.
Ibid., 95–98. For more on barriers to communication, see also, Marra, Enough with the Talking Points, (2020).
Ibid., 102–03.

Healing America’s Narratives: Playing Whack-a-Mole in Politics and Celebrity Performance News

Posted on July 17, 2023 by Reggie Marra

[Part of a series, this essay continues our exploration of Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow. Now available.]

The previous posts in this series provide evidence that the problems and mood of the United States of America in the third decade of the twenty-first century are not surprising and are inevitable when history and current events are viewed through a trans-partisan, developmental lens.

A significant number of elected officials, including those I vote for and those I would never vote for, and a significant number of paid performance news commenters either do not know this (ignorance), do know it but avoid telling the truth due either to partisan agendas (arrogance) or to their concerns with not being re-elected or losing their jobs and careers (fear). Ignorance, arrogance, and fear are not mutually exclusive.

Instead, both groups play whack-a-mole.

They never seem to consider the hidden network of mole passages that are below the surface and that allow the moles to appear, avoid the whack, and reappear later through a different hole. The moles escape and reappear through a new hole because the whackers’ views tend to be so far from whole.

Each day, faced with the enormities of the consequences of the violence, depression, suicide, inequality, intolerance, ambivalence about the planet, lack of health and caring, greed, and excess that inform American history and current society, they try to whack a mole a day — or talk about whacking a particular mole. Again, they do not, cannot, or refuse to recognize the existence of the vast underground mole network that makes their whacking so frustrating or the interrelatedness of the various moles (or the same mole) that pop(s) up at different times and places.

Mole-whacking provides the appearance of busy-ness and hard work while very few, if any, moles actually get whacked. More importantly, whacking any particular mole will never get to the foundational, historical elements of the collective American Shadow (ignorance, arrogance, fear, bigotry, violence, greed, excess, bullying, untrustworthiness) that helped build the mole network and that keep it hidden.

These mole-whacking elected officials and paid performance news commenters will continue to whack moles as long as American citizens are willing to encourage, tolerate, or ignore this idiocy. What about you? Are you encouraging, tolerating, or ignoring this mole cruelty?

And yes, there are some elected officials and paid performance news commenters who try to point to the history of mole whacking and the mole network and keep their own whacking activities to a minimum.

Were Sisyphus real, he would probably admire them.

Healing America’s Narratives: The Inevitability of the Current Mood of the United States

Posted on March 30, 2023 by Reggie Marra

[Part of a series, this essay explores the inevitability that surfaced amid the research for and writing of Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow. Now available.]

If we begin with Jamestown, Virginia in 1607 and work our way forward through each day since then, especially those days not included in some of the more (in)famous years like 1619, 1776, 1787, 1830, 1865, 1868, 1920, 1945, 1964, 2001, 2003 (et cetera)¹ and into our current state of affairs in the third decade of the twenty-first century, where we are as a country is inevitable. Said differently, our ignorance, arrogance, fear, bigotry, violence, greed, excess, bullying, and untrustworthiness are not surprising.

In his Pulitzer Prize-winning A Bright Shining Lie, Neil Sheehan wrote this about the 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam:

“What Calley and others who participated in the massacre did that was different was to kill hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese in two hamlets in a single morning and to kill point-blank with rifles, pistols, and machine guns. Had they killed just as many over a larger area in a longer period of time and killed impersonally with bombs, shells, rockets, white phosphorous, and napalm, they would have been following the normal pattern of American military conduct. The soldier and the junior officer observed the lack of regard his superiors had for the Vietnamese. The value of Vietnamese life was systematically cheapened in his mind…. The military leaders of the United States, and the civilian leaders who permitted the generals to wage war as they did, had made the massacre inevitable.”²

Sheehan’s words indict the worst of leadership that arise through unhealthy masculine energy. Be it military or civilian, local, state, or national, such leadership renders inevitable, or at least highly likely, horrors such as My Lai in 1968; the mutilation and slaughter of Cheyenne men, women, and children at Sand Creek in 1864; the massacre of Lakota men, women, and children at Wounded Knee in 1890; the more than 6,000 lynchings of blacks between 1865 and 1950; the incineration of Tulsa, Oklahoma’s Greenwood district in 1921; the degradations of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo in the post-9/11 war on terror; and the incessant gun violence in the U.S. Among other examples.

In response to a school shooting at Oxford High School in Michigan, two members of the U.S. House of Representatives³ created Christmas photo cards, posing their families holding assault rifles in front of Christmas trees in 2021 in support of the weapons commonly used in U.S. Congress-enabled mass shootings. Evidently, these folks were channeling the intersection of what Jesus meant when he said “Love one another,”⁴ and what the framers had in mind when they penned the Second Amendment.

That’s a small sample of evidence regarding the inevitability of our current culture of violence. What about greed and excess, you ask? A country built on slave and peasant labor, sweatshops, migrant workers, and now cheap international labor renders inevitable a 2022 second quarter report that the wealthiest 1% of Americans own 31.1% of the nation’s wealth; the top 10% own 68%; and the bottom 50% own 3.2% (the 40% of Americans who fall between the bottom 50% and the top 10% own 28.9%). Said differently, the top 10% of Americans own more than twice (68%) of what the bottom 90% own (32%). This is like saying that the folks in Texas and Montana (together about 10% of the nation’s population) own more than twice as much wealth as the rest of the country. In a nation where owning and having things is important, this is a big deal.

Here’s one more juxtaposition: the defense industry — those companies that build and maintain the weapons and infrastructure of war and everyday violence, and the insurance-pharmaceutical-medical-government-finance-lobbying industry (euphemistically referred to as healthcare in the U.S.) are both for-profit endeavors. Need more deterrence, want to go to war, or choose to keep assault weapons available to our huddled masses? Cha-ching. Need to attend to the physical and psychological effects of war, everyday violence, and active shooter drills for school children? Cha-ching. Need to make sure none of this changes? Have more lobbyists in D.C. (more than 700) than there are members of Congress (currently 535 when all seats are filled).

The above are selected, limited examples, painted with broad brush strokes. For more specific information, see Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow.

_____

Briefly: 1619 (initial delivery of enslaved Africans to what is now Virginia by the British); 1776 (U.S. Declaration of Independence); 1787 (U.S. Constitution); 1830 (Congress passes “Indian Removal” Act); 1865 (Civil War ends; 13th Amendment passed); 1868 (14th Amendment passed; Second Fort Laramie Treaty); 1920 (19th Amendment passed); 1945 (U.S. drops two atomic bombs on Japan; World War II ends); 1964 (Civil Rights Act passed); 2001 (September 11 terrorist attacks on U.S.); 2003 (U.S. preemptively attacks Iraq).
Neil Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam, (New York: Random House, 1988), 689–90.
Lauren Boebert (R-Colorado) and Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky): https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/christmas-card-guns-lauren-boebert-thomas-massie-start-new-culture-ncna1285709
For younger readers: Christmas began as a celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ and had nothing to do with retail sales, garishly decorated real and fake trees, and assault weapons.

Healing America’s Narratives: What Am I Not Seeing?

Posted on March 16, 2023 by Reggie Marra

Part of a series, this essay explores a subheading from Chapter Eleven of Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow. Now available.

In our previous three inquiries into subheaders from Chapter Eleven, “So, Now What?” we explored identity, story, and impact. Here we’ll consider what any one of us — or millions of us — might be missing with regard to our own lives and/or our country. “Shadow,” as it’s referred to throughout the book, is one reason, among others, an individual or a collective might not be seeing something.

There are various ways to work with Shadow.¹ One hint that an element of Shadow may be clamoring for our attention is if we notice a disproportionate emotional response to someone or something — especially if that response recurs. So, a recurrent, disproportionate, emotional response to someone or something we experience as being angry or lacking in compassion may be inviting us to explore our own anger or lack of compassion. Likewise, if we have such a response to someone or something we experience as exceptionally creative, generous, or successful, we may want to explore our own as-yet disowned creativity, generosity, or success.

Whether what we’re not seeing is considered positive or negative, recognizing, owning, and integrating it into our sense of self leads to a more integrated, “wholer,” fully human being.

Questions such as these may begin to uncover what might be repressed, denied, and projected:

1. What is it about this situation, person, event, issue, idea, emotion, or dream, such that I respond as I do?

2. What is it about me, such that I respond to this situation, person, event, issue, idea, emotion, or dream as I do?

3. To what extent do my reactions or responses feel disproportionate?

4. What might I be projecting onto this situation, person, event, issue, idea, emotion, or dream that I need to explore in myself?

The first question engages through an external locus of control. It helps begin to identify the source of the disproportionate response by looking toward something out there. Getting clearer about what that something is moves us closer to identifying Shadow — what we don’t yet see or know about ourselves.

The second question engages through an internal locus of control and is more challenging. It implicates us. What is it about me such that I respond as I do? Ooh, is my discomfort with his ease in expressing anger related to my unowned anger? Is my admiration for her success in the art world the result of my own as-yet-unrealized creative potential? What is it, exactly, that brings up my disproportionate response? Now, I’m curious. Repressing and projecting parts of ourselves requires energy. Owning and integrating what we repress and project frees up our energy for other aspects of life.

The third question invites us to authentically consider the extent to which our response is disproportionate to the reality of the situation, person, or thing. Honest, challenging, trusted friends may be helpful here.

The fourth question explores the quality, emotion, trait, or characteristic that may be repressed, denied, and projected. Sometimes we recognize it immediately, and perhaps experience a mix of relief, guilt, or simply, oh, THAT! Sometimes it may be slower to emerge — harder to see and even harder to own and integrate. Oh. That. Me? Lacking compassion? Nah. No way. For that one particular colleague/friend/sibling…? Um, perhaps, yes.

Working with Shadow can be discomfiting. Be kind to yourself.

Among many, see Bill Plotkin’s Wild Mind (207–34) and Soulcraft (267–80); and Connie Zweig and Jeremiah Abrams, eds. Meeting the Shadow (65 essays from a variety of authors).

Healing America’s Narratives: Everything Is a Story

Posted on March 2, 2023 by Reggie Marra

Part of a series, this essay explores a subheading from Chapter Eleven of Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow. Now available.

Some of the story sources that inform Healing America’s Narratives

Everything Is a Story

Note your immediate response to this premise. Is it, ‘What do you mean — please explain?’ or, ‘Bullshit…?’ or ‘Du-uh, tell me something I don’t already know?’ Perhaps it’s ‘Thank you for confirming what I was beginning to see?’ Is it something else entirely? Whatever it is fine — it’s your story about the suggestion that everything is a story. Consider that if your response was in the general area of Bullshit.

The cultural givens handed down by our parents and earliest communities and experiences are stories. As (or if) we grow up, wake up, clean up, and show up, some stories hold up and some don’t. Sometimes the givens that don’t hold up were false when we received them and sometimes they were true — as far as anyone knew at the time — but the larger, always evolving community of truth learned more and disproved them when new evidence was found.¹ Doctors no longer recommend smoking cigarettes as a way to relax. Planet Earth is no longer considered the center of the universe.

The stories we choose to believe and tell, as well as the stories that choose us, are powerful. Being in the position to choose our stories and not be chosen by them carries power. Mary Catherine Bateson encourages us to exercise this power:

“…think about the creative responsibility involved in the fact that there are different ways to tell your stories. It’s not that one is true and another is not true. It’s a matter of emphasis and context…. The choice you make affects what you can do next.”²

So, let’s be thoughtful about the stories we choose to tell about who we (think we — and they) are. The choices we make and the stories we tell matter.

Consider the specific stories that inform(ed) your cultural givens. What holds up? What’s the most recent revision you’ve made, or that was made for you, where revision actually means re-vision — to see again? Look at the sweeping revisions, many ongoing, in the earlier essays in this series, and the specific, personal revisions shared therein, such as Robert McNamara’s ‘re-visioned’ view that owned the extent to which he and the other architects of the Vietnam war misjudged, underestimated, failed, and did not recognize a long list of people and ideas.

Such seeing again is never easy and always valuable when it moves the seer toward a more comprehensive, inclusive view. Malcolm X’s life stands as an exemplar of re-visioning. Two of his major re-visions — becoming a Muslim and joining the Nation of Islam while in prison and then leaving the Nation of Islam while remaining a Muslim after his 1964 Hajj — follow the developmental trajectory from a focus on me to a focus on us to a focus on all of us. In each case he changed his name and publicly recognized and owned his seeing again.³

How we tell our stories is as important as which stories we tell. Focus only on what’s wrong and get an “illness” story. Open up to the possibilities of moving through and beyond what’s wrong and tell or write a “healing” story. Adults model both of these for children: if the child who falls down the stairs and breaks an arm is confronted with parental overwhelm, blame, anger, and fear, an illness story emerges in which stairs are dangerous and the child is careless or clumsy; if the child is met with parental support, concern, acceptance, understanding, and love, a healing story emerges in which accidents can happen, stairs are useful and fine and best engaged with care, and the child is curious and open to experience.

Illness stories limit us, narrowly focus on a sense of wrongness, keep us stuck, and can reinforce trauma; healing stories open up the context in which we understand what happened (wrongness may be relevant, but not primary), they can expand and free us, and they can contribute to trauma recovery. Because they focus on what’s wrong, illness stories are often tidy, brief, stagnant, partial, and consistent. Because they emerge through and invite increasingly larger contexts, healing stories are often messy, ongoing, progressive, comprehensive, and paradoxical. Explore your stories. Be kind to yourself.

Writing can be engaged as a powerful process⁴ that helps open us up to increasingly larger contexts that allow us to see and feel as others see and feel — to go beneath all the individual differences, see another soul just like ourselves, and at the same time deeply understand and embody those differences. Going one step further, learning to embody and tell or write someone else’s story, both helps us understand the other and often provides clarity into our own narrative.⁵

Finally, if I’m truly playing an infinite game,⁶ some questions may arise at the intersection of “who am I, really?” and “everything is a story.” Try these questions on for size: Without the stories I hold and that hold me, who am I, and what’s true in this moment? Who am I and what does this moment offer without my story/ies? Ram Dass’s channels four and five point toward a prospective answer. John Tarrant, in Bring Me the Rhinoceros, put it this way:

“Everyone knows that some events are just bad and make you sad or angry, and some are good and make you glad. Yet what everyone knows might not be true. For example there might be a certain coercion to the attitude that weddings must be happy, funerals have to be sad. It could prevent you from meeting the moment you are in. What if events don’t have to be anything other than what they are?”⁷

We owe it to ourselves and each other to create and tell our stories with care.

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1. See Jonathan Rauch’s The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth (Brookings Institution, 2021) for an expansive and passionate exploration of his book’s title and the “community of truth.”

2. Mary Catherine Bateson, “Composing a Life,” Sacred Stories: A Celebration of the Power of Stories to Transform and Heal. Eds. Charles & Anne Simpkinson, (HarperSanFrancisco, 1993), 42–43.

3. M.S. Handler, “Malcolm Rejects Racist Doctrine,” New York Times, October 4, 1964, https://www.nytimes.com/1964/10/04/archives/malcolm-rejects-racist-doctrine-also-denounces-elijah-as-a.html; Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley, (New York: Ballantine, 1992).

4. James Pennebaker has led the way in decades of research that back this up. See his Expressive Writing: Words that Heal, co-authored with John Evans, (2014); and Opening Up: The Healing Power of Emotions (1990), among others. See also John Fox’s Poetic Medicine: The Healing Art of Poem-Making, (1997). There are many more resources available.

5. See Marra, Enough with the Talking Points, (2020), 79–82 for more on truly embodying another’s story. For a deeper dive into telling another’s story as if it were our own, see the work of Narrative 4, which uses “story exchange” to help young (and old) people develop empathy. (Some meeting “icebreaker” exercises skim the surface of this experience: two strangers briefly share who they are and then introduce each other to a group — speaking in first-person, as if they are the person they’re introducing. Narrative 4 goes deeper): https://narrative4.com/.

6. Inspired by James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility (Free Press-MacMillan, 1986). An infinite game is one in which the goals are to invite everyone to play and to keep the game going. A finite game is one in which the goal is to limit the players, win, and end the game.

7. John Tarrant, Bring Me the Rhinoceros, (Shambhala, 2008/2004), 113.

Healing America’s Narratives: Who Am I, Really?

Posted on February 23, 2023 by Reggie Marra

Part of a series, this essay explores a question raised in Chapter Eleven of Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow. Now available.

Amid the other-than-human world. Photo Copyright © by Reggie Marra

Who Am I, Really?

If you’re sure you know and are ready to dismiss the question, what follows may be a waste of your time — or exactly what you need. Here are five prospective responses. They are neither mutually exclusive nor exhaustive. Add your own.

1) I am a mystery that I explore more deeply every day.

2) I am a mix of elements that’s worth four or five bucks.

3) I am the result of the exploits of God, Adam, Eve, and that horrible snake.

4) I am a ___-year-old, ____-generation _______-American ___________ [ your occupation] from _________.

5) I am a child of the stars.

The identity story I choose (or that chooses me) provides a unique view of myself and the world and a wildly different array of possibilities for my need for healing, my views on Shadow, and life in general. Every human being in the history of humanity had a sense, clear or vague, conscious or unconscious, of who they (thought they) were. We’ll engage this question through three distinct, interrelated perspectives — Body-Mind (aka middleworld), Soul (aka underworld), and Spirit (aka upperworld).

Body-Mind, or middleworld, as used here, refers to our conventional, everyday lives. We do, think, and feel, and we recognize, to various degrees, the connections among doing, thinking, and feeling. Our thoughts and feelings impact what we do and vice versa. In terms of our who-am-I inquiry, the Body-Mind perspective encourages us to assess skills, strengths, likes, dislikes, and aspirations in order to identify with a job, social role, or occupation. We are educators, plumbers, nurses, stay-at-home-parents, and truck drivers, etc. From a Body-Mind perspective, our job may be a valid response to that pesky question famously asked by Mary Oliver, “…what is it that you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”

Turning toward Soul, we learn from eco-depth psychologist, Bill Plotkin, that our “soulwork…does not correspond to a job title.” Howard Thurman directs us to find “what makes [us] come alive.” Frederick Buechner refers to “the place where [our] deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” Harvey Swift Deer speaks of “sacred dance,” and William Blake wrote of being “organized by Divine Providence for Spiritual communion.”¹

These various takes on a similar theme begin to move us beyond job descriptions and earning an income (each of which has its place) toward a somewhat deeper inquiry. Plotkin and Swift Deer differentiate soulwork or sacred dance from survival work or survival dance, which, in no way deprecatory, simply refer to “our way of supporting ourselves physically and economically….”² Aptitude and career tests and other Body-Mind assessments can be useful for matching us with survival work we might enjoy, and rarely, if ever, address soulwork, sacred dance, deep gladness, spiritual communion, what brings us alive, or what poet David Whyte calls the “one life / you can call your own.”³

Plotkin works with Soul as an ecological, rather than a psychological or spiritual, entity, referring to it as one’s “ultimate place,” or one’s “unique ecological niche” (“eco-niche”).⁴ Discovering one’s ultimate place or unique ecological niche in the world feels very different from getting a really good job with good pay and benefits. Our task from a Soul perspective is to find and create delivery systems that allow us to “offer our unique gift to the world.”⁵ These delivery systems change as we develop and are not who we are. They may manifest as survival work, soulwork, or both. For example, writing, teaching, and coaching are among my delivery systems.

From a Spirit or upperworld perspective, self-inquiry has been around at least from the beginning of the Advaita Vedanta tradition as a means of exploring this question. One iteration guides us through asking and returning to the question, “Who am I?” in a way that gradually eliminates who and what I am not. When I notice what arises in awareness (externals like clouds, sore muscles, job title, and cars, and internals like emotions, thoughts, concepts, and beliefs), I objectify and eliminate what I am not, as in “This cloud arises in my awareness, but I am not this cloud,” “This thought arises in my awareness, but I am not this thought,” “This pain arises…but I am not this pain.” Eventually I may get curious about “in whose awareness does all of this arise?” Who is this observer/witness? Who am I, really? Of course, this observer, or witness, or awareness itself is just another thought or concept until and unless I directly experience it. Then all heaven can break loose, until I get distracted again.⁶

Body-Mind, Soul, and Spirit perspectives each offer something of value. The center of gravity of our democratic, capitalist, American culture privileges the Body-Mind, replaces or dilutes Spirit with conventional, middleworld religious beliefs and requirements that usually protect us from any direct experience of Spirit, and generally ignores Soul — as Plotkin has developed it — or uses it in a variety of often disparate ways.

Ram Dass, in his teachings on change, aging, and death, shared a metaphor for waking up through these who-am-I perspectives or states of consciousness: he asks us to imagine that we each have a built-in receiver that picks up planes of consciousness. Most of our American receivers are tuned to pick up just one or two of the available channels — channel one’s physical traits (shapes, sizes, and colors, etc.) and channel two’s moods, emotions, and social roles. We don’t pick up more because middleworld culture doesn’t teach us (or know) how to fully tune our receivers. Said differently our American culture’s center of gravity holds a Body-Mind/middleworld perspective. We have not, as a culture, learned to tune into, nor do we seem to value, the Soul- and Spirit-based perspectives available on channels three, four, and five.⁷

Of course, amid our cultural attunement to channels one and two, some individuals do have access to additional channels. What channels are you attuned to? What’s your view on all of this?

Which leads us to story…in the next essay.

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¹Mary Oliver, “The Summer Day,” New and Selected Poems, (Beacon, 1992), 94. Bill Plotkin, Nature and the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World, (New World Library, 2008), 316. Howard Thurman attribution: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2021/07/09/come-alive/. Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Seeker’s ABC, (HarperOne, 1993), 118–19. Harvey Swift Deer, in Plotkin, Nature…, 258. William Blake, The Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake, David V. Erdman, ed., (U of California P, 1981), 724.

²Plotkin, Nature and the Human Soul, 258.

³David Whyte, “All the True Vows,” The House of Belonging, (Many Rivers, 1997), 24.

⁴Plotkin, “ultimate place” in Nature and the Human Soul, 35–38; “unique ecological niche” in The Journey of Soul Initiation: A Field Guide for Visionaries, Evolutionaries, and Revolutionaries, (New World Library, 2021), 6–17. A 52-minute interview with Bill is available here (there are more): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOTaKXHMabM

⁵Plotkin, The Journey of Soul Initiation, 18.

⁶This paragraph is meant to be descriptive, not instructive. My encounter with self-inquiry began with the writings of David Frawley and Ken Wilber, which led me to Ramana Maharshi’s work. Here’s a link to Frawley’s writing from 1998: https://www.vedanta.gr/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Frawley_SelfInquiry_ENA5.pdf. Online references to self-inquiry are abundant and unequal. Inquirer beware.

⁷Ram Dass, “The Art Form of Dying,” Conscious Aging: On the Nature of Change and Facing Death, CD, (Sounds True, 1992), Disc 2, 2:50–6:25.

Healing America’s Narratives: Our Collective National Shadow

Posted on October 10, 2022 by Reggie Marra

[Adapted from Chapter Two of Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow]

Read or listen to this post on Medium (4 minutes).

In mid-March, 2003 I sat with Animas Valley Institute’s Bill Plotkin and others in Payson, Arizona, for five days of an experience entitled “Sweet Darkness: The Initiatory Gifts of the Shadow, Projections, Subpersonalities, and the Sacred Wound.” On the evening of our first day there, the United States began bombing Iraq. So while we were exploring our respective individual Shadows and projections, our country’s collective Shadow and projections — “the evil out there” that we tend to see in other nations, groups, cultures, genders, colors, orientations, and people — was on full display, providing us an opportunity for recognition, ownership, and integration at the national level as well.

Jungian analyst Robert Johnson refers to “persona” as “what we would like to be and how we wish to be seen by the world.…our psychological clothing” — the mask we wear. He refers to “ego” as “what we are and know about consciously” and to “Shadow” as “that part of us we fail to see or know…. that which has not entered adequately into consciousness.”¹

In A Little Book on the Human Shadow, Robert Bly posits that behind each of us in childhood, “we have an invisible bag, and the part of us our parents don’t like, we, to keep our parents’ love, put in the bag.” In order to keep our elementary-school teachers happy, we continue to fill the bag, and in high school we further fill the bag in order to please our peers. “We spend our life until we’re twenty deciding what parts of ourself to put in the bag, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to get them out again. Sometimes retrieving them feels impossible, as if the bag were sealed.”² Bly points out that “There is also a national bag, and ours is quite long…. we are noble; other nations have empires. Other nations endure stagnant leadership, treat minorities brutally, brainwash their youth, and break treaties.”³

So, Shadow refers to disowned or repressed traits of an individual or group that the individual or group doesn’t recognize in itself and unknowingly projects onto others, whether or not the trait is considered positive or negative and whether or not the others actually embody the projected trait. Sometimes they do; sometimes they don’t. If I tend to have a disproportionately highly charged emotional response to someone I experience as angry, there’s a good chance that I’ve repressed or disowned my own anger — it’s in my invisible bag.⁴ Until I recognize this dynamic and work to integrate my anger, anger will follow me around and allow me to see all these angry people “out there” everywhere I go, while I remain oblivious to being the one constant at every scene of all this anger. Everyone else is angry. I’m not. Oops.

Finally, the word shadow is sometimes used to refer to negative or undesired traits that we don’t like about ourselves. We might refer to these traits as our “dark side.” These undesired traits that were never in or that we’ve already retrieved from our invisible bag are not what we mean by Shadow in this essay.(6) We don’t know our Shadow is there. Our repression and denial are not conscious choices. Collective Shadow, as used here, refers to elements that are common to individuals in the United States. A nation does not have a discrete psyche or Shadow. A nation’s Shadow exists in the collective impact of individual Shadow elements that are common to many — not necessarily all — of its citizens.

As developed in Healing America’s Narratives, the collective Shadow of the United States historically and currently includes at least nine traits: ignorance, arrogance, fear, bigotry, violence, greed, excess, bullying, and untrustworthiness. Chapter Ten of the book argues that one man — a former president — embodies all of these traits and that his life unintentionally presents us with a gift: an invitation to recognize, own, and integrate our national Shadow amid our ongoing American experiment.

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1. Robert A. Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow, 3–4.

2. Robert Bly, A Little Book on the Human Shadow, 17–18.

3. Ibid., 26.

4. Anger is not necessarily a “bad” thing; it is clarifying. What can go wrong is how we understand and what we do with our anger.