Death, Rebirth & Regenerative Living: The Somatics of Collapse Aware Attunement

“The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

I was at the crest edge of an existential, pinnacle phase crisis, a decade ago, in the build-up years leading into 45s first office term living in Richmond, VA, the former capital of the confederacy. A crisis that would last about 6 years (until Biden’s presidency and) until I found, practiced & embodied enough of the right kinds of somatic healing & dharma tools to “let” myself evolve (aka “heal”).

I wrote this Substack a good two weeks prior to election day this year, and sat on it, because it didn’t feel right at the time. Now I’m publishing it with editorial revision in the wake of our collective realization, of the veil that has purposefully tried to obscure this monumental existential shift in reality, dissolving even further (alt)right before our eyes.

One of the first things I welcome folks’ new to Dharma, Buddhism & meditation with is the truth that “I didn’t come to these practices & this philosophy because I felt well.” I came to these practices, and thus, my own evolution because I needed a pathway inside our world of acute violence to grapple with my own mortality. My depression. My ideation. My fury. My alcoholism. My grief. And my unfortunate, unbridled, unconditionally loving heart and Divine Will to live.

Kidding about the unfortunate part. But it is both a blessing and a curse.

So it is Scorpio (and post-election season), and OF COURSE everything feels like death around us. We have every, valid reason for feeling that way. We don’t need astrology, marxism, pessimism, neoliberalism, climate scientists or the bible telling us that… we feel it somatically in our very flesh & bone. I have been experiencing waves & constellations of emotions & thoughts since November 6th, as I’m sure you have. And I have also been able to touch in underneath all those surface winds to a much deeper, grounded, truth and right resolve. And I’ve had conversations with multiple fellow queer liberationists & healers this week that have landed with the exact same resonance…

We are exactly where we are, doing what we’re supposed to be doing, with the people we know we need to be doing it with, and nothing has fundamentally changed in our approach to systems change and liberation.

Because our efforts don’t rely on the color of the party in a farcical office, from an illegitimate government concocted on stolen land.

The Healer in me invites you to feel every, gotdamn emotion that you feel called to feel right now - there is nothing to do or fix about that. Feel that shit. Do not rush through it. Do not negate it or try to make it go away. Witness your experience and metabolize what overwhelming energy you encounter through nature, dance, music, art, kickboxing, crying in the shower, pick your poison.

When you’re ready, the Buddhist + Systems Change Facilitator in me invites you to bring those emotions and land yourself right here in collaboration with me as we open our hearts & actions to the energies of death, rebirth and the true topic of this post, regenerative living.

“The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

For the purpose of this article, and to clarify the type of work that I do in the world, I want to link the meaning of “regenerative living” to “healing.” And I also want to firstly bust some preconceived “truths” you might have been fed about “healing.”

• Healing doesn’t mean that the shit that happened goes away or stops hurting or bothering you.

• Healing doesn’t mean “going back” to whatever your version of “normal” was before your experience(s) of trauma, crisis or whatever you imagined “normal” was supposed to be.

• Healing doesn’t mean you’re broken, deficient, need fixing or need saving.

I define healing, and specifically, emotional & spiritual systems-changing regenerative healing (because that is my chosen practice of “medicine”) as:

• Taking different actions within the same limiting conditions.

• Cultivating new life patterns that support the ever evolving now version of you, in full reverence of all past you’s, and partnership with all future you’s.

• Allowing yourself the wisdom of experiencing the entire breadth of human emotion - joy, rage, grief, doubt, vulnerability, numbness, faith, peace, fear, playfulness, discomfort and everything else in between.

As I wrote on my Spiritual Solidarity Monthly Blog over on my website:

I’m choosing to let myself evolve this Scorpio season, and I gotta say, it’s hitting a lot different for me this year. Maybe it’s Pluto’s underworld journey about to enter my Sun & Mercury sign of Aquarius for the next 20 or so years, maybe it’s the perimenopause, maybe it’s that I’ve settled into resonance with my midlife total & utter career path realignment. Maybe it’s that the veil of the sensationalized, performative, virtual reality TV charade of our entire socioeconomic-political system is just absolutely hollowed out and for all intents and purposes, D.E.A.D. (and decaying) on an unprecedentedly disgusting scale.

I’m saying it’s all of those reasons.

I’ve been “done with” a lot of energies, for a lot of years, but this year, and even more so in the wake of election results, I’m noticing a lot more embodiment into those active choices… and being unafraid to withdraw my own energy, even if and especially when the path I’m choosing looks different than even that of my queer, peers & contemporaries - who, albeit, maybe spend a lot of energy on social media and/or productivity output, but mostly, are still retaining a lot of neoliberalist, consumerist, capitalist, carceral, avoidant and escapist conditioned tendencies… and thusly, just unconsciously continuing to play their own shell game of suffering.

Being “done with” feels great.

It feels like depth.

It feels like not-abandoning myself for the lure of likability.

It feels like choosing an alternative pathway, directly through the most harmful aspects of trauma & oppression and without being more-so harmed myself, sensationalizing myself, martyring myself, making myself more palatable, or doing more harm to others… quite the opposite actually...

It feels like this because underneath all of this shedding, is new life.

The energies I’m “done with” and finishing shedding over the winter are:

• Racing, chasing

• Influencing, selling

• Gossiping, idling, clique’ing

• Coddling, placating

• Shallowness, avoidance, ego-individualism

• Sensationalism, aggrandizing

The energies I am refining over the winter are:

• Discernment, discernment, discernment

• Adaptability & preparation

• Cord-cutting

• Deep time, ancestral healing & regenerative living (they are all connected)

• Regenerative conflict

• Quantum solidarity

• Mundane mysticism

• Simple joy

• Abstract movement

• Rewilding

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And so, healing also looks like being really ok with folks having completely misconceived or outright incorrect versions of you in their heads.

That one was a hard one for me, for a really long time… separating myself out from my own unconscious neoliberalist, conditioned tendencies. Until I really stepped into the practice of somatically letting go (like, in my fucking body and through my actions) of other folks’ projections, assumptions, inability or refusal to critically question or check themselves, or heal their own harmful & limiting conditioned tendencies born out of their own wound protections. And then I had to release my own judgment of folks’ in those situations because guess what… that judgment was more about me than it was them.

You know what I’m finding underneath all this noticing?

The rebirth I’ve gone through over the last decade, the last 16-years since Pluto entered Capricorn & economic life as we knew it went to shit, led to a material reality of regenerative living. Meaning, the effort I am putting in produces a cycle of growth. Not just sustaining (though there were periods of that involved), but I am receiving back a reciprocal energy that feels even more life generating for the long term than the material resources I have at my own disposal (which is to say, not enough).

I’m even saying that now at the precipice of another orange-felon term in office, and working in the social impact field of queer liberation.

And what I notice about that… is that absolutely none of this happened without the relational support & energies of others, community, teachers, mentors, tools & lineages, systems & other folks’ willing to actively participate in this cycle of regenerative living that MUST be our chosen path in full collapse-aware attunement.

Whatever your spiritual, religious or scientific lineages & heritages say about “death & rebirth,” about “dying” and what comes, or doesn’t come after that… relative law of the universe states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. However with quantum law, well we don’t have all the rules for that yet…or should I say we need to make new ones…

So I leave you with this pondering at this pivotal moment, to deepen your own somatic practice of regenerative living within full attunement of collapse:

• What if quantum law is responsive law instead of reactive?

• What choices would you, and we then have access to if we were to realize our own participatory energy gave back to us?

• What choices would you make today that the you on the other side of this oval office term would be fucking thankful you made?

Drop a comment and tell me where you’re placing your energy, and you know where to find me to learn & practice liberatory somatics, dharma & embodiment, consistently.

In solidarity,

-Deanna-