hey y'all,
i'm sitting with how many of us believe that being peaceful/ calm is the metric of being healthy emotionally, spiritually, and mentally; how many of us lean into stillness being our only metric of how well we are.
i'm sitting with it because I was and consistently am trying to re-center to being peaceful. recently though i had a series of conversations where i realized that energy/ expression didn't serve me all the time. consistently centering on peaceful didn't allow me to be fully express myself. at times, by being convinced i need to be peaceful and calm, my wellness was being weaponized against me.
in a sense that it is how capitalism and dominant white oppressive culture works right? it convinces us there's a single formula that can be sold to us for something we desire. thus all resources from meditation apps to yoga to social media mediums try to sell us something that aligns to that "one right way" to be well and healthy.
while being peaceful or calm is a good emotion to have, the reason we are convinced that it is the "one right" indicator of our wellness is because most of the time we're stressed out, we're overworked, we're numbed. society and the systems we have to be a part of to survive in this world pushes us all far away from peaceful. so we feel like we need to be on the other extreme to compensate...
what happens when we start to expand that? what happens when our ability to have an entire world of expressions intentionally becomes our metric for wellness instead of a single emotion?
if instead of being bought into the "one right way" to be well, we lean into our ability to fully express in all our variations as our metric of wellness, we return to a place of full humanity. just as nature varies from thunderstorm to sunshine to misty hot days, we can tune into different energies intentionally to serve us best in that moment and let that fullness be our fulfilling metric of wellness. we can break away from the trances of capitalism and systemic oppression to be well differently.
in this way, our full ranges of expressions become our power as they show us how we can intentionally use our multi-dimensional energies to be well. they show us how to fully be human again.
the questions to now ask ourselves are: what is the energy i've been trying to come back to and center as my measure of my wellness? what are the other energies that have been ignoring because i've been convinced that's not good, that's not well, that's not healthy? what happens if i shift that definition for just a moment?
(feel free to reply with what comes up for you!)
