[4.4] Making Meaning + special announcement!!
after a long dark winter, spring returns 🌻🌸🍃 spells, prompts, & rituals for dancing with the light + dark
The miracle of life is that parts of us can die, and from the decomposition, from the dark musky fertile soil, new life will sprout when you’re not even looking 🌱
Happy Spring Equinox! After a long dark Winter, Spring returns. A time of rebirth, regeneration, bouyancy, new beginnngs. It is a time of integrating that which we’ve learned in the dark and bring up to the light, outside of the cave.
UPCOMING WORKSHOP: Connecting to Your Embodied Intuition 🍯🌸🐍🌎
What better way to celebrate the season of spring than with THE RADICAL BADDIE’s first live workshop to practice and embody that radical baddie, dark goddess, wild woman energy: Connecting To Your Embodied Intuition 🌸
Get out of your head and into your body!! Make art!!! Your body is a temple to be loved and adorned!!!! Treat yourself to 90 minutes of juicy reveling in the beauty of our bodies and spirits alongside other gorgeous humans 🍯🍇🦋
I’m so excited to be co-creating and sharing this offering with my friend Anhelo 🪷 We met in business school, took Indigenous & Decolonial Feminist Ways of Knowing together, and have been walking side-by-side on this path of connecting to embodied feminine wisdom through ancestral healing and cross-cultural community building. The vibes will be super sweet, playful, and cozy!!!
Use promo code TRB for 20% off the ticket price 😈 We’d love to see you there!! Share with your baddest friends!!!
What does it mean to live a life of meaning?1
The philosophers throughout time have pondered this question and come to different conclusions. We’ve explored Maya, Plato, Frankl in depth. TLDR: everything is god, enlightenment is waking up to that, and then we make meaning by creating, doing something about it.
So today I’m sharing some prompts and rituals to help you divine meaning in your life.
Y’all know that theory ain’t shit without practice. Allll the theorizing and philosophy memes and musings on WHY things are the way they are amount to nothing without actually doing something in your actual life.2
This is why ritual is so powerful - it combines mind-body-spirit to help you be the shaper of meaning of your life (we’ll be discussing this more in depth at the CTYEI workshop!) So as always peruse through, take what resonates, leave the rest. Let these prompts, spells, and rituals from the wise ones and the ancients move you. Dance with it!!
This is my Nani, and two two women behind her are my two other Nanis, my Grandmother’s two sisters. My Nani, like me, is the eldest of three girls. Many have referenced these Nanis and my sisters and I as the teen deviyaan, the three goddesses, referencing the Hindu Triple Goddess of Durga, Lakshmi, Saraswati. In this video you can hear my mom singing and see the Nani’s dancing with jubilee. I watch this and am reminded how I’m supposed to dance with it - in a sari, forgetting the lyrics and all, with a twinkle in the eye, with full joy in the present moment 🥹🥰
Expand your Awareness 🧠
Begin by noticing. The small coincidences, the animals that cross your path, the stories in your dreams, the memories that resurface unexpectedly. These are all messages being whispered from your subconscious and nature. Pay attention! What might they be telling you?
People dismiss mythology and dreamwork as pseudoscience, without recognizing these are the oldest sciences that have existed. Consider astrology - people misunderstand that it is a woo-woo random attribution of meaning to planets and signs. Rather, it is a closely tracked, meticulous collection of patterns over ages: when stars and planets move to different places in the sky, behaviors in the world tend to show up in a certain way. It’s an age old observed science. Just like story, the stars have much to tell us about the human psyche.
I will always say to go towards systems and practices that you’re drawn towards, but the symbols, stories, memories, dreams that swim past your awareness are especially worth a second look. Turn to different sources to understand the varied meanings associated with archetypal symbols.
Story as Medicine 📚
I’ve talked about Women Who Run with the Wolves here quite frequently. This book is so well-loved it’s literally falling apart at the seams 😅 It’s evidence this is a text I have returned to many times and found meaning in it everytime I come back. These stories and the interpretation of the wild woman in my psyche remind me that the journey that I’m on is one that maps directly on to the stories and psychology of the wild women who have endured through time. I’ve found meaning by documenting and examining the stories from my childhood, making meaning of them, mapping them onto other archetypal stories and fables.
“To my mind, story, in every way possible, thrives only on hard work— intellectual, spiritual, familal, physical, and integral. It is never ‘just picked up’ or studied in one’s ‘off times.’
Story cannot be ‘studied.’ It is learned through assimilation, through living in its proximity with those who know it, live it, and teach it - more so through all the day-to-day mundane tasks of life, much more than the clearly ceremonial times.
Among the best of the teller-healers I know, their stories grow out of their lives as roots grow a tree. The stories have grown them, grown them into who they are. We can tell the difference.
Estes is arguing we have to live the story. Which brings me to:
Steward your Story 🧙🏽♀️
One way to make meaning of your story is to map it out on a timeline.
What are the peaks and valleys? What are the recurring themes? Where is there additional yearning? Where are there gaps? What are the different seasons and eras you’ve lived through? What are the moments that made you? What’s your villain origin story?
What’s next?
You get to be literally whoever you want to be. You get to decide what parts of your story you share, whether or not you’re the main character, you get to decide all of the characters. You are the director of the show!
Find your Wild Wise Elders 👵🏾
Lot’s of unlearning we have to do around paternalism and patriarchy. But!!! I think something that can get lost in the sauce of the self-empowerment discourse is we’re not meant to move through life all on our own.
We are meant to find elders, teachers, guides to share with us perspective that can only be earned after resisting, surviving, enduring for decades.
We can forget that wisdom is there for us waiting in places that we’ve learned to overlook.
Delightfully and unexpectedly, wise, imaginative, reflective elders have come into my life in different ways with jokes, compassion, reminders, clarity. The love from wise elders is so pure and selfless!
One person for me recently has been Anjali Rao. For the last 5 weeks I’ve been taking her Lighting Up the Path course on Caste, Religion, Race, & Yoga. It’s been SO good. As a survivor of little-t religious trauma3, I can’t tell you how precious it is to find a teacher steeped in spiritual texts, yoga philosophy and practice, history, culture, AND teaches it with a critical feminist lens.
Deconstructing our oppressor-identities (in my case coming from an unorthodox Brahmin family) is painstaking work. It is difficult to go through the lessons we learned in our youth and rather than reject it all, find the threads of meaning and ways of interpreting that promote healing and connection.4
It’s taken me a long time to find Anjali, and I’ve met a lot of False “Gurus” on this path of finding my teachers. Hint: if they call themselves a guru, run the other way. It takes discernment to find the teachers who are right for you. And I’ve found, the great ones are in pockets, in margins. They’re not always where we’ve been taught to look - academia, religious institutions, therapy, family. Sometimes they are there but often they’re not.
"Psychology, in its oldest sense, means the study of the soul. Psychology is not one hundred or so years old. Psychology is thousands of years old. Thousands of people in every generation worldwide, mostly old ones who are often ‘uneducated’ but wise in many ways, have watched over and pratected the exact and intricate parameters [of story].” Claudia Estes
Let’s take the false gurus with the shiny instagrams and massive platforms and de-pedetalize them a bit. Remember that which is uplifted by and hungrily consumed by the masses essentially help to maintain the status quo through their teaching. Just because someone’s earned a PhD or earned wide acclaim does not mean they have this life-earned wisdom we’re talking about here.
An example - and some of you will disagree with me… Beyonce is someone I’ve loved a long time as an artist, her music, her vision, her talent, her performances!!! As she’s become a billionaire though, her success has eclipsed that which made her special.
The new visuals for her new album are just… so cringe to me. This is what I mean by false prophet, false guru, etc. The DEI and non-profit industrial complexes are major perpetrators of this kind of energy - they promise progress towards liberation or salvation in hollow, spineless delivery.
Let’s look instead for the archetypal La Que Sabe, the one who knows. Who are your wild wise women in your counsel?
MAKE STUFF
Mothering, baking, gardening, writing, dancing, teaching, community-building, revolution - these are all acts of sacred creation.
Remember from Frankl’s theory on making meaning, the three pillars we need to make meaning in our lives is through the EXPERIENCES we have, the ATTITUDE we use to interpret it, and what we CREATE from it.
If under capitalism, our creativity is squashed, reclaiming creativity as a sacred practice is radical. Dangerous even!!
The Four Directions 🧭
Across cultures, natural elements have become associated with different meanings. I’ve been re-watching Avatar recently and it’s such a good show and also gets so well at the archetypal meanings of the elements, or the four directions.
Different cultures have associated different meanings to the different directioins and the elements.
I learned the Four Directions as ritual from my herbalism teacher Lidia from Tierra Rituals. Essentially it consists of beginning your day with physically facing each direction and acknowledging, affirming, giving gratitude to the direction and the different symbols and associations with them.
Are you so curious and want to learn all the things Lidia has to offer? That’s how I felt when I ran into Lidia’s work too. Lidia is a Queer Two-Sprit Indigenous Herbalist, Curandera, Healer, Community Care Practitioner, Teacher, Medicine Maker.
Y’all are in for such a treat because next week I’ll be sharing a personal and intimate conversation with Lidia on all things plant medicine, indigenous wisdom, goddess mythology, and ancestral healing 🌿🌽🍆🍅🥒
Have any questions for Lidia? Hit reply to this email or drop a note in the comments and we’ll make sure to get to it 🌸 No question is too big or small!!
Happy Spring!! The Horrors Persist But So Do We!!!
If there’s one thing you take from today, it’s that you are the one who is making meaning of your own life on this spinning rock. Meditate on this simple question and arrive to a conclusion that can be a mantra for your life. Re-visit and revise as necessary.
Still an important step though. Definitely a lot A LOT of people could stand to think a little bit more about their lives lol. Elevate the image of speculative reflection - this idea comes from School of Life’s How to Write & Think Effectively. In our culture we glorify the doing and taking action. Creativity and critical thinking also requires persistent, silent, solitary reflection and we should do more to elevate this image of simply being and thinking.
When I’m at home, my mom will walk into my room and starfished in my bed staring at the ceiling. What are you doing??? I’m thinking.
And she’d scoff and laugh like oh wow what a luxury that you’re just spending your time laying and thinking. And it still makes me giggle, because it really is a luxury to simply think.
This is an INCREDIBLE episode on how our attention is being stolen and how it is a radical act to reclaim it. One of those pod episodes that change your life after a listen.
Meditation, people don’t realize, is like a strengthening exercise for your brain. Everytime you practice centering on your breath, bringing your awareness to the present moment and your body, you are practicing being able to do that in the real world where things are not as calm and sweet and smooth as they are on a whispered meditation audio or yoga studio.
So actually, this is another practice to add in your grimoire of radical self-care:
Carve out regular intentional pockets, moments, space of time for thinking, reflection, daydreamimg. Elevate your self-image of speculative reflection as part of your sacred creative practice.
lol
An example from a recent call we had was on the complex nature of using and teaching yoga alongside sanskrit. As beautiful of an ancestral language that Sanskrit is, it’s also been used to gatekeep religion and spirituality by orthodox Brahmins. Lower-caste people would be violently punished for even reading a text in Sanskrit. So when yoga teachers insist on using Sanskrit to teach yoga as “honoring it’s roots,” what they’re doing is actually only attributing this body-based wisdom practice to the Sages and Gurus who documented these practices in the language of Sanskrit or who falsely attribute “the roots” of yoga showing up in Vedic texts or Patanjali’s sutras, rather than from their rightful origins. Yoga is a technology that has been influenced by so many cultures, people, and philosophies. It would be deeply false to attribute yoga to India, Hinduism, or only “proper” when taught in Sanskrit. Fascinating right? More on this to come!
