I want to speak about anger. Rage. Blame. And the events that bring all of these feelings to the surface.

We call them current events, but so often the patterns underneath them are painfully familiar and ANCIENT: sexual violence, objectification, the abuse of power, and the belief that one person has a right to possess another person’s body.

These harms become headlines. They move through our conversations and social media feeds. Then public attention shifts, sometimes so quickly that we're left to wonder whether anything important happened at all.

But people were living with harm and trauma before the headlines, and people continue living with them afterward. For those who have experienced trauma and are currently experiencing harm, it does not begin when the rest of us notice it, and it does not end when the world goes on turning.

I am thinking about the patriarchal beliefs, divisive behaviors, systems and structures that enable these patterns to continue. The turning away. The protection of powerful people and the constant wheels of power that are turning while we're paying attention to whatever we're fed as the salacious news of the day--or the second. The ways institutions can preserve the very relationships of power they are supposed to hold accountable.

Our bodies belong to us. No one’s status, wealth, relationship to us, or perceived authority gives them ownership of our bodies.

And when the systems we turn to for protection also participate in harm, we have to ask what needs to change within those systems. We have to examine the assumptions beneath them, alongside their rules and procedures.

I am also asking another question: how do we respond to harm without allowing it to determine everything we become? How do we respond without feeding it?

Speaking from experience, while still learning

I am coming to this conversation from a place of love, and from a place of ongoing learning.

I have a long history of activism, community organizing, and social and environmental justice work. I have also spent significant time retreating into my own psyche and spirit, examining what I carry and working to transform it. And I am committed to continue that work.

I have experienced sexual violence in varying forms over several years. I have lived through sexual inequality and relationships in which I was objectified, controlled, or treated as though my body belonged to someone else. I have existed in a body and a mind that believed I deserved such treatment, and I allowed it to continue for years without understanding my agency and the part I was subconsciously playing with all of my choices.

Some of these patterns remained a big part of my life until only a year ago. Their vibrations reverberate. I am still working through them. It is a long journey.

Looking back, I can recognize places where I struggled to protect my boundaries or understand what I deserved. That recognition belongs to my healing. Responsibility for the harm belongs to those who caused it.

Both truths need room.

I live about 20 minutes from Cornell University, and I have now found myself connected to survivor groups nearby without deliberately seeking them out. These conversations are hitting close to home and bringing memories of my own college years to the surface--when I was able to begin speaking out.

As a freshman at the University of Delaware, I participated in Take Back the Night through Students Acting for Gender Equality, a campus organization affiliated with the Feminist Majority.

That was the first time I spoke aloud, in a group of people, about being raped and my history of sexual violence.

Being heard was profoundly empowering after years of fear of being told I was a liar, shame that any of it was my fault, or causing my loved ones to completely crumble.

I later became president of that organization and organized events to help others find spaces where they could speak with safety, camaraderie, and support. I know from experience how much it can matter to have people beside you when you begin telling the truth about what happened.

That history remains part of the work I do today.

I do not know everything. I am always learning, always growing, and always trying to understand how my beliefs translate into the way I live.

What I am sharing here is an evolving understanding of how personal healing, spiritual practice, and collective responsibility meet.

What am I learning about spiritual bypassing?

I have been trying to better understand what people mean when they talk about spiritual bypassing.

I want to be careful with language that becomes a buzzword. A useful term can help us recognize something important. It can also become an accusation we repeat without examining what we mean.

I understand the concern about using spiritual ideas and practices to avoid pain, difficult realities, or responsibility. Someone who's experiencing the effects of trauma, violence, or abuse does not need to be told to lean into God or pray about it, or even to be placidly comforted with "I'm praying for you." These humans require material support and physical change.

Both/And/Also: At the same time, I am growing concerned that people sometimes use "Spiritual Bypassing" as damnation without understanding the spiritual work another person is actually doing.

I do not want spirituality to be dismissed simply because it is spirituality. Prayer, ceremony, sound, contemplation, and connection with land can hold profound meaning for people.

The work I am speaking about involves facing what we carry. Unearthing what has been buried. Looking honestly at our wounds, our inherited beliefs, and the parts of ourselves we would rather avoid.

That can be demanding work.

I am learning to ask: does this practice help me face what is here? Does it make room for grief, anger, fear, boundaries, and difficult conversations? Does it help me recognize my responsibility?

Or am I using it to move away from something I do not want to feel or address?

If I speak about love while refusing to acknowledge abuse, something is missing. If I encourage peace while asking a harmed person to remain silent, something is missing. If I call for forgiveness without respecting someone’s safety or freedom to choose, something is missing.

I want my spirituality to help me become more honest about being human.

I also want us to recognize the depth of spiritual work that does exactly that.

Prayer is a contribution to the collective

When I speak about prayer, I am speaking from a belief that we are connected.

In my ever-expanding spiritual understanding, each of us participates in the life and energetics of the world. What we cultivate within ourselves matters. What we bring into our relationships matters.

I believe prayer itself can be a profound act of contributing to the collective. I believe healing ourselves can be a profound act of bettering the collective.

I do not believe prayer needs an immediate, visible action attached to it to have meaning.

A person may spend a season--or even years--grieving, recovering, listening, or working deeply with what they carry. That work can remain largely unseen. Its significance does not depend on an audience or a public result.

I can understand the concern if prayer becomes a lifelong reason never to engage with suffering, never to examine our choices, or never to offer help when we have the capacity to do so. Over time, I want to ask what our spiritual practices are making possible in our lives.

But I do not want that question to become another demand for constant output.

For me, prayer and healing already participate in change. They can also strengthen us for the action that follows.

The patterns we have inherited

I believe part of our collective work involves examining what we have absorbed about power.

Who is allowed to speak? Whose discomfort matters? Whose body is treated as available? Who is expected to accommodate, remain quiet, or keep the peace?

What have we learned about masculinity and femininity? About entitlement, possession, obedience, and control?

These questions can reach into our relationships, families, communities, workplaces, and institutions.

We do not all cause the same harms, carry the same power, or bear the same responsibility. But each of us can examine the beliefs and behaviors we have inherited, including the ones we reproduce without realizing it, and especially the ones that are hidden so deeply beneath the surface that it takes intentional work to unearth them.

I want to name harm outside myself while remaining willing to examine what is happening within me. Everything inside is mirrored on the outside. Everything we allow inside, we allow outside. Everything we fear and do not address, we manifest, even if we never realize or witness the results for ourselves.

Where do I try to control? Where do I stop listening? Where do I dismiss someone’s experience or make my comfort more important than their truth? When do I tune out because I've been triggered? How can I recognize the trigger, speak or write it aloud, examine where it came from, and tell it to move on?

Where do I participate in a pattern I say I want to change?

For me, this is part of the deep inner work: unearthing what has been buried, witnessing it honestly, and participating in its transformation.

I am coming to understand that process as alchemy. Something painful, hidden, or destructive becomes material we can work with. We develop a different relationship to it, and we practice making different choices.

That work can influence how we listen, how we support, how we parent, how we respond to another person’s boundaries, and what we are willing to challenge in our communities.

I believe its effects reach beyond us.

Making room for anger and rage

My relationship with activism has long been different from many others I see around me, even since I was deeply enmeshed in Occupy:Philly (15 years ago this month!) and had a profound realization that shifts amongst "adversaries" happened as soon as they were met with love and compassion. I participated in meetings with people trying to understand "What is it that you want?" so.many.times. I actually was that kid in my early 20s that told police I loved them when they were moving to arrest us as we were blocking traffic in major Philly and DC intersections. And NO. I'm still not a hippie.

I do not want to keep feeding the patterns of harm that have already taken so much from people. I want to understand what my anger is asking me to notice, and then choose what I do with it.

Anger can tell us that a boundary has been crossed. Rage can hold grief, helplessness, betrayal, and a fierce desire to protect what matters.

Those feelings deserve room.

We need places where we can grieve, mourn, move, speak, sound, and be witnessed. We need community in which we can acknowledge what we feel without being shamed for it or pushed to make it immediately beautiful.

We need space to "ugly cry" and pound on the ground with our fists and scream into pillows. And, geez, everyone everywhere needs a set of Socker Boppers.

Feeling anger does not make us less loving or less spiritual.

I am concerned with what happens when anger becomes humiliation, dehumanization, or an impulse to reproduce the harm we oppose. That is where I want to pause and ask what kind of world my response is helping to create. This is the kind of action that results in traumatized people traumatizing people. Over and over and over again across millennia.

We can want a safer, more loving world and still become so attached to anger that we lose sight of what our own behavior contributes.

I want to recognize that possibility in myself.

Taking action without feeding the fire

There are strong, necessary responses to injustice: setting boundaries, speaking publicly, documenting harm, organizing, demanding accountability, and protecting people who are unsafe.

I want to bring my full strength to those responses while remaining attentive to how I use it.

When I approach everything as a fight, I can become organized around defeating, humiliating, or overpowering someone. That way of relating can carry forward the patterns of domination I want to transform. "Fighting" anything is still fighting.

I want to examine that fighting impulse.

What is my response making possible? Who becomes safer? What harmful condition changes? Am I acting from clarity, or from a need to discharge pain onto someone else?

These questions belong alongside the questions I ask about spiritual practice.

Outward activity deserves examination too. Being vocal, visible, or constantly engaged does not tell us everything about the effects of what we are doing.

I want my inner work to strengthen my capacity for action that contributes to the world I am praying toward. Action with care, courage, boundaries, and accountability.

That is a practice. I am still learning it.

And in myself and my spiritual practice, in safety, I am counteracting any desire to fight with full-blown surrender.

Agency, support, and the freedom to heal

I believe there can be power in discovering where we still have choices.

In my own life, turning inward has helped me recognize that what happened to me does not have to define every possibility ahead of me. I can develop a different relationship with my body, my voice, my boundaries, my safety and stability, and my future.

That does not mean I can think my way out of every circumstance. It does not mean another person’s violence was mine to prevent. And it does not mean someone is failing if they remain afraid, angry, grieving, or dependent on help.

People need safety. They need resources, time, practical support, and other people who will stand beside them.

Naming a harmful system can be part of reclaiming agency. Understanding what happened can be part of healing. Asking for help can be part of freedom.

I want to hold the possibility of personal transformation with compassion for the conditions people are actually living in.

Labels, healing, and divinity

I no longer call myself a survivor.

That is a personal choice. I respect people for whom that word remains meaningful, empowering, or necessary.

I believe labels can help us at particular points in our lives. They can offer language for an experience, help us find community, and give us a place to begin learning and healing.

I also want the freedom to move beyond a label--any label--when it no longer reflects how I understand myself.

I do not want any experience, wound, role, diagnosis, imposed characterization, or category to become the whole of my identity.

In my spiritual understanding, our deepest identity is divine. In unity.

There is something within us that is larger than what has happened to us and larger than the language we use to describe it. Remembering that has become part of my healing.

The experience remains part of my history. I am continuing to discover who I am beyond it. I invite you to do the same.

Listening when women’s emotions are dismissed

This story connects to another pattern I have been thinking about: how easily women’s words and emotions can be shrugged off.

PMS. PMDD. Perimenopause. Menopause. “She’s hormonal.”

I am concerned with how these words can become explanations that end a conversation before anyone has listened. For eons.

What is she actually saying? What has she been carrying? What boundary is she naming? What reality is coming into view?

I want room to consider the body while taking the words seriously.

Sometimes I understand an intense emotion as something that has finally been given permission to speak. Something I have accommodated, minimized, or held quietly is asking for attention.

I want that possibility to be heard.

We can be curious about what shapes an emotion while also listening to what it is telling us. A label should never replace attention to a person’s experience.

This deserves its own big space, probably over multiple future posts, but I wanted to name it here, especially in the context of gendered and sexual violence.

Prayer that reaches into our lives

When we work to loosen the hold of entitlement, contempt, control, and harmful attachment, I believe we create more room for love and freedom.

I hold that as a spiritual belief. I also want to see it expressed in daily life.

What changes in how I treat someone? What becomes possible in my community? Who receives support because my capacity to care has grown?

I believe deep healing can move us toward service. As we become more able to remain present with pain, we may become more able to accompany others in theirs.

I do not want to turn that into a deadline or another demand on people who are already carrying too much. Sometimes someone’s work is surviving the day or accepting care.

But I want to remain open to the ways healing can reach outward: through listening, protecting, organizing, sharing resources, offering practical help, or standing beside someone who has been left alone.

For me, collective prayer includes what we cultivate within ourselves and what we do with our hands, our voices, our attention, and our resources.

Why sound, land, and gathering are part of my work

This is part of why my work has taken the shape it has.

Sound journeys. Sound immersion. Toning. Listening. Gathering with people who are grieving, overwhelmed, or carrying anger. Communing with land and the more-than-human world.

I am continually learning through these practices. I listen for what becomes available when I am quiet enough to notice, and I try to bring that listening into the human world.

I understand this as a continuing form of activism and activation.

Through Earthtoned, I want to help people expand their capacity for the work they feel called to do. I want to offer spaces where people can make room for what they carry, reconnect with themselves, and discover what they have available to bring into their lives and communities.

A person may leave with more room to have a difficult conversation. To ask for support. To hold a boundary. To take more space for themselves. To return to community work. To care for a child, a neighbor, or a place with greater presence.

These possibilities matter to me.

My spiritual and ecological work grows from the same concern that has always informed my organizing: how do we create conditions in which people and the living world can thrive?

Listening beyond the loudest voices

I also want us to be careful about whose voices we allow to shape our understanding.

Reach, volume, and confidence do not tell us whether someone has understood the whole picture. A headline or a widely shared post can bring something important to our attention while still leaving much unseen.

I want to ask who is speaking, what they know, whose experience is missing, and what incentives shape the story being told.

That includes asking those questions of myself.

I want to know what I believe while remaining open to what I have not understood. I want to listen beyond the people who can most easily command our attention.

There is work happening quietly: someone accompanying a survivor, a neighbor offering practical help, a community creating a safer place to gather, a person learning to interrupt a harmful pattern.

Its visibility may be small. Its significance to the people involved may be enormous.

I want to remember that when I think about prayer, healing, and the many ways people contribute.

The world I am praying toward

I hope these words reach the people who need them. I pray they make room for a conversation that can hold anger, grief, accountability, spiritual belief, and practical care together.

I pray for a world in which our bodies are our own. In which people experiencing harm are heard and protected. In which power is examined and abuse has consequences.

I pray for spaces where we can feel what we feel, work honestly with what we carry, and strengthen our capacity to care for one another.

I believe prayer contributes to the world we want in a significant way. I believe healing contributes to it. I want the actions those practices strengthen in me to contribute to it too. I will continue to act, but I will work forever more to not act as reaction, but rather from a place of groundedness that is backed with prayerful intent.

I am still learning how.

May there be more light and more love and less harm, every day on this planet.

May our choices help make that prayer real.