Last fall, I asked my tarot deck what the theme of the month would be. I got the five of wands–the card of conflict.
Sure enough, that month ended up being super conflict ridden, with conflicts with friends, my boss, my professor. I don’t feel anxious very often, but one of these conflicts in particular gave me one of the most intense anxiety episodes of my life.
So I did a healing session with Anastasia Light to help with what was going on.
She asked me, “So this person you’re having a conflict with… are they white?”
“Yes,” I said.
She paused. “Whoa,” she said. “I’m seeing like, a huge ancestral thing. It’s… massive. Going back so many generations. The theme is: “I’m going to be killed by white people.”
Up until that point, I had dabbled in ancestral work, but had never actually connected ancestral happenings to what was going on in my life.
My ancestors were revolutionaries who fought against British imperialists, and my great-great-great(?) grandfather was even jailed by them. (I’m pretty proud of these badasses in my lineage!)
Needless to say, they faced a lot of shit from white people. (Like every BIPOC’s ancestors, lol).
I was feeling so much anxiety with my professor because it was activating an ancestral fear of being killed by Europeans.
This quantum, ancestral piece — it’s a HUGE piece that is often missing from social justice frameworks. We’re programmed (ancestrally and within this lifetime) with colonialism/imperialism, and then like a computer code, end up replicating it through our now-distorted experience-sensing of the world.
There’s the normal oppressiveness of white academia that I was experiencing at the time, and then there’s the additional ancestral layer that intensifies it. The two layers merge because they share a similar resonance.
Like, my prof was obviously not trying to kill me, but when my nervous system reads it that way, the situation “feels” more oppressive.
Oppression is not just the act of violence itself, but the way our nervous systems then becomes entrained to, and houses, that violence.
Ergo, My ancestors experiencing violence from colonizers is one thing, but then housing that fear of violence in their bodies is another.
If I continued this fear of conflict with white people within my system, I would essentially be perpetuating the same oppressive dynamic, because that matrix would be living within my system.
Like a bait and hook, I become enmeshed with that colonial paradigm. (Because enmeshment = perpetuation) And if I’m in a fear response, I am much easier to “oppress” in that state. But this is the main point: the programmed fear response IS the oppression, and by deprogramming it I unplug myself from the imperial paradigm.
Activism work is crucial. However, a lot of it is essentially reacting to whiteness, not actually unplugging from it within our nervous systems.
Rather than choosing sovereign-ly when we want to engage with the imperial matrix or not (i.e to critique it and make changes), constantly reacting against it creates a situation where we constantly live in that paradigm.
Because while it’s true that the colonial timeline exists (because we obviously see oppression around us), the organic timeline exists simultaneously.
The more and more we unplug from the colonial matrix, the more we can embody and live in the organic, authentic timeline.
That timeline is what I’m holding the vision of, practicing, and choosing to embody every day.
Originally published July 1 2021.