Introduction
In the following blog post i will expand a bit on a note i wrote about how i see what is really going on with trauma and colonized culture, and why the master’s tools won’t dismantle the master’s house when it comes to moving the needle of health & wellbeing.
This article mainly focuses on language and the cognitive function of language but keep in mind that my practice and understanding of cognition is not in competition with the body, emotions or somatic felt sensations. The western model of pitting the body (sensations) against the heart (emotions) against the mind (thoughts, language) is absolutely part of the overall colonialism that makes real transformative healing impossible in such a worldview. I get into that in this writing.
At the end i will compile some recent ephemera, videos and various things.
Before i get into it, a request:
the work i do combined with my fate, appearance and position in society makes it so that what i offer is routinely diminished and willfully misinterpreted by folks. Essentially, people want to own my narrative for themselves while constantly positioning me as a perpetrator against them and their sacred cows. (to be fair, none of our cows are sacred enough to be exempt from critical analysis.)
Add to the fact that i’m anticapitalistic and averse to cringe marketing tactics makes it so that paying my rising and ongoing medical costs and regular bills is a constant looming threat. As one of the folks in the last few years to be talking openly about decolonial somatics, i see a new legion of well-polished, well connected and financially able people (usually with masters and doctoral degrees) now adding to the discourse, which in the long run is great, but in the short term is a version of the hunger games.
Every way that you, the readers, students and clients who have been positively affected by my work can assist is necessary for my continued ability to subsist in being able to do this. Sharing my articles, referring potential clients, donating and booking private sessions are all ways you can help this neuro-decolonial worldview to benefit more beings.
I have to take 2024 to refine my “brand” in order to stay true to the vision of the work and this requires an immense amount of craft, practice, time, care, astrology and divination. This work is the long game, perhaps the longest game ever (death practice), and is anathema to this culture, society and economy. If you ever wondered where all the elders went, it’s because we all starved them and left them to die, or worse, never gave them the chance to become elders. Revolution takes cycles, generations (it’s literally in the name). There’s no quick fix for karma except getting to work and refining our practices. I wish i was in a position financially to subsidize a certain number of sessions a month, but this work IS work. There are energetics involved and like it or not, money represents energetic reciprocity. The spirits come when they are respected and when the container is respected, which includes the wellbeing of the practitioner.
Take it from someone who was also willfully MIS-educated by a colonial school system and oppressed society: these lessons are hard earned and are carried on the bitter waters of regret. The blessings cannot be separated from the burdens. Those who can do, ALSO teach.
1.
Western imperial indoctrination aka colonization aka abuse dynamics teaches the child mind a framework of (often coerced) behavior based on valuations that are mismatched to reality and biology.
When this happens in the family and in the culture at large, by the time a child is an adult they have incorrectly named and incorrectly perceived the processes of life and death to such a degree that they then perpetuate their own problems (internalized oppressions & learned helplessness) and police each other in ways that also uphold the oppressive and disease-causing relationships.
As an overarching symbol of this issue, this is also why most well-meaning white people on the internet cannot think critically for themselves in ways that garner actual results without also upholding various oppressions like casual and systemic racism, implicit bias and dominator behaviors.
Tldr: Whiteness is a SYSTEM. Anyone can learn to uphold it whether they are conscious of it or not. (watch these two brief videos)
When a person’s choice making and meaning making processes (how value is perceived and assigned) have been corroded at such an early stage (from birth or in utero) and in such sustained ways (via the dominant popular culture), this corrosion and the processes the corrosion obscures are largely invisible to the mind.
This “double invisibilization” is a hallmark of neuro-colonization. I position neuro-colonization to be a colonization of the senses (how we sense, our perceptual optionality) leading to an overall behavioral maladaption that affects every relationship we have and every choice we make.
The further in time this process continues without purposeful disruption, the more entrenched certain behaviors become in the nervous systems of people and their offspring.
2.
To really drive this point home think of an abusive behavior by a family unit such as chronic dissociation and all the ways that enmeshment and codependency has become normalized. Imagine that pattern of behaviors to be like crack-cocaine, a highly refined and addictive by-product of the coca leaf. Taken out if its original context and environment, the situationally useful coca leaf becomes a super toxic narcotic that wreaks havoc on entire groups of people. However, the coca leaf itself is not a problem. In its original environment it is useful and in moderation within an ecosystem of practices and nutrients provides a functional effect.
Therefore, the highly toxic patterns of enmeshment and abuse exhibited by our imaginary family are intensified and decontextualized versions of a situationally useful option that has mutated beyond its original position and ecological niche.
This maladaptive and addictive process becomes the habitual reaction because it is easy and narcotic. Because both the overall environment and the specific behavior are now mismatched and exist within a tangled web of mismatches.
This is colonization, generations downstream.
The mass brainwashing of people using multiple forms of operant conditioning: threat, rewards and punishments entangled with the policing of language, narrative and communication towards the endpoint of “semantic blindness”.
Positive Punishment (PP) — If something bad or aversive is given or added, then the behavior is less likely to occur in the future. If you talk back to your mother and she slaps your mouth, this is a PP. Your response of talking back led to the consequence of the aversive slap being delivered or given to your face.
Positive Reinforcement (PR) — If something good is given or added, then the behavior is more likely to occur in the future. If you study hard and earn, or are given, an A on your exam, you will be more likely to study hard in the future. Your parents may also give you money for your efforts. Hence the result of studying could yield two PRs — the ‘A’ and the money.
Negative Reinforcement (NR) — This is a tough one for students to comprehend because the terms do not seem to go together and are counterintuitive. But it is really simple and you experience NR all the time. This is when something bad or aversive is taken away or subtracted due to your actions, making you more likely to do the same behavior in the future when some stimulus presents itself. For instance, what do you do if you have a headache? You likely answered take Tylenol. If you do this and the headache goes away, you will take Tylenol in the future when you have a headache. NR can either result in current escape behavior or future avoidance behavior. What does this mean? Escape behavior occurs when we are presently experiencing an aversive event and want it to end. We make a behavior and if the aversive event, such as withdrawal symptoms from not drinking coffee for a while, goes away, then we can say we escaped the aversive state. Feeling hungry and eating food is another example. Taking Tylenol helps us to escape a headache. In fact, to prevent the symptoms from ever occurring, we might drink coffee at regular intervals throughout the day. This is called avoidance behavior. By doing so we have removed the possibility of the aversive event occurring and this behavior demonstrates that learning has occurred. We might also eat small meals throughout the day to avoid the aversive state of being hungry.
Negative Punishment (NP) — This is when something good is taken away or subtracted making a behavior less likely in the future. If you are late to class and your professor deducts 5 points from your final grade (the points are something good and the loss is negative), you will hopefully be on time in all subsequent classes.
3.
When people do not have the words (or relationships) to describe something correctly, then they cannot see it properly. They “see” it as something else. They place it into the frames they already have. (see also shifting baselines theory)
More insidious, if the way you process language is riddled with traps, mazes, taboos and various “triggers”, then you will perform the linguistic erasure yourself, you will bar your own capacity to perceive via language, often by believing you are seeing and languaging correctly, “better” than others.
This is partially why “trauma”, or more accurately the processes and relationships that the word trauma is attempting to label, is so difficult to remediate in colonized cultures who lack older pre-colonial languages and customs.
There are substrata of langauge-perception that exist within the human family that pre-date colonization and the mass brainwashing of so-called rational enlightenment aka the cartesian split. The inflated valuation and prioritization of a particular option of perception, taken out of context and put on a pedestal, worshipped as an idol.
We could call this “concept inflation”.
Regaining access to these older substrata is key to releasing the self-replicating shackles of negative bio-perceptual phenomena aka “trauma”. You essentially begin to de-program the malware in the operating system.
This malware of colonization is responsible for much of the negative affect we attribute to “trauma”. And further, the negative affects we experience from what we obfuscate and invisibilize using the nebulous umbrella term: trauma.
If how we perceive changes based on how we describe what we sense, then the shorthand and reduction we use to make cognition and language “cheaper” and more biologically “cost effective” also further colonizes us by reducing cognitive and relational specificity, clouding our direct experience via abstractions.
We all know a map is not the territory but how many people actually practice reversing this linguistic shortcutting? If we seek to heal then we must also decolonize our perception and the way we describe our perceptions since how we describe something determines how we perceive it and how we relate with it.
In short, we must question our answers.
This is one of the main ways to decolonize our behaviors and thus our bodies and souls. How we think determines what we think, how we feel, and what we are available to feel.
4.
Developing intrinsic wholeness
When humans experience relative peacefulness, they gain access to more creative potential. Peace is a dynamic state in which the stability and constancy of the cycles of time are integrated as the baseline state and whatever disruptions happen to that baseline can be met with creative sanity. The conceptual and lived understanding of the cycles of time within a given ecosystem or culture allows for the disruptions to be a natural part of the underlying constancy.
In today’s world very few people have access to an extrinsic sense of peace, mainly due to the ruling classes understanding that constant stress and threat make us less creative and less able to take back our power.
One can argue that this strategy has been employed by dominators for ten thousand years.
So, we can’t wait for extrinsic peace to arrive before we act creatively. We have to develop intrinsic peace in order to deal creatively with life and death.
There are countless beings and forces that prey on our un-sanity, our inability to cultivate, maintain and nourish intrinsic peacefulness. Many of those beings are part of us, so we also feel shameful because of “self-sabotage”, addictions and impulses that give us temporary highs at the expense of our intrinsic peace.
That’s why learning to build intrinsic peace is also about refining our critical thinking and feeling processes so that our language, actions and perceptions are more accurate to reality. Peace won’t just happen extrinsically anymore. It’s too random, and many are in toxic external environments that have also corrupted the internal environment.
Learning to (re)create the internal environment that stabilizes peace is the main job for many of us, and pruning out the internalized oppressive ideas, beliefs and narratives is a fundamental priority.
Part of doing so is fundamentally healing the way you process language and the way you use language to create inner narratives, priorities and value judgments. This will also help you to suss out when people are using language maliciously to manipulate power dynamics.
In short, developing the stability of intrinsic peace and wholeness allows you to actually think critically. And thinking critically helps you to develop the stability of intrinsic peace and wholeness. aka DECOLONISING.
5.
Critical Perception as a Natural Function of Collectivist Nondual Animisms
Most of the pushback i receive about me & my work comes from people whose underlying worldview believes that the body, mind and emotions are in a battle for supremacy. That one of these three “things” is the Most Important Thing and the others are subservient to it. This is a hierarchal model of supremacy that is also the way race, class, and gender dynamics play out socially under the oppressive colonial project the last few thousand years. It is also the way a pyramid scheme functions.
Let’s break down and recontextualize what it would mean when i say that Critical Perception is the synergistic collaboration of all of the modes of the body resulting in the capacity to observe, orient, witness, relate to and perceive aspects of reality in ways that are truly scientific in nature.
This would be the scientific method as discovered and cultivated by our animist ancestors before the agricultural revolution. The scientific method that allows intuition, dreams, meditation, trance states, divination, animistic non-linear information and communication to interact with and sit alongside of rigorous material examination and systemic analysis. The capacity to “THINK WITH” other beings and spirits including other ways of thinking.
The reality is that we can think with our bodies, our hearts, our spirits and our minds together. And when i say thinking i mean all this and more, and when i say thinking i mean the process and practice and play of Critical Perceiving. Critical Emoting, Critical Expressing, Critical Sensing, Critical Feeling, Critical Enacting, Critical Relating.
The colonized mind cannot perceive wholeness and therefore battles rage in every direction, within and without. The feedback from a colonized person is always suspect because no matter how seemingly well-meaning, sooner or later there will be a binary flip that betrays all possible trust and honesty. The colonized mind is rotten with dualism and reductive hierarchy. The battle for supremacy is the ultimate lose-lose situation. This worldview is why we live in a zero-trust society and why abusers are “successful”. Because the addiction to enmeshment and narcissistic dynamics is the only way to function when one’s inner life — one’s mind, body, heart and soul — is constantly in an oppositional war of supremacy instead of complementary process of collective liberation.
6.
The end for now: the long game of integration and Soul Justice
There is more to reality than what lies within the colonized frame. The practitioner realizes this and enacts a long-term struggle of resistance against the societal obstructions to real practice. Aka what is culturally sanctioned may not be practically and spiritually functional.
The long game is a soul game.
Justice is an artistic expression of soul.
What you do determines what you become.
How you perceive determines what you do.
Question Your Answers.
Practice Your Questions.
i reserve the right to edit my work as a living document
questions about this article can be asked via this post:
Assorted materials
Enmeshment addiction short podcast - anyone who’s been following for a bit knows that i think april harter has one of the most accurate takes on what is going on in our culture. this is one of her short podcasts that breaks down a bit of the cultural enmeshment addiction so prevalent in colonized cultures. she and i came to very similar conclusions from slightly different angles and i love what she’s doing.
more from Joris Lechen: https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/decolonising-autism
for me in this moment, this part is very juicy:
“Colonial Mindset Assumptions
Science is not objective. The idea of the objectivity of science has been questioned by many feminist and anti-racist scholars who argue that products of science often reflect social and cultural norms, which in turn perpetuates inequalities and mechanisms of violence (Fondacaro & Winberg, 2002). When the observer, the person ‘doing the science’, belongs to a hegemonic (or dominant) social group, and the subject being studied exists outside of that group, their respective positionalities may be reflected in the implicit biases, and assumption of superiority of the observer over their subject. In the context of colonisation, this mindset is illustrated by what I call the three Colonial Mindset Assumptions:
What is invisible to the coloniser is non-existent to the coloniser.
What is incomprehensible to the coloniser is deficient to the coloniser.
What seems different to the coloniser is inferior or wrong to the coloniser.
These assumptions exclusively centre and validate the dominant group’s perception. They served as the basis for the moral justification for Colonisation, Slavery and Genocide. In this principle, it’s not only that most of us are blinkered to the experiences of others because ‘we do not know what we do not know’, it’s the peculiar assumption that ‘What we don’t know must be rubbish’ that facilitates the continued impact of colonialism via systemic structures and systems of oppression by privileging the experience of the dominant group.”
benebell wen divination zoom session - On Practicing Divination With the I Ching | CIIS
sliding scale zoom lecture on feb 15th.
I practice yijing divination and recently bought her book to supplement my teacher’s book - looking forward to all the supplemental and historical information within as well as her translation of the hexagrams. hopefully will help further dispel any dualistic and propaganda filth that’s accumulated on this system of divination over the last few hundred years.
For a sample of a full reading i did an IG livedream for the month of december. I hope to do one of these per month:
and lastly…
If you want to embark upon a truly honest path of discovery and relationality with biology, nature and soul, I offer private sessions for brave creatives who want to relearn how to really use their operating system in a systematic and liberatory way for the benefit of all beings.
You can read a bit more about how i frame what i do and how i do it here.
If reading the above writing has opened some doors for you in the process of healing and neuro-decolonization, please share it with others and/or donate to my work at paypal.me/daresohei or venmo @dare-sohei
“Don’t build brands, build coalitions”!- hearing you say this in a podcast episode (I can try and find the specific one) filled me with such enthusiasm the past few months, so to your 2024 I say, happy brand-coalition-ing 💅❣️tysm
Question:
"I have seen information about 'critique' but I am not seeing 'Critical' (especially with capital C) being explicated in this article (nor as a praxis) which would appear to be something the author presumes an understanding of pre-exists."?
Just as a form of transparency this was a question that was asked to me, which I am relaying to you.