A tidal wave of fully liberated humans
An introduction to Liberatory Biomimicry
Liberation is a dynamic, living strategy, not just a destination.
If we think of Liberation is a destination, we may feel sad, angry, or hopeless about how far away the destination is. No matter how far we come, we may still feel defeated because we have still not arrived.
But liberation is not only a destination, it is also the strategy we use to arrive at that destination.
By shifting our perspective, we can be nourished by the practice of Liberation, all the way to the destination of Liberation. How great!
The tricky part is, systems of oppression taught us all to avoid using Liberation as a life-strategy when we were young, impressionable, and dependent. Over time, we learned to avoid Liberation and to use only our society’s specific blend of oppressive practices to avoid punishment and ridicule. We “internalized” the oppression and learned to punish ourselves for being so liberated. We tried to kill off our aliveness, but we could only hide, repress, or mask it.
You might have noticed you’ve gotten very good at using oppressive practices to kill off parts of yourself. Maybe you’ve tried perfectionism, saviorism, shaming (yourself and others), hiding, masking, repressing and stifling your aliveness, using denial and minimization as weapons against yourself and others, and using imposter syndrome to hide yourself from the threat of failure or success. You’re pretty good at these, right? You’ve been practicing.
Liberatory Biomimicry offers a set of 18 Liberatory Practices you can use to replace, heal, subvert, and undermine oppressive practices and reclaim your natural ability to live from Liberation.
Remember, all people were once indigenous people, so the knowledge of how to live from Liberation is in your DNA. It’s just buried underneath many generations of traumatized, colonized conditioning, or “practicing.”
You’ll have to practice Liberation to get good at it, just like you practiced oppression. You can do it! Living in alignment with life is much easier than living in an aggressive, antagonistic relationship with life. Fighting life is tiring. The ease and the magic happens when we co-create with life, play with life, and partner with life!
But it gets better! From the state of Personal Liberation we created by using Liberatory Practices instead of oppressive practices, we become significantly more powerful allies in the work for collective liberation.
Colonized people use oppressive practices because they are afraid and ashamed. Fear and shame make colonized people easy to control. Fear and shame make our communities and movements easy to divide and conquer. But the Dignity we cultivate with our liberation practice gives us the courage and wisdom to overcome terror and leverage the awesome power of Life Itself to help us accomplish our goals.
Nothing can stop life.
A tidal wave of fully liberated human beings is unoppressable.
Join the wave.
Image Credit - Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash.
brilliant, Boib!!!