Empowerment through Meditative Exercise

Post date: Apr 18, 2017 8:48:20 PM

Written by Erika Marcinek at Wednesday, April 5, 2017 4:42:47 PM

The radical notion of deconstructing social structures on gender and sexuality through sex-positivity and eroticism in every aspect of an individual’s life is emblematic of the process of engaging with self-care as a tool of social justice and resistance. What had initially only been explored through conventional notions of meditation can and has begun to branch in different directions, expanding previously narrow conceptions of meditation. Traveling abroad last year, I attended a queer meditation in Berlin, in which the purpose was to engage oneself entirely, from the deepest and most intimate parts of one’s body, in empowerment through drawing out an unconditional love for oneself, ultimately leading to feelings of self-worth and the realized value of helping others to reach this point, to resist all who try to extract these positive feelings from us and deny “their” right to taking from you.

Further on my journey, I met with a sex-positive art collective who shared with me that confidence, self-expression, and self-love are the answers to enlightenment and once this nature is established, it can radiate out to the community – a phenomenon known by some as artivism – making the invisible visible. Finding personally accessible ways to “speak,” and here I mean speaking as in standing for something – whether it is through a literal form of speech, however, is irrelevant (sometimes, being alive can be an act of resistance) – “saying your name,” by which I mean unapologetically expressing oneself, follows suit with feminist critical thinkers such as Audre Lorde in her known text, Poetry is Not a Luxury. Self-expression is not a commodity, but a necessity for all humans to maintain connections both with their innermost selves and with the outside world. Much like the scholarship we have read over the duration of this course, meditative exercises to stimulate love for oneself radiates out, imbuing love in all you approach. With love comes acceptance and a desire to understand others. I also think an integral strategy to establish resistance on a personal level against oppressive systems is never through one modality, but successfully achieved inter- and trans-disciplinarily (summed up in differential consciousness).

I have continued to explore the ways new experiences I have can fit into a further understanding of many of these principles. An empowerment program I worked for last summer based their work of aiding young women in championing their own safety and wellbeing in not just physical self-defense but a core reflective element. Personally, I taught weekly workshops with the girls in the program that bridged social justice and self-empowerment to self-care and artistic expression. It was our opinion at the organization that empowerment to disenfranchised individuals and communities can only come about through the intersecting forms of creativity and mindfulness.

Finally, my focus on opening up meditative exercises to more accessible and beneficial practices leads to my advocacy for movement and self-pleasure that awaken one’s whole being through an internal manipulation of power. I recently completed an improv dance course that instilled in me a desire to energize, and in so doing, find strength and confidence in myself and the ability to approach every experience, interaction, and new connection with a newfound sense of presence and livelihood. The individual experiences that brought me to this point have allowed me to welcome integral philosophies within earth, women, and body based spiritualities. A sort of bible of mine, “The Body of the Goddess,” by Rachel Pollack, further reaffirms my own personal need to understand my body so that I can realize its boundlessness – if doing certain physical actions will produce specific reactions, including a sense of leaving our bodies, then what we are leaving is really just a limited view of who we are and what is a body. Understanding that we can only comprehend the universe as necessarily taking part in it ourselves is something white, androcentric, Western, colonialist ideologies look down upon, resulting in an invalidation of womens’ realities. This notion that mortality traps us in our bodies is the most harmful, soul-crushing, mass psychological imprisonment. We have lost the sense of the wondrous in everyday things in life precisely because we are encouraged to see God as abstract, remote, somewhere out there, detached from our bodies. Fear of death, of imperfection, of difference, then, becomes a mark of our humanly distance from godliness. But once we accept our bodies as sacred, we see perfection in difference, in being alive and engaged. As women, as disenfranchised individuals and communities, we must understand that our power, regardless of existing oppressions we experience, can never go away because it rests ultimately in the miraculous bodies we have.