My Values

This values practice is adapted from work I have done over the years to reclaim all parts of me. This comes from the beautiful humans who have stuck by me in my accountability pod, and from Time to Spring Up, who quite literally saved my life. https://www.timetospringup.org/

Living Commitments: (From the practice and lineage of Generative Somatics) I am a commitment to abolition and the liberation of all beings. I am a commitment to the storm and blade that cuts through ancestral curses and faces shadow without fear. I am a commitment to ending systems of violence starting with myself and my own actions. I face the mirror with courage and commit to change.

✨Value: Liberation 

The freedom of all people. 

Practices that support me in embodying liberation: 

• Accountability
  Belief: Mistakes are teachers and can facilitate personal and community growth. I believe it is important to acknowledge intent and center impact. 

• Consent
  Belief: Actions/ work/ decisions in relationships should be voluntary, informed, and conscious. Choices can be reversible.

• Anti-Capitalism
  Belief: “We can end capitalism one transformed relationship at time.” - Alexis Pauline Gumbs.
  Actions: I can change my relationship to internalized capitalism. I can practice consciously spending my money in different ways and challenge internal narratives about money, ownership, production, worth, and value. 

• Rest as resistance
  Belief: By intentional resting and having a balanced life between labor production and self-care, I am actively practicing my value of liberation because capitalism is inherently anti-liberatory. 

✨Value: Abolition 

Belief: The prison system is not only external, it is internalized in our minds and communities as a mindset of punishment. 

Practices that support me in embodying abolition:

• Transformative Justice
  Belief: TJ acknowledges that the “harmony” at the beginning of any relationship or system already had issues, and when we come together to talk about conflict at the right time, we can address root causes and make wider changes to prevent this harm from happening to others. 

• Restorative Justice
  A practice where the goal of RJ process is for all participants to be seen in their full humanity and for conflict/harm to be addressed and amended for. RJ tries to restore the community as a whole where the perpetrator and survivor can maintain relationships and community despite the harm. Goal: for survivors to feel heard and for perpetrators to take accountability for their actions. 

✨Value: Healing

Belief: “No one comes into violence for the first time by committing it.” - Danielle Sared 

Belief: Wholeness. Dignity is a birthright. Everyone deserves access to healing/ support in embodying their wholeness. 

Belief: No one deserves to lose their right to dignity/healing because of harm they have caused or any other aspect of their actions/ identity. 

Belief: Healing is a process, not a destination. It is an ongoing process that cannot be bounded. There is no perfect/ full recovery. 

Belief: I am responsible for my own healing. No one can give me my healing/wholeness.  My wholeness is not dependent on the actions of others. 

Practices that support me in embodying healing: 

• Circle Keeping:
  Based on indigenous Yukon people. This is not a tool to prove harm happened, but instead to uncover and address the roots of the harm. It is not about excuses, but it is about understanding the contributing factors so we can prevent it from recurring. 

• Meditation, yoga nidra, generative somatics, martial arts, accountability mapping

• Accept incompletion
  Belief: Healing takes time. I choose not to embrace the emphasis on urgency and completion prevalent in capitalism. 

✨Value: Anti-Racism

Belief: Racism goes beyond institutional. Racism is inherited trauma and is ancestral, and embodied. 

Practices that support my embodied anti-racism: 

• Generative Somatics: and building anti-racist white communities / maintaining relationships with those comrades/ exploring the roots of my ancestry 

• Healing my ancestral trauma 

• I must stay aware/ in relation to my ancestors and ways I embody white supremacy in the same way that I would engage in a restorative justice process. 

“The way I look back is influenced by the stories I know now. And I do think some of my ancestors were monsters. And I still hold the power to create and destroy, if first in my imagination.” - Alexis Pauline Gumbs

✨Value: Solidarity

Belief: People are experts in their own reality. 

Practices that support embodying solidarity: 

• Subjectivity & Specificity: Belief: We all have biases. Each of us are socialized into different norms and have our own ways of noticing and analyzing information. There is no one right way (non-binary) 

• Speak  using “I statements.”

• Shared Labor: Belief: I want to have awareness of my labor, and how much I ask of others. I believe in community, and that the community I am in or building around me must come together to share the weight of the work/ tasks at hand.
  I believe in abolishing hierarchy. Each person has their own unique set of strengths. I believe in reaching for those within myself and others and that we all have something to give and receive with one another. Abolishing “experts” and ethical board stands that stay stagnant. I believe each relationship I’m in or community that I am a part of should work together to determine shared values and how continue to be in conversation about how harm will be addressed if and when it happens. 

✨Value: Change

All that you touch You Change All that you Change Changes You The only lasting truth is Change God is Change - The prophet Octavia Butler

✨Value: Accountability

Belief: Taking accountability should be a normalized practice/ way of being. 

Practices that support me in embodying accountability:

• Acknowledging my privileges

• Honoring land and native/ indigenous peoples everywhere I go. Fighting for land back. Asking for forgiveness from the land.

• Practicing taking accountability honestly and clearly as a daily practice.

• Practicing centered accountability.

• Staying connected with my accountability pod. Returning to my values as prayer. As ritual.

✨Value: Pleasure

Belief: Pleasure is a birthright. I deserve to feel pleasure and joy.

Practices that support me in embodying pleasure:

• Dance

• Harp 

• Poetry 

• Cuddling

• Deep conversations

• Looking at art 

• Hyping up friends

• Choosing to work less 

✨Value: Nonbinary 

• I believe in deconstructing dualistic assumptions and binary thinking to embrace nuance, intersectionality, context, and uniqueness. I strive to move past gendered language that holds assumptions about good girl/ bad guy and survivor/perpetrator. I strive to remain aware of historical patterns, power dynamics, stereotypes, and social expectations associated with identity. 

• I can also also also and and and https://youtu.be/c2r5nTSZf3U

Practices that support me in embodying nonbinary: 

• both and also this

• Take it or leave it
  There is no right or wrong way of healing and transforming

✨Value: Sustainability  

• Just as I feel toward humans, I love the Earth and want her to survive. 

• There are no quick fixes or easy solutions.

Practices that support me in embodying sustainability: 

• patience/trust

• Emergent strategy (adrienne maree brown) By being flexible, creative processes can evolve to meet the needs that are presented in the moment. I (We…) must be able to adapt and respond as new information is presented in order to strengthen the process and being-with.

• Connecting to land and ancestors

• Intentionally spending money in ways that support the survival of the earth

• Becoming water.