Service is the answer.
You don't have to take on take on the world. You only have to take on YOUR world.
Showing up in service is honestly the only thing that works.
All the stress we’re all feeling, the despair, the helplessness, the extreme fear and panic that’s been sweeping through all of us for a good while - the only thing that works to soothe it is showing up in service.
Because look. You can do all the journaling and affirmations you like.
You can manifest abundance all the live long day.
You can kick yourself into a productivity frenzy, trying to grab onto some sense of control.
But none of that stuff will really hit the spot. It’s not what your body is looking for.
Showing up in service is the only thing that works.
What does “self care” mean in the context of so much collective calamity?
Before we start chatting about Self Care™️, we need to acknowledge the brilliant and prolific Audrey Lorde.
Political activist, intersectional feminist, academic, and writer, Audrey Lorde.
It was she who first popularised the concept of “self care” way back in 1988, when she said -
Caring for myself is not self indulgence - it is self preservation. And that is an act of political warfare.
Not “self indulgence”…
…political warfare.
The original context of “self care”, as popularised by prolific intersectional feminist activist Audrey Lorde, had nothing to do with bubble baths and mass consumerism - it was an act of devotion to the movement for all our liberation.
We need to bring self care back to its radical roots, that’s for sure.
Because as I’m sure we all feel and know inside of white supremacist colonial capitalist patriarchy, any so-called “self care” we’re sold, isn’t self care at all…
…it’s a sedative.
Self care, as its understood from inside colonial capitalism anyway, involves a lot of buying stuff, a lot of dopamine, a whole bunch of needless products, and most importantly - ignore and shove aside anything that reminds you of how scary it is out there.
“Self care” became synonymous with “numb yourself out as much as possible to the suffering of the world. If anything makes you feel scared or sad, it’s ‘out of alignment’ and needs to be cut out of your life. It’s Self Care™️. If anyone makes you think even a little bit about the systems of oppression keeping all of us trapped in cycles of suffering and scarcity - cut them out too. Because Self Care™️.”
None of that shit actually does what it says on the tin.
None of that stuff will actually do anything to Care for your Self.
It won’t make you feel better.
It won’t settle your body, it certainly won’t soothe the fear and despair you’re feeling, and it might even end up making you feel much worse - because you’ve reinforced the isolation and separation that this paradigm indoctrinates us into.
This is why you might often end up feeling disillusioned or lost after doing a whole bunch of “self care” shit. You might feel frustrated and scared that it didn’t work, or that you feel even worse than you did before.
It’s because, anything that perpetuates our separation from each other, anything that bolsters the hyper-individualism we’re socialised into, anything that numbs us to the intensity of what we’re feeling… can never soothe us.
We’re relational, co-regulatory creatures.
Anything that reinforces our alone-ness will always make us feel worse.
Anything that reinforces our together-ness will always make us feel better.
The ironic thing is that caring for each other is the best “self care” we have available to us.
When we show up in service of one another, our bodies relax.
On a real fkn deep, primal level.
We move into what’s called a ventral vagal state - meaning that our parasympathetic nervous systems are doing their thing and helping us metabolise any excess adrenaline and cortisol we might have produced, which then slows our heart and breathing down, clears up our vision, and opens our minds beyond any fear-based loops we were running. Our imagination and empathy start to breathe again.
Essentially, a whole lot of magickal somatic stuff starts happening, and our bodies remind themselves over and over: we’re safe. We’re safe. We’ve got each other. We’re safe. We’re okay. Breathe. We’re safe.
Good stuff.
Next time you’re feeling incredibly anxious, find someone in your immediate family or community who needs your help, and help them.
Help them with an open heart.
Notice how your body responds.
Notice yourself relaxing.
With your heart as light as a feather.
There’s a trick to this though.
Showing up in service from a place of resentment, martyrdom, or self-interest will definitely not make you feel better. It’ll exhaust the fuck out of you, actually.
(This is one of the leading causes of burnout among activists and change-makers, but more on this in a bit)
Only when you offer yourself relationally to another human being from a place of pure interdependence, total openness, will it soothe your tired nervous system.
In a lot of ways it’s a good barometer for where your capacity and internal narrative is at.
It reminds me of the feather of Ma’at - which Anubis would weigh a person’s heart against - deciding their fate after death.
If their heart was deemed to be “lighter than a feather”, meaning - they were pure of heart in life, they were allowed to pass through to the afterlife.
Your offering of service is the feather of Ma’at.
If you’re “pure of heart”, it’ll soothe you, energise you, and ground you back into your humanity.
If there’s resentment or guilt present, you’ll be even more exhausted.
What happens when you start resenting the service you’re showing up for…
Resentment comes with a kind of bitter indignation that we’re being treated unfairly.
Or rather “I deserve better than this. Look at everything I’ve done!”
Resentment, on a spiritual level, is a kind of resistance to the flow of Life.
Resentment says “things shouldn’t be like this, they should be like that instead.”
Nothing in the world will burn you right the fuck out, more quickly than resentment.
Sometimes, resentment is overt. It can feel like a stinging frustration, or even hostility. Other times though, it’s sneaky. It hides in our unconscious perception of who we are and what the world is made of, feeding our worldview, never fully making itself consciously known… but leaving us feeling drained, and a little vindictive.
This is where I hung out for a while. In the early days of my not-awake-yet “awakening”. When I thought that my feminism and my environmentalism were seperate from each other. Before I’d met the colonial shadow within. Before I’d clocked the individualism I was bristling with.
What tends to happen when we’ve got sneaky tendrils of resentment running around, is that all our “service” becomes ever-so-subtly transactional.
Meaning, “I do this for you, then you do that for me”.
When we’re “showing up in service” from a place of transactionality - our service is never going to soothe us. Because it’s not really service at all, it’s making a purchase.
We are purchasing a desired commodity - whether it be a service rendered in return, or a bolstered self-image of “good person”.
When this happens, our service is never actually about showing up for the other person, or for the movement as a whole.
It’s about being seen as selfless.
It’s about repressing guilt you might be feeling (because look! I’m a good person! I don’t need to feel guilty!!)
It’s about bolstering a narrative about yourself you’d like to have.
It’s about reinforcing an egoic construct of who YOU are.
Do you feel what I mean here?
This kind of “service” is not you running towards the suffering of someone else with an open heart.
It’s running towards a fear and ego-based construct.
The desire to be seen as the person who “ends the suffering”, is greater by far than the desire to actually end the suffering.
And it’ll only bolster the individualism that probably burnt you out in the first place.
I’m speaking about this from a place of deeeeeeep intimacy. I spent many years in this space of resentment and saviourism, without knowing it. I think we all do, particularly those of us socialised as white.
Internalised colonialism often gets unpacked in layers.
It took me a long time to come to terms with the ego-based narratives I had around my own “service”. I didn’t even clock that they were there, not for years. I just thought I was “doing my bit”.
I ended up chronically ill, in active addiction, fatigued, malnourished, and constantly in pain.
0/10, would not recommend it to a friend.
…and how to not do that:
Begin training yourself OUT of the hyper-individualist, saviourism-ish conditioning of our culture.
It’s a tricky process, and it starts with getting your head around the following paradox:
You are worthy of everything. You are entitled to nothing.
You are worthy of everything simply because you exist. You’re a precious, one-in-a-thousand-trillion spark of divine humanity. There’s never been a you before. There will never be a you again. There’s nothing you are not worthy of. You are infinitely innocent, and infinitely worthy of love, joy, and belonging. Existence welcomes you. Existence would not be the same without you.
You are entitled to nothing, because there’s no transaction taking place. You are purchasing nothing. You’re not being “short-changed”.
Begin to teach yourself, on purpose, to properly believe that when you show up to give, your role really is just to give. Resentment sneaks in when we believe on the surface that we’re showing up to give, but really, underneath, in the sneaky, oft-silent, oft-deeply conditioned parts of our unconscious, we’re showing up to receive in that moment.
(Which, by the way, there’s nothing wrong with. Showing up to receive is absolutely allowed. We just have to be clear and intentional about it. More on this in a bit.)
Train yourself, on purpose, to delight in the act of giving. Feel yourself relishing in the joy of it.
This bit might take some doing, because it goes so very against everything this culture teaches us. Even when we’re taught as children about kindness and “doing unto others” et cetera, it’s always with an overlay of “giving is important, the world/life/karma/god will always pay you back in kind”.
Training yourself to actively delight in the giving will solidify your place in the vast collective that is humanity.
No individualism can exist within us when we’re joyfully giving without abandon.
We begin to recognise the true nature of our existence in this wonderful space. We begin to really grasp the whole “collective care” thing. Our separation from each other, dissolves. It’s like we melt into a big gooey pot of wild humanity, a great web - always holding us.
How glorious.
How deeply fucking nourishing.
When, try as we might, we simply cannot show up in service joyfully… showing up in receptivity is the only way left.
Okay, but what if you literally cannot get yourself on board with joyfully showing up in service?
What if there’s still tendrils of resentment running, no matter how much somatic work and journaling and reframing and exploring it with loved ones and whatever else you try?
To be honest, there’s a teensy asterisk attached to the “showing up in service is always the only answer” thing.
When we’re genuinely fucking fried, burnt out to all fuck, becoming ill from how much we’ve pushed ourselves… more giving (from a place of joy and openness) will definitely help, but it might not restore you all the way.
But, to be clear here, this point will often come waaaaay later than we might expect it to.
Burnout, exhaustion, and extreme anxiety will usually, almost always be resolved by some joyful and open-hearted service. Particularly for those of us with lots of proximity to systemic power.
When it’s not resolving things all the way, it means it’s time for us to show up in receptivity.
Again, this is not a transaction. This is not you “buying” the love and care you need with a promise of future “payback”.
This is total openness to being held by those who love you, and by the movement itself.
Showing up in open receptivity is, for a lot of folks, even more difficult than showing up in delighted service.
It involves completely divesting from the notion that you’re only worth anything because of what you can produce.
How would it feel to open your heart and ask to be held, knowing that you’re worthy and deserving of it without doing anything in return? How would it feel to sink into the fact that you’re allowed to ask, and you deserve to receive the care you need, simply because you exist?
Can we do that, with literally no attachment to “what we owe” later?
This is the trick.
The solution to chronic burnout and overwhelming anxiety, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, is joyful, open-hearted, non-attached service.
But, for the one time in a hundred when that’s not the case - it’s joyful, open-hearted, non-attached receptivity.
When you show up to hold, let yourself really just hold. Feel your body attuning itself to the needs of the loved ones and comrades around you. Feel your nervous system settling as you step into this place of joyful giving.
And, when you show up to be held, let yourself really just BE HELD. No guilt. No pressure. No performance required. No “payback” necessary. Feel yourself melting into the pot of collective care. Feel yourself letting go, and allowing yourself to really just receive.
Now, as I’m sure we all know already, the transactionality and hyper-individualism of our colonial capitalist paradigm both make it veeeeeeeery difficult for us to move into a space where we’re just giving, or just receiving.
It takes some doing.
Lots to divest from, lots to re-write in the very foundations of our worldview, and our relationship with ourselves.
I would really love it if we lived in a world where everyone knew how to do this.
But, fact is, we just don’t.
But, you can certainly learn. Once you have all the tools and frameworks you need, building a nourishing relationship with yourself, and with the movement, starts happening much more quickly than you might think.
Particularly if you have a community of devoted intersectional + anti-colonial feminists around you to hold the work with you.
This is what REWILDING is for.
We are an online collective of anti-colonial women and femmes, dedicating ourselves to disrupting + divesting from white supremacist colonial capitalist patriarchy, and embodying our roles in the revolution.
We are dismantling the old, and cultivating the new, in equal measure.
To learn how to fully interrupt the hyper-individualism and transactionality that’s keeping you overwhelmed, exhausted, and paralysingly anxious…
…so as to step into the role that only you are here to play in bringing about a liberated world, from a place of groundedness, nourishment, and interconnection…
At the time of writing, we’ve got three spots remaining.
Applications officially close with the full moon on Wednesday, so if one of those spots is yours, click the button below.
Come sit in circle with us. Because devotional, liberation-centric community is where our recovery happens.
Big love.