This week could have been worse; what comes now must get better. If we’ve learned anything over these six months, it’s that QAnon is to conspirituality as Trump is to the political status quo. We can debunk or vote out the fever dream, but the virus will remain.
In our first post-election episode we take stock of work yet to do. Derek checks in on QAnon mysticism. Julian speaks on the populism and language games that horseshoe right and left together, and how strong communities cannot afford horizontal violence anymore. We review a new podcast out of Montreal that studies “The Nexus” — the toxic intersection between identitarian activism, social media, and cancel culture.
Matthew crystal-balls the precarious future of post-COVID yoga, and interviews cultural somaticist Tada Hozumi on why Andrew Yang offered attachment politics, decolonizing wellness, and WTF is going on at The Embodiment Conference. “The future of global embodiment,” Hozumi says, “is also the future of global politics. Because the mind always follows the body.”
Show Notes
Sapolsky: Religious Ritual is OCD
Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst — Robert Sapolsky
Most Yoga Teachers are Not Online Producers. They Have a Deeper Gift, and Now Is the Time to Trust It.
Dr. Northrup continues: now the conspiracy is electoral fraud
Fucking Cancelled podcast
Molly Meehan’s 5-part “zine”.
Molly’s podcast: “Out of the Woods”.
Exiting the Vampire Castle by Mark Fisher (who tragically died by suicide after a lifelong struggle with depression).
Open Letter to Mark Walsh and The Embodiment Conference
Why I, as a therapist, support Andrew Yang
The Ritual As Justice School
Whiteness as trauma in the body
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You can find us on all of our social media handles, Facebook, YouTube, and I know there have been issues with Instagram.
We got booted out, we were told that we violated some guidelines, then we received an email saying that that was a mistake and we would be back up imminently.
But we have not been put back up yet, so we have just created a new handle which we have posted to our Facebook page.
It's Conspiripod, so C-O-N-S-P-I-R-I pod, and we will be posting there and hope that we get our old handle back.
We'll figure all that out.
It's been a tough week on social with Instagram anyway because of the elections, so we're gonna Just give some breathing room and we'll start posting content there today.
We are also at patreon.com slash conspirituality where we post bonus content every weekend.
So if you want to support the podcast and our efforts, please do so and check us out there.
Also, if you would like to support us in trying to reach out to Instagram, and pressure them to resolve this issue.
Apparently the account was taken down by mistake and we should be back up, but it's just not working.
I have about 20 of the same duplicate emails saying that it should be fine now, but it isn't.
We have a Facebook page on Conspiritual, a post on the Conspirituality podcast page on Facebook that will give you instructions about how to do that if you want to take a minute and just help us that way.
Okay, guys, Conspirituality 24, "Body politic recovery with Tada Hozumi." This week could have been worse.
What comes now must get better.
If we've learned anything over these six months, it's that QAnon is to Conspiratuality, as Trump is to the political status quo.
We can debunk or vote out the fever dream, but the virus will remain.
In our first post-election episode, we take stock of work yet to do.
Derek checks in on QAnon mysticism.
I'm going to talk about populism and the language games that horseshoe right and left together, and how strong communities cannot afford horizontal violence anymore.
We review a new podcast out of Montreal that studies the nexus, the toxic intersection between identitarian activism, social media, and cancel culture.
Matthew crystal balls the precarious future of post-COVID yoga and interviews cultural somaticist Tadao Hozumi on why Andrew Yang offered attachment politics, decolonizing wellness, and what the fuck is going on at the embodiment conference.
The future of global embodiment, Hazumi says, is also the future of global politics, because the mind always follows the body.
The 1111 Code, The Great Awakening by the Numbers, is a book that claims to apply the sacred application of geometry and numerology as the divine map to humankind's enlightenment process throughout the millennia.
Yeah.
The book is written by an electrical engineer, Charles J. Wolfe, and purports to explain the Great Awakening espoused by QAnon through numerology.
While it has a 4.5 star rating on Amazon, one one-star reviewer was upset that it mostly focused on Wolfe's life and not enough on the spiritual aspects of 1111.
I feel you.
But honestly, I didn't read all 388 pages.
There is a QAnon Anonymous episode that they go into that, so you can check it out there if you want more on that.
But let's look at it from a slightly different perspective.
Numbers have power.
I used to work for someone who invented a calculus, the row calculus, and I listened to dozens of hours of him talking about both its real-world application and its philosophical aspects.
I have close friends who are math wizards.
I myself have taken a few statistics courses to try to get my math-addled brain up to speed.
The entire way that I'm communicating to you right now through this podcast is thanks to strings of zeros and ones.
Numbers matter.
But I don't make a prayer when the clock strikes 1111 or any other number.
It's fun and wistful, sure, but sometimes people assign the mysticism of randomness with too much meaning.
I like practical applications to math, and I know there's long been speculation about the divine nature of mathematics.
I love Pythagoras' theory of the music of the spheres, but he honestly loses me when he says numbers reveal a link between divinities and humans.
When I see fractals in ayahuasca ceremonies, I know it's the drug's effect on my visual system more than cosmic messages that mean, well, that's what I mean.
In the end, the meaning is whatever my mind conjures.
Here's an example of the unrealistic depth we assign to the numbers.
Earlier this year, around the time of the release of Plandemic, Friend of the Pod Mickey Willis said something to the effect that, 2020 vision is leading us to the truth, wink wink.
Yet if we're being honest, it's really 2024 right now, since most scholars agree that Christ was actually born in the year 4 BCE, not 0.
When inventing the concept of a year, we had to throw away an extra day.
We had to throw in an extra day every four years because we couldn't quite get the numbers of a day down.
And I don't even want to discuss numbers in a country that stubbornly refuses to use the elegant simplicity of the metric system.
Come on, America.
2020.
Thing is, if you're Jewish, it's 5781 right now.
In Ethiopia, it's 2013 today.
The Islamic calendar begins with the Hegera, Muhammad's epic journey from Mecca to Medina.
So if you're Muslim, it's actually 1442.
The Gregorian calendar was only introduced in 1582.
Pope Gregory XIII took quite a bit of liberty counting backwards for nearly 16 centuries and again, he was four years off.
All of this is relative, not cosmic.
If it's 1111 in Los Angeles, we're already in another day in New York City.
Or should I say 2311, which is how the military measures time.
It's hard to make a wish at such an unsymmetrical hour.
And really, repetitive numbers appeal to our love of symmetry, not time.
Or is 2 plus 3 plus 1 plus 1 really 7, the divine number, so I should make a wish then?
Is it 4 or 7 that's really relevant here?
Maybe I should write the next QAnon Bible.
The human brain creates meaning where there is none.
We hate unresolved stories and we invent endings where none exist.
Reasons that often have nothing to do with the events we connect them to.
Saying 1111 is a divine time where I live isn't a mark of my connection with the cosmos.
It's indicative of my lack of imagination.
My ignorance that it's many other times in many other places on the planet.
So, I'm sorry, but Mercury coming out of Gatorade on election eve or the cosmic significance of Q's numbers are not marks of importance, they're flights of fancy.
And yes, I know I said Gatorade.
Before astrology fans get mad, hear me out.
I recently saw someone post about Eric Francis and planet waves.
And I haven't heard that name in a while, and I haven't seen Eric in over 20 years.
But I remember standing in his backyard in North Jersey as he laid out the cosmos to me, and him telling me about the relevance of Chiron, which a lot of other astrologers at the time didn't use in their maps.
Around that time, I was employed as a crossword puzzle editor, and we had a sister publication, Dell Astrology.
I spent hours listening to the editor read my chart and talk about the stars.
I take no issue with storytelling related to astrology.
It's actually quite mythological, which appeals to me.
I just think we get a bit too carried away thinking that the stars influence our poor behavior here on Earth, using them as explanations as to why things happen.
Because check it out.
On Election Day, when Mercury was out of retrograde, a lot of people died, but a lot of people were also born.
Likewise, people got married while others got divorced.
Some people on the planet were ecstatic and others were angry and sad.
We can't continue to only look at our tiny little bubbles of perception and extrapolate that out to the cosmos.
It's always contextual and it's always relative.
Your computer breaking down isn't due to mercury.
It's probably thanks to Apple.
Now we'd make much more progress as a country when we realize that a conservative court is preparing to overturn abortion rights and healthcare, and the administration is crying foul because they know that Trump lost.
At the time of this recording, Biden has nearly 4 million more votes than Trump.
And that's a number that actually matters.
So, until we come to terms with the fact that humans aren't little angels-in-waiting, but just apes that scored a few more neuronal connections over the course of millions of years, it's going to be impossible to self-actualize what's really possible.
As this week in America has shown, we still have a lot more work to do in order to actually live up to the dictates of democracy.
So, let's take our activism out of the clouds and put it down here on the ground, where real work can actually be done.
So Derek, yeah, numbers, very abstract.
But counting, not so much.
And I think that when we're talking about spiritual or religious or pre-modern wellness systems that rely upon lists and three of this and four of that and multiples in various forms, we're also talking about the self-regulation of the rhythm of counting.
So, I tend to understand the numerology not so much in the symbolism that incredible stories can be woven around, but I think maybe I got my first understanding from it being a Catholic boy and being handed a rosary.
And yes, trying to understand the gravitas of the prayers that I was taught, but then also realizing that or feeling that what was more important was that I was putting myself into a trance state that was dependent upon the rhythm of counting but then also realizing that or feeling that what was more important was that I was putting myself into a trance state that
And so, yeah, I just think about counting a little bit more than the stories that are woven around the numbers themselves.
But I do remember I had this very old aunt who was a nun, a great aunt, and I would go to visit her in her convent in Michigan everywhere.
And then there was a monk who I would visit in the Canton de l'Est around Montreal in a Franciscan monastery.
And they did the same thing, they would say, they both said the same thing, they said, I love the novena, which means nine weeks of a particular prayer ritual involving the rosary, and there was something about the nine that was mystical and meaningful, and that's where we get into numerology a little bit, storytelling, but I think they were also talking about, like, I love this season, and this is how I measure it out.
Yeah, and I think that's why I referenced the aspect of storytelling with numbers.
I got straight A's in math, which was predominantly counting, and algebra, up through algebra too.
But when I got to geometry, I just lost it in high school.
And only recently has my wife Explained to me what geometry is and how it tells stories, and I was blown away because it's something I didn't think about.
Using anything as a tool is fine, and again, my piece wasn't really about, it's more the mysticism of it.
I have had so many friends of mine say, it's 444, make a wish, and then actually believe that that had an impact.
And so it's really that's what I was addressing, not the actual significance of numbers, which again, everything digital has to do with numbers.
I mean, math is extremely intense.
So I don't want to give that away.
And what you said, I mean, the 108, the mandala, I mean, or the counting of the beads, all of that has, it's a way to yoke your mind of focusing your mind on something.
So I take no issue with any sorts of practices like that.
Yeah, I think so often what's going on in any of these areas is that there's a sort of misplaced perception of where the power lies.
As if the number itself has some sort of magical power and then you fetishize the number and then if you have a certain kind of temperament you can go from there into extrapolating outward that everything has to be a certain number in order for things to go your way, you know?
Right, you know, it also puts me in mind of, I don't know if you've seen Robert Sapolsky's lecture in his, is it Stanford that he teaches his free course at in evolutionary biology and it's Religious Ritual and OCD, which I know is very effective.
Defensive to many people, but he goes through a very compelling argument that we'll post into the show notes about the place of numbering and counting rituals in so many pre-modern traditions, Vedic memorization patterns, the numbers of Jewish law, and his argument is basically that
The profession of being able to use numbers in a rhythmic way, but also to commit their meanings to memory is what allows a priesthood to biologically self-select over time and then become prominent in a community and hold social power.
It's an amazing, amazing 10 minutes of lecture.
And, you know, if, You know, people who can, I don't know, tolerate, you know, somebody who's obviously a, you know, an atheist making short work of some huge swath of human history.
I don't think he, I also just don't think he does it a disservice either, you know, by pointing out that there's something like neurologically special about the, I think even more than that, and it's a great lecture, I highly recommend it.
And the capacity that it has to give people some kind of relief or sense of order.
Well, he's also, I think even more than that, and it's a great lecture, I highly recommend it.
He's talking about numbers, he's talking about cleansing rituals, and he's talking about what happens when you go in and out of sacred spaces.
And how people who have a certain proclivity where they become very preoccupied with this, who might also have other gifts like being charismatic and eloquent and insightful and compassionate or what have you, probably turned out to be the priestly class within early societies that then said to people, probably turned out to be the priestly class within early societies that then said to people, hey, if you perform I've discovered this.
You know, it just occurred to me, I'm going to be talking about post-COVID yoga a little bit in my segment, but it just occurred to me with regard to the sacred space stuff.
I think that what, I haven't made this connection yet, but I think that what I'm picking up from a lot of yoga studio owners who are really champing at the bit to open their studios up in the space of lockdown is not just the argument that, oh, you know, we need to take care of our clients' mental health.
It's that it's also hard to believe that these studios that they've built aren't somehow spiritually special or sacred in some way, and that maybe just through the power of intention or good feng shui or something like that, that the virus will be less dangerous.
And yeah, I feel that's a real thing.
Are you saying that the secret isn't a real thing, though?
At the secret?
How dare you?
At the secret itself?
Well, yeah, but I mean, think about, think about when, I mean, we just went through a whole spate of closures of yoga studio closures, not just because of the pandemic, but even before a lot of the big chains were crashing because of course they're, they're overextended and, and you know, they're underfunded.
It's nothing that a good feng shui consultant couldn't have fixed though.
Maybe, maybe.
But I mean, when a studio closes, the outpouring of, you know, my heart opened here, or I had such a special connection here, or my development was really enhanced by this space.
It's not something that people say about, you know, their gyms, or I haven't heard Oh, and it's true, and it's a sacred space because of what we do in it, and the kinds of experiences that a group of people is sort of valuing together, right?
And I will disagree, because after 17 years at Equinox, I deeply miss the people there.
Because that was really it.
I mean, we built a gym in my friend's garage, so the equipment isn't the thing, but it's the actual seeing dozens and hundreds of people every week that I connect to.
So, gyms have that too.
I don't use the same language, perhaps, but it does have that effect.
And I'll just also want to say, I haven't seen that Sapolsky video.
He did some work with Big Think though, but his book, Behave, If you want to learn about biology, it's one of my go-to books for understanding evolutionary biology.
He's such a good writer because that same charisma that he brings to his videos comes through in his writing.
It's his heart.
He's a little bit hard to take.
I mean, he has that kind of like, I don't know, JFK was known for how many words per minute and Sapolsky's got to be up there as well.
So, I don't know, listening to his lecture on OCD and religious ritual makes me feel a little bit OCD and hyper-ritualized.
But it's great data.
Yeah, I mean, especially from a guy with that wild long hair and that big bushy beard and jeans and a t-shirt pacing back and forth like he's had one too many cups of coffee, right?
Or something.
Something.
I want to ask, how do we wrap our heads around the fact that almost half of this country still find Trump appealing?
up to the next.
Upon coming across a villain like him in a work of fiction, many might find it hard to suspend their disbelief.
What a grotesque caricature of all that could go wrong in the development of a human being on every single level.
How does anyone watch him stand there on Tuesday night and completely subvert the nature of our democracy with one lie after another while doing the very thing he's trying to accuse Democrats of doing?
Rig the vote.
We're talking about counting, right?
And then go on to try to stop the count in places where he's trending to lose and keep the count going in places where he's hoping he might still pull ahead.
How does anyone watch that and not become viscerally disgusted?
But clearly they believe him.
Or maybe they just think everyone lies and being transparent about winning at all costs by lying is somehow more honest or just feels more authentic to them.
Sam Harris recently shared that his latest insight into Trump's appeal is that perhaps the secret is that Trump offers a truly safe space for hypocrisy, for human frailty, a total expiation of shame, a kind of spiritual balm for the deplorables who feel judged and inadequate.
Trump's patent ability to feel no shame or express, excuse me, Trump's patent inability to feel shame or express remorse, or to be humble in the presence of experts seeking to advise him, and his frank, ugly pronouncements of bigotry, misogyny, and reactive aggression led Harris to refer to him as a kind of grab-them-by-the-pussy Jesus, or a go-back-to-your-shithole-country Jesus.
I thought it was an interesting moment he had this week.
And look, I'm not saying anything remotely earth-shattering, especially to our audience, but there's more.
I think Trump represents the re-emergence of right-wing populism in our country, and exploring that right now is part of a piece I'm working on.
As I do that, I'm thinking about language games, language manipulation, and the ways social media provides the biggest megaphone ever.
So that not only can a lie go halfway around the world before the truth is put on its pants, but the insidious influence of propagandistic language can be injected into how whole demographics interpret the world.
I'm talking about fake news, gun rights, Being pro-life, a rigged election, which we've been hearing about, you know, probably since last year that the election is going to be rigged.
White pride drained the swamp.
In all of these cases, what the language does is stake out territory that creates a feeling of righteousness around a false or oppressive principle.
In spiritual circles, the idea that words like intention, accountability, integrity, alignment, receiving downloads, energy, sensing the energy, or being open to channeling, all of these are sources of, or pathways to, ultimate revelatory truth.
And as we point out every week on this podcast, this easily becomes a kind of blank slate upon which any number of false, oppressive, delusional, or dangerous claims can be projected and elevated to enlightened status without any real process of evaluation.
So being convinced that essential oils will give you protection because they are natural or that having a healthy immune system will mean you don't need to succumb to the indignity of Western medicine.
Saying that you are pro-vaccine choice, not anti-vax, or claiming a right to spiritual sovereignty that sees public health measures as muzzling or totalitarian.
All of this starts to then overlap with right-wing militia language that gins up anti-government sentiment, and as we have seen, bleeds over into folks like Sasha Stone and Christiane Northrup parroting the language games of those who tried to kidnap Governor Whitmer.
And may well have some shenanigans planned, I hope not, in the coming days.
We have seen people trying to storm places where they're counting the vote.
But as part of this exploration, I also will be looking at how perhaps the incredibly insular and somewhat elitist influence of college campus woke activism has its own language games that might be shooting us in the foot on the left.
Now look, we can argue the academic and historical basis, for example, of how the words white supremacy and racism are correctly used, and the nuanced meaning of slogans like defund the police, and whether or not activist defenses of riots and looting have a valid moral calculus.
But I have a hunch that when most blue-collar voters in the middle of the country hear that the only way to move forward is to confess and confront their internalized racism and white supremacy and start doing the inner work to dismantle it, that having any questions or objections and failing to admit it openly is mere white fragility
And that the police need to be defunded while their neighborhood is on fire, it probably doesn't move them to the left politically.
Likewise, of course, we have the problem in this country of so many buying into absolutely dishonest ways of using words like socialism as a pejorative when referring to basic social safety net measures present in most other capitalist democracies for decades, as if these somehow represent a Kim Jong-un-style dictatorship.
I guess I just want to say by way of concluding this introduction that I think language really matters.
I think that being more careful and precise in our language can be a powerful practice, especially say in the domain of yoga, meditation, somatics, practices that are under the umbrella of healing and experiential awareness.
I personally want to keep making a stand for how the way one uses language to talk about meaning, experience, values, emotions, etc.
can be filled with experiential richness while still being in realistic relationship to our existential condition, to how we claim knowledge, to science as a way of knowing the natural world, which for me is the most meaningful reference point for the sacred.
For me, if we get the foundations right, this can then support approaching the trickiest topics around culture, politics, history, and indeed how we move forward with a more functional framework and toolset.
Some little bit of breaking news that just came through on my text.
Mickey Willis has just posted on Facebook, friend of the pod, cheaters may sometimes win, but they never prevail.
And I was just kind of quickly scrolled through some of the comments and it was just perfectly timed as you were talking and then I saw that appear on my notification here.
I truly, I mean, I think one of the most cognitively disorienting aspects, features of this year has been the purported people to care about wellness and health and espouse ideas like compassion, practice yoga, I have gone full in for Trump.
I truly, and it's something I think we're going to be unpacking for a long time, and I know many people have made connections, we've made connections, Jules Evans did some great essays making connections.
But it's still, when you see it appear, and I'm just scrolling through and just seeing Biden and his Alzheimer's, the pedophile Biden.
It really, I don't know.
I feel like a lot of people who I would say are more Biden supporters, liberals that I'm engaged with, think that this victory is going to just shift everything.
And it will mean a great deal for sure.
And I'm hopeful that it happens.
But this isn't getting swept back under the rug.
And I think there's going to be a lot of work that we need to do to understand how we deal with this.
And it felt like there were a lot of these folks were kind of Hedging their bets or being coy, and then this week, they just came out.
They just came out and started saying it.
They did, they did.
Now you're saying, Derek, you're looking at the comments under Mickey's post, I am too, but I didn't unfurl the whole thread, and I can see that the first comment at the top is also from Mickey, and it says, curious, why do so many on this thread assume I'm accusing Democrats?
It's interesting, yeah?
So it's not just, it's not just, this is not just wordplay, it's not just bending language or filter-bubbling reality or extending the conspiracy theory du jour.
This is also, like, pure, disruptive epistemology.
And you said, Julian, like, how do people stand on the, how do they, how do people watch him stand on the stage after all of his Jesus and, you know, pussy grabbing comments or whatever?
How, how do they watch him stand on the stage and attack democracy?
I'm reminded of, you know, the Steve Bannon playbook where he says, you know, the enemy isn't the Democrats, it's the press.
and And I think we can go deeper with that and say the enemy for this particular movement isn't just the press, it's actually epistemology itself.
It's like, how do you come to know something is not something that we are going to have an open conversation about.
Mickey can say something specifically related in the OP to pointing to obviously the Democrats are cheating.
And then in the very first comment, he can say, he can say, why do you assume I'm talking about Democrats?
How interesting.
How interesting.
Like this guy.
And okay.
And now we're spending X number of minutes talking about dude.
And now it's 461 comments, 122 shares, 2.5 thousand engagement likes or clicks.
And what he's done is he's doubled down on an illusion or an insinuation with a walk back so that there's no actual position there except disruption.
It is.
The word is so overused nowadays, but that is the best example of gaslighting I can think of.
Yeah, and I also wanted to say, Julian, that when you were describing the language tangle that we're going to be talking a little bit more about as part of the digital left, You know, I think you really phrased it well in terms of when we're talking about the crucial swing state voter who, you know, candidates are chosen to appeal to.
To speak to directly in some way, and wondering whether or not the ritual of self-examination and self-criticism and, you know, unpacking your privileged backpack and making amends for your implicit bias, whether that entire threshold of passing into, you know, reasonable discourse, whether that's something that will be appealing to
The person that you actually need to vote for your side.
I hadn't really like, I hadn't really thought so much about the emerging industry of woke to this language as having a distinct market instead of an actual politics or a functional politics.
I mean, I think it does have a functional politics.
I don't want to like just, you know, knock it.
But I'm like wondering about, I'm thinking about the book that has been very very influential in my circles, Me and White Supremacy by Leila Saad, which I haven't read and I've heard great things about and I've heard some sort of mixed reviews about but
But I know that it comes along with a workbook where readers are going to be undoing their internal biases and the impacts of white supremacy in their lives, and I'm wondering who the market is Like, I'm wondering how extended the goal is.
Like, how many people is that going to be accessible to?
Yeah, that's exactly the question.
And I think that's a wonderful thing to do.
I think it's wonderful to have workshops like that.
It's wonderful for people who are already on board to go, wow, there's this whole piece of inner work that I can do that's self-reflective, that's challenging, that is valuable in all these ways.
I'm all for it, I just, I think it has very limited appeal.
I think you're going to have a very, I think actually it's impossible to get people who are not already playing the same language games, already on board with the same general politics where they feel like they want to be a good person and a good person is someone who is willing to consider how they may be complicit in racism.
Right.
Unless you're already there, why on earth would you take the idea of going into a touchy-feely Let's look at your unconscious, hidden self.
It's so psychoanalytic in its framing, right?
That you have these deeply unconscious racist and white supremacist attitudes that you need to examine.
On the surface, you're going to push back.
And if you do push back, it's just your white fragility.
Also, if we're talking about Americans in the flyover state, they already have places where they're doing confession.
They already have places where they're examining their internal lives.
And I think that it seems, I don't know, this is a longer conversation and we didn't really plan it out, but it does seem like there's almost a spiritual request or implication to some of this work that is going to interfere with, that it might interfere with its political goals in terms of accessibility.
Yeah, and that's exactly what I'm wondering about and looking at right now as I work on this longer piece.
And I'm also looking at how, you know, if there's a traditionally strong alliance that people on the left have with blue-collar union people, if the message they're getting is one that turns them off, then right-wing populism actually becomes more appealing.
Absolutely, it does.
And that was the story of the Rust Belt in 2015.
Yeah, that's the Obama voter turning to Trump.
I also want, when you had in Slack mentioned what you're going to be talking about, I was thinking about, and I don't know if Matthew, you found this or a listener passed it to us, but the Decoding the Gurus podcast.
Yeah, somebody posted it to Facebook and it was excellent.
So hopefully that's in our show notes somewhere, but it's also on our Facebook page.
Okay, yeah, I'll add it.
I'll add it to the show notes.
I wanted to point out one thing, a sort of big picture view for people to understand because we've talked a lot about not wanting to amplify messages, and you're right.
I saw the Mickey Willis talk about it.
There is an amplification there, but I also think it's important to talk about these things from the perspective of Look at the motives and what people are trying to accomplish when they say certain things.
And I think what I loved about the Decoding the Guru's episode on J.P.
Sears did so well is showing how he is all about anti-mask Now, right-wing sovereignty, if you want to see that, look at his pinned tweet or his last tweet, which is talking about the Clinton body count.
He's talking about Hillary Clinton.
He's gone Alex Jones.
Yeah, completely.
But what I loved, because I've read his posts and I've watched his videos, but what I've never done is listen to Sears' podcast.
And on the Decoding the Guru's podcast, they do... At length.
At length.
At length.
I knew about this, but hearing it really clicked.
He's selling supplements.
He's selling supplements.
And so, of course, you're going to have an anti-mask immune system.
This is your immune system over on one side.
And then, oh look, but I sell what will actually help you get that immune system on the other side.
And with Willis, we know it's helped fund his documentary because after a pandemic, he immediately put up a donation link.
And again, clear, we have a Patreon.
We're trying to make a living out of doing what we're doing, and that's totally fine.
But I at least think that, I mean, I hope that our message and what we're doing and presenting, they line up.
And so when you look at some of these figures, some of them can truly be conspiratorial in every facet, but you have to weigh in what they're saying and what they're selling.
You always have to look at those two factors.
So I think that takes a little bit of research.
And again, I wasn't caught up with Sears on that level and thank the Decoding the Gurus guys for doing that.
But just in general, I think looking at what they're saying and looking at what they're selling and understanding that link is going to be very important as we try to navigate through this time.
I have a related brief news item before I do my spot, which is that last week I predicted that cognitive dissonance amongst conspiritualists would continue, pivot, find new topics, generally try to figure out what it could continue to serve its market.
Is 6G out?
Not yet, not yet.
But true to form, in the hours after the election, Dr. Northrup retweeted a disinformation post from friend of the pod Sasha Stone about alleged voter fraud in Michigan.
Now the original tweet came from GOP operative Sean Davis, who's co-founder of the Federalist.
So if there are any doubts about whether the material reality of the election Would bump Northrop offline, off message.
I think they're allayed for now.
You can rest assured that her Great Awakening will continue.
And it's going to change only in the sense that, you know, not only Bill Gates will be featured as trying to kill everyone, but also the Democrats will be stealing the election.
So Sasha, I'm sorry, but Sasha Stone's in bed with the Federalists now or they're retweeting each other?
What happened there?
Yes, Sasha Stone is retweeting the Federalist, yes.
Retweeting the Federalist, okay, so when they go out and claim we're not for a political side here, we're just trying to present evidence, and then you use the Federalist as your... Oh sure, oh sure, yeah, of course, totally normal.
I mean, there's something tragic to me here, is that From the point of view of her reasonable concerns, whatever are left of them, things like vaccine safety or medical consent, I keep remembering that she did all of this great anti-circumcision work.
What better way to make yourself completely irrelevant and to complete the sinking of your social capital than to bounce from Bingo to bongo.
Like, I've never thought about it this way before, but I'm starting to feel like one of the things that conspiritualists are really doing is they are abdicating some valuable responsibility.
I mean, obviously they've built up social capital, sometimes in good ways, but they could be part of a reality-based conversation.
It's not like she doesn't have the pull and the sway and the contacts to get a meeting with, you know, DNC officials who are working on health policy.
Like, she could actually advocate for what she believed in, but the possibility of that, I think, is fading very quickly.
Now, should our next Instagram handle be bingo to bongo?
Is that a Canadian thing?
That's amazing.
I don't know.
I think, you know, it might be.
And I think I might have an older relative that said it.
I'm not sure.
Awesome.
Yeah.
Anyway, yesterday was the day after the election.
I was super exhausted, like everybody else.
But there were a few touches of grace.
The fall weather was extraordinary.
By the way, Derek, I don't know how you're dealing without a real fall out in Los Angeles.
You're from Jersey.
I just don't get it.
It's coming this weekend, actually.
It's going to be in the mid-50s.
So we get fall here.
Bada boom, bada bing.
Anyway, the boys and I found a huge new park that's close to the house.
I've known about it for years and I think as a child I went there but we just hadn't got to it.
It's called Taylor Creek Park and it has this really long walking and bike trail and the forest is blanketed with bright yellow and red leaves.
And in the middle of it, we were all really psyched to find out that some kids, or maybe one of those super-industrious dads that I'm somewhat jealous of, had built a really intricate fort around a dying grandmother maple using these thick, fallen branches that were all hooked together by their crooks and elbows.
So, it was about 10 feet tall and really stable, stable enough that the 8-year-old could clamber up to the roof.
Just sit up there and daydream while the four-year-old found various sword-shaped sticks.
And there was a fresh wind, and my fatigue lifted a little bit, and then, you know, a seeming miracle, I looked at my phone and I saw Michigan flip blue.
And I texted my partner something like, looks like he's losing for real.
And there hasn't been violence yet.
And then there was another good moment because my phone's battery crapped out.
And, you know, it's an old phone and the battery doesn't really last for more than about 45 minutes.
And I don't think I'm going to replace it because I actually like the fact that the battery will randomly cut me off from the world.
It's like I'm a dog or something like that.
And when my human takes me out, I get to break my leash every day.
So I had about a half an hour for mental review.
And, you know, if there's a better than terrible outcome to this election, you know, globalization and surveillance capitalism means that we're still sharing a burning house.
And, you know, some of us have oxygen tanks, a lot of us don't.
And when Trump melts away, if that's what happens, what we gain is a little bit more space, because like a sociopath isn't like fire hosing gas on the flames, and there'll be less of a sense of living with an abuser upstairs, you know, constantly on his phone.
But, you know, systemic abuse will continue.
And so I found myself just Thinking about a wishlist for what I hope happens with some of the breathing room.
But I'm just going to focus on two things.
There was a lot of things on my list.
So, like first, wellness spaces, specifically yoga spaces.
I had some thoughts about post-COVID yoga, or at least yoga after COVID has changed the yoga world.
It's been really sad watching all of the brick and mortar spaces that people have worked on so hard to kind of crumble and to go vacant.
And there's a real push in the U.S.
to reopen, but if people do, it's only going to prolong the danger as cases continue to rise.
And, you know, there is however also a part of me that realizes that this was coming one way or another.
That the modern yoga industry is a product of unsustainable globalization and its spaces exist because of it and because of gentrification.
It's a machine, and it will seek to maximize profit, and there's a hard ceiling on what the square footage of any yoga space can bring in.
So you can add all the trainings you want, you can combine your classes with high-end chocolate and wine events.
That's how I first came to know David Avocado-Wolf, by the way, because he started showing up in Toronto Yoga Studios hawking chocolate and making money for other people.
You can also try to supplement your income with MLMs and other BS, but at some point, gentrification is going to drive the urban yoga studio out.
And so what can we learn from this?
What does it mean?
Doesn't it prove to us that wellness as a commodity is always somewhat fraught and contradictory just like the rest of the culture?
And let's say that 80% of the industry fails during the two-year probably COVID drought.
What then can those workers go on to imagine?
I think that's what we should look forward to.
So, a little bit of background, I met, to this podcast really, I met Julian somewhat through 21st Century Yoga, which is a collection of essays published 8 years ago now.
This is before either of us had children.
It's kind of amazing to think of.
And my essay in there, you wrote about the body electric as Walt Whitman's kind of You know, proto-American yogic vision for embodiment, and it was a really beautiful essay.
And I wrote an essay called something like, Modern Yoga Will Not Form a Culture Until Every Studio Doubles as a Soup Kitchen.
And, you know, since then, there's been some movement to integrate social justice concerns with yoga practice, but even that seems like a kind of fragmentary branding at times.
You know, as in social justice oriented people talking about social injustice and yoga together on the internet, but not really doing a lot beyond that.
I remember I consulted on one project back around that time.
There was a yoga studio in Montreal that I worked for in this hipster part of town called Mile End.
And the idea was to serve the student population better.
And basically everybody was going to McGill.
Well, everybody was either single or in, you know, interesting domestic relationships.
And, you know, nobody had their families and everybody needed community.
And that's what the studio owner very sagely realized.
And so I had this idea that they could have like an open restorative class that started at like four o'clock.
When people started coming home from classes but it would last throughout the evening until like 8 or 9 p.m.
or something like that but you could come in and and start a series of restorative poses at any time if you came in quietly and then very quietly you could get up whenever you were done and there would be tureens of soup like in the next room and people could like hang out and and and eat together and And so I've always thought about, well, how can these spaces serve more needs?
And how can they be more integrated, as integrated into our communities as churches used to be, really?
So anyway, I don't think any of that I haven't heard of a space in which that really happened.
I'd love to hear stories about that.
And now that COVID has kind of slammed the door shut on so much of the industry, it's going to be hard for anybody to go out on a financial limb and be adventurous like that.
But I mean, one format that COVID has amplified is certainly home practice, in-home practice.
And at the moment, this is facilitated by Zoom, which is super taxing for everybody to work with.
You know, there's a lot of yoga teachers who, you know, say they absolutely hate it or they're getting burned out, you know, teaching for the green light.
But I wrote a thing on that back in the spring, which I'll post in the notes.
And my main point was that COVID yoga on Zoom, it kind of irritates this strange part of physical culture that has always been there, which that it's performative and visual.
And when we're talking about something that is supposed to offer a kind of spiritual relief as well, there can be a conflict there.
But I'm wondering whether when COVID yoga on Zoom kind of dries up or when people realize that, you know, online aggregators who are already offering huge online yoga programs have the tech already and they have the content and the price point.
I'm wondering whether more at-home or creatively situated practices will emerge.
And I think that if COVID does knock out a big part of the wellness economy that actually goes to funding the gentrification of real estate, I'm thinking that there's a lot of energy freed up there.
And if all of the very smart and industrious yoga people don't have to spend a lot of time working to hold on to the expensive gentrified spaces by their fingernails, they might have more time to spend on the commons, on public health, on they might have more time to spend on the commons, on public health,
But leading into this next thing that I was thinking about, I think the bottom line is that the gentrified yoga studio is to wellness as social media is to progressivism.
You know, You think you're doing good work, and in some ways you are, but really, in the end you're lining the pockets of people who profit off of your presence.
Yoga studios make parts of our cities look sexy and feel uplifted, and that's really great for the real estate developer that wants to sell that shit to tech bros.
So, the second thing is that, you know, as I look towards the future and our topic is, you know, what is it?
Recovering the body politic?
You know, the dramatic call-outs on Leftbook and social justice discourse on Facebook, Often make Facebook itself look like a vibrant space for discourse, but surveillance capitalism just like predatory real estate really doesn't care about your content.
It just cares that you're there so that they can sell your attention.
This other thing that I wanted to mention was that I've started to talk to people who are making noise about how to build better culture within online progressive spaces.
And so I want to talk a little bit about what I've learned so far from a woman named Molly Meehan.
And, you know, you mentioned this last week, Derek, a little bit, which is that one of the things that makes the MAGA movement, and especially I think if we look at the last pre-election Trump rallies, so disturbing, is their cultural cohesion.
That there are throngs of unmasked people.
You know, the last couple of weeks, a lot of them were tragically left in fields miles away from their cars.
In the cold.
In the cold.
We were promised buses, but the Trump campaign obviously flew off into the night and said, fuck those guys.
You know, people on the left, I think, look at those images and they see zombies, but they see zombies with a purpose and Derek mentioned last week that this cultural solidarity on the right is carefully crafted and vigorously defended.
I'm going to propose that part of what progressives hate when they see those gatherings is that, or what's going on is that they're actually jealous of the obvious feelings of cohesion and solidarity that they see.
Now, in the interview that we're going to run with Tada Hazumi, we touch a little bit on the divisions within progressive culture because they've been working on the problems of call-outs and how performative and destructive they can be.
They've also done some interesting stuff around laying ground rules for how to ask for accountability cleanly.
We talk about a lot of other stuff as well, but I'm really hoping that this is the start of a rich exploration of discourse healing in progressive and wellness spaces, because I see a clear link between super dramatic call-out culture and the black and white and magical thinking and cultic aspects of conspirituality, in fact.
So this is why I was really happy to run into Molly Meehan this week.
We did an interview that we're going to edit down for future releases, but I want to just front load some of the content she's shared with me into the show notes.
First of all, she pointed me to a 2013 essay by UK anti-fascist organizer.
His name was Mark Fisher, and it was called Exiting the Vampire Castle.
Here's the slug for it, which is pretty straight talking.
He writes, We need to learn or relearn how to build comradeship and solidarity instead of doing capital's work for it by condemning and abusing each other.
This doesn't mean, of course, that we must always agree.
On the contrary, we must create conditions where disagreement can take place without fear of exclusion and communication.
Now, Fisher knew this in a deep way, and actually he died of suicide several years after publishing that after a lifelong struggle with depression, which I'm sure online conflict made a lot worse.
So that was fantastic to come across.
But Molly also introduced us all to a podcast called Fucking Cancelled by a woman named Clementine Morgan and her partner Jay there in Montreal.
And they identify something called the nexus And it's really, like, good stuff.
The nexus to them is the combination of identitarian politics, cancel culture, and social media, and how these three things interact together.
None of which are toxic on their own, but some very devastating things can happen with the right sort of cocktail.
And then also Molly shared with us her zine, which is called or based upon her idea of something called trauma-informed activism.
And so here's a little intro from it.
She says, I became embedded in Tumblr feminist spaces in the early 2010s after a sociology class that got me hooked on the study of society, power, privilege, and justice.
These are the writings, so she made five zines out of this period, that emerged after the straw that broke the camel's back, when I experienced cyber harassment after a political clash online, what one might refer to as a call-out.
My tolerance of and submission to the contradictions and militant relational culture of the digital left evaporated after this traumatic experience.
I believe that a critical part of justice is actively creating a world among, within, and between ourselves that mirrors our values and vision, and a main area this can be achieved, I believe, is in our relating.
It felt all too obvious to me that we were not doing that and we were only hurting ourselves and recreating dominating dynamics that enable violence and inflict trauma.
So, some really good stuff to be introduced to that make me very hopeful.
And even more compelling, Molly and I discussed how some social justice conversations around things like fragility, which we were just talking about, might be missing crucial interpersonal realities such as abuse and mental health challenges.
You know, so the bottom line is, you know, something like white fragility is clearly a structural reality, clearly a resistance to investigation or defense mechanism.
But what happens when this concept is weaponized against a person who is legitimately fragile, also known as vulnerable?
So another quote from Molly, listen to this.
For many of us with developmental trauma disorders, anxiety, depression, personality disorders, social justice discourse is inaccessible.
It is beyond triggering.
It is re-traumatizing.
I can't tell you the amount of times I have spiraled into suicidal depression because of merely witnessing social justice discourse, let alone actively participating in it.
And every time I have, I convinced myself I am at fault.
I'm being too weak, too self-centered, too fragile.
And if that's the case, what use am I to the work?
If I can't engage in the work, what's the point of being alive?
So, those are the things that I thought about in the leaves, and both of them made me kind of hopeful.
And I'm super, super just moved by the bravery of some of the material that I've seen, which is really sort of geared at how do we build, in difficult times, cultures in which we just stop beating each other up.
Shortly after moving to Los Angeles in 2011, I visited the Krishnamurti Foundation in Ojai.
I remember looking across the vast field next to the parking lot and imagining the philosopher reflecting on life while doing the same.
Having read at least six of Krishnamurti's books, I always appreciated his no-nonsense approach to philosophy.
Earlier on in my life, I had read the works of Helena Blavatsky, so I was aware of Krishnamurti's connection to an ultimate abandonment of theosophy.
Then I came across Pushkin's new podcast, Into the Zone, posted by Harry Kunzru.
It's a show about opposites.
And how borders are never as clear as we think.
As a novelist with a keen eye for a good story, he takes the listener around the world to talk to philosophers and punk musicians, new age gurus and space explorers, and investigates the grey zone between life and death, public and private, and black and white.
And really, he touches upon some of the same topics that we do here at Conspirituality.
I highly suggest starting with The Guru of Ojai, where he talks about his family's own relationship to theosophy and how Krishnamurti effectively ended the organization.
I was also fascinated that as deep as a philosopher as he was, Krishnamurti was also a huge fan of spy novels.
Kunz re-humanizes him in a way that I had never yet heard.
You can subscribe to Into The Zone wherever you get your podcasts.
I was really happy to sit down with Tada Hazumi, who, according to their bio, is a practitioner, developer, and teacher of emergent methodologies for individual and collective healing that holistically integrate animism, somatics, and justice.
We spoke about a lot of things, and something that Hazumi has been very involved in, which is the examination of the ethics of the embodiment conference, is going to be the subject of this week's bonus episode, which drops on Monday.
Tata Hazumi, welcome to Conspirituality Podcasts.
Thank you so much for taking some time today.
Yeah, thank you for having me, Ramster.
If you don't mind me... Do people call you that?
No, nobody has ever called me that.
But actually, there's probably something culturally somatic going on with how I was last named in my Catholic boys' school, but maybe we can talk about that later.
We'll talk about that later.
Okay, so to...
But to get to anything that would approach that, can you walk me through your discipline?
What is cultural somatics and how do you apply it as a consultant?
Yeah, thank you.
So like the first thing is cultural semantics is like kind of just a word I put onto something that already exists, you know, and it's not just for, you know, me as a thread, there's Resmaa who is also using the term cultural semantics actually a little bit before and independently.
But essentially at the same time.
So that was actually an interesting thing that was happening.
But what we practice in kind of like my area of the world of cultural semantics, and that's kind of like primarily with Dara Silvey and Larissa Cull, who are both part of the Rituals Justice School alongside me.
We practice a methodology where we really understand cultures or bodies.
So this biomimicry, this fractal pattern of cultures, that's groups of people being bodies, is really foundational to my practice.
And one of the things that happens when we understand that is You see that our individual healing process and our collective healing process are fractals of each other.
So it makes it really simple.
So I'm not really actually saying that you need to do things X way.
Cultural semantics for me is actually more just a suggestion that like, hey, cultures are bodies.
So you're a Reiki practitioner or a TCM practitioner or yoga teacher or a somatic therapist.
What do you do with that information in your community?
And Yeah.
And I also just want to honor the real breadth of cultural semantics for me comes from a lot of Asian and Japanese energetic work and energetic martial arts and writing around that, where the perception of the world as kind of like this state of flux of energy and chi, it really comes from that kind of consideration.
I don't know if we'll have the time to talk a lot about that background, but It comes from this view of everything is moving in this yin and yang, and so when you consider that, like, oh, what is oppression in our bodies?
Or what is oppression in the world?
I was like, oh, wait a second, all illness in Chinese medicine is energetic imbalance.
And that's when I was like, wait a second, so oppression is energetic imbalance.
And that was really the key that took shape for me, that really kind of like, for me, creates this strand of cultural somatic work that I do, because that's like the foundation.
It's like, oh, right.
What we think are systems of oppression are actual energetic imbalances embedded within a cultural body.
And that's actually one of the easiest ways to understand the phenomena of the world around us.
Because if we think about it in terms of ideology and ideas, our political world makes no sense.
Once we see it as nervous systems, it makes all the sense.
It also sounds like there's a way in which cultural somatics bridges some sort of gap between the neoliberal fascination on wellness as an individual pursuit.
And because you can't really talk about, you know, energetic imbalance from a traditional medicine standpoint without seeming, I think, to refer to one's individual body.
But somehow you're also talking about how that networks out or is embedded within a broader body politic.
Yeah, absolutely.
And making that more responsible than the current conversation, right?
Because the neoliberal wellness approach is like, modern humans sit too much.
What they won't say is colonized humans that have been under European imperial rule sit too much.
That's a whole different level of responsibility once you start naming that.
Because the colonial process is actually really about changing diet, posture, Um, daily habits, breathing patterns, walking patterns, dress, it's all about the body.
When you actually look at the colonial process.
You mean colonizing, colonizing as a historical phenomenon has always been focused upon changing what people do with their bodies?
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And that's, that's again, part of like the understanding that ideas follow what the body does.
So when you change the body, the idea is that people start to change.
There's a really embedded dynamic there.
And colonialism is a process of changing that.
It's actually kind of a spread of an illness in a way.
Like if you really look at colonialism and its financial foundation, right?
Modern white European colonialism too, right?
Because there's other kinds.
I'm just being a bit limited here.
What is it about the acid acquiring sugar, caffeine, wheat?
Tobacco, all kinds of what we call drugs or ceremonial medicines, AKA, right?
All those mood stimulants.
And now why did Europeans need that?
So what you're saying now is the Europeans need to go conquer the world to acquire all these mood stimulants.
So the entire thing is a neurological project.
When you actually look at it at its foundation and then you go, Oh, that's actually the, what is driving this whole process.
Then you really start to get it and what we're living inside of.
And, and where, what is the, in that particular model, uh, is the money a sort of side effect?
Like when the, the recent research came out that actually if you, if you told it, totaled it all up, that the, the, the British East India Company took something like, $40 trillion out of India within a set amount of time.
They're also taking sugar and tea and tobacco and mood stimulants, as you say, but what about the money itself?
What about the building resources?
Does that factor into this model that you have?
Yeah, because I think everything in our world is flesh, you know?
And money is a certain kind of part of the flesh, you know?
And it's probably a little bit boring, because it's like New Age talk too, right?
Money is energy.
But I think it is that.
So actually, this is actually an interesting segue because I think just how you distribute money is very key to resuscitating the cultural body, which is actually a real, real problem right now.
A real, real important political problem we have to look at.
It's really foundationary.
You know like when you're in a cranial sacral session or some kind of energetic work session, you realize when the body relaxes, circulation restores and all the cells start breathing together, you know?
There's this kind of type of respiration that's whole body and then energy starts to flow, blood, lymph and all that.
That is what really money is.
It's a traveling information and When there isn't that and there's imbalance in the body, what happens is resources get taken out of what you might call as a culture, like our lower body.
So like the guts and the feet and the legs.
So that might represent the people.
You know, in the commons, and as well as elders, you know?
So what you see is, it's like there's cultural dysbiosis, gut dysbiosis, and energy being sucked out of our internal organs, culturally speaking.
And that's a lot of what we see today, structurally.
You know, capitalism itself reveals that kind of trauma in a cultural system.
You see, like, so all the money gets sucked up to, like, white dudes, which kind of, all this, like, right up here, right?
Gets sucked up into the brain.
Of the cultural body, we're occupied all these white dudes, right?
And that's kind of like how we characterize white masculinity, right?
It's really intellectual.
And then there's disconnection from the body.
And so rerouting that is like very, very, very, very key.
And how to reroute that is also very key, because that's the part where it's, you know, distribution of money is not all equal.
Just as much as distribution of energy in a body by a practitioner is not all equal.
This is the real stakes of politics in the US right now and the world is that you need people who understand this really intentionally to be governing at all levels of policy from local to municipal to provincial, state, to federal to international you need absolute kind of tuned in this about like oh the the energetics of the well i mean i mean it all flows into this uh memory
and plus question that i have about how you know so much of what you talk about in cultural somatics has body politic implications which is how i first noticed your content uh and And, you know, this is the day after the election.
I'll just let our listeners know.
And last night, as the election count rolled in, you posted to Facebook, you said, I'm just going to say that if Trump wins tonight, that again, it was always Yang and the left center whatever couldn't get it sorted.
Yang was the only real president running in the primaries, someone who captures the American zeitgeist of a positive future.
What a colossal shame for America to think of all the factors that led him not breaking through like he should have, and one of them being anti-Asian bias in the left is a LOL sob of epic proportions.
Am I supposed to say Lolsob?
Lolsob, yeah, I don't know.
I'm not that young.
But I think I first saw, I think I first came across you because I'm sure it was before, but when you started posting Andrew Yang materials from a cultural somatic perspective, I was really taken by but when you started posting Andrew Yang materials from a cultural And so, yeah,
Yeah, so given what you've said in your preamble so far, including about money and the distribution of wealth, how was Yang doing something different, and why didn't it take, and what does the fact that it didn't take say about the U.S.
body politic?
Yeah, it says something really, really fucking alarming to me.
One thing I would say, you know, Andrew is the product of his ancestors.
You know, so I wept when I first saw his platform because I knew exactly what it was about.
Andrew is a Chinese doctor of the economy.
He sees the world through the Chinese medicine lens.
This is actually a huge gift.
Because when you actually listen to him, the first thing he talked about when he talked about his platform, right, which is so relevant now, you know, is universal basic income, right?
Now, a lot of people have talked about universal basic income, right?
He's not the inventor of it.
But when Andrew Yang talked about universal basic income, what he said was there's so much stuck in our society and racism and economics, all this stuff, because people have too much financial vigilance.
And people need a little bit of headroom before we really start working on this stuff.
That was really the foundation of this platform.
And when I heard that, I was like, as a therapist, that's absolutely lock on.
Absolutely lock on.
Absolutely lock on.
The other thing that you commented on regularly was that just in his demeanor and in his presentation and his willingness to do Facebook Live events for four hours straight, And his personableness with regard to, you know, answering questions from parents of autistic children and so on, that, like, this guy was working really hard at fostering secure attachment.
Yes, exactly.
You really spotlighted that, and so I'm wondering what else, you know, we threw that away, or it seems like the Democrats threw that away, and so what does that mean?
Well, because it means people are attachment addicted to like, okay, so first I'm not saying like, Andrew is like the perfect father or something, but as an Asian person, I can say he's a pretty good emblem of a dad.
Cause we haven't seen an Asian dad like that.
You know what I mean?
In media, somebody who's like kind and like, you know, personable and it's like, of course, you know, it's not okay to hit your children.
Like, you know what I mean?
If you, if you think about typical stereotypical, you know, Asian fathers in the media and how we portrayed ourselves.
It's not like Andrew.
It's not like cool playing bad.
It's like not hanging out with rappers.
That's not us.
Because I'm an Asian dad myself.
I don't have children.
I'm not partnered or anything.
But you know what I mean?
I'm in the dad age.
So that was a huge thing.
He's an attachment figure in this really Unexpected way, an Asian person.
So that was also like bonkers because Asian people have not been parental role models in American history, really ever.
So it's a huge revolutionary thing for him to have even gotten the kind of attention that he did.
But his conceptions about attachment extend into like, Into how he perceives government, because he really perceives universal basic income.
And when I say all distributions are not equal, and even all UBI is not equal, is that like, Andrew understands that universal basic income, he understands that intuitive level is about establishing more level of secure attachment between the government and the people.
And he's able to do that because he internalizes that relationship with his relationship to his children and his family.
And it's, you know, in his approach to a child being, you know, having being on the spectrum and realizing kind of like going like, oh, what is your human value in our society?
And how is that so wrong?
How it's articulated.
And that's not something an Asian parent, like, would really be, like, even thought to understand.
So that was huge for us.
Right.
Because, I mean, the stereotype or the caricature is work harder, achieve more.
Tiger Mom is in the next room.
And she has a lot of expectations.
Yeah, I mean, so there's also other layers of shaming being undone in the popular imagination.
Yeah, and Andrew really broke that expectation.
And actually, I'm sure he went through himself because he's like Philip Exeter, like he is a double Ivy League, you know, he's a real academic monster if you actually look at his career and CV, right?
But he went through all that and came into a place of like, you have to work less.
I still argue one of the places where he failed in his campaign is working less, naturally, because he got caught up in that political thing, right?
But I also think he pulled out at the right time based on that, too.
And that's a longer probably story.
Right.
But there's this place where he came to is that, like, we need to actually work less.
We need to change our value system.
And it's really interesting to see.
He really kind of fell into this animist, like, I feel like, you know, he's Taiwanese, but I feel like the It's like the Chinese medicine, the Daoism in the way he thinks.
I see the Dao in the way he thinks.
And he mentions that.
He's like, yeah, my wife got acupuncture when she was pregnant.
Maybe that should be in her universal healthcare.
There's a lot of things that people like you and me and people that watch this podcast and are around us, a lot of embodiment practitioner stuff should have been paying attention to.
Really should have been paying attention to this guy because he's really on board.
People said he was a tech entrepreneur and all this stuff.
He was a non-profit operator for seven years.
One of America's most impactful social entrepreneurs.
That is racist to me, flat out to paint him as that.
They didn't champion him as a social entrepreneur or a community organizer.
But it is absolutely bizarre.
And actually his amazing thing is definitely like the stats and all that stuff, but what is actually moving it underneath is like this Daoist perspective, how to move energy with an economic system.
And so he's really unlike other leftists.
He's not like, oh, this place is hurting.
We're going to give you this.
This place is like, you know, it's kind of the Bernie Sanders approach, like, okay, so you have this claim, I give you this money for this, like, it's all parcel.
And Andrew's like, actually, actually, that's, that's great.
But what we actually need to do maybe before that is to stabilize the entire system.
Right.
Psychologically.
And I'm like, yes, like, as a therapist, I 100% agree that you need to create a secure base for your clients, like, come on, guys.
Well, okay, so this is a really important bridge, I think, to the fact that I think it seems, and I learned a little bit about this from your commentary, that one of the things that Yang brought to the national stage was At least for progressives, a different angle on the fraught world of identity politics that I think intersects with the way in which, you know, you approach how you describe cultural somatics.
So, can you say a little bit about that?
That, you know, this fragmentary approach of kind of assigning uh, value to, uh, certain, certain injustices, but then in a fragmentary way, trying to fix those as though they were isolated.
Um, that seems to be a parallel to, um, the way in which he, he kind of reconfigured the, the language of identitarianism within the left.
Yeah.
I mean, that's why he, people thought like, you know, um, you know, there's, so one of the elders of Aikido, uh, um, uh, Tanomo Saigo, who is from Aizei Wakamatsu has this great phrase.
Uh, you know, when you walk the middle way, you look right to the left and left to the right.
It's a hard, you know, it sucks.
Basically, that's his phrase.
He's one of the grand elders of Aikido.
Oh, you look, you are perceived, you are perceived by the right to be on the left and you're perceived by the left to be on the right.
I got it, okay.
Yeah, yeah, when you walk the middle way.
And you're quoting somebody, you're citing somebody who you share heritage with, right?
Yeah, like, not like blood, but yeah, his house is down the street from my grandma's.
Like a legendary samurai.
It's like a long, long story.
That's a whole other long story.
But yeah, he is.
But you know, Andrew really, I think, fell into that, right?
Because he's like, actually, kind of nowhere.
His essentially was like, I'm not left.
I'm not right.
I don't really care.
I'm a pragmatist.
I'm not really ideological.
And people really needed an attachment anxiety.
Politicians trade in saying the right thing and then people go, oh, I feel safe now.
Now I can connect with you.
But it's actually manipulation a lot of the time.
And Andrew wasn't necessarily like that.
The thing he did have a problem with, though, is really formulating an identity politics of his own.
But I was always looking at it in frustration, because it was like, dude, I have it for you.
I've already formulated it, how you want to talk about this whole thing, but you're having trouble.
If you had been in a consultancy meeting with him, you'd say, you know that you're a Chinese doctor, right?
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
You're a Taoist, this is how you have to talk about identity politics, and you have to talk about fragmentation, and you have to talk about neuropsychology, and you have to talk about mental health and white supremacy, and you have to go through that route.
That's the route you have to go through.
And as you talk about all of those things, you already have the foundation of You're trying to create something cohesive and supportive for the entire society.
And so the, the, you know, the, the driving force isn't going to be, you know, punishment and division or, or, or, or purity politics.
Yeah.
And I think to be honest, really where he struggled as an Asian person, I think he struggled to be centered in,
And understanding his own race, you know, understanding how racism affects him speaking for himself politically, as well as kind of like really, you know, mediating the relationship between white and black people, if you want to like call that to be like this kind of primary kind of polarization in American society and how we think about racism.
Andrew had a lot of issues, had a lot of issues and trouble with that.
Well, I can be forgiven.
I mean, how complex is it?
I mean, But the thing is, anti-racist discourse is already brokered by it, right?
There's the right phrases to say and the right things to say, essentially, to appease a lot of activists.
And I think Andrew was not skilled at that, on creating a new language that could replace the old thing.
Because I think one place where he struggled was, he's like, You know, he said, you know, he was like, you know, like white men are like the suicidal numbers are just like going through the roof.
They're actually like, like if you look at the numbers, it's like shooting up, it's the death rates of like deaths of despair only like second to indigenous people and like surpass black people like a long time ago.
So that's really alarming when you look at the amount of privilege and supposed access white people, white men are supposed to have in their middle age.
Right.
And Andrew talked about that.
Andrew is talking about it in a way that's actually very similar because I started my career off in this kind of work by actually doing a group for white folks because I saw an incestual trauma in white people and I was like, this actually needs to be attended because I understand a lot of my colleagues are helping the fallen.
You know, the fallen from white supremacy, you know what I mean?
The people are getting targeted and essentially shelled at, and they're in the fields, you know, like you want to look at it that way.
But I was like, I actually need to stop the machine itself, too.
Like, you know, we need people to treat people on the ground and I also need to go and get that thing and stop the machine itself.
And I think I know what it is.
It's incestual trauma.
It's attachment trauma.
It's a whole mess of things.
I need to go stop it.
And I think that's very much similar to Andrew and I's perspective because he's like not seeing, he sees white people and sees white supremacy and he sees like anti-blackness.
He's going like, oh shit, we need to support those people who are, are, Are actually having a really bad time right now and we're not addressing it.
And I also understand that Trump is capitalizing on this.
So we need to do something about it.
So he actually has the whole mindset, but I think he, he's essentially Trump in a way.
He is Donald Trump.
So I think, I think people have a lot of problems with that in the sense that he's actually, you know, has two kids.
He has the whole family thing going.
He's an entrepreneur.
Right, like if you look at actually his personality, they kind of map onto each other, like who he is.
He's like from the outside, he's a disruptor, you know, to the establishment.
So he, Andrew, has a lot of the same patterns as Donald, but actually in a much healthier way, so that's what I'd say.
Well, we could say opposite healthier way, opposite or like, you know, paradigmatically different way, yeah.
But you know, it's kind of like if you look at like, you know, you know, synthesis, antithesis, sorry, thesis, antithesis, synthesis, like you might see like Barack and then like Trump are like thesis and antithesis to each other.
What I saw in Andrew is like, oh, you're the synthesis.
You are the sympathizer of all the political movements that are happening before you, and because of that, you actually have to be president.
There is no other choice.
There's no other choice in the field that's relevant, actually, for American society to be healthier.
There was none.
You know, when I hear you say that, I almost hear a kind of mythos or Taoist poetry in it, like, there's no choice.
So I'm thinking, I'm almost thinking like in some alternate Tata universe, that's just what's happening.
And we can't get away with it, away from it.
Now, just to backtrack a little bit, another key bit of analysis that caught my eye in your publishing is exactly this framing of white supremacy as traumatic, not just for BIPOC, but for white people.
And, you know, to me it recalls that, that bell hooks framing of patriarchy as taking boys as its first victims.
So can you just, can you unfold that a little bit?
Like, you know, when you hear Yang speak about suicide rates amongst white men and you relate that to your own sort of field experience, What is ancestral white trauma?
Does it have to do with a colonizing process?
Yeah, absolutely.
So one of the things I'm able to do because I read and speak Japanese, I'm fluent, right, is read Japanese texts about the body.
So a big part of my work over the last five years is actually not studying English, but studying in Japanese.
And one of the things that's revealing to me, all these Japanese writers are writing about Western bodies versus Eastern bodies, or Japanese bodies versus white bodies for a long time.
And it's done in a very nationalistic perspective, so some of it can be a little bit, you know, Nationalist, so I'm going to posit that frame.
But what they kept talking about is the white body is not grounded in the lower body.
That Japanese original culture is a pelvic culture, pelvic abdominal culture.
Hara, sacral chakra, dantian, whatever you want to call it.
And people kept saying that energetically this makes white people or Westerners dysregulated.
You know, and I was like, this is really interesting.
And I was like, keep writing that.
And I studied like, how do Japanese people move?
Like in the old paintings and stuff, there's a whole field of research on this.
And I kept thinking about how Japanese bodies were affected by the West.
So translate that in a political frame, how has colonization affected the bodies of people of color?
And what you see is that through a colonial process, people of color and communities of color started to lose their contact with their lower body.
They start wearing shoes, they start sitting in school, they start wearing pants, because men didn't wear pants, generally speaking.
And do pants just restrict walking movement in general?
Yeah, like walking movement, hip movement, circulation.
It's a different idea of the self.
Because most men wore skirts for centuries before Western expansion.
So are the somatic values and gifts that are then pursued and commodified in a global culture, are they the aspects of Colonized cultures and their embodiments that got away, that didn't actually succumb.
Yes, exactly.
Or are surviving.
When we think about how Afro-Caribbean dance is fetishized or something like that, that it got away.
They couldn't actually load that into the boats like sugar.
Well they tried.
And they did.
That's a terrible metaphor.
Sorry.
But it's also raw.
I feel that.
Totally.
But yeah, so I guess it survives.
So is this at the heart of the pain surrounding conversations of cultural appropriation?
Is that you're taking the last thing that we actually had?
I think there's that.
I think there's that pain.
Or you've changed the thing that we've loved.
Right, and that actually helped us survive.
Yeah, because all these things shifted, right?
The things that are left with us as people of color in our own culture have been permanently affected by Western imperialism.
So even what we think is ours is, is just changed.
But, but I also, I also want to reflect that, that that's, that's, that's with everything in the world.
And, and so I don't necessarily for here want to, to dwell on that, but I think it's interesting.
Or maybe there's a moment of silence.
I'm trying to find my ground a little bit.
Okay.
So where I think this hits is actually, you know, where you started your work from about like yoga gurus and stuff like that.
Right?
Because what happens is, you know, I think a lot of people talk about this.
Barbara Ehrenreich talks about it in her book Dancing in the Streets.
I'm sure a lot of, you know, black feminist writers have talked about it, but attraction repulsion to blackness or otherness.
And that is about the pelvic abdominal cavity or not.
You know, it's about the soma.
You know, and so the narrative, you know, Barbara Enright, you know, kind of introduces in her book Dancing in the Streets, it's like when colonizers roamed at the shores, and the people, you know, the communities of color, they saw the bodies dancing and thriving and undulating, you know, elude by European standards.
What they saw, though, was themselves only a few hundred years ago.
They remembered something.
Yeah, about themselves and are attracted and repulsed by it.
Because it's a shame that the European body is accumulated through the colonial process of themselves.
And what is key here is to understand aspects of Western civilization in terms of daily habit, mimic the effects of trauma.
And that was the big thing for me that connected it.
Because when people started saying, these Japanese writers started talking about the energy rises in the body in Western culture.
When you don't have circulation here, your nervous system becomes synthetically over-activated and energy starts to rise.
You lose circulation in your abdominals, your internal organs.
I'm a somatic therapist.
I read some basic neuropsychotherapy book and I was like, that's the effects of trauma.
Oh, now I get it.
So, colonialism is a process of trauma, is traumatization.
Like, it's the thing.
When you actually start to render it that way.
And that's why it's driven by all the stimulants and all that jazz.
That's why.
That's the foundation.
Can I just step back and ask a meta-question about how cultural somatics doesn't, in its own way, end up stereotyping or generalizing about cultures?
Like, how does it preserve You know, how does it preserve diversity and uncertainty with regard to how a culture functions and leave room for, you know, how people break out of it or hack into it?
I think you're asking, like, a question, how does it not become a cult of its own?
Or, like, how does it not become a form of, like, cultural phrenology or something like that?
Like, if we can watch a bunch of white dudes walking down the street, you know, the conclusions we can make about whiteness in general, you know, they'll be valid in some ways, and they'll be very intuitive, they'll make sense, but, you know, I imagine we don't want that to be over-determined.
Yeah.
To be honest, I'm not perfectly understanding the question, but I'll try to respond in a way.
So how do we prevent essential... I think the question still comes back to how do we prevent cultural somatics from taking too much power?
Yeah, or creating essentialized visions of who people are because they belong to this culture or that.
Yeah, I think there's... That might be a longer conversation.
Yeah, probably.
I think it's that not all memes are equal.
And that not all ideas, because cultural somatics is an idea.
It's not me.
Not all ideas are equal in their behaviors.
And I hope that, like, You know, I can't guarantee it, but I will kill cultural somatics if that happened myself.
That's how I feel about it.
You know, an idea takes over industry and then becomes a focal point and cults develop around it and stuff.
There's a part of me that I want everybody to have a foundational way of thinking that's correct.
- Right, right. - That is part of it. - Right, or productive or fruitful or right. - Sure, well, those are nice words.
You know, it relates, though, to something else that you do that that is both important and something that I think you've explored the limits of.
You had this great post the other day, I think just yesterday on Facebook, related to something that I'll ask you about right at the end.
But it was it was, you know, how to do you know, how can we do better call out and accountability processes in progressive left wellness communities so that we preserve, I think your point is, so that we preserve our good attachments, we build relationships, we make sure that our we build relationships, we make sure that our progress is rooted in solidarity instead of horizontal violence.
Great question.
So yeah, how does cultural somatics provide for better accountability within the spaces that we share?
Yeah, I'm not sure if that's what cultural somatics does.
It's certainly what I think about a lot, but I would say how it kind of ties in is like, you know, I guess you can call me one of the gurus of cultural somatics.
Okay.
You know, there's, there's a cult of cultural somatics building around me.
Good.
Excellent.
You know, we'll put your, we'll put your Patreon in the link.
Well, that's a good sign.
That's a good sign, yeah.
I have a PayPal.
But one thing I would say is that I challenge everybody to come and kill me.
Come challenge me.
Call me out.
Let's battle.
Like, you know, I'm a street dancer.
I don't battle.
I'm terrified of it.
But I really appreciate the culture and what that means of how to preserve eldership and how to create positions of community leadership that are really based in, like, relationship as well as, like, it's not something that people are claiming, but, like, recognized.
And I'm willing to battle people, straight up.
If you don't like what I'm doing, come battle me.
Call me out.
Let's go.
Show your integrity and I'll try to show you mine.
And then we'll see who preserves.
And I think that's actually the healthiest thing in the sense that I'm so not into these people avoiding conflict.
I'm so not into it.
And all these white dudes teaching body men and all this other junk.
And they're just not willing to get into it.
They're not willing to get into it with anybody.
And I think my commitment is to not be like that.
So I think Cultural Semantics hopefully has some health in it in the sense that a lot of the people who are currently stewarding it are basically, at least hopefully have that ethos of like, we also, if to develop this, you know, this space, we're willing to just go at it with each other.
You know, if you don't like what I'm saying, like, just rip me apart and let's do it to each other.
And it's like, it's that like sacred dance ritual battle space of like ideas and go like, let's go.
I guess.
Yeah.
And I guess what I guess what I'm thinking too, though, is that an openness to conflict and to argumentation is something that would be really fresh and welcome in left of center progressive spaces.
But I think unfortunately what we see so often is a way in which activists will often exert power or control amongst each other because they're not experiencing any vertical wins.
They're not gaining the social power that they crave.
And so it's easier to criticize each other.
So I see a lot of that.
Yeah.
Yeah, so essentially the thing I shared, you know, you talked about is how to do better call-outs.
It's about landing clean blows.
It's not about being kind at all.
It's about landing clean blows and taking people out in that way, kind of like taking out their argument.
And really also yourself, not going into battle and fighting in a way that's dishonorable, that's unethical.
That causes unnecessary pain and harm.
It's really about being a good martial artist.
And I see cultural semantics as a martial art, more than even maybe a healing modality, actually, in a lot of ways.
It's martial, and it's artistic, and it's a dance, and it's healing, but it has all those different qualities.
But I think that in that Conflicts place where it's important is like to learn to be a respectful martial artist in conflict.
And that's what it was about.
It's like, what you don't do is things like, say, like, you know, as a black woman or as a queer person, and use your lack of privilege and try to flip that.
Using a kind of a cultural trope and stuff.
It's like, don't do stuff like that.
Be really careful about stuff like that.
Because the liability there is you elevate the identity to the position of sort of moral, I don't know, virtue.
Yeah, moral virtue.
Instead of the argument around justice itself.
Yeah, absolutely.
And that doesn't mean, of course, you don't speak to your experience.
Like, this is the experience I have.
You might not have that.
That might be, that might be, that might be like a grapple, right?
Like you don't have the experience I have, you know, let's grapple here.
You know, it's funny because, because I have learned, I've been trained, I think, in so many spaces to disclaim whatever I say by identifying my, my privilege through a kind of self-criticism or self-transparency.
And whenever I say, I mean, I, I think I'm educated enough to say that when I, you know, disclose what is obvious that I'm white, I'm male, I'm cisgendered, you know, I'm, I'm Gen X, I'm, you know, lower middle class or middle class, you know, I have, I have employment.
When I go through the list, when I go through the list, you know, I'm white, I'm cis, I'm male, I'm Gen X.
What did you see?
You just saw me get deflated, right?
I don't know, but it's just so funny.
It's like, and I'm Gen X. Yeah, right.
But why in the middle of all that?
It's perfect.
Well, yeah, but I mean, I think that I'm smart.
I'm educated enough to understand that I am naming structural realities that impact my positionality and that make me who I am in many ways and give me a certain place.
Oh, so I'm going to land a clean blow and say that's not necessarily a product of education.
Oh, it's not a product of education?
What's... I mean, for a lot of people, that's their reality of being aware of that all the time.
It's not a product of education.
Oh, you mean being aware of being white, male, cis, and so on?
That they're aware of that all the time?
Being aware of your position.
Oh, yes.
Well, what I think isn't that a characteristic of privilege is that you don't actually have to be aware of that because it's normative.
Yeah.
Or you're always aware that if you're underclassed, you're always aware of that.
Not because you have education, but because it's your daily life.
Right.
Got it.
Yeah.
Just trying to land a clean blow.
So a clean blow there would be like, Oh, you know what, Matthew, as a person of color, that would be like, like, you know, doing that.
Right.
This thing, and it's like, I'm not actually finding it with the merit of the argument there anymore, you know?
That would be an unclean blow to me.
And a lot of people talk like this.
You know, it's normalized, right?
I mean, what I was going to say is that whenever I give that list, like I know what I'm naming.
I also know that there's this split developing between the person that's speaking and the caricature that's being drawn.
I feel like I give the list and then that's like kind of a gauze or a mask or something like that and then there's my face behind it and I'm gonna try to speak through it, which is okay, but I get it.
But there's just a difference between the icon that I have copped to and then the person who is or is not free to whatever it is.
ever degree to speak to it or through it or against it you know what I mean so yeah it's it's a very uh it's a it's a very strange very strange process but I also feel like I'm on the the winning end of that because no I argue differently because if that's the only way you know how to fight then you don't know how to fight clean then so you can only fight dishonorably now
And that's a huge handicap in terms of like, you know, that's a handicapping when you're talking about being a person with integrity.
If the only way you know how to fight is dirty.
Okay, well, listen, it's clear that, you know, another episode, we should go through whole martial arts training on argumentation across identities.
But I wanted to sort of pull it all together, I think all of the threads that we've spoken about, to just reference one kind of visible thing that you're doing right now, which is that you recently made waves with a really poignant open letter That you wrote to the founder and organizer of the ginormous The Embodiment Conference.
His name is Mark Walsh and it took place last month.
It featured 1,000 presenters and you were invited to be the little drop in the ocean, one drop in that ocean.
But instead you offered to give constructive feedback instead of going.
And so I'm going to do some reporting on that for this upcoming bonus episode on Monday.
But can you give us a quick preview of how that has gone down so far?
Uh, well, you know, like I called out Mark, right?
Like, and I think it was all clean blows to be honest.
And it's just like a very typical example.
And you know what offends me is that he says he's a martial artist and he can't deal with a non-cooperating opponent, you know, and his basis practice is on Aikido, which is comes from the, literally from the lands, you know, that like my birth family is from.
It's like, It's offensive in so many ways, but these white male teachers, any teachers in power, they're just not willing to stand up to challenge when they're faced with it.
I think that's just a huge problem.
And then, you know, he's responding to, you know, whatever I say anonymously, you know, like not naming me on my Facebook, but calling people SJW terrorists, you know, he used the word country, describing behaviors, you know what I mean?
But in this whole time, he's not actually, like, matching up to a formidable opponent.
And so, like, what is your practice?
Well, you've said that in a number of exchanges, and I'm starting to understand it.
Like, I'm not seeing a practice there, you keep saying, right?
And that, it's really interesting because it would seem that if the clean blow was met with a clean defense or, you know, a counter, that that would be a really productive 100%.
Mark comes from, from what I know, Mark comes through like Paul Linden, you know?
And Paul Linden teaches like Aikido for interpersonal relationships and all this other stuff.
And so it's like, I didn't see any of that in what Mark has, it's like, like Mark's actual practice is about dealing with my kind of attack.
Literally, that's my challenge.
His practice is literally about how he's teaching and how he made his social capital and when he goes around workshops, tries to teach people.
And it's like, this is bananas.
You're literally not doing the thing that you're teaching in front of everybody.
And then your teacher is like, Mark, congratulations.
And I'm like, teacher, you're a student.
I'm calling you out now.
And Paul Linden hasn't responded.
That's highly offensive to me.
And this is like, you know, like, this is like the place where I go, it's like, I'm not, I'm not even a martial artist of anything.
But it's like, you know, it's like when white people are taking shit, like this is, this is just the nonsense.
This is just the nonsense.
This is not okay.
You know, what's amazing is that your open letter was a critique around the extending and continuing politics of colonization of indigenous somatic practices.
And, you know, the lack of response you're framing not in terms of Necessarily.
I mean, the content is still there, but you're not framing the lack of response in terms of, you know, this silence is racist.
But rather, like, the challenge, you know, the challenge is fair and, you know, the most basic thing to do, regardless of whether the ideologies work out, is just meet it.
Just meet the challenge.
Yeah.
I mean, I'd still, you know, probably think not very highly, but, but, you know, it's, it's just like, you know, I walked into your dojo, started rattling around and where are you?
And now you ran away to your other castle and saying things about me.
I'm just going to, you know, I'm going to just keep walking into your dojos then.
You know, this is, this is like that, like, and it's like, it's like, whoa, man, like you didn't, you don't watch enough Kung Fu movies, obviously.
You didn't watch enough ninja animes, you know, like, you don't know where this culture is from, buddy.
This is formed through samurai hardship.
My ancestors, like Aizu where I'm from, is where the last samurai government fell.
And obviously it's a samurai government, it's a fascist government, right?
But Aikido comes from a lineage of people where their wives killed themselves because they didn't want to be raped.
From the onslaught of the new government.
It's the army.
And so that's kind of the, that's kind of the birthplace of Aiki and it comes from like these temple arts and legendary, like the legend has, it's a lot more than that, right?
But it's not, you know, it's not just about the violence that Ueshiba Morihei saw like through the Second World War and things like that.
It has roots in the war that took place in the prefecture that I'm from and the people's graves are in front of my grandmother's house.
This is what it's like to me.
You know what I'm saying?
So like when I'm like talking to Mark, that's where I'm coming from.
You know, that's my story.
So it's like, you know, like you're, you're just like fucking with something, you know, and I'm asking you to show yourself as like a, as somebody who's supposedly a sibling of mine.
in a culture, you know, like you, you know, and then it's all this Western chauvinism stuff, like, it's just that he purports, like, nonsense.
Well, I just wanted to, like, to also say that for you, it seems like this particular conflict also is broadly symbolic because yesterday you posted to Facebook, I hope you're getting it seems like this particular conflict also is broadly symbolic because yesterday you posted to Facebook, I hope you're getting it, addressing everybody, the future of global embodiment is also the future
So are you, so this is a really, this is a sort of...
That's your wheelhouse, right?
That's your wheelhouse.
I suppose.
I mean, I suppose.
Some kind of spirituality.
Yes.
Yeah.
And also just the, certainly the body politics of wellness and their histories in nationalisms, for sure.
But it sounds like you're saying that the way that something like the Embodiment Conference is organized, you know, with Walsh, without Walsh, but it's kind of a bellwether for what comes next.
Is that what you see?
100% yeah 100% and that's why like by not saying what it is now but there are risks involved when you consider that the person who heads this like world's largest embodiment educational body that's online
The world's largest one right now is somebody who expressly has shown complete and human decency, in my opinion, to people of color and says West is best.
He's said West is best multiple times.
He said, isn't the West the best place?
He has literally said that.
I've seen the receipts of that.
This is not like hyperbole.
You know, there's a picture of a black woman standing up to, I think, maybe some kind of, you know, like white folks in Sweden, and she has her black fist raised up, and he has commentary saying, oh, she is, she's the Nazi, she's the one who's preventing these people from expressing themselves.
When that is the person who's heading that organization and he said, Oh, you know what?
I'm so like interesting and cool person.
You know, I can do something invited Trump supporter or Putin supporter.
I don't have to share their love with fascism, but like, you know, I, I can respect who they are.
And that whole thing, that whole argument ignores the fact that ideology follows the body.
So when you're actually spreading the body culture, Then you're spreading the ideology, regardless of what you're saying on the surface.
Because that's where left and right doesn't really matter sometimes.
If left and right share the same body nervous system conditioning, left and right ideology doesn't matter, they can both become authoritarian.
It doesn't really matter at all.
That's a really important thing people need to understand as well.
So it's not about ideology, it's about neurology.
It's not about what people say, it's about behavior.
So when you are en masse conditioning people to be a certain way neurologically, you're inviting a certain kind of, maybe not ideology, but political neurology.
And that might be liberation, and that could be fascism and authoritarianism.
There is a difference.
So there are stakes.
From everything that Marcus said, there are stakes to this.
And I saw that from very far away.
And a lot of the people, or not a lot of the people, but a few of the people close to me also saw that from far away and were dismayed that these people who are global leaders, some of them in my own field of social justice semantics, Like joining without thinking about it.
And I'm not going to disparage everybody because sometimes you just don't have the information in front of you.
What I've seen is people not taking up the responsibility once even the information is put in front of them.
I've seen that and that's a real problem.
I'm just dismayed at the sheer number of people and all these white male gurus that have been really capturing the embodiment field for a long time.
In the end, it's all getting sucked up into their businesses and their empires.
It's not actually going to grow people at my level.
Right.
It's not structured that way.
I see the file structure and that's okay.
Or maybe that's not okay.
That's not illegal or anything.
That's not what I'm saying, but it's kind of like, what are we participating in?
But I think it's the way the social capital moves in that thing.
It's so transparent.
That neurological patterning, it always leads to something.
So it's not about what people say, it's about the neurology, it's the cultural somatics behind the whole thing you need to pay attention to constantly.
Same with elections.
That's what you pay attention to.
Don't pay attention to what's coming out of people's mouths.
You pay attention to somas, you pay attention to nervousness, you pay attention to attachment patterns.
That's how you vote.
That's how you build companies.
That's how you build better businesses.
That's how you build a cool fucking podcast.
And I'm out.
Thank you, Tata.
Thank you so much.
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