In an anesthetized, apathetic and disconnected society, feeling is a revolutionary act! It is a portal to a New Culture.
You and I have been taught since childhood to swallow our feelings, to suppress them and pretend they don't exist. We had to learn to swallow the crying, be strong, not be cowardly, not be a sissy or not be scandalous. "If you feel angry, you go to hell", if you are not a good girl or a good boy you will be beaten, you will not be loved, "if you are afraid you will attract bad things, it is low vibration, think positive". "Don't put on a show, you'll embarrass your mother." "The opposite of fear is love, it's not good to be afraid." You've probably heard or even said one or more of these phrases.
We were born in a patriarchal culture, in which be training, anesthetization and control is the norm, it is what reigns.
However, although most of the population lives in this patriarchal culture, it is evident that we no longer live in a disciplinary society (according to Foucault) as a few years ago. As the book Tired Society brings out, we live today in a performance-sick society. You have a strong belief that you are free, but this discourse of freedom is a pure fantasy world.
Modern culture loves to make this speech of freedom, especially after the Enlightenment. According to the season, the speech is being adapted, but it is always the same, in essence. Today, the discourse is that we are condemned to be free and at the same time slaves of this counterfeit freedom.
We give up life, we go through life and we walk towards death. While we are too alive to understand death, we are also too dead to understand what it is to be alive. We have entered an “undead” stage. We are losing the flavor of things. What's the point of having the knowledge, but not experiencing the taste? It's like having a glass of water in the desert and not being able to drink it.
In the insane life that modern culture presents (and I don't know if I dare say it's life) the only way to survive is to become living leftovers, is to anesthetize ourselves. Anesthetize us from everything we feel. The fact that we don't feel it, that we become more and more numb, has a very obvious reason. Control. In the patriarchal empire, the more we are disconnected, apathetic and anesthetized, the more we are led as a herd. It becomes much easier to manipulate and control.
If I consciously feel my fear I can choose. If I don't feel my fear I am controlled.
If at that moment you enter a subway in the middle of São Paulo you will see, for the most part, empty, hollow and disconnected bodies. Feeling is very cruel and painful. We are smarter than that, and of course, we have developed mechanisms to relieve the pressure of living in a chaotic metropolis like greater São Paulo. We anesthetize ourselves, we drink, we eat until our bodies have to shut down, we clog our minds with useless information, we work until our bodies' energy runs out, we play games, we get caught in the whirlpools of thoughts. We created a thick dam to contain all our internal waters. Only then can we go on with “life”. Study, work, earn money, in order to stay “alive” for another month.
If we are increasingly anesthetized, we can only feel when the feeling is at a high percentage, and from there we have two behaviors: either we implode or we explode. Because basically the entire population of the planet deals with their feelings in this way, there is a taboo about feeling that feeds back. If you feel anger, it will explode and hurt someone. If you feel fear, you will paralyze and panic, if you feel sadness, you will go into an endless pit and become depressed. If you feel joy you will be called crazy, hysterical and alienated.
This mechanism, this mass anesthetization is not a system error. The patriarchy is not bankrupt in doing this. On the contrary, he is fully succeeding in what he sets out to do. It's not about trying to change the patriarchy. It's about building something new, a new culture.
In this new culture, feeling is gold. In it there is a new map for the same territory: the territory of feelings. Feeling is an important internal resource because it reveals things that the brain cannot discern or understand. Feelings are the elements of nature expressed through us, manifesting in our bodies. They are pure forces and energies that bring neutral information to act in the world.
Feeling is a revolutionary act because by lowering your anesthetizing bar and consciously feeling again, you regain your power, your authority, your energy of change and transformation. When you feel again, you care again. By caring you are able to take responsibility and responsibility is awareness in action. So we have the possibility to change the course of this sick society.
I invite you to dive with me in this discovery of the new culture. In this new way of living and feeling. It doesn't exist yet, and it's up to us to create it. Buckminster Fuller says, “You don't change things by fighting the current reality. To change something, you have to build a new model that will make the current model obsolete.” Patriarchy is already obsolete. And how to build something new?
My invitation to you is to dive into the Journey in AltoMar: navigating the feelings that the next class will start soon. In this transformational space we experiment and build a new map of feelings that gives you more power, more awareness and more power of transformation and creation.
To sign up for the waiting list click here
Love and adventure,
Gabriela