The Pachamama Skillshare was the most spiritual feminist space I’ve been in in a long time. It wasn’t tied to any particular spiritual tradition—though many of the organizers were inspired by their understandings of the spiritual history of Pachamama, the earth-mother goddess of indigenous communities of the Andes—and participants individually identified with various different spiritual traditions or no spiritual tradition at all, but when we introduced ourselves in the opening circle, a majority of participants expressed things like “being present” or “openness” as part of their intention for the weekend. Throughout the gathering, impromptu meditation sessions were organized, several people talked about how they had recently begun connecting a spiritual practice to their political activism, and almost every workshop in some way offered a holistic approach to feminism and environmental justice—that is, an approach that connected mind, body, and spirit, or discussed the importance of individual and collective healing to social justice movements, or was presented in multiple modalities, or was rooted in notions of the deep interconnectedness and interdependence of all things.
Pa’ti Garcia’s workshop on DIY gynecology involved physical exercises; partner, group, and solo activities; and information and analysis that linked health to colonialism, the erotic to the spiritual. Kellee Matsushita and Sonya Collier’s workshop on plant medicine was rooted in the concept of “plant allyhood” (check out their zine, Plant Allies)—that is, a deep sense of interconnectedness with, and responsibility to, the plants we might use for healing. I facilitated a workshop on holistic approaches to living with what is normally called “depression” in which dozens of participants shared wisdom and strategies ranging from therapy to sex to exercise to meditation to food to art to organizing, and we discussed the ways oppression, body colonization, violence and trauma, spiritual crisis, brain chemistry, and so many other factors contribute to “depression,” which I suggested is often fundamentally about disconnect—between mind and body, between mind and spirit, between sense of self and the whole to which we are all connected.
Throughout the weekend, we shifted rather naturally between giving and receiving, usually doing some of both at once. We moved between structured workshops and open time, between being alone in the desert and coming together to laugh or strategize (often both). When things needed to be done, enough people volunteered to do them that they got done. We ate together or alone, we did a mix of work and play and different types of activities. We felt like we had time. We felt connected, and we felt like we had enough. Because we did—each of us having shared whatever resources we had available to share (time, skills, equipment, land, food, ideas…) to make it happen.
Visionary, paradigm-shifting political and community work goes beyond the kind of “intersectionality” that can be superficially incorporated into an organization’s programming or web copy for the sake of appealing to a broader audience, or market. It’s not about intellectually understanding how different “issues”—environmental and reproductive justice, domestic violence and the criminal-legal system—are connected in order to broaden or strengthen a movement to gently reform, or increase marginalized groups’ access to, existing systems of power. It is about a deep, multidisciplinary, multiform approach that aims to profoundly alter how power functions, how resources are shared, how all people and everything live. Yet most major U.S. feminist organizations have internalized, and are operating within, capitalism’s narrow narratives.
The dominant myth that if we each focus on our narrow self-interest in maximizing individual financial/material resources, the invisible hand of the free market will sort out all the rest with the maximum possible liberty for each individual human—that myth is literally, and ever more quickly, destroying the planet, including the human species.
Of course, capitalism has never provided liberty for most individual humans; as it has snowballed, it has provided a weird, isolating kind of supposed liberty for ever fewer. People who call ourselves feminists can stick with this paradigm, hoard our individual or organizational resources, focus our scarce-seeming energy on our own key issues, try to make things a little more equal for some women within this system, and watch destruction happen at an ever faster clip.
Or, if we are serious about ending rape, or ensuring that everyone has food and a decent place to live, or supporting girls’ agency, or creating communities free from violence, we can unlock ourselves from dominant systems and their supporting myths and start experimenting with, or reconnecting to, or seeking, or acknowledging the existence of different paradigms. And this is not a superficial thing, or something that can be done with a narrow focus or in a single modality. Nor is it a thing that can be done alone.
