because practice takes.... practice
A spiral is what happens when a plant or cell or galaxy or shell practices moving between getting bigger and getting smaller and over time, that movement results in a spiral. I always think of it as a visual representation of the word “practice.”
In this post there is an essay with an offering of a practice including a recorded version of the essay and recordings of the practices followed by non-recorded information about opportunities in the coming year.
Because practice takes… practice
Voice recording of this piece 30 minutes
Recently we completed a community training through REP, a project I talk a lot about on these blogs (and one whose website is getting a major upgrade this year, thank you, Kiana). The training focused on a range of community safety and care practices including deescalation, community mental health first aid, assessing crisis situations, working with your own triggers and more. All of these are skills shared to support a person’s capacity to meet moments of crisis by turning towards each other rather than toward an impersonal system. Because knowledge without practice is often only information, we work with a range of scenarios to more strongly root into the learning. Things like: “it’s 3am and you hear shouts from next door, what do you do?” “There is someone lying on the ground in front of the house across the street and your neighbor wants to call the police on them, what do you do?” “An intoxicated person is accusing their significant other of cheating. They are outside the house next door, demanding to see their partner but the mother of the person impacted refuses. The intoxicated person is threatening to bust out the windows. What do you do?” “A parent you know is frightened of their teenager or a teenager you know is frightened of their parent, what do you do?”
We start with offering people examples like this to work with and then we ask folks to share situations from their past; times when they froze or were too overwhelmed to do anything. Times when they wanted to intervene but didn’t know how. It doesn’t matter how often I have practiced these scenarios and others just like them, I learn something each and every time. Back when we had more cash and a different structure, we hired actors to create scenarios on the street so that people could experience the practice more intensely.
In a closing circle for this recent training, one of the participants said something like this: I took this training thinking I would learn skills that would make me better able to protect my community; to be more badass. But as the weeks have gone by, I’ve realized that what you are teaching us is just how to be a good community member. And it’s amazing that any of us have to go through a training to learn something like this, except we do.
Another reflection from the same circle went something like this: I am realizing that being a good community member is not so much about the skills we learn, but about how we practice them. How we adapt them. How they become not what we do but who we are.
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Some of you reading this are in another moment of urgency and crisis, on top of potentially years or generations of the same. Recently, I was listening to a state address to the British Parliament. Sadly, I didn’t save the feed as it flashed before my eyes but the words from the person speaking lingered: it is important to think of this moment as the best moment in your life because with each day that follows, things are going to get worse. We feel like so much has been lost already but focus deeply on what is here because in five or fifteen years, the present moment will have lost even more. The speaker was talking about the climate but because we are the earth and everything the earth feels and experiences shapes our feelings and experiences, this constellation of change and chaos is about many different situations. Rising authoritarianism. Increasing forced migration. Shifting economic chaos and disorder. All of the things that happen when we-the-earth are as unsettled as we are. I am not writing these words from despair - an old word meaning to separate from hope and possibility - but instead I am just sitting and looking at what is happening all around us.
My Signal thread, like many of yours, is filled with strategies and responses to the targeting and kidnapping of our neighbors. I, like you, watch as fights and power struggles surge up on the thread and then settle back down. People come and go, bringing their best selves, their ok selves and sometimes their worst selves. Everything is awkward and the same dozen people keep everything going with everyone else fitting in here and there. There aren’t enough Spanish or Somali speakers, the teachers and nurses and seasoned organizers lead the way and sometimes ICE is stopped and sometimes ICE is tracked and sometimes ICE shows up a few blocks over and we missed them. Trainings are repeated weekly from one neighborhood to the next and the number of hyperlocal groups is widening constantly. Where I live, friends who have been in organizing work for decades reflect on this as an extension of the organizing that gathered during the 2020 Uprising. Others talk about even older moments of occupation or violence and about what is the same or different in this moment. And while all of this is happening, some of us are caring for elders and children, and making sure there is food, and going to work, and fighting for housing justice and to protect wild rice and still finding time to shovel their neighbor’s front walk when the snow is high. There is so much to do. And there will be so much to do tomorrow.
Every single thing is practice, a word whose oldest meaning is “before.” Just “before,” because what comes after might be anticipated but it's not yet known. And so in my world, the “before” includes things like safety planning, scenario practice, food and resources assessment and other kinds of agreements and commitments. Some of those have been part of my life since childhood and some are more recent, thanks to the teachings of people like Cara Page, Shira Hassan, Ejeris Dixon, Marcie Rendon and more.
But in the worlds I am part of, there is another practice that we don’t talk as much about. This is the practice that focuses not on what we do, but on who we are. And not only when we are triggered - we have practices to support coming back to the present including practices of self-care. I am talking about other kinds of practices, the practices of self-noticing and self-accountability. Self-assessment.
I have recently read a series of articles that share theories about the evolution of consciousness. By looking at a range of biological life forms, including humans, the current theory is that when we were multicellular organisms, the first level of consciousness that emerged was the consciousness of our survival. Meaning, we became conscious of the fact that threat exists and that threats can hurt us. This consciousness then led us to develop ways to respond to those threats. For many different mammals including humans, this means fight, flight, freeze.
This theory names the second level of consciousness as the awareness that we are one being among a multitude of beings. This is an expansion of our awareness of what being alive feels like. Look left and look right. Look up and look down. We are not alone and not only that, there are a range of opportunities and distractions and threats between each one of us and everything around us. So this second level of consciousness that emerged was the consciousness of relationships. Because first we learned ways to survive threats, this consciousness of relationships emerged in relation to our survival. Meaning, we became aware of others around us, that we are one among many, and we learned all kinds of ways to connect and disconnect from those other beings in order to ensure our survival. We evolved and continue to evolve complex nervous systems that have a relationship with the trees and fish and birds around us. When we hear bird song, our body's parasympathetic system fires, telling us it is likely we are safe and can relax. When we are born as infants, our first reflexes are all about relationships: the capacity to root for food, to turn our head so we can see what is around us. We learned early on that relationships make our capacity for survival stronger. Which is why our survival strategies are not only about fighting and fleeing but also include our capacity to tend and befriend. These evolutions of consciousness wove together and we learned that if we build connections and relationships with those around us, our survival is more likely
The final level of consciousness that evolved, according to this theory, is self-reflection. Self-reflection. Because these are western scientists, their assumption of self-reflection is about the individual self. I don’t know if some of our animal kin experience self-reflection as more collective. I do know that there is a group consciousness that happens within ancestral lines, within cultural lineages and within group membership. But within this theory, self-reflection comes next or our capacity to be aware of threat, to look left and right and notice our relationships and then to turn inwards and be aware of our self being aware of our own survival and relationships.
When we are born, we are not aware that our bodies are separate from the bodies of our caregivers. Their flesh, our flesh. We begin to feel our separation by literally pushing against their bodies, feeling the boundary between us and them. Over time, we move further and further into a sense of a separate self with a specific experience of life. This is ancient, of course. This capacity for self-consciousness predates our species - and is not limited to our species. And because self-consciousness is the most recently evolved, it is the least developed. And what we are self conscious of varies generation to generation and culture to culture. At its simplest, the self-consciousness of those who grew up in the time of accessible mirrors is different from those who did - or do - not. Just as the self-consciousness of those who grow up as part of the selfie generation are not the same as those who live without cell phones.
Survival. Relationships. Self-consciousness. Survival responses predate cognition so they are faster than our thinking brain. Relational responses also emerged before self-consciousness so they are less of the mind - although we can strategize around them - and more of the felt sense. Meaning, as much as we think about or understand the trajectory of a relationship, the biggest test is what it feels like. Self reflection has a relationship to survival and to relationships, of course, and it brings us to where we are. Sometimes our self-awareness jams up with our awareness of relationships and survival and we get very very confused about belonging. Am I good enough? Have I done the right thing? Do I fit in? And sometimes our self-awareness jams up with our awareness of relationships and survival and we get very very defensive: don’t show vulnerability, this will make us dangerous, this feels unsafe so fight, protect, withdraw.
In the movements I am part of, we are very good, at least theoretically, with an awareness of and response to the survival self. That is, after all, the impetus for a range of our actions and strategies. Movements exist to ensure the sovereign survival of those whose lives are targeted by histories and the present moment. When we are our best selves, we are also good at relationships, or at least some form of them. We, like every other political stripe, can be heavily judgemental about who or what we have relationships with but still, there is a consciousness that relationships are essential. We know that the only way to shift an extractive approach to living is to find our way back to love and connection, remembering that we are interdependent, each with the other.
I am more confused about self-reflection and how we hold this in our commitments. I think we are strong here when the commitment is to be anti-oppressive, so straight folks do work on their homophobia, cis folks on their transphobia. White folks on their racism and colonialism, able-bodied folks on their ableism and on and on. These are important, so important, but they are only one part of what it is to be a conscious person. Far too often our anti-oppression self reflection gets tangled up with survival and focuses on what we do, again, rather than who we are. It’s why you can have white folks taking a shit ton of anti-racist workshops and still tighten up inside when they are around folks of color, terrified of doing, saying, being the wrong thing.
Almost every cultural or religious tradition includes a form of practice that is often absent in the training and frameworks that shape movements. It’s the daily practice of self-assessment, self-accountability and commitment. The point of daily self-assessment and commitment is based in humility; the awareness that no matter what we believe or know, those older forms of consciousness act faster than cognitive thought and can lead us to contradict our belief systems and values.
After I finished my walk across Turtle Island, someone asked me what I would wish for if I could wave a magic wand and create one mass shift for all of us. One great and glorious transformation. I didn’t even hesitate. I told her that I would make it so that all of us could live with contradiction without having to fix, control, avoid, or cover it. Contradiction, a word whose roots mean “against what has been solemnly shown/spoken.” The word “solemnly” is important because it distinguishes the fact of a contradiction from the intention of sarcasm or strategy. The old meaning of the word “solemn” means “whole and well-kept.” It shares roots with safety and solidarity. So contradiction is not just an idle oops, but a state of being that goes against what keeps us whole and well-kept, goes against our safety, our solidarity.
As the Gregorian calendar shifts from 2025 to 2026, things are changing faster than we can keep up with. It is unlikely that there will be any large-scale “better” for a while yet, even though our most personal and local lives will carry moments of “better” and “ok” and pleasure and joy and the quiet savoring of love. Over the coming years, each one of us and sometimes groups of us will move from feeling useful to feeling lost, from feeling clear and certain about our role to feeling driftless. We will feel ok and feel like we shouldn’t feel ok. My god, the number of times I am in meetings and I watch as, like a wave, each person checking in unconsciously tries to pull out their greatest pain because it feels like betrayal to admit we are having a great day when others are barely holding on. Some of us will take a vacation or a weekend break and then spend a lot of words explaining why we had to take this time. Others will preface every conversation with the laundry list of what actions they are taking and showing up for. And in the midst of this, some people will be quietly living a life, looking for where they can step up and taking care of other things when they can’t. There will be shame and guilt and collapse and defensiveness and there will be joy and orgasms and birth and giddy pleasure. There will be strategy and direct action and focused care and a lot of prayer.
And every moment will contain a before, even the worst moments. Because every moment is always before another moment and another after that. And that is what practice is. The before.
All of these words are leading to the offering of a practice. It is an offering, fascinatingly enough an old word that means to carry as in to bear children. As with all offerings, just like the potential for pregnancy, it is more powerful when you are clear if this is actually something you want. The offering is a daily assessment practice.
The old meaning of the word “assess” is “to sit” and “assessment” is the act of being in this “sit.” It turns the verb into a noun, into a state of being. This is about taking a moment at the start of each day and at its end to sit with what is true. To notice it. To witness which means “the state of seeing and therefore knowing”. So, to spend time each day seeing and therefore, maybe, knowing.
Daily assessment practices are part of every spiritual and cultural tradition. But if you, like me, approach movement and change from a more secular place, then chances are you don’t have a practice like this. And even if you do, whether Buddhist or Ignatian examen or Halacha or Salah or Jo practice or 12 step or really any kind of prayer practice, then here is another shape of it.
The practice is to notice in some specific ways and to then be with what rises. When action is ready, you will know it. It will be clear. Sometimes it can take days or weeks of noticing and feeling something before action is clear. The waiting matters. I can think of far too many examples of action pushed too soon, an action taken because folks felt they “should’ do something and then that action either did nothing or caused further harm.
This is a daily check in, one that happens after you wake up and one that happens before you go to sleep. There is also a weekly check-in; the opportunity to assess and reflect on the actions and inactions of the week and then measure them against our values and contradictions. As I was working on this, I giggled to myself. I thought, Raffo, this is what synagogue or church or temple does: you pray every day and then you go to services once a week for the big check in. And I thought, well, those systems have lasted for a long ass time. They are successful in providing shapes for people’s lives, a way of remembering who we are. How funny that our movements don’t do the same. This kind of daily self-assessment so that we can be clearer about when things are about our survival and when they are not, when our relationships are fractured and need tending and when they are welling up and filling our heart with all that is good.
Again, healing or getting help is what happens when we are in daily practice and notice that something is stuck; that we are repeating a pattern over and over again and can’t find our way out of it. What is offered on this page is a practice that is about coming into the present moment in a reflective assessing way. Sometimes the practice points to other needs.
One of my favorite touchstones to remember: we are trying to change the wound while we are within and shaped by the wound. There is no separate place that we can get to, there is just each step within the tangle of generations that have shaped who we are along with the experiences of our lifetimes. We forget far more than we remember. And individual change and collective change are completely wrapped up with each other, each influencing the other. Always.
I will first write down the practices but also, there are separate recordings linked below if it helps to listen rather than read. In the future, I will share other practices. These are practices that I do or have done; like practices about sitting with repair and impact. Practices about decentering human and other forms of supremacy so that I can feel the interconnection that is here. Practices and practices and with all of them, the dignity of self-assessment and self-accountability in the middle.
Morning (voice recording)
First, notice that you are awake. Feel what it is to be awake and alive on this day. If the sun is up, feel it. Speak to the sun. Our life depends on this life. Offer gratitude to the sun for their consistency in rising. Notice that you are alive another day.
Now, notice any emotions that might be here. Any feelings that carry over from the night. Are there dreams from the night before that you want to pause to write down or just feel? Are there feelings that have carried over from yesterday or from the night to the morning? Is there something tugging at you that needs to be attended to or settled?
What do you know about the day in front of you? Are there things you need to do? How do you feel about them? Are you excited or anxious, dreading or neutral?
How would you like to be today? How do you want to show up for the things you already know will happen? How do you want to show up with the people in your life? With the land? With your community and your sense of spirit or culture?
Is there any help you need today? Who can you ask, including spirit or ancestors as well as living humans and companion animals?
Notice all of what you have noticed and see if there is a single sentence, a commitment to yourself, that will help you remember yourself throughout the day. Say it out loud, if you can. Say it a few times and then move into your day.
Evening (voice recording)
First, notice that you are alive. If the sun is on its way down or has already set, notice the dusk or the darkness. If the moon and stars are already out, be aware of this. Our heart rates, sleep patterns and hormonal fluctuations dance along with the phases of the moon.
Go over your day. It doesn’t have to be exact, just let the events of the day float up in your memory. Imagine them rising and then passing, like something that is part of you and also something you are watching pass. Was there anything that happened to you or from you? Anything you did or didn’t do that sticks out?
What has the impact of the day been on you? Is there anything tugging at you that feels unfinished? Anything you want to attend to or lay down before you turn towards sleep? Don’t make a huge list of things, just let yourself feel for the most important thing. One thing that rises above. Maybe it’s something you feel good about and want to savor. Maybe it’s something that feels unfinished, or a hurt that you want to address. Maybe you notice that your moods impacted someone else or you didn’t show up when you wish you would have. Or maybe you are feeling really good about how you spent the day, noticing your clarity or certainty in places where before those things were absent. Just notice and see what rises in the noticing.
Is there something you can learn from this? Is there something that might shape tomorrow or another day?
And now notice that this is one day in a string of days and years and generations and lifetimes. Trust yourself to remember what you need to remember. Do what supports you to feel that as Octavia Butler writes, God is change and change is constant. Tomorrow will not be the same as today.
Weekly (voice recording)
Notice you are alive. Really pause and sense what your aliveness feels like right now. Observe and feel. Sense and sense again.
Take a moment to remember your connection to the aliveness around you and your sense of purpose or commitment. Maybe this is something simple; a commitment to treat people around you with respect and care. Maybe it is something like this: to fight every day for a world that respects the sovereignty of life. Maybe it is more specific: to ensure that your people feel a connection to their past and their future that strengthens and roots them. Maybe you don’t have any words yet or maybe your words are specific to something happening next month. It doesn’t matter. This is a moment where you are practicing noticing your north star, your guide rope, the belief or commitment that is bigger than your mood and daily responsibilities. Sometimes it starts as a feeling and takes a while for words to show up. Sometimes the words shift and change.
Now take a moment to notice the past week. You might go through the week one day after another, you might let the whole week rise up and show itself to you. Let the events of the week flow past your memory and notice how it feels to notice them. Does anything make you soften and gladden? Does anything make you tighten with an ouch? Does anything feel unfinished, even if it frightens or stresses you out?
Now gently notice: how have your actions and inactions this week met your sense of purpose or commitment? How have they not? This is one of those moments where the practice is to look at yourself and to notice if shame or judgement rises up in the next breath. If it does, don’t shame yourself for feeling shame. Just notice it. Clean shame is a gift from our ancestors, an inbuilt system to tell us that we have been contradicting our own values. Toxic shame is the tool of oppression, telling us that our safety and belonging is directly related to how we follow the rules. If shame rises, see if you can tell if it is clean - crap, I did something I am not proud of and want to address it - or toxic - I feel like I am going to get in trouble.
Notice if there are things you want to attend to in the coming week; repairs to make, actions to honor and see, friends to check in with, meals to share, activities to schedule or cancel, places for rest, places to get loud. Just notice them and feel into them. Imagine yourself doing them. If you need help or companionship, imagine yourself asking for it.
And then let go. Remember this is one week in a lineage of time. Let your life merge into the interconnection of all life, where your actions are both important and small. Feel how you are one small piece of a large cycle of change and evolution and expression and how without your piece, that large cycle is smaller.
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News and opportunities
In 2026, I’m going to be sharing writing that is related to what is talked about in this piece. They all focus in some way on that part of healing or change work that is about self-accountability that lives within the space of unconditional belonging. They will all include some kind of practice. If this material is useful for you, please let me know about it. I have been grateful when people have shared with me how they are using, for example, some of what I shared in that long eight hours of video that I posted a few months back.
I am reopening a version of my practice starting in February. For the near future, it will not include table work but other kinds of body-based support, mentoring, and care. I am offering a mix of single sessions and longer term commitments. Some of the things that people have worked with me on include everything from mentoring around work, purpose, commitment; getting support on family/kin relationships and conflict; ancestral connection and support; working on issues of supremacy and generational disconnection; working on harms that I/we have caused either specifically towards a person or community or in a bigger picture way; working with past abuse and neglect and more. I am off line until mid-January and will start returning messages then.
I got to spend time talking with the beloved breana connor about our wanderings, about meeting strangers and about how change happens through their podcast, Signs of breana.
I get to be a guest teacher, along with Shauna Janz, on this course: weaving new ritual — firelight : embodied ritual & practice. Lucy and Nicole are putting together a practice for white Christian-lineage folks that is about holding the truth of accountability for Christianity’s harms with learning and listening from the faith. What I like about it is that there is no over-ride. Instead, it meets with dignity the practices of Christian answers, listening for how to unweave the harm from its rituals and to honor the faith of those who came before. The sign up ends on January 5 but because this is only going out a few days before, Lucy and Nicole said they are open to late enquiries.
And as I shared before, there are two workshops already planned in 2026. One near Toronto (date not set) that Marika Heinrichs is organizing and another in October at Kirkridge Retreat Center in Pennsylvania. I also intend to plan one in the Twin Cities, date also not set. They all focus in some way on the relationship between land, repair, reconnection and self-assessment and accountability.
In addition to the writing I am offering through my blog, I am also offering additional writing - occasional essays and bits of reflection - through my Patreon. I use Patreon to support writing time and I am deeply grateful for those able and interested in supporting me in this way.
And finally, one of my goals in 2026 is to begin interviewing a whole range of people, from ages 18 to 90 (and older when possible), on eldering as a part of cross-generational change and movement building. I am talking with beloveds who know way more than I do about film and video to understand how to do this easily and in a way that makes the film accessible. My intent is to offer these conversations for free as one of the many threads that might help to ground into something amidst the chaos of the moment. And, also, as a way to tease apart the difference between authoritarianism, leadership and the specific developmental truth of what living a bunch of years can give you. For this to be honest, it therefore also has to include attention to the many times this role has been deeply mis-used. I am quiet-fundraising to help with this project and so if you are someone who has capacity, please reach out and I can tell you more about it. I am not fundraising a shit ton of dollars, but just to pay for the time it will take and some of the costs associated with making the videos.