I’ve burned a lot of bridges in the last few years and I don’t regret a single one of them.
In the summer of 2020, I wrote a blog post about how hopeful I was feeling after attending the Justice 4 Black Lives Winnipeg rally, and I how proud I was of my step-daughter, who had been one of the organizers.
I received an angry response from an American woman telling me that BLM was a terrorist organization and she couldn’t believe I would support “that kind of thing”. I didn’t just delete her email from my database, I made sure she would not be able to sign up for my emails or offerings ever again.
As I have written about the complexities of doing business as a settler Canadian on stolen land, working in an industry that has deep deep roots in the white supremacist movement, and wanting, through my work, to offer something hopeful and good and useful - not just to white settlers but to everyone - I have received so many responses asking me to please “stay in my lane” and just write about dreams and creativity and inspiration (as though we dream in a vacuum and not in the world!) (as though our creative dreams are not political!).
I regret none of it.
You can never BE as powerful, creative and magnetic as you ARE if you are not doing what you can to live your values. Every time you shrink and bend to fit in and not rock the boat you weaken yourself.
I mean, you don’t need to be rude or aggressive about it. But if you have been socialized as female in this culture, politely but clearly speaking your truth and holding your boundaries can FEEL rude, or aggressive, and people will definitely accuse you of these things.
Everywhere where you don’t do what you can to live your values weakens you. If you feel guilt about not recycling or driving a gas guzzler when you have values around taking good care of our planet, if you freeze up when people talk about racism - our bodies know when we’re not in integrity with ourselves and will keep sending signals.
***Note I keep saying “doing what you can to live your values” in recognition of the fact that we live in a world that makes this hard! You don’t have to “be perfect” and we all have to make compromises to survive in this world. I’m saying - don’t ignore your internal nudges, look at where you can be in integrity with your values.
You just VIBE DIFFERENT when you’re doing what you can to live in tune with your own values.
And you cannot BE as powerful, creative and magnetic as you ARE if you are living out of tune with your self.
So, even though plenty of people have been upset with me, I regret none of this because of how good it feels to do what I can to live in alignment with my own values and because of how this draws like-minded people to my work.
Since I’ve started speaking out, I have drawn like-minded people into Dream Book and we have THE BEST conversations about all of this on our group calls. We help each other figure out how to live our values in a world that is always pushing us to conform to patriarchal, white supremacist, colonial capitalist values.
Slow the fuck down! BE as powerful, creative + magnetic as you ARE community spell + zoom call is happening Feb 28.
Together we can free ourselves of all the ways this world dims our light.
