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One of the exercises in CLP is about identifying and clarifying our personal values. We each identify our top five values, writing one each on five index cards. Then we have to drop one, and another… until we are left holding the card with our number one, top value. What is your current One right now and why?
Take care of myself first. The reason why I say that, is because it has been proven to me that when I take care of myself first, I’m better for other people.
Where this core value emerged for me, I was leading a group process virtually. We were following the journey of Inanna.
Some people say it’s the story of Venus; Inanna went down to the underworld. As she went through each layer of the underworld, she dropped something, she had to take something off until by the very end, she was naked. She went through a transformation, and she did suffer, it was painful, but she came back up.
We did a similar process – a non-rational, spiritual process – and what I came back up with was ‘take care of myself first.’
I remember being very embarrassed that that was my thing I came up with from the underworld, because it seemed so selfish and not of service. I’m so service oriented. There were other values I came back up with, but that one surprised me.
After I came up with that message, I immediately faced the challenge of, ‘do I act on this value?’ Because I felt like I needed to go immerse myself in water, like a bath or a shower. I thought, ‘what the heck, Amanda, you’ve got to serve these people, they’re here online, waiting for you!’
I chose to go take a quick shower. I don’t remember what I asked the group to do – maybe the group took a break, maybe people were journaling. I just decided to take care of myself first, so I went and took a shower, came back out and I felt great. Then I was able to lead the group through the rest of the process.
That was not what my rational brain would have done. My rational brain would have said, ‘Nope, finish this out, and then you can go do whatever you need to do for yourself; you’re committed to these people, you made a promise. Gut it out.’
I think we’re in a time period where gutting it out is not the path for many of us. I really don’t know what it is for everybody, I don’t know if there’s a universal truth for everybody. But I do know for me, and maybe for people who are vibrating similarly to me, we have to reorient and take care of ourself first.
That shift from gutting it out to self-care first, did that happen for you during the lockdown part of the COVID-19 pandemic?
Yes. It definitely happened during the lockdown.
Ricardo Levins Morales came to a CEIO forum in 2017, I believe. I quoted him throughout my notes, he was such a revelation for me. One of the things he said then that I agreed with but I didn’t really know how it affected me, was “You know the three words I don’t want to hear again? We’re going to re-double our efforts.”
He said, no, we have to look at nature. How does a Monarch butterfly manage to go from Mexico to Canada every year? We cannot do that just on our own effort. Like the Monarch does, you have to find the currents that carry you, you want to be in alignment with the currents.
I think that gutting it out is you fighting, being in this overcoming kind of mindset as opposed to – What if I trusted the energy here? What is the energy in this space right now? What is the energy in me?
Even if the energy in me is like: ‘Oh my god, I’m too afraid, I want to go hide under the table, under the bed, in the closet’ (which is an energy inside me), I think the move is to find out what that part of you needs, the part that wants to hide. Rather than pushing it down and acting as if you have it all together.
So what I’m saying is pay attention to where the energy is. That’s another one of my values now, to follow the energy. And that energy could be – where is the national focus right now? The national focus is on the economy, honestly. I think there’s a lot of concern about banks failing, and the value of the dollar. I live here, I use dollars, so this is where my focus is, this is what a lot of people are thinking about right now.
In terms of being relevant to people, what is it that I have to say about that, what can I do to support us as we are in this period of uncertainty, or in this period of learning, or re-prioritizing.
Follow the energy also applies to the Earth and what season we’re in. Are we in the depths of winter, when it makes sense for people to hunker down, rest, stay inside, it gets dark early, seniors don’t want to be out to drive. When are we doing events? Pay attention to the season.
We’re coming up on the summer solstice, coming on summer mid-June, and that’s the high point of sunlight just beaming at us. In traditional Chinese medicine, they say that’s Yang energy, that’s energy of expansion, outward. If you think about the season, that’s when things are growing, when we’re starting to eat things like berries – there’s bounty.
Also, what are the cosmic energies that are happening? I was going to have a conversation with someone, and she told me, ‘let’s wait until Mercury goes through retrograde.’ That was the first time anyone had ever said that to me. I was like, ‘Is she putting me off, does she not want to talk to me?’ And then I realized from other communications I’ve gotten from her, she actually pays attention to what’s happening with planets and planetary energy.
If that’s real to you, then it makes sense that you don’t want to have sensitive conversations when there’s a lot of communication interference going on. In a different conversation about business, someone else said it to me – ‘yeah, that was a really rough time, because everything was in retrograde, nothing was moving forward until…’
These are people who do justice work. It’s like picking your head up and paying attention to the energies around you, rather than gutting it out – you’re only focused on one thing, and that is getting that one thing that you want when you want it.
Thank you for sharing that, it’s such a timely message in this moment of post-lockdown recalibration or balance-seeking. Can you share one big, burning leadership question you are wrestling with these days?
I’m wrestling with how to do justice work in a way that moves it forward and that is regenerative for me, as someone who wants to move it forward.
When I say regenerative, I really do mean like biodynamic farming. People are trying to create systems that regenerate, so we’re not having to add negative chemicals or do things in an inhumane way because the system itself is insufficient to the task.
I’ll give an example of this from my lived experience. When I had two young kids – little, little kids – at home, I was the primary caregiver, their dad was making more of the money. It’s a system of energy – money is energy, but time, focus and love is energy too, right?
I remember at a certain point we were like, “We’re tired.” We didn’t have enough energy in the system. So then you start saying, “well how many hours are you doing?” You know what I mean? You start poking at each other, rather than saying ok, we need more support. It’s not that someone’s not doing enough, it’s that there’s insufficient energy here in the system.
I feel like with racial justice work or social justice work, we need regeneration. We need regenerative systems that enlighten us, that challenge us, and that love us. If we’re only in systems that correct us, that shame us or where we feel shame, that don’t delight us, where the learning is under the sense of a lot of pressure, under the gun, then we’re going to get systems where there’s not enough energy in them and we’ll turn on each other.
I really appreciate that. Can you say more about what racial or social justice work looks like in your world?
My form of racial justice work takes place on a couple of levels.
One is as a teacher. People pay me to come in and teach them some awareness skills, or they ask me to come in and teach them to have conversations about racism where people can stay connected and not shut down and break apart.
And, this is where my experience with the trees in my own spiritual awakening in late 2021 came in. I started to look at the work that I do to reconnect with the earth, to reconnect with trees and crows and all of our more-than-human kin, as part of shifting us from the current paradigm we’re in to a new one.
In the current paradigm we’re in, fear, scarcity, hierarchy, less-than, more-than-ness is endemic. In the new one, fairness and compassion are endemic. So the work that I do is to help us shift to a higher paradigm, or a paradigm that is more cooperative, more in-the-family. What does Mary Oliver say: ‘your place in the family of things,’ where we’re kin with each other. Not just with humans, but with all of us.
That paradigm is going to address, in a more systemic way, all kinds of injustices.
That’s beautiful; I love that it’s an opening and an invitation. I remember when we first spoke a few months ago, you talked about “inter-being” and responding to the natural world.
I first heard the phrase “inter-being” from Thich Nhat Hahn years ago, and I liked it. It’s just that experientially, I feel more connected now than I did when I heard about it in the 90s or early 2000s. When I look at the plants in my garden, or the trees in the yard, or the ancestor tree and I acknowledge her – yes, there’s inter-being.
It’s like if you take your earplugs out you can hear more. You might theoretically know there’s a lot of music playing, but when you take them out and you hear all the music that’s going on… I didn’t know all this was happening.
And that’s more like what’s happened for me; I knew some things conceptually, but then some of the blocks got removed and I can know them experientially. And I’ve also made the effort and taken the time to cultivate it, to open that level of perception and sensitivity.
I’m curious what you attribute the shift to; I know you mentioned the pandemic lockdown generally, but are there more specific things that were part of the tipping point?
That is a good question. One of the tipping points was that I was exhausted. I felt so not just obligated, but I felt like I wanted to do everything I could to create more justice and more compassion. There were all these things going on – all really good things in the world, but all at the same time.
I wanted to lift up people around me and give them opportunities to create more justice and compassion. So, I started this facilitator training program for Racial Justice from the Heart facilitators, so that there were more people working with the tools I had, and the mindset I have, doing work in their parts of the world. I was working on a book with my daughter and a beautiful artist illustrator named Jennifer Folayan; I was doing some kind of organizational development effort with some other folks.
I think it came from a sense of – so much has been given to me, I owe it to everyone, my ancestors – to push it to the max.
The turning point came after over a year of pretty intense work from April 2020 to 2021. I was in a coaching session with someone who said, ‘let’s do a nice meditation so we can check in with your true self about how to scale.’ There I am – I’m trying to build, trying to expand even more, scaling.
Then I just said to myself, in this very lightly meditative space, my true self speaking to me I said, “you know what? Amanda needs to stop everything. Stop everything. Stop everything.” Three times! It was like, you will not miss this message. What confirmed it for me was how much I cried as I was saying it. It was like, “Girl, you do not need to carry this all on your shoulders, what are you doing?”
And I want to say out loud, I don’t think I’m unique, I have met a number of people, people who care deeply about justice – different racial groups, I’ve met white women who do this, I’ve met Black women who do this, women from Latinx backgrounds.
One of the things I started talking to trees about was, well, how do I know what’s enough? Part of the problem was that I felt like if I could think it and I could pay for it or collaborate with somebody and it fit in the calendar, then I could do it. I wasn’t doing that thing that Ricardo said – follow the energy.
Also, I think in that time, there was so much energy, it felt like everything was on fire. The killing of George Floyd, even before then, Trayvon Martin in 2013, Ferguson 2014. I had been burning it in an emotional way in addition to a ‘what’s right and what’s wrong’ kind of way.
I really felt like this was my way to protect Black life, honestly – this is my way to protect young Black life. And I had to put it all out. So when I got the message from myself that I need to stop, and I’m crying, I did start to communicate with trees.
One of the messages I got from them was that the inner feeds the outer. So when I was saying ‘how do I know what’s too much, how do I know when I’ve done enough?’ The answer was to focus on feeding the inner, and you’re going to feed the outer naturally.
It’s going back to that message, take care of me first. Feed the inner, and then you will naturally get to what you need to get to, you will have enough. Don’t be looking at, ‘well I should… well how much does so-and-so do… oh, look at what X and Y and Z are doing…’ You know what I mean? The money, visibility, all that is outer. If you focus on and feed the inner core, that drives the outer.
If you think of it that way, then – and I’m going to say something bold here, I don’t know if it’s true – but maybe at this point that 80-20 rule is true. Maybe 80 percent of my thing needs to be inner, so nurturing, so enlightening, and then 20 is the outer, because that 20 is going to be extremely impactful. Maybe, I don’t know, it’s an experiment.
And that leads us right into the next question and the recognition that this work of transformational change is hard. Stepping in, stepping up, over time, can be draining – physically, intellectually, emotionally, psychically, spiritually. In what specific ways do you recharge, restore, take care of yourself, rekindle your fire?
Here’s a major thing. I just spent a month away from home, in the north Georgia mountains, in a tiny house in forested land. It was a beautiful thing that I manifested – all of my guides and ancestors co-created with me. While I was there, I walked on land every day, barefoot. And some days, when it was warm enough, I was nude, walking on land nude.
The person who cares for this land had built all kinds of earth altars and earth art. And so, daily I was just outside with a gratitude prayer, or a prayer for health or healing, or just looking and appreciating, walking barefoot.
Being on land directly, barefoot, being on land where it’s safe, naked. Taking my trauma to trees and sharing and asking and lying down, belly and face down on land, toning, giving over, stuff I’d held in for decades. All of that I found restorative.
Pardon my interrupting, did you say “toning?”
Yes, literally, ‘oooohhhh,’ toning into the land, sound into the land, giving that vibration, asking. Because, you know what – sickness, trauma, for me, a sexual abuse got re-triggered, that is at a vibration. And it’s even a color for me. So, giving that, asking the land where I was to hold it for me, to take, for me to give it.
So for me it’s a lot of land-based practices.
The other thing is water. I need hot water. And the longer I go without taking a hot bath, or being in a hot tub, the less well it’s going to go.
If you know you need something like hot water, or cold water – give yourself what you know makes you feel good, makes you feel cared for.
I think one of the difficulties with having grown up so urban and then suburban toward the latter years of my life so far, is disconnection from land and forested land and whole systems, you know?
Yes. I totally agree.
Yeah. So, this year for the first time, I was listening to a woman I know who I’m becoming friends with, Jen Frey, she’s written a book called Communicating with Plants.
I was listening to one of her instructoree lectures on it – a lot of the things you might instinctively do already. Like, for example, you’re walking along and you see a plant and you might be like, ‘oh, you’re beautiful!’ Or, ‘thank you, tulips, you are looking good!’ Because – wow – they’re feeding your eyes, the optic nerve is being fed with their beauty, or whatever it is that comes to you.
I wanted to practice plant communication with some dandelions: “Hi, dandelions!” When you make an intention – let me practice some plant communication with dandelions, for example – things can happen. So I thought, well, let’s look at the dandelions. Yellow. Yellow’s so bright, where does that yellow relate to my body… well, for me it’s my third chakra, my power center, it’s ‘I am here, look out world.’
She also said you can sing to a plant as a gift to a plant, and to get some communication going. I thought, what song should I sing? The song “I Am Woman, hear me roar” came to mind, so I started singing. And the funny thing is, I used to remember when I was younger, 11 or 13 or 14, singing that song so passionately! [laughing]
What a great re-connection.
Later on, when I looked up the song, it turned out that those lyrics are crazily relevant: “I am woman, hear me roar, in numbers too big to ignore.” Which is of course women, but also dandelions are in numbers too big too ignore! And then dandelion — dande…LION – took me a couple days, but then I thought – dandelions, I respect you!
And then I started thinking about how people eat dandelion greens, there was a profusion of dandelions at that point. I thought, why don’t I pluck some greens and eat them, I looked it up online to see if it was safe. And I did; I washed them really well, and made some dandelion tea, I have a dandelion tonic that’s brewing right now, and a dandelion tincture that’s brewing right now.
The reason why I brought this up is because growing up in an urban environment for most of my life, I had a disconnected relationship with the natural world. Dirt is dirty as opposed to being soil, dandelions in suburbia are the enemy — as opposed to lawns being really weird, why are we wasting all of our resources in creating these situations called lawns?
I’m saying thank you to the earth.
I remember when we spoke earlier, you mentioned turning to songs as medicine; I’m curious now if you meant human-produced songs like “I Am Woman,” or if you were talking about birds and the music of nature.
Yeah. Yeah. You know, the music of nature is medicine. When we are really sensitive and open, with our own voice we can give voice to the frequency of the land that we are connecting with. And we can do that with our voice, our literal voice.
What inspires you, gives you hope these days?
When I lay down on the ground. When I lay my body down on the ground and look up at the sky and see the trees, and the branches. Or if I look out the window and say, ‘what’s going on, let me see what’s really happening today.’ And all of a sudden, a really beautiful cardinal just hopped into my view. That’s the kind of stuff that inspires me.
Medicine music inspires me. There’s this whole emerging genre of plant medicine music. Music created for people while they’re journeying or in relationship to journeying. I find that makes me feel good in my body.
When you say journeying, what do you mean?
I mean ingesting plants – all kinds of plants – some of them have been declared legal and some have been declared illegal. Ingesting dandelions, or mushrooms, or vines, roots, bark, all kinds of ways that people ingest plants.
For spiritual and physical transformation, that kind of journeying?
Yes, for spiritual journeying. And speaking about it, the other thing that gives me hope and inspires me is journeying with plants. That helps me to touch into a deep wisdom inside of myself, it just reminds myself of things. Especially reminding myself: I’m going to be ok, I am ok, I’m going to be ok. I am ok, I’m going to be ok. Or, yeah, things seem to be chaotic, things seem to be falling apart right now, and it’s towards or for a higher evolution.
Amen, I’m telling myself that now too as I feel the stress of the breaking. But I turn to hope that these things – structures, systems, hierarchies – need to be broken in order to get someplace that’s healthier.
Yes. And you know, we can look at what’s happening out there as reflecting what’s happening in us, and what’s happening in us gets reflected out there. If we look at these things as dynamic and interrelated; there is a part of me that’s very hierarchical, very managerial, that has my to-do list and my desire for control, for saying who’s better and who’s less, all of that that’s out there is also in here.
I’m grateful for your pointing to transformation and evolution as iterative. As I change, I’m changing systems around me. As the systems around me change, they’ll change me, feeding a hopefully positive spiral that’s moving faster than those who want to steer in unhealthy directions.
Yes.
Speaking of positive influences, would you please introduce us to someone you are/were close with personally (e.g., family, teacher, friend, mentor), who shaped (or shapes) you and how you view leadership and possibility for a better community/world?
Wow. There are so many people who have shaped me and contributed to me.
Malidoma Patrice Somé. He has passed on, so he is now an ancestor. But he was an elder from the Dagara people in Burkina Faso. He wrote a book called The Healing Wisdom of Africa.
This book has just been profound for me of late. He talks about how indigenous people view the world versus how westerners view the world. One of the things he says is that in a village – in his village, amongst his people, is to assume that each one of us has a purpose. Everyone who is here is here for a reason, with a gift.
The person cannot be happy, at peace, can’t vibe in this life if they’re not living their purpose. And they can’t just live their purpose alone – their purpose has to be reinforced or affirmed by community.
So what’s recently come up for me is realizing that when I’m collaborating with someone – whether it’s with “the client,” or “the provider,” we’re collaborating. I was at a retreat, and it really hit me very strongly. By me having signed up for this retreat, I am giving this woman an opportunity to live her gift. And even though her gift is of service to me, if I didn’t sign up, she couldn’t do it, and I’m of service to her.
So I feel like that whole idea of co-creating, partnering with each other, as opposed to “Oh, I’m of service,” “I’m the receiver of the service,” “I’m the client,” that whole situation – that has been dissolved for me.
That’s really powerful – back to power and hierarchy.
Right!
I look forward to reading his book.
I was talking about it for a while, all the time, I tend to do that – read one thing and then it’s all I talk about. [laughing]
One of the things he talks about is his own colonization. He was given to a Catholic school by his father, but his father didn’t know what he was agreeing to when he signed his son over to the school.
I really appreciate the book, because he talks about his own mental disruption. He was screwed up for a couple years after he completed I think 12 years of that schooling.
To come back to his own, to come back to his own people and to re-indigenize. I identify with that journey, wow – watching how you have internalized this stuff, and now wanting to adopt a more holistic values system, but you’ve been taught to disregard that thing that you want to adopt.
It sounds like a terrific roadmap, thank you for sharing. In addition to his book, what do you recommend to us, in each of these categories:
- Reading – Fiction. I just love reading “unrealistic,” magical, speculative fiction. On the serious side, Ursula Le Guin and K. Jemisin – and on the lighter side, I like Charlaine Harris, she’s the author of the Sookie vampire series. She’s got a new series out – the Gunnie Rose series – that I’m reading right now, about an alternative United States history in which the country broke up. And so there are these separate nations on what is now the United States.
- Listening – I am loving two things. One is a group, Bird Tribe, led by Tony Moss, they do neo-medicine music. I’ve also been loving my husband Michael Jamanis’ music.
- Eating – As local as you can. If you can eat something that is on the ground where you live, good. But if you can eat something that is growing nearby, good. Just try to eat as locally as possible, and as many veggies as possible – because again, it’s about that live energy coming inside of you.
- Watching – Watch how much time you spend on your cell phone, in particular. Ask yourself, how many times do you need to check your email a day, really? And do it the minimal amount. How many times do you need to check your messages a day? And really, do it a minimal amount.
- Laughing – For me, joy is about getting outside and appreciating who’s around you, non-humans who are around you. Some people say our “more-than-human kin.” Our more-than-human kin will make me laugh, and bring me joy. My dog makes me laugh, and gets me out of the house! The dogs in my second photo are Jessie the princess of healing and Jake, our minister of love who became an ancestor in July 2022.
- Wildcard – Lean in on some kind of divination tool or process. To make it through the period that we’re in, we’re going to need to rely on something other than the rational, conscious mind. So, whatever you feel comfortable with, I recommend you lean in on that. If there’s something attracting you that you’ve never done before but it’s got you curious, I recommend you walk towards it.
Learn more about Amanda at her website, her Mother Tree Network podcast, or Linked In
Get in touch with Amanda directly: amanda@dramandakemp.com