“We live in a society of an imposed forgetfulness, a society that depends on public amnesia”
-Angela Davis
Remembering who you are and where you come from is a radical act.
But in the culture that brought us airbrushed waist lines, fast fashion and 50 million… opps I mean 50 BILLION plastic water bottles a year…
Forgetting is a coping mechanism.
(But it’s not really good for any of us)
Forgetting is a trap door that allows folks to bypass history, science, and human experience in the name of capitalism and convenience.
Forgetting costs the planet 78 million acres of rainforest per year, largely to satiate the desire for beef, leather, and dairy.
It costs putting millions of children to work, when they should be playing with their friends and going to school, in order to support western consumerism.
It costs the dignity and humanity of people all over the world.
And it costs lives.
Forgetting who we are, and where we come allows us to fit nicely into a sick society, and prevents us from building a healthy one.
We need to “remember” so we can build a new culture.
We have to know where we’ve been, so we don’t repeat old mistakes.
As radical visionaries, change-makers, and system disruptors , we have to be keenly aware of the systems we are operating in and the patterns we’ve been conditioned to perpetuate.
We have to take responsibility for remembering and honoring the indigenous and ancestral ways of being… so we can rebuild our relationship with the earth, we each other, and with ourselves.
Remembering is how we will collectively get free.
I help my clients remember who they were supposed to be before they internalized the narratives about “being nice” and “playing by the rules” and “being too much/not enough”
When we remember our innate truth, we can begin to unravel the ways in which the current system benefits from our silence/complicity/complacency… and it becomes easier to take action and change the narrative.
Remembering helps us transform shame and guilt into grief and responsibility.
It fuels us to show up for our unique work from a grounded and activated place.
We have to ask ourselves:
Which parts of our authenticity have been forgotten because it benefits the system for us to forget? And how does our remembering make more space for radical social + cultural change?
I invite you to set a timer for 15 minutes and journal on these two questions…
And if you feel like sharing, click here to share your thoughts with me.
Love + Liberation
Lauren Elizabeth