110: How to Fight

Speaker 1: How to make love. Now, is that from recipe or from scratch? This is how to make love. Wow. Oh gosh. Oh my God. A little to the left and faster. A show that tests the edges of what love is, worthiness, empathy, beauty, sex, positive, the borders. It can cross how we do integrity in all of our relationships, and its hidden costs and shadows. In a world where we other people, where we build walls, we just tear down walls, fuck finding it or falling into it. Our future depends on making it. Hey everybody, welcome back to How to Make Love, a podcast designed to hone your love and justice and courage muscles. I'm Laura and I'm super glad you're here. And today we're going to talk about how to fight. I don't know about you all, but I am walking around in the world right now, heartbroken and pretty pissed off every day, just more and more and more violence and oppression.

Speaker 1: And I found that the rage and the anger and the exhaustion and the overwhelming frustration of watching people in power wield this control and vitriol and cruelty and greed like weapons. It has been consuming me if I'm honest. And I notice in those moments, in these moments of rage and anger that I really want to lash out. I want sometimes to enact harm against the people I perceive to be ambassadors of oppression. I want to match fire with fire. I want to dominate what and who seeks to dominate others. So I tighten my grip, I demand punishment, I hoard or I isolate or I silence other people. And when all of that starts to build, I know I've been duped and I know I need to slow down because that's the trick of oppression. It invites us to play by it's rules. It seduces us into believing that power's about force and that the only way to stop harm is to control harder.

Speaker 1: And the only way to win is to become the thing that we actually desire to resist. But if we do all that, we don't win. We just reify the systems that we want to undo. It's this heartbreaking cycle of using force and control to try to stop force and control. And we know in our best moments, that's not the path of love, and it's certainly not the path of liberation. So let's rethink what it actually means to fight today. Not in the way we've been conditioned, not as a struggle to dominate or conquer or eradicate an enemy, but as a practice of becoming something so different, so free, so ungovernable by the values of control and punishment and greed that the old system simply can't hold us anymore. Fighting not in the paradigm of war, but as this disciplined intentional effort of breaking free. That's what I want to talk about.

Speaker 1: Listen, I get it, my friends, it can be really, really easy to think we are in a war against them, whether it's the billionaires or the fascists or Elon or the people in power orchestrating this horrendous collapse. Our culture tells us we need to be against someone or something. But I think if we pause for a minute or when I pause for a minute, I see that though there are forces at play out there, what I want to be up to is learning how to fight for something rather than against it. And I think what we're fighting for is our own. Humanity is a collective. And the thing about fighting for humanity is that it's both an inside and an outside undertaking. And that's because oppression doesn't just show up in policies and institutions. It shows up in us in the way we control, in our relationships, the way we police each other's mistakes, the way we hoard our resources or our love or our care, the way that we exile people when they fall short and make big mistakes the way we silence ourselves when we're afraid of getting it wrong.

Speaker 1: There's just so much. So if we don't fight those things inside of us, it's going to be really, really, really hard to dismantle them out in the world. And I understand I've fallen for all this too. I have tried to control what scares me. I have shut people out in the name of self-protection. I've let my fear of losing love convinced me to tighten my grip. I've policed, I've patrolled, I've controlled, I've repressed, I've suppressed, and I've shut down, extracted and colonized in big and little ways a thousand times over. But I also know that every time I fought control with control or exile with exile or punishment, with punishment, I have lost something real. I have betrayed my own desire for liberation and I refuse to do that anymore, at least to the extent that I can be conscious of it. So if we're serious about liberation, if we're actually wanting to fight in a way that matters, in a way that heals, in a way that restores, we have to keep practicing the opposite of the forces that we claim to resist. So let's dig in.

Speaker 1: Here's what I think our work involves. Instead of becoming what we fight or what we oppose, we work to become sort of the opposite. We work to become ungovernable, unmoved by the values of control and fear. So much so that we make them irrelevant, that we dissolve their power not by force, but by refusing to live inside their logic. So we're going to go step by step through some of the main fighting tactics that the world, the world of oppression, systems of oppression, status quo culture uses and rewards. And we'll talk about how to fight back. And I'll give you reflection questions in each area so that you can have some introspection about how to put up a better fight in your life, so to speak, if better means not only more effective, but also more unconventional, more resistant. I see five primary weapons and tactics that systems and the status quo culture use all the time.

Speaker 1: The first is control. So when the world wields control, we need to learn to wield freedom as a practice concretely in our words and our thoughts and our actions and how we embody consent. There are so many ways to do this, but it requires a very conscious practice. When you are in places and spaces where control is being exerted, how do you start to move in ways that engender freedom for yourself and others? How do you talk and move and be and communicate and connect in ways that offer freedom? Here are some reflection questions for you to noodle on how to do this better. So number one, where in your life are you tightening your grip? Where are you afraid to let go? Those are hints about where you might be hanging on to or using some unnecessary control. Number two, what would it mean to practice consent based power to lead, to influence, to act boldly, but without coercion really embodying radical consent?

Speaker 1: What would it look like to embody consent in all of your actions and relationships for that matter? My experience is that real freedom isn't so much about seeking or receiving permission to do something. It's about being so rooted in your own power and agency. That external power has a really, really hard time getting ahold of you. It might limit or constrain your actions, but it does not constrain your sense of self, your sense of connection to self, your sense of agency, your connectedness to others. So when the world enacts control, you enact freedom, choice, presence, consent, spaciousness. The second way I see the world fighting and attacking is through policing. And what I mean by that is its use of monitoring, judging, controlling the actions and behaviors of others. So when the world polices, we need to learn how to wield abolition. And again, here's some reflection questions for you.

Speaker 1: Where do you instinctively reach for punishment instead of repair? Punishment can look like reprimand judgment, and it can look like withholding as a form of punishing someone. It can look like silence or silencing other people. So where do you reach for that instead of repair? Also, what would it mean to build an ethic in your life where accountability is real, but exile punishment? It's not the answer. What might it look like for you to really reject this notion or this tendency culturally to cancel other people? Abolition isn't just about systems, it's about reworking how we handle harm at every level of our lives. When the world works to punish, we need to learn to be the conditions for repair. Okay, next common fighting tactic that systems of oppression or status quo culture really use is a notion of extracting and hoarding. And so when the world does that, we need to learn how to wield generosity on purpose.

Speaker 1: So where are you afraid of not having enough? This could be time or energy or love or money. How are you working to heal those narratives? How are you working to challenge those narratives? And what would it mean to live as if more than enough were possible even in a world trying to convince you otherwise? My experience is that generosity can be a form of resistance, namely because it disrupts the logic of scarcity. It breaks the illusion that you have to protect yourself at all costs. But as with all things that we talk about in this podcast, that requires training, we have to train ourselves to give generosity as a currency, as an ethic, as a practice when our instinct might be to take or to protect when things feel really scary. Alright, home stretch. We're going to talk about two more tactics that the world wield as weapons, as it fights with oppression.

Speaker 1: So the next one is the use of isolation. So when the world isolates, we need to learn how to wield connection. And this one is especially hard for me. The older I get, the more introverted and the more of a loner I become and I'm working on it. But it's true, it can be easy for me to say, it's fine to isolate because I really like my own company or justify it because I'm an introvert. But while those things are true, I have to hold that alongside this notion that isolation is complicated at best, can be complicated at best, and it can be harmful at worst. Remember that all these tactics that the world uses are really well-trained. They are meant to best us. And I get bested all the time by the pull toward isolation. There's a difference between recovery and retreat. There's a difference between alone time and pulling away.

Speaker 1: And it takes work to tune into the difference in your body. I'm not just an introvert. I pull away all the time from connection, from care, from vulnerability, from community, and that's when I need to look up and see that the world's weapons are working on me and I have to learn to fight back with an impulse toward connection instead. So a couple of questions for you. Where are you keeping yourself disconnected or small or constrained or out of reach? Check in with yourself. Is that intentional? And where do you feel the line being drawn between alone time and pulling away? The next question is, what would it mean to risk interdependence? To let people see you, to help you to love you, but what would be the risk in and for your life? And what would it mean to take that risk? Oppression thrives in isolation and love thrives in this messy, vulnerable practice of showing up and being seen.

Speaker 1: So again, when the world isolates, we need to be able to have the skills and the capacities and the desires and the habits of connection last when the world uses silence, which it does and will again and again. We need to be able to wield expression and creativity and truth telling, power oppression. They seek to silence other narratives in ways of being. We know that. So we have to not just embrace those other narratives and ways of being, but learn to write and speak them, to lift them up to express to our fullest capacity because it makes silence so much harder to enforce. So what are you afraid to say? What truth have you been holding back on? And what would it mean to train in truth telling in your life, not as an act of aggression, not as a weapon, not as a way to enact harm, but as an act of freedom, as an act of love? What would that take for you to make truth telling an act of love if it were that? What sort of truths would you need to say to yourself and others? The goal isn't just to say something, it's to make speaking truth. So embodied, so heart-centered, it's second nature that silence no longer has the capacity or the conditions to thrive.

Speaker 1: Alright, y'all. So we learned to fight non-traditionally unconventionally with freedom, abolition, generosity, connection, expression among many other things. But these five are strategic responses to some of the most common weapons of oppression. The hardest part of this practice, well, for me, it's not about resisting external power. It's about resisting the ways I have internalized it. We all have a cop in our head, we all have a hoarder in our chest. We all have authoritarianism somewhere in our gut, convinced that the only way to be safe is to use control or to punish or to grip a little tighter. And if we're not training ourselves out of those instincts, then we're doomed to repeat the cycle under a different banner. The fight for justice and love isn't just about dismantling the world as it is. It's about training for the world. We actually want to live in building those conditions on purpose bit by bit.

Speaker 1: So I want to ask you, number one, where in your life are you still practicing the things that you want to be fighting against? Number two, if someone looked at your actions, not at your beliefs, not at your values, but just at your actions, would they see the world you say you want. Number three, what is one thing you can do today to fight in the values and practices we discussed through this episode to train for the world we actually want to be a part of. Because this is not just about what we're against, it's about what we're building, what we are becoming, even in the midst, especially in the midst of the hardship all around us. I think that's the real fight, and I want us to win. Thanks for being here, friends. Next up, an incredible, incredible interview with former guest Roshi Norma Wong. Be on the lookout in a couple of weeks for that. Until then, everybody may you fight well and with new tools. I'll see you next time. Bye for now.