"Your Liberation is Bound to Mine," was the title of a workshop I read about on my recent travels down the Pacific coast from Washington, through Oregon to Northern California in June. The workshop, in Astoria, Oregon, was designed to educate and protest against the routine practice of the enormous corporate conglomerations, like Mansanto, who control local farming and the big business of tampering with our food sources while routinely bringing in illegal Mexican workers, who they underpay and don't defend when they are subject to violence, designation as illegal aliens and subsequent deportation. The phrase struck me as a clear, concise and accurate statement of what seems irrevocably true to me, about how things work.
Since then, the devastating events between police and those whom they are designed to protect, the ongoing challenges of racial inequality as well as all types of bias that foster outrage in our own country, as well as the increasing horror of daily terrorist attacks around the world, occurring at a time when we are more able than ever to be in communication with one another through the advances that we ourselves have created through the internet and social media, make it all the more paradoxical that we continue to ignore this concept that our humanity is bound up inextricably with one another as well as our planet.
On further investigation, I found that the phrase is credited originally to an indigenous Australian, or Murri, artist /activist/ academic by the name of Lilla Watson, who works in the field of women's issues and Aboriginal Epistlemology. She was hesitant to accept the phrase as her own, stating that she was, "not comfortable being credited with a phrase that was born of a collective process" and prefers that it be credited to "Aboriginal activists group, Queensland, 1970's."
The full phrase,
" If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together,"
is seen in the poster at the top of this page.
Dune Shack Dharma is all about slowing down enough to be present to our own skin and environment, our thumping heartbeat humming with aliveness to the thrumming of every other thing, where everything is already connected. Everything that pulls us away from that presence is what leads us to the fear engendered by the mental constructs of our intellect. It leads us to separation, destruction, greed and violence. It's in all of us. But so is that infinite seed of creation - the Breath of the New Moment, the End and the Beginning.
I salute you Life, World, and Everything in It.
Harmonychiroyoga.com
