The Current: Introduction
January 2021
The Current is working within me and around me. Everything goes through cycles, and the surefire way to bring me back into the flow when I try to resist it is to get dragged. But why get dragged when I can go willingly? Why fight what is within me, which is essentially fighting myself? I am in a period where the deleterious methods of affirming my knowing are being illuminated. I am being shown a less harmful path to acceptance and peace that doesn’t require being dragged or putting myself in danger and distress to arrive at the necessary truth of the Current: that it is me. I surrender to myself and my knowing.
It has not been an easy or a swift lesson. I have spent a long time testing myself and testing through my interactions with other people and environments. However, my testing has always led me back to trusting divine guidance and divine flow. Even with so many tools and methods of receiving confirmation and finding out the order of my steps, the most useful tool has always been attunement, tapping into the Current and making decisions out of an inner guidance that goes in the direction of the Current. Admittedly, I have not always received this guidance with openness. My tendency towards distrust of my somatic experience has led me to test it by going in the direction against it. While this method may still lead me to openings, the path is traveled neither gracefully nor peacefully.
There can be peace in the willingness to explore in a way that is not in resistance to myself or my knowing or the Current, all one and the same. I initially understood darkness as undesirable, but how does one appreciate light without first finding where we are in the darkness? The darkness offers the opportunity to feel into oneself, to find certainty in the integrated body, the soma, who only questions perceptions after accepting them as valid indications of reality and paths to truth.
Having not trusted my own perceptions and having relinquished my intuition to colonized instincts, I have found myself in precarious situations without the slightest clue on how to get out of them or how to mitigate their harm. I have returned to those situations many times to confirm that the discomfort, the signal to save myself, was real. This was me testing myself in a direction against the Current, but the Current never lets up. In resistance to the Current, we will still get swept away into the direction that we need to go.
In just the past month alone, I have had sweeping after sweeping. It is obviously the time for me to release my tendency toward resistance, my tendency toward testing in a direction against the flow, my tendency toward disbelief and distrust of my own inner Current. In this moment of rest, regrouping, and recalibration, I have found that what I once understood to be undesirable is the very thing that is necessary, the very thing that governs and structures all life regardless of what external systems and framings exist to make us deviate from this truth.
What’s been illuminated is the openness of Chaos. We come from Chaos, and Chaos is ordered in ways that are beyond our comprehension. We come closer to understanding by tuning into the Current because the Current is the order of the Chaos.
Divine timing, a way to describe the Current, but also inadequate in that it is so much more, is paramount to the understanding of Chaos because it provides a thread for us to discern how things flow. As I’ve tuned into my inner Current, I’ve found that all the places I’ve been and all the places where I am now followed a nonlinear path that made it possible for me to be where I needed to be to receive and experience that which is for me, that which makes it possible for me to attune to divine guidance in the direction that is most peaceful and to survive the barrage of harm that is directed at me as a result of being of a body that is not the most valued under the white supremacist patriarchal capitalist order.
Chaos provides the openings. Chaos gives us the opportunity to experience both dark and light so that we know how to bring them into balance. Chaos shows us what and where darkness is so that we may learn to appreciate it before directing light. To work with Chaos is to work with laws of complements, balance, and harmony.
The cold, dark season comes because it helps us to appreciate the balance achieved through cycles, which we all must experience. Everything requires its period of rest and receptivity, its period of solitude and darkness, of shadows and obstructions of light, of trying to find and follow the sun so as to not be overcome by the cold. In this period of darkness, we learn how to re-energize ourselves after going through a period of depletion and pouring, a period where we are testing the integration of our experiences with other people. The cold, dark season asks us to turn into ourselves and consider how our methods are working. It asks us to alter those methods if they are proving unhelpful. It asks us to shift our understanding to find methods that prove beneficial and aligned with the Current.
Through this shifting and reshaping, I have found that the framing matters and that all systems create feedback loops, which we will find ourselves stuck in and recycling if we don’t acknowledge and shift the framing that produces dangerous outcomes. If I am looking at a monster, then that probably means my framing is not accurate, because monsters do not exist within the Current. If I am looking at a monster, then I have become a monster too, because all others mirror myself back to me. We deserve more grace and compassion than that. We deserve to acknowledge and value our complexity and the ever-moving cycle of energies and energy exchanges.
As I feel myself becoming more acclimated to the cold, I’m more aware of an inner fire that sustains me. And it is not just fire alone, but all of the elements that I must know how to hold in balance. I must know how to shift in and out of their qualities when necessary. The problem with the systems that become our framings and create our feedback loops is that they don’t know how to hold the elements in balance. There’s too much imposition and not enough receptivity. Despite this imbalance, the Current runs through us all, so it’s still running through the entire collective even when we are subject to systems and framings that skew our access to and perceptions of inner knowing. Thus, everything is still within the Current and moved along by it, even when we try to push against it.
Oppressive systems are always shifting to sustain themselves because they can’t truly escape the Current. They reinvent themselves through new symbologies to make themselves unrecognizable as they are carried along. By changing the face of the framing, oppressive systems have been rather successful at sustaining themselves and escaping accountability. It’s only by reaching through past and future that we come to recognize the faces we’re staring at. They are the faces of a continuation of a long, long tradition of violence and subjugation. There have been many times, including now, where we have failed to make the Current the framing through which we see everyone and everything, including ourselves.
Now, we’re in this moment where the Universe is telling us that the Current must be recognized because it does not give up. The failure to recognize is not to suggest that there have never been folks who were aware of and tuned into the Current. It is to say, however, that as a collective, we have had to go through the portals traumatically because we lost our ability to assuage collective harm. When everything became about imposing oneself on other peoples, we could no longer see how collective harm meant individual and collective trauma in all directions. The ones who impose suffer too. Harm calls for rectification, and continued abuses must come to an end.
As the Current takes over because more of us are willing to access it within ourselves and give it a governing role within our lives, those who institute and impose oppressive framing are being called to task. With so many presently colliding realities that interact with one another and produce multiplied harm, many of the collective are unwilling to allow oppressive systems to continue transforming into other, bigger harmful conglomerates of oppression. So we’re accessing the inner Current.
As part of my self-work during this period of winter, rest, darkness, coldness, solitude, stillness, and silence, I have been guided to identify my patterns and the threads that have led me here to this moment. What I have found is the subtle link between instinct and intuition, between patterns and processing, that is either skewed or altogether severed due to the ways that white supremacist patriarchal capitalism has colonized our instincts and impacted our intuition. White supremacist patriarchal capitalist framing denies us the somatic awareness that serves as the guiding compass for our alignment with and attunement to universal energies that place us in right relationship with ourselves, each other, our environments, and the divine. I believe that reframing our lives through the Current, acknowledging the Current as the guiding and governing system of our lives, happens through and strengthens somatic awareness.
What follows in a later essay is an explanation of the soma, the seat of our knowing, and somatic awareness, the interplay between instinct and intuition. I articulate how white supremacist patriarchal capitalism and its reinforcement are predicated upon the denial of somatic awareness. Nonetheless, the Current does not allow the complete severance of somatic awareness because it is only through the soma that we can experience human life.
Somatic awareness, then, calls on intuition to process and interrogate embodied patterns. This processing requires us to acknowledge and sit with difficult instinctual responses to oppressive framing. Engaging with our emotions, feelings, patterns, and darkness provides openings for transformation, integration, and embodiment in our daily lives. Through these internal processes, we are then able to shift our external framing, replacing that which is oppressive with what is liberating and attuned to divine internal guidance, which is also external in that it is universal.
This exposition pulls from a variety of sources, including but not limited to life experience, scholarly theory, spiritual concepts and practices, professional guidance from a therapist, and the documentation of my own patterns through journaling. It is an autoethnography of sorts; I identified emerging themes and patterns through review of personal journals I kept from March to December of 2020.
While the review is from writing in the space of nine months, the understanding I reach is the result of lifelong work and experiences that preceded the documentation beginning March 2020. In fact, my study of somatics began during my time in graduate school from 2018 to 2019, and my deconstruction of white supremacist patriarchal capitalism began, in earnest, during my undergraduate education from 2011 to 2016. Furthermore, while I have always had an interest in religious and spiritual knowledge and practice, a profound shift in my interest and practice occurred around 2015 with my introduction to African traditional religions, African Diasporic religions, and New Age spiritual practices.
May this work be insightful to all those who choose to read it. May it affirm your own knowing and inner Current. Take that which you need from it and leave the rest. Ase.