Venus’ Descent into Darkness — Racism in America: Emergency 11 Day Shadow-Integration Challenge
It is not lost on the mystics of the world that the Minneapolis 3rd precinct burned to the ground as Evening Star Venus was making her retrograde exit into the underworld for the next 11 days before emerging again as the Morning Star on June 9th.
(More on this mythological/astrological correspondence in Sunday’s upcoming article).
If you are a white person who wants to be a true alchemizing ally:
Join me for the next 11 days in integrating our internalized racist shadows that we may emerge together on the 9th of June as better effective spirit-driven allies.
Join me in staring into the eyes of the white supremacist inside ourselves that we may emerge together on the 9th of June unattached to the ego-driven need to prove ourselves a good one.
Join me in hacking the program inside each and every one of us that allows us to compartmentalize Black people as the “other” that we may emerge together on the 9th of June understanding that as citizens of the world we are only as free as our most oppressed, we are only as wealthy as our most impoverished, we are only as healthy as our sickest.
Join me in accepting the spiritual responsibility that comes with the unearned platform of white skin that we may emerge on the 9th of June as people ready to make a lifelong commitment to using said platform to leverage antiracism and antioppression in every corner of our lives.
Join me in integrating the shadow that continues to allow Black people to be the only people taking action that we may emerge on the 9th of June understanding that if white people as a whole are to change, then we as white individuals need to change.
Join me in alchemizing the guilt that you have felt for not taking action sooner that we may emerge on the 9th of June in alignment to engage meaningful action on a daily basis for the rest of our lives.
Join me in transmuting the fear that it is too late to change anything that we may emerge on the 9th of June with the courage to address the racism in america as the most pressing core issue of our lives and actually inextricable from other issues (mainly the climate crisis and the genocide and oppression of Native-Indigenous People).
Our next 11 days will look like this:
Days 1–8 Crash course in seeing and disentangling your own racism and collusion with white supremacy by working through Layla Saad’s book “Me and White Supremacy” with shadow-integration support materials from Andrew Harvey’s book “The Hope” and course “The Shadow Course.”
Yes Layla’s course is technically a 4 week course and Andrew’s is an 8 week course. You’ll have the rest of your lives to work both of these courses more thoroughly, but we don’t have that kind of time. This is an emergency, and you are here because you recognize this as an emergency.
This 11 day challenge is a push to get your momentum going and on dissolving the fear and paralysis that has stopped your activism so far.
How many months and years and atrocities and murders and unlawful incarcerations have passed you by with little more than just feeling upset? How many times has an offense against Black existence occurred where you swear that this time you’re going to start doing something about it? How many times have you then just gone back to continuing on with your normal life?
Do you feel in your bones that this is the breaking point inside yourself because it has to be?
Layla Saad divides her book into 4 weeks, so we will do one week’s worth of work every two days.
If you don’t already have the book, buy it on kindle immediately so you can read it on your phone while you wait for your paper copy to arrive. You can also scroll back in her instagram to summer 2018 and screenshot all the posts from the original “me and white supremacy” challenge.
Days 9–10 will be spent in silence and meditation creating space for Spirit to speak through you and direct your divine action, your sacred activism.
Day 11 will be spent dedicated to personal writing as you make your personalized 3-part plan of action.
- Part 1 is your plan for continued shadow integration work as your primary spiritual path.
- Part 2 is your plan for self-education (as it has been stated by many, it is not your Black friends, relatives or colleagues responsibility to do the emotional labor of educating you — but by the time we get to day 11, you will understand this on a deep cellular level). This will be your list of books by Black authors and other resources that you find on your own and commit to reading or watching for a minimum of some amount of time every day.
- Part 3 is your plan for externalized action. This is not posting or reposting or hashtagging within the confines of social media. This is also beyond just calling the numbers, which also needs to happen but it also needs to be recognized as base-level and reactionary and thus not appropriate in terms of mending the fabric. So, of course we have to continue doing those things, but we do so understanding that those are the arrows not the destination.
The point of externalized action is to put yourself and your comfort on the line by making your position and solidarity known to the world. Externalized action means things like:
- Attending and organizing protests
- Volunteering as safety/guard to protect Black people at protests
- Donating money to organizations that are working day and night to protect Black people and change this reality. Donate a little bit more than you’re comfortable with — challenge your sense of financial safety as you recognize the inherent privilege in its existence at all.
- Going to the hospital with your Black friend, relative or colleague as bodyguard/advocate knowing that it is literally not safe for a Black person to walk through the doors of a hospital.
- Attending your Black friend’s, relative’s or colleague’s hospital birth knowing that it is literally not safe for a Black Woman to give birth at a hospital without putting her life in danger. You can do this even if you are not a doula. (more on the above two points in Monday’s upcoming article on doula-ship in general)
- Talking to people about dismantling racism via helping them understand what shadow work is.
- Organizing groups like this one to guide others through shadow integration work (you literally don’t need to be a professional, you just need to care and to have committed to the work yourself).
- Wearing t-shirts that state your position, even/especially in environments where it will rock the boat.
- Start writing. Medium-to-long form. To write is to act, and to engage the spirit at the level of depth required to put your soul out there is much more alchemizing than memeing and posting within the short-form confines of social media.
*These are just a few examples, obviously you can use any or all of them, but your personal plan for externalized action really is personal and it’s meant to be things that resonate with you, that challenge you enough to change you and the world around you, but that are simple (not easy) enough for you to actually follow through with.
We save our plan for externalized action for the end of our challenge because often white people wanting to know “what to do” is a means of bypassing the actual problem which is our unwillingness to do self-reflection.
Often when we don’t get an easy answer from our Black friends when we ask them to do the emotional labor of telling us what we can to do to help, it’s just another excuse to let the prioritization of this movement fall by the wayside. Often when there’s not a protest in our immediate local area, or we can’t find childcare so we can’t go, or any other number of things (internal and external) that prevent us from engaging, we stop there without challenging ourselves to dig deeper to find other ways to support our Black communities.
As a mystic, I must be emphatic in saying that if we attempt to engage externalized action without doing the internal work first, it just doesn’t work right. We want our life’s mission to actually effect change, and when we have the cleared-up channels of shadow integration within us, we can actually be powerful entities in prioritizing dismantling racism.
Yes, this is a big commitment. It will take all day every day. It will exhaust you, shatter what you believed about yourself and the world, rock you with sobs that break you apart enough that you may rebuild yourself anew.
And this is a small offering compared to the sacrifice that Black people live every moment of every day, not by choice but by birth into Black skin. Maybe you had other plans for the next 11 days. So did George Floyd. Your plans literally don’t matter. Plans aren’t real. And there is a part of you that knows this, otherwise you wouldn’t be considering this challenge.
Hashtags aren’t enough. Posting isn’t enough. Re-posting isn’t enough. Sharing isn’t enough. Those are necessary, but they aren’t enough. These are people’s lives. These are the lives of people who share the literal exact same DNA as you. You know this and feel this deeply otherwise the paralyzing weight of your own racism would not have brought you here.
This challenge will take place on my instagram page @thebtchymystic
Please “sign up” below by commenting “I commit” and then sharing this post in your stories or on your page.
