SHE CALLS ME WITH HER SACRIFICE

Daily Meditation, Inspirations, and Practices for the Sacred Masculine March 12

• My practice: 5am: 45 minutes of yogic practice and Meditation to Purify the Elements

• My vulnerability practice: Remembering mistakes, willing to feel the shame and regret, that I may not be so again… And, trusting her, that I too am changed.

Hans Peter Meyer

TODAY'S MEDITATION

The call of fascism appears not with men in jackboots blowing trumpets and waving flags. Though that too, perhaps soon enough.

The call of fascism is, again and simply, anger in the streets, and especially in the most anti-social of media. Young men blaming women (and anyone “other” than their bleached and twisted version of masculinity) for so many things they think they deserve. Among them: sex, money, purpose.

But our sense of entitlement —“our,” because I too was once a young man who took what I wanted, what I believed, without thinking, that the world, this life, offered me— our sense of entitlement is just one of the many (but perhaps most painful, and especially for those we “other”), stage we must grow through. To realize this: I deserve nothing. You deserve nothing. Except this: the opportunity to serve something greater than ourselves. And, if we’re lucky, we understand that that something bigger isn’t a leader or a god or even a “purpose.” That something is love.

We are guided to that understanding by shame, regret, by a willingness to learn from & through mistakes honest and less-than honest,  and not letting ourselves off the hook…

…

We are, today, a scant four days from the day of remembering women. A good time to think about the everydayness of fascism that creeps back into our lives as we —men, some of us actively, so many of us passively— allow or encourage institutions to limit what women can and cannot do with their bodies. All the cries of “Freedom” invoked by the proto-fascists, with the intent of limiting freedoms for the “others.”

…

I am roiled today, in part by what I’m seeing in the world around me. And because last night I watched, for the first time, A Promising Young Woman. Terrible. Yet it was just a fictionalized account of what was observable during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings during the reign of Trump. The ugly eruption of this culture’s hate for women who will not be still. Who “ruin everything,” as one character in the movie put it.

…

We don’t deserve anything —except, perhaps, the opportunity to feel our shame, to regret who we’ve been. And to make amends. To behave differently. To feel more. To be more open. To create and hold safe spaces for those we’ve “othered.” To allow ourselves to be vulnerable to the beauty and the love that we feel so threatened by.

…

I’ve made mistakes. Many mistakes. Some of these were what I’ll call “honest mistakes” —I was trying to do the “right thing,” and I failed. But others were not so “honest.” These were mistakes I made where I knew I was wrong, yet I persisted, at others’ expense.

What moved me to persist in the face of knowing I was wrong? Selfishness. Self-righteousness. Self-centredness. Not intentionally mean, nasty, cruel, hurtful. But certainly all or most of that in how it was experienced by the others. And all I had to do to persist was to close my heart, to choose to not consider the other as a person, like me, with feelings, fears, desires…

Regret and shame. It’s not popular to call on these today, except to vilify and blame. But what if these are the very tools we need when faced with the nascent fascism in the streets and on the media, and in our very self-righteous selves? It seems to me that a healthy culture needs these tools, to remind us of our culpability, and of the consequences of persistent and wilful and wrong choices.