A Plea for Help
Love! What could be more suited to undoing patriarchy than love? Joy perhaps? A lovingjoy, all-one-word, that lives to help self, persons, and earth?
I was helped. I received help and I’d like to pay it forward, yet I require your help to do it. Here’s my account in very brief:
After years of increasing depression and stress, I was at the last threads of my rope. A very kind person’s words came back to me. I call her Violet. Using her approach, I felt better and better and life went better. Then it opened up wildly.
It came down to this: overcoming patriarchal habits of division and control encoded into meanings of common words. A few of my friends have done something similar.
But there’s a problem: I don’t have any idea how the method that helped me so hugely can be broadly accessible. It amounts to prioritizing love-joy-peace-energy (I call it élan) instead of words. It’s taking the division and dominance out of ordinary meanings of words. In that respect, it has affinity with non-violent communication.
I once considered myself worse than worthless, with a negative sense of worth. Finally, I decided the only way I could end depression would involve getting over the meaning of ‘worth’, along with ‘superior’, ‘inferior’, and related ideas that put people—and myself—‘low’. The method worked beautifully and exit-from-depression became rapid. In ten weeks, over ten years of increasing funk ended for good. That was way past 20 years ago. I haven’t had a down day since though I still cry at movies.
I’ve worked to simplify the process. I’d like you to simplify the process even more so it can work for more people. What’s the minimum viable method that works? I don’t have the answer. Can you try it and give advice? I’d be grateful.
The jist: So far, each time a person redefines a concept away from patriarchal leanings, that person has felt better. Each effort’s incremental and (so far) appears to provide sustainable benefit. Thus far, results have been far faster than yoga or meditation and work beautifully in combination with yoga, meditation, or both.
Will you consider helping? I don’t presume to ‘know’ ‘answers’ either. I don’t have answers. I’ve come to this community to learn and ask for help. Some absurdities seem wild to me: even words as innocuous as ‘the’ limited my life and my choices. Overcoming ‘the’ has helped me a ton! I’d like such for you if you’d like it too. More than that, you yourself can find more streamlined, effective, powerful ways to both do the process and how to convey it. I’d like this to be a group effort, because only a group effort works!
Love,
Hillary
p.s. In my experience, fun helps. Good natured sharing and shared laughter about the absurdities of life help us. I wish I had a joke to say, but-