Reciprocal Recovery Project

While I haven’t read them extensively, I know that the reflections below are rooted in lessons passed on by wise ancestors such as Audre Lorde and bell hooks, Black feminist ancestral beacons that are always teaching us how to remember ourselves in right relationship. I’ve received their wisdom mostly from reading adrienne maree brown, in some cases reading their essays compiled by her, and other times reading amb’s reflections on their writings. The teachings of reciprocity that I refer to here are reflections on Robin Wall Kimmerer’s writings and teachings. The somatic teachings of releasing systemic oppression from our bodies come from healer and teacher Resmaa Menakem.

It is time to write.

It is time to put down all of the things I feel like I’m carrying–the wide, overwhelming matrix that often feels like endless puzzle pieces floating in space around me, all tied to each other, but chaotically out of order. Putting them in order feels like it could take my whole life. Maybe it will. So the writing begins now.

In this lifetime, I have been fortunate enough to be a student of how we’re connected. I’ve been fascinated by this since I was a child, when I would close my eyes, feel consumed by the void behind my eyelids, and ask the question in my mind “what was it like before there was anything?” And a feeling of profound peace would rush over and through me, assuring me that this, this peace, is what came before everything. And this peace is inherent to who and what we all are at our core. And this peace is what we return to.

This kind of meditation and insight from a kid shouldn't be surprising. We as children tend to remember what we as adults tend to forget. Plus, I’m an aquarius.

Reciprocity. My word for the year. A word that, when I’m experiencing it, I feel the most alive and attuned that I can feel, similar to the feeling evoked from that innocent meditation on the void. When someone really sees me, and I see them. When I feel the impulse to do something loving for someone just because I want them to feel loved. Or maybe harder, when someone does something loving for me just because they want me to feel loved, without expecting something in return. These experiences and impulses are the fruits, the measuring sticks, the indicators of being in reciprocal relationship, love in action, not just in feeling.

Reciprocity can be a difficult concept to remember, because this market economy (let’s make it sentient for a moment, because it feels that way sometimes) is hell bent on us forgetting what it feels like to be in reciprocal relationship. 

I’m currently reading “The Serviceberry,” by Indigenous author and scientist Robin Wall Kimmerer. A mantra throughout the book is “all flourishing is mutual.” I am a musician, well, mostly a music teacher these days. I’m remembering how to be a musician, someone who makes music because they can’t help it, because music threatens to bubble up through them like water in a spring all day long, and when they let it through, they feel the universe’s joy coming through them, and they feel the most like themselves. My spring was capped long ago, and the process of relieving that pressure has been a long, slow road. But I am remembering. And it feels so, so wonderful to let that water spill out of me more often now than I have in years.

When I heard that line, “all flourishing is mutual,” I remembered it as “thriving”-- “all thriving is mutual.” And hearing those words, a melody gently crept through my mind, converting them into song. I was able to teach that song to my choir community at a meeting we had recently, where I told them I am burnt out and need a season of not holding choir space, and would they be willing to take the baton and continue the organizing of our community while I rest. Of course. Of course, they said. Of course, getting to have that meeting, feel so incredibly seen, held, and cherished by not just their willingness, but their compulsion to take on my request with love and ardor, and then me feeling compelled to do the very thing I have felt too tired to do, lead them in song…that is reciprocity. 

I am so ready to be in right, reciprocal relationship. Right now, one way that is manifesting is being tired of being a teacher. I’ve been a teacher for 20 years. I’ve been someone-raised-as-a-woman all my life, which means I have done so much free emotional and mental labor, it feels like the marrow has been sucked from my exhausted bones. I believe that is the crux of my autoimmune disease (4 out of 5 people with autoimmune disease in the US identify as women or femme). The body is a reflection of the environment. I believe womyn are conditioned to give so much of themselves without reciprocity that their bodies start to take from themselves what they don’t have to give, and thus start attacking themselves (read in the voice of the body to itself: “the buck stops here. I have no more to give. I will rebel against myself because rebellion outside the body is not available yet.”) 

Those primed to receive care or take what they want from folks raised female cannot see this disparity, because they are on the privileged and profiting end of the “exchange.” Seeing this would cause them to feel the deep pain of the imbalance, how their existence has been made possible because of the unreciprocated labor of women and femmes. This is the same enormous, collective wound that privileged folks tap into when they realize they have profited from other groups of people’s pain, often people of color, particularly Black people, especially in the US. The pain of that realization is enormous, it can feel like a black hole ready to swallow you up, which is something most folks do not have the capacity or support to feel.

I so wish we had more compassionate, well-contained spaces for folks to feel how they have taken without reciprocity, because all of us have, and all of us currently do*. If we haven’t actively worked for it to be otherwise, power imbalance and a lack of reciprocity exist in nearly all our relationships, often simultaneously, with both parties using the other unconsciously and non-consentually to fulfill some need. It is the model of relationship we currently know best. This unreciprocal extraction is unconscious for most, and antithetical to how we are built to operate as human beings. It is essentially an addiction most of us have inherited to help keep us alive, and reflects the extraction that humans as a whole commit everyday toward our collective mother, our precious, exhausted, earth (I first heard about dependency on systemic oppression as an addiction from author and teacher Myisha T Hill). 

But reciprocity is the relational structure our hearts and bodies are desperate to return to.

When someone realizes they have lived in such an extractive way, they arrive at a tiny glimmer of a choice point. Most folks are too overwhelmed by the gut punch to realize this choice point is present. The choice is continuing to live as you have, or realizing there is a need to break this addiction. The challenge is, there isn’t a well-known 12 steps group for this kind of addiction. We seldom have a safe place to go. And since breaking any addiction means going through withdrawals, and withdrawal is one of the most vulnerable states we can find ourselves in, people choose without thinking to continue in the addiction. Because, is there really a choice? 

Yes, beloved. There is a choice. Because that same painful blackhole threatening to swallow us up is the same resting place of a void that is compelling us to return to right relationship. It is the tomb and the womb (shoutout to Valarie Kaur), where we go to release that which is no longer serving our collective thriving, and where we are reborn to engage in the world in the way we’ve always known in our exhausted bones we are meant to.

The only way out is through. And the only way through is together.

Now for the very most fun part. I invite you now to consider the delight and magic of what “getting through together” can mean. Labor, while sometimes hard or even painful, can be exquisite. I personally believe that nothing feels better than the labor of crying while being held by someone who is giving you full support, safety, and permission to let go. Have you ever engaged in group labor where everyone was talking, laughing, encouraging each other and offering to help each other out, and then getting to the end goal and getting to experience the sense of immense shared gratification? These kinds of experiences—a long hike, building a house, planting a garden, cleaning up a trashed beach, painting a mural, being in a choir—they are connective experiences that show us that shared labor, even if it’s hard, can be enjoyable, can be ecstatic. And the bonds that are created as we toil together connect us deeply. Also, one of my favorite examples of enjoyable labor: there are folks that orgasm while giving birth to babies. We need not fear labor, but remember how amazing it can feel to engage in it and be transformed by it together.

I intend for this writing space to support difficult, mundane, and ecstatic healing from our addiction to extraction, to the addiction to those systems of oppression that keep us bound to this mode of operating. I believe we need radically compassionate and well-contained spaces where we can feel safe enough to go through cycles of seeing our predicament clearly, then feeling loved and held enough to go through the labor of change, then feeling strong and clear enough to embark on our journey of living in right relationship while supporting others to do the same.

Reciprocity is the lens, the tool, the balm, the agent that makes this process possible. 

All thriving is mutual. Welcome to the Reciprocal Recovery Project.

*Some of the teachers and guides I’ve felt the most held by to do this loving labor are listed here. Many, many thanks to these folks and the spaces they provide. I recommend looking into them and their work if you’re seeking more holding than this blog can currently provide:

Kat Nantz, Louisa “Weeze” Duran, Myisha T Hill, Resmaa Menakem, Char Kasza, Gangaji, Marty Wolins, adrienne maree brown, Lael Keen, Mixed in America, Susan Raffo.

I am absolutely sure I am forgetting someone and will add them as I remember.