North Atlantic Books
Excerpts
Download excerpts, practices, rituals, & invocations for:
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Building and sustaining our resistance
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Integrating anger and heartbreak towards liberation
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Holding space for ourselves and others
With gratitude to NAB authors for supporting us in making these excerpts available to readers.
Please continue to check back as we add more throughout the coming weeks and months.
Building and Sustaining Our Resistance
From Healing Justice Lineages: Dreaming at the Crossroads of Liberation, Collective Care, and Safety, by Cara Page and Erica Woodland
This practice invites you to reflect on the roots of your resistance to persevere in the midst of despair. How will you sustain your commitment to liberation for the long haul? What can you draw from to stay the course?
Consider having a notebook, art pad, or other creative medium ready to help you visualize & complete the practice.
Follow Cara:
Follow Erica:
How will you sustain your commitment to liberation for the long haul?
How Much the Heart Can Carry
An excerpt and grief ritual from Mirrors in the Earth: Reflections on Self-Healing from the Living World, by Asia Suler
We think we are too fragile for these times, but we are not. As saner cultures begin to sprout, and healthier ways of relating take root again, we are learning the one skill we need to survive it all—how to let the Earth hold us so we can remember how to hold ourselves.
Once we know this, no matter how dark it gets, we’ll always be able find each other—to join hands with our beloveds in the human and more-than-human-world, as we find the songs that will guide us forward.
Consider having a candle, blanket, or pillow at the ready to help you create a comfortable and healing space to complete the grief ritual.
Follow Asia:
We think we are too fragile for these times, but we are not.
For When the Heart
is Breaking
From Returning Home to Our Bodies: Reimagining the Relationship Between Our Bodies and the World, by Abigail Rose Clarke
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Life includes heartbreak. No amount of deep breathing will take away that fact. And being in deep relationship with the world means being in relationship with the despair caused by violent systems and broken people.
When it feels like the floor is about to fall out from under you, when it feels like you might be washed away with the intensity of your grief, it may be helpful to remember the breathing diaphragm, the primary muscle of the breath, is right here, ready to hold your tender heart.
Follow Abigail:
And perhaps most importantly, the softness this gives me means that, come what may, whether systems change or people are open to the process of repair and healing, I can grow into a more whole version of myself. The breaking doesn’t have to be into pieces; I can break open.
Anger and Sustainability
From A Queer Dharma: Yoga and Meditations for Liberation, by Jacoby Ballard
We can shift how we relate to violence and injustice while still doing everything we can to counteract it and build a better world.
We need that world to exist with us in it, still alive, the changemakers and visionaries healthy and vital—so how we do the work really matters. We want to do our social justice work in a way that is reparative, restorative, revitalizing, so that we’re not worn out with broken hearts and broken bodies when the world we want arrives.
Follow Jacoby:
The resilience we find in self-care practices necessarily impacts the resilience of the community as a whole.
Holding Space for Yourself & Others
An invocation and ritual from New Moon Magic: 13 Anti-Capitalist Tools for Resistance and Re-Enchantment, by Risa Dickens and Amy Torok
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The Circle is Unbroken
But never closed
And so it is
For my Soul and Mind.
I seek beyond history
For a new and more possible meeting.
I must be very strong and love the other
in order to go on living.
My silence will not protect me.
Follow Missing Witches:
My silence will not protect me.
Skillful Mourning
From Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation Through Anger, by Lama Rod Owens
Much of my freedom and joy is bound up in my capacity to mourn. Mourning is my attempt to acknowledge heartbrokenness, accept it, and offer it space to be in my experience so it may do its work of teaching me and passing through. Whenever I feel this energy, I allow it; and it is something that I am encouraging others to do as well.
When we are sitting with someone, it is an expression of compassion to offer them the space to move through their heartbrokenness.
Follow Lama Rod:
In my practice, I’m trying to be in power with my heartbrokenness.
Ground Zero
Follow Kerri:
Follow CTZNWELL:
From American Detox: The Myth of Wellness and How We Can Truly Heal by Kerri Kelly
Nine days after 9/11 we piled into my living room—family, friends, neighbors— and leaned into the TV as President Bush addressed the nation. Our house had become mission control since the attacks—overcrowded with people, activated by the search, and stuffy with uncertainty and grief. We were yearning for answers: How did this happen? What will make it right? But when the president boldly declared retaliation—when he said “this will be a war like no other”—I flinched. At the time, over 10,000 were still unaccounted for (including my stepdad). Hadn’t we lost enough? Why would we put ourselves in a position of losing more? Of risking more lives? Of destroying more families? And in that moment, I had a punch to the gut—a knowing so deep it was undeniable—that meeting violence with more violence was not the answer. As I sat there feeling the sting of his words, the dread of what was to come, I knew that my life as I had known it was forever changed. ... Everything I had come to know about what it meant to be well came crashing down with those towers. My perfectly curated “before” life was shattered, and the illusion that I was somehow insulated and sheltered from the rest of the world was destroyed. And despite society’s attempts to deny us the truth, to numb our pain, to distract us, and to keep us separate and desperate, I was forever altered.
The heartbreak of what I lost on 9/11 was brutal. But equally painful was the realization that I had been living a lie.
From "Enchantment: The Liberatory Gift of Wonder"
From Poetry as Spellcasting: Poems, Essays, and Prompts for Manifesting Liberation and Reclaiming Power, edited by Tamiko Beyer, Destiny Hemphill, and Lisbeth White.
True transformation, true power, does not exist in a vacuum, but in a space with many other energies, many other beings, many other knowings. Or else there is no material, physical or psychic, to transform. There is wonderment in enchantment. It belies innocence, by which I mean both vulnerability and a willingness toward that vulnerability. It softens the rigid edges of thinking to make room for play and the seepage of surprise. The relearning of enchantment activates expansion as we must stretch the container of our perception beyond what is physically and materially known. We must be open to awe.
Follow Poetry as Spellcasting:
My enchantment—my re-enchantment—with the world as a whole becomes my very resistance against isolation, exploitation, and alienation.