Transformation at the Threshold
Thinking, doing and being. Collective transformation at our boundaries.
Our bodies, senses, conscious, unconscious and higher selves’ are living our lives. Isolation and a daily meditation practice have allowed for some thinking time. Reflection. Slowing down, mindfully observing the un-doing of modern life. Un-doing the working, travelling, studying, reading, consulting, deadline-ing, function-ing, gig-ing, invoicing, eating, laundry-ing, grooming, exercising, zooming, re-framing, re-zoning, re-modelling, re-imagining . . .and landing into simply being. Being within, breathing nature, intuiting the soul’s wisdom and sensing ‘knowing’.
Joe Dispenza examines the idea that we humans have three ‘brains’ — our neo-cortex/thinking conscious brain, our limbic/chemical emotional brain and our cerebellum/reptilian unconscious brain — neural connectivity driving our thoughts, feelings and behaviours. Dropping into the heart, observing our hands’ actions and mindful of thoughts inspired a curiosity about the transitions between these ‘brains’ and the threshold of each. The spaces between one inner life, one body’s thinking, doing and being and the thoughts, spaces and bodies of others. Wondering how our past internal and external experiences inform the present connectivity between how we think, do and be. Imposed social distancing also making one more cognizant of our liminal spaces and their boundaries.
BOUNDARY: a wall, a border, a frontier, a threshold, a dividing line, a limit, an edge, an interface
Throughout history boundaries are often sites associated with conflict and struggle over land, power, resources and people. Boundaries exist within a marriage, when navigating parenting, professional and personal relationships. Borders are policed. Edges and limits are flexed when we express ourselves and process emotions. Being at the contiguousness of our boundaries requires emotional intelligence, nuance, fluidity and flexibility. Sustaining healthy boundaries upholds our values, grounding us with strength and the will to resist being tractable.
The frontiers of our inner lives explore what we come to believe and ‘know’ to be ‘us’. Without reflection and inner exploration we remain ignorant, blind and deaf to our higher selves and the harm our inner voices and trauma inflicts on our personal boundaries. Healing our wounds and doing the ‘work’ can shed new light and increases the ability to consciously navigate our inner frontiers.
We can seek an understanding of different cultural experiences and standpoints to consciously inquire into what Martin Nakata calls The Cultural Interface between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. We can be inclusive and aware of the intersection of race, gender and sexuality, where Gloria Anzaldua’s calls the Borderlands . Is it possible that it is at these thresholds we could find the keys to transform, heal and evolve our collective humanity?
Where do ‘we’ start and finish?
Confusion can exist at the boundary of ‘what is mine’, ‘what is yours’, ‘what is not mine’, ‘what is not yours’. ‘Doing’ healthy physical, mental, emotional and spiritual boundaries transforms our ‘self’ and our relationships.
Charles L. Whitfield claimed ‘boundaries are crucial in healing psychological damage.’ (p.5) Our physical boundaries encompass a broad spectrum of simple and complex factors when in proximity to other bodies. From simple loving touch and gestures to eye contact, body language, sexual behaviour, harassment and unwanted touch and invasions of privacy. Human beings’ physical evolution requires the support of boundaries to secure our safety at home, for food, money, clothing and time. It is accepted by many healers that we hold trauma in our physical bodies, it can trigger social anxiety, or even panic, when our bodies enter and exit physical spaces. When we experience such unconscious physical triggering of childhood trauma it affects how we enact boundaries in our relationships.
“We can be shattered by what we come up against.
And then we come up against it again.
We can be exhausted by what we come up against.
And then we come up against it again.”
Sara Ahmed, “Living a Feminist Life” (p 163)
From conception through the birth canal and our early years our bodies learn to ‘do’ by sight, sound, touch, smell and taste. These early sensory experiences of, and within, our bodies and others impact our world view, sense of safety, fear and love.
The birth canal is the first physical boundary we cross. A beautiful, exhausting mess of new life seperates from the womb to (ideally) be held in loving arms. It is the role of our care givers to nurture and support this newly ‘separated’ spirit for the next couple of decades into adulthood. However, what if a new life lands into a hostile environment shortly after birth in the days, weeks, months or early years that follow?
Children, separated from their birth parent/s for one reason or another, keenly experience how the body feels when it is physically abandoned outside the womb. What Nancy Newton Verrier, in her book about the pre and perinatal psychology of adoption, calls the Primal Wound. A psychological wound that feeds a lifelong quest for identity and the ‘need to prove that [she] has a right to exist in the world’. (p.71) The initial pain of separation from the birth mother, and any further emotional harm caused by the adoptive mother deeply wounds the inner child. The wounded baby becomes a little girl, a teenager and a complex [1] woman. The woman experiences life impacted by post-traumatic stress. Pete Walker’s work on Complex-PTSD lists the symptoms of traumatising abandonment as “emotional flashbacks, toxic shame, self-abandonment, a vicious inner critic and social anxiety. “ (p.3) [2]
It is well known that humans’ intuitive responses to danger include flight, flight and freeze. A more complete picture emerges when you include a fourth, the ‘fawn’ response.
“A fawn response is triggered when a person responds to threat by trying to be pleasing or helpful in order to appease and forestall an attacker.” (Walker, p.13)
We can learn to will the body to suppress physical triggers and anxiety through years of ‘fawning’. Desperatly seeking an identity, to be seen and heard. Gripped by fear in the throat when speaking up and out. Living with hypervigilance down to the bone, apprehensive of being touched when standing in a crowd, on a dance floor or at a music festival. The body learns to acquiesce for physical and sexual safety. Learned self-talk from a ‘fawner’ can include: ‘I better fit in’; ‘don’t make a fuss’ ; ‘always be clean and tidy’ ; ‘behave’ ; ‘be quiet’ ; ‘be compliant’ ; ‘put your knees together’ ; ‘don’t ask for it’ ; ‘make yourself smaller’ ; ‘be charming’ ; ‘be easy to please’.
Be. Willing.
Crossing the threshold of willing to wilful
The momentum of a life with Complex-PTSD can cause a level of willingness that can land a woman in a place that disrupts the status quo when she finally adopts healthy boundaries. Boundaries require vigilance and ‘work’ to maintain — a certain wilfulness.
Feminist theorist Sara Ahmed’s writes of “Wilfulness and Feminist Subjectivity” explaining how women “pick up feelings that are not supposed to be felt because they get in the way of an expectation of who we are and what life should be.” (p. 65)
A certain degree ee of wilfulness is embedded in the ‘doing’ of boundaries. It is at this threshold that a ‘gear change’ takes place, from being a compliant and willing feminist subject, to being a wilful one — women saying no, speaking up. Women standing or sitting how they want, where they want. No longer suffering the incessant inner dialogue of social anxiety and emotionality that exists at the edge of body and mind. Non-existent, or poor, boundaries will continue to attract people and situations that do not support, value or respect us. The ‘doing’ of being ‘too willing’ or ‘too wilful’ requires clear boundaries to keep us safe and maintain our self respect and integrity. Women reclaim their physical spaces and inner-lives, safety, freedom and agency when wilfully being our ‘true selves’ at the boundaries. They can be fully present, speak and hold space with respect and integrity. They find the courage to cross the threshold to being wilful from the comfort and habit of being willing. [3]
Unsettling the status quo
As lives move on into the post-COVID-19 world the ‘norms’ and biases for how men and women navigate spaces and behaviours will require vilgilance and a willingness for progress. There could be an increasing wilfulness from all genders in the practising of presence and physical boundaries.
Sandy Doyle wrote in the very first line of her 2017 book Trainwreck that seeks to understand why we love to hate, mock and fear women :
“She’s everywhere once you start looking for her: the trainwreck” (Sandy Doyle Trainwreck p. xi)
Women that transgress accepted boundaries can become either a scapegoat or a revolutionary. They stop shutting up and begin speaking up. Boundaries are crossed, expectations challenges, rules are broken when women commit the ‘crimes’ of wilfully expressing their sexuality, emotional needs and true selves.
As transformational as collective relationships and feminism are — they can only evolve humanity so far. If we don’t challenge the ongoing class opportunism and damage of mainstream (white) feminism ongoing harm will prevail.
Rejecting Boundary Street
Non-Indigenous people almost never give a thought to the evidence they are colonists. As bell hooks reminds us “unenlightened white feminists (are) unwilling to acknowledge the spheres of life where they act in collusion with imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” (p. 46) If we are to evolve and heal the collective by the ‘doing’ of healthy boundaries it is imperative we break what hooks calls ‘the wall of denial.’ (p47)
Reject ideas of feminism that do not interrogate the self at the borders of colonialism, exploitation and oppression. Recognise, hold space for and manage the tensions, perspectives, knowledges and pain at the site of Nakata’s ‘Cultural Interface’ — the threshold of Indigenous and Non-Indigenous people’s standpoints, ways of knowing and being. Seek inclusive, productive and conscious ways of acknowledging, accepting or rejecting the complexity of coloniality. Be willing to acknowledge the tensions and triggers of physical experiences, trauma and collective memory of the pain at exploited boundaries and the diverse responses found there. Seek understanding and compassion for ourselves and others at the Cultural Interface. Actively search for safe pathways forward. Only through challenging our personal and collective practices of thinking, doing and being at the interface can we value and respect each others integrity.
Evolution at the threshold
“New life forms capable of meeting the challenges of a changing world don’t emerge from the status quo, but instead germinate in the pools of social diversity.”
(David Engwicht “Your New Wings”)
At the 2018–19 Woodford Folk Festival change coach David Engwicht spoke about evolution as only happening in the marginality of spaces. The spaces between ecosystems, in the fringes and empty areas usually bordered between ‘things’. What exists inbetween the traversing of borders and boundaries ? How does change happen in the spaces between our individual liminal, inner and physical worlds and those of others?
The very marginality of our own evolution exists when we poke at the boundaries of our assumptions, habits, bias, emotional triggers and memories. We could choose to throw ourselves into doing and/or un-doing, protesting for change and creating chaos whilst seeking new ways to view and evolve the world within healthy human boundaries.
Ahmed explores in Part III of Living a Feminist Life how we ‘create other ways of being when we have to struggle to be’ and provides a Killjoy Survival Kit. Survival itself can be a protest for change. How we care for ourselves, our inner lives, our bodies and some fence mending of our boundaries and curiosity about life at the interface during this time could in itself become the living embodiment for positive change in the world.
Another answer could lie in what Jungian analysist Clarissa Pinkola Estes inspired a generation of women to do — reclaim their ‘true’ wild selves. In the chapter Shadowing: Canto Hondo, the Deep Song of her book Women Who Run with the Wolves Estes offers that for change to happen we need to ‘call back the hawk which has been let fly’ — to use the voices in our minds (thinking), to live our lives (doing) and nourish our souls (being). To call back imagination and intuition and break away from, or tunnel through, change and evolve. Estes, First Nations women, Camille Paglia, Madonna and the punk rock Riot Grrrls all contend that there really is a feminine nature, to be celebrated and not reasoned away. The Wild Woman that Estes asks us to find within is at odds with the pre-Covid world.
Let us welcome our Wild Woman at the threshold, the margins and boundaries of being wilful/willing subjects. Let us reimagine and heal our personal boundaries within ourselves and between all humans — men and women, Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples.
Our individual struggles at the threshold do matter. Together we can choose to transform and evolve ourselves and the collective, we can all willingly move forward with courage, integrity and respect.
[1] Substitute words via a Visual Thesaurus for the adjective ‘complex’ include: difficult, hard, intricate, composite, colonial, convoluted, knotty, tangled and torturous . All those words I could have used to describe a ‘complex’ woman. Mind boggles.
[2] For a more extensive and clinical understanding of Complex-PTSD a good starting place is Judith Herman’s 1997 seminal book Trauma and Recovery. Rev. ed. edition, BasicBooks, 1997.
[3] Brené Brown unpacks the word integrity as choosing “courage over comfort” in her 2018 book “Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts.” Random House.
REFERENCE/READING LIST
Ahmed, Sara. Living a Feminist Life. Duke University Press, 2017.
Anzaldua, Gloria. Borderlands : The New Mestiza = La Frontera. San Francisco : Aunt Lute Books, 1987.
Dispenza, Joe. Dr. Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself. Hay House, 2012.
Doyle, Sady. Trainwreck — the Women We Love to Hate, Mock and Fear and Why. Melville House Publishing, 2016.
Estés, Clarissa Pinkola. Women Who Run with the Wolves : Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype. First edition. New York : Ballantine Books, 1992.
hooks, bell. Feminism Is for Everybody Passionate Politics / Bell Hooks. [Second edition].. edition, New York : Routledge, 2010.
Nakata, Martin. “The Cultural Interface.” Australian Journal of Indigenous Education, vol. 36, 2007.
Verrier, Nancy Newton. The Primal Wound : Understanding the Adopted Child. Gateway Press, 1993.
Walker, P. Complex Ptsd: From Surviving to Thriving: A Guide and Map for Recovering from Childhood Trauma. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013.
Whitfield, C.L. Boundaries and Relationships: Knowing, Protecting and Enjoying the Self. Health Communications, Incorporated, 1993.
I write from my own standpoint as a quinquagenarian, white woman who has benefited from the privilege that the ongoing coloniality of Australia has afford me. For three decades I have worked in, and around, the Australian music and culture industries.
I am a non-Indigenous Australian. I pay my respects to the Turrubul and Yagera/Yugura Peoples as the custodians of the lands where I work, study and live. I acknowledge that sovereignty was never ceded.
I am a 1971-born adoptee, an undergraduate mature age student at the University of Queensland (Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences.) I am mother to a 19-year-old daughter and 17-year old son. This is my first attempt at a Personal Essay, a writing challenge to myself during the 2020 Covid Pandemic. May, 2020.
