Are we robots?!?!?!?!?!
You know acting and saying the same things in the same way. Not really knowing how to break out of a loop because we don’t even know we are in one.
“Hey, how are you?”
“Fine.“
But really though are you fine? Or are you FINE! We all know fine is code for 🤦🏽♀️ :
I don’t want to tell you anything about me
My insides are burning down and I am about to explode into tears.
I am dead inside, what are feelings?
There are so many examples of us living out our robotic lifestyles.
The biggest one I can think of is the American dream formula that I referenced in the last letter:
Step 1: Go to school and get good grades ++ don’t get distracted by drugs or love (tbh they are the same)
Step 2: Find a good job, but we are only going to tell you about four possible job options (doctor, lawyer, accountant, engineer) even though there are a million options
Step 3: As soon as you are financially secure, magically find the person you are going to spend the rest of your life with
Step 4: Buy a house in the suburbs
Step 5: Have babies.
This is not me throwing shade. Trust me, I adore you.
I am just asking, are we actively choosing what we want?
Meaning, are we awake and consciously choosing what makes us happy. Or, is this what we do because this is what we know to do; that these are known patterns of our society, family and culture.
We are a by-product of patterns.
Disrupting our domestication, our learnt patterns, is required to uncover our personal truth. Transformation is breaking the loop of our thoughts and their associated scripts. You may already know that we recycle 90+% of our thoughts.
Do you dare place a limit on how much life you contain?
to limit your thoughts is to limit your aliveness.
codes that encode us :
dark or light
good or evil
all or nothing
1 or 0
Binary patterns form judgements. Separating us, from ourselves and each other. Our worthiness is dependent on the the output of whatever binary formula we are using to measuring ourselves too. Are you measuring yourself in binaries? I know I do. Here is a common (painful) example, that I feel regularly and is amplified by social and cultural pressures:
I am only worthy, if I am successful.
Successful =
Lots of money or failure
Lots of power or failure
Lots of influence or failure
There are many flaws with the binaries that formulate the western definition of success. These equations don’t leave space for nuance:
What does a lot mean?
Do you have to have a lot from each category? Or can you have a little from each?
There are so many permutations of what success means, yet many of us don’t stop to consider them. Instead we find ourselves in a never ending chase. In the rat race of success. In the monotony of the American dream.
These binary formulas are also inserted into the creation of technologies — the 1s and 0s of code integrating the biases and judgements that technologists embed into technologies DNA. Simple example: facial recognition tools struggle to recognize people of colour and female faces.
This is not new.
This is another form of settler superiority, and a reflection of our subconscious colonized mindsets. (e.g. white men building tech tools for the masses, and not considering other genders or races).
Colonialism is invasive and extractive, it is also unimaginative since it has been in tact for ~500 years. Our mindsets creates a binary of the past and future. Mark Gonzales reflects this in a conversation about cities, where he translates past and future thinking and their respective dangers :
Future focused: Accelerate to the future and discard everything we’ve held and used to survive till this point. To move fast and perhaps break things and people as we rush into the 21st century.
Past focused: Nostalgic and freezing the past, where the past needs to be preserved at all costs, and it needs to be static. The preservation referenced here is the 16th century model, which is the rise of western civilization and economic systems.
Binary in nature. Is not our nature. We are NOT robots.
Our vitality is our choice. Our choice is our freedom. Our freedom is our ability to express our whole damn self. All of you, all of me, is so welcomed.
There is an active choosing to disallow the conditioning, the domestication of colonization, from dominating our thoughts. Quite literally, training yourself to think differently.
A lot of times these are learnt or experienced patterns from our childhood. This programming likely served you or protected you when you were younger, but when it is no longer relevant for a healthy existence we feel that friction within us.
Friction could be anxieties, indecision, retaliating to yourself by falling into destructive behaviour patterns. These are signs that your being is trying to tell you something.
Escape or desperation, two paths of emotional burials. Yet always there is another option. There is always a magical third.
if you see more of what you don’t want, know, that is a gift of clarity
There is space to imagine the futures we want to live in. Do no limit yourself with expectations that aren’t even yours to begin with.
Practice your thoughts.
Rewrite your scripts.
Create new patterns.
“If you take responsibility for your creation, you can create anything you want in your life. You can rewrite your story; you can re-create your dream.”
— The Fifth Agreement by don Miguel Ruiz, don Jose Ruiz
How can we reach back to go forward?
it’s our unravelling that will lead us to our remembering, to our truth
Finding our truth is not straightforward. Self honesty requires a peeling of layers. Beyond our own experiences, history and our ancestry plays a role in our unravelling as well. We are tangled a bit, as colonization has blended with cultures like coffee + water — perhaps impossible to fully separate.
Poetry is a way to break the loop. It is a tool, a form of technology that allows us to disrupt cycles of thought and feeling patterns. Because it does not follow the cadence of our normal language patterns. With poetry we can restrict the flow or open it so wide that our imagination cannot help but enter.
Super basic poetic forms :
structured :: a container to hold what is flowing out of you
abrupt :: a distortion and abstraction from your reality; shedding your norms to see other vantage points
freestyle :: bypassing the trained conscious mind; allowing space for your imagination
Poetry allows for different ways of seeing. It allows for alternative models of thinking. Capturing various forms of truth. Know that the truth of you can have many different versions – some fearful, some free.
“The indirect transmission of truth uses paradox or poetry. If you know how to listen to poetry, then you are always close to truth. Poetry is a metaphor for the wordless. It dances along the banks of silence, teasing you to enter.” — Richard Rudd
Be gentle with yourself. This is a lot.
Self healing
I asked the wind what secrets she wanted to tell me :
your divine task
is to find a place of inner stillness, presence
so you can continue to day dream
and manifest
to see your desires fully
What can you do to ease the pathway of manifesting your future?
breath
awareness
choice
++ free writing :
A writing technique to by-pass your conscious “monkey” mind.
Simply put your pen on the page and do not stop writing till you fill 3-4 pages. Repeat. Over the next 7 days watch as patterns and thoughts emerge.
we do
not hear what
when we say our truthswords slip
unconscious
hold our truth not tongue
This poem is written in by me or another woman in a Sunday poetry group. As women from across the world holding deep diversity within and among us, we find ourselves blending and holding one another in poetic phrases. This style of poetry is called Deekaz. More to come on this in later letters to you.
Meditation Flow [CHANGE]
Instead of meeting daily to meditate. We will virtually meet on Friday mornings only.
~20 minute silent or poetic meditation
~20 minutes of journaling with a prompt
~10 minutes of collective sharing
Friday’s from 8am to 8:50 am EST on zoom.
Your time is precious. You can choose to come to the poetic meditation only from 8:00-8:20 am.
It is only love waiting for you over here.
If you noticed I did a little name switcheroo — this letter is now called poetic technology 💙 — as I evolve my understanding and sit in my depth. Changing the name of my newsletters feels better. As I feel the restrictions of written text as static objects, and desiring a need for it to evolve with me. I feel aligned with practices of oral information sharing; where the content is fluid and evolves as per needed, again more of that in later letters.
p.s. please do leave a comment. I would love to know how this resonates. 😘
letter 002: we are encoded with patterns, so are we robots? 🤖🙀