Unlearning Punitive Mindsets

Conversations around how we do movement work as spoonies ultimately lead to how are we engage with caring for each other. Weather that is collaborators, friends, comrades, lovers, or the wider communities, our relationships have the power to make or break projects, movements, revolutions. This is why colonizers have worked for centuries to pit us all against each other.  We can’t effectively organized long-term when we don’t learn how to get through conflict. What does cross-movement solidarity look like when we do not treat each other as disposable?  Why do we have tools like transformative justice, but struggle to implement them?  How do we harness the momentum of abolition when so many are still rooted in punitive behaviors and mindsets?  My answer to all of these are the same, by unlearning and healing in relationship.

Healing in Relationship

We talk about joy as resistance and honoring our bodyminds in our work, but as soon as a conflict arises, whole communities blow-up and we throw away our relationships with each other. And while some create containers for repair, the desire to go through the process is more often than not one-sided, or non-existent. Where does that leave us? Why can’t we practice regenerative conflict and actually repair and rebuild? These are the questions that have been at the front of my bodymind since I started writing about Social Justice Seduction. I introduce this term coined in relationship and collaboration with my comrade-turned-lover, in my piece in Disabled Parts out now. [https://www.disabledparts.com/writing/social-justice-seduction] Stay tuned for her companion piece as well as more publications on this topic to come. 

These questions have lead me to beginning the development of a training series in collaboration with members in One Free Community.  Our goal is to learn, digest, and disseminate Transformative and Restorative Justice knowledge in our communities. We want experienced practitioners to train us and then we share the knowledge via creating tools, infographics, art, zines, and more to meet the needs in our respective communities. There is no one-size-fits-all solution for any group or space. We want to meet people where they are at.  This is how we bridge the gap as bridgewalkers. We are helping to build the bridge to the world we want to create for ourselves and future generations.

But this is hard work, especially as disabled and multiply marginalized folx. We are asking everyone to build new relationships based on reciprocity and care, which requires everyone being supported through the process and doing the hard work of unlearning punishment.

Invitation to Care

This will be a life-long journey and I am inviting you to join us in this work. Be part of learning with us.  Let us learn together how to do practice regenerative conflict, community care, using joy and play as a part of healing.  These are all practices that are part of our beings, but these learnings were stolen from us through generations of colonization. We need to reconnect and learn to embody reciprocity with earth and with each other. I want us to understand how it feels to go through conflict, be supported in repairing relationship, and how to move to a place of joy with each other so that the movement work can continue. This is vital to doing movement work.