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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Mimi Zhu
Read between
February 10 - March 27, 2025
It can be an act of love to confront somebody when we feel betrayed by them if we are transparent and centered in our intention to express ourselves, and not focused on punishing the other person or replicating harm.
In The Smell of Rain on Dust, Martín Prechtel writes that tears actively help guide the souls of our loved ones toward peaceful passing. If they are not properly mourned, their souls will linger and haunt the human realm. Prechtel writes that mourning aloud ushers the souls of our loved ones to return to the “Beach of Stars.”
Somatic healing practitioners have distinguished the most common survival strategies as flight, fight, freeze, appease, and dissociate. In The Politics of Trauma, Staci K. Haines closely studies the iterations of each reaction, explaining that “these protective responses are well beyond our conscious capacity to control them. We have inherited them through both evolution and the particular biology of who made and birthed us. In turn, they work with the interpersonal, cultural, and social context in which we live.”
“Learning to live as a man of conscience means deciding that your loyalty to the people whom you love is always more important than whatever lingering loyalty you may sometimes feel to other men’s judgment on your manhood.”
Love cannot coexist alongside fetish and domination, and we must free ourselves of these fantasies that turn us into vases, shadows, and ghosts.
Shame is a feeling of perpetual regret, and it holds us hostage to fruitless wishes of undoing. Only when we really get to know our hauntings can we release shame and enact change. We need to move from a place of possibility instead of punishment. We need to believe that we deserve better and can do better. Though we were not deserving of our hurt, we are deserving of transformative continuance. Our hauntings teach us that although we may be incapable of reversal, we are capable of infinite transformation.
I think we just have to stop asking that question. I know that you’re asking it, like, out of love, but like I’m just gonna make a stance and say that I’m not gonna answer that question anymore, because the question should really be to the abuser, “Why are you holding someone hostage with abuse?” People say, “Oh it can’t have been that bad because or else she would have left.” It’s like, “No, it’s because it was that bad, I couldn’t leave.”
Kristalyn Salters-Pedneault, PhD, differentiated the two by saying that guilt is the feeling you get when you are aware that you have done something wrong, while shame is the state of being that tells you that your entire self is wrong.
In The Politics of Trauma, Staci K. Haines defines shame as “the generalized sense that we are wrong, bad, tainted, stupid, that it is all our fault. It is a deep and often hidden feeling that something is very wrong with us. Shame is the pervasive sense that we are wrong, not that we did something wrong.” Shame triggers a spiral that leads us to detrimental self-punishment; instead of creating possibilities for change, shame makes us feel like everything is caving in on us. Guilt, on the other hand, is an uncomfortable awareness of our actions. It can drive us toward a recognition of our
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If we have been harmed, sinking into shame can prohibit us from accessing resources, reaching out for support and guidance, and believing in our healing. If we have caused harm, shame can create a hard protective shell around us that stops us from the difficult but necessary process it takes to reduce harm, atone for our mistakes, and make sure that we not repeat the harm that was enacted.
True accountability, by its very nature, should push us to grow and change, to transform. Transformation is not to be romanticized or taken lightly. Remember, true transformation requires a death and a birth, an ending and a beginning. True accountability requires vulnerability and courage, two qualities that we are not readily encouraged to practice in our society.
“This step is key because it doesn’t matter how great your apology was if you continue the hurt or harm.”
Apologizing is part of accountability and accountability is a sacred practice of love. If you’ve hurt someone you care about, it is sacred work to tend to that hurt. You are caring for this person, the relationship you share, as well as yourself. You are engaging in the sacred work of accountability, healing, and being in right relationship. This work is part of the broader legacy of transformative justice, love, and interdependence.
“apologizing to someone so that they will apologize to you is not apologizing—it is manipulation.”
While you cannot control the outcome of the apology, becoming dedicated to accountability means committing to finding resources that will help you not replicate the harm that you caused.
He did not engage in repairing or changing his behaviors, and just saying the words “I’m sorry” did not constitute an accountable apology.
The carceral state’s intentions were always rooted in shame, punishment, torture, and white supremacy.
In I Hope We Choose Love, Kai Cheng Thom writes, “Trauma dictates that justice must be punitive for us to feel safe. Paradoxically, of course, punitive justice tends to diminish our safety because it involves hurting other people and makes them far less likely to be accountable of their own volition.”
We can start with our self-accountability and the ways that we don’t show up for ourselves. We can acknowledge how most of us are in an abusive relationship with ourselves. We blow past our own boundaries, we punish and beat ourselves up in terrible ways. We can start with the ways we treat and talk to ourselves—ways that we would clearly recognize as abuse if it were being done to another person.
What am I devoting my time to? Who is controlling our fate? What have I forgotten? What is not working?
But the art of letting go does not always come with a list of actions. In fact, most of the time, it is succumbing to inaction, and accepting that no matter how hard we try, sometimes there is nothing more we can do except be.
By accepting impermanence we free ourselves from the heavy binaries of life and death and save ourselves from constantly fearing impending doom. Doom passes too. All things regenerate.
Interbeing is the acknowledgment that all things are interconnected; therefore, because I exist and am connected to everything, I will not fully cease to exist when I die. To achieve enlightenment, we must always be with these three sacred parts and release the desire to conquer our pain.
Letting go involves being aware of a feeling, letting it come up, staying with it, and letting it run its course without wanting to make it different or do anything about it. It means simply to let the feeling be there and to focus on letting out the energy behind it. The first step is to allow yourself to have the feeling without resisting it, venting it, fearing it, condemning it, or moralizing about it. It means to drop judgment and to see that it is just a feeling. The technique is to be with the feeling and surrender all efforts to modify it in any way. Let go of wanting to resist the
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Go to the ocean, the forest, the desert, and see how each lapping wave, cluster of moss, and rock formation is actively letting go. Not only are they letting go of themselves in every second that they live, but they are also welcoming each new moment with full embodiment. They know that they, too, will pass.
“I am sitting, I am breathing, and I am thinking these thoughts with the present moment. This thought is part of my experience in this moment, and I sit with them until they pass.” Becoming aware of what I am doing during sacred meditation allows me to become one with the moment. When I started practicing this way, I was no longer in a state of resistance, and I let those thoughts go.
I am as multidimensional as Earth, and I am as soft as the soil I walk on.
I have experienced so much joy despite my many heartbreaks, and though I have not always engaged in healthy coping mechanisms, I have always been open to learning and healing. I was always committed to life.
I want to bottle up the cloud formations that I feel so moved by. I see scorpions and dragons and hearts in the sky, and I want to make them mine. I must breathe deeply and notice the intent behind that desire. It comes from a struggle to adapt to change as it comes, and it originates from a place of thinking that I must possess what gives me pleasure. Everything around me that is alive, or that is made of something that once was alive, is an agent of change. To love each of these beings with wholeness is to see them fully as they come, go, connect with me, and pass me by.
While white spiritual practitioners and corporations might find it easy to ask somebody to love themselves, it is imperative that they start by considering who exactly has the privilege of growing up encouraged to love themselves in the first place.
Every time I hear the flourishing of piano keys or the dramatic serenade of strings, I think of my grandfather and how my birth is connected to his existence and his passing. He is still everywhere around me; he is in birdsong, the full moon, and the delicate wings of a butterfly. He is right here with me, for love does not vanish, and death is not the end.
