Be Not Afraid of Love: Lessons on Fear, Intimacy, and Connection

by Mimi Zhu

“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.”

Our survival mechanisms are unique, brilliant, and necessary, and they can tell us a lot about what we care about, what we fear, and what can bring us closer to love.

Patriarchal supremacy cannot take the shape of love because its shapes are morphed from violence.

This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master’s concerns.”

“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.”

You do not have to deem others unworthy to enhance your own miraculous life.

For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”

Encrusted by representations, abstracted and reified, the yellow woman is persistently sexualized yet barred from sexuality, simultaneously made and unmade by the aesthetic project.

One of the only ways to rebuke these hollow fantasies is to be grounded in community and to relearn what abundant love can truly look like. I want to trust in love, and I can only be in a loving, trusting relationship with somebody who is also willing to sacrifice these illusions of “power,” release their learned ideas of fetishistic desirability, and dismantle these structures of domination.

Our survival strategies teach us that there is validity in our distrust, and that our somas are always equipped and ready to protect us.

somatic opening.” We must be open to learning new forms of love, and not allow our fears to impede us in nourishing new relationships, especially the relationships we have with ourselves.

Our somas show us that we want to continue living, and that we want to experience the healthiest and most dignifying forms of love and relationships,

I cannot pretend that pain does not continue as I continue too.

How can we use accountability to transform our behaviors while also diffusing the stickiness of shame?

we are deserving of transformative continuance.

It’s not about absolving ourselves from responsibility but instead making a wider space to understand our full selves. When we can see ourselves, we can assess our harmful behavior, the roots of our pain, and what we can do to change.

the four parts of a sincere apology are self-reflection, apologizing, repair, and behavior change

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.

how do we make sure that our efforts are always centered on survivors?

A good question to focus on regarding yoga

Carceral systems actively attempt to distract us from their harm by masquerading as the perpetrators of justice.

Police and prison guards are enactors of the very same strains of harassment, violence, and sexual assault.

A study in 2010 found that sexual misconduct was the second most frequently reported form of police misconduct.

The core precedent of abolition is to always center and prioritize the survivor’s safety. Abolition calls for true transformative consequences while dismantling state-sanctioned forms of punishment.

defund police, demilitarize communities, remove police from

schools, free people from jails and prisons, repeal laws that criminalize survival, invest in community self-governance, provide safe housing for everyone, and invest in care, not cops

Accountability is a community process

What if we rushed towards our own accountability and understood it as a gift we can give to ourselves and those hurting from our harm? What if we understood our accountability, not as some small insignificant act, but as an intentional drop in an ever-growing river of healing, care, and repair that had the potential to nourish, comfort and build back trust on a large scale, carving new paths of hope and faith through mountains of fear and unacknowledged pain for generations?

Slowing down is not a function of speed, [it] is a function of awareness,

contemplate what capitalism has pushed us to be devoted to.

Meditation is about being immersed and relaxed with everything that exists in the now, even the pain, the joy, the confusion, and the fear. It is an orchestral congealing of every interconnected part of reality.

concrete actively separates us from connecting directly to sacred land.

When you take the time to savor stillness, you will notice all the ways that you move, and it will move you. You will see how your heart beats, your lungs expand, and your breath swirls, and it will be as charming and miraculous as a swaying weeping willow or a flock of soaring doves. When you sit in silence, you will notice the sounds that reverberate within you and beyond. You will hear the song of interconnection. You will realize that you are never alone.

To experience true presence with miraculous Earth, we must remember why we feel so disconnected in the first place.

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 cowered, and X controlled, and I stayed because I did not want to abandon the dream.

hierarchized

biological and romantic relationships were not always the safest spaces for love.

I relearned love slowly by listening to my own intuition.

“Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously.”

I learned of closeness not so much as striving for perfection, but of collectively finding our way.

Perhaps being in community isn’t as much about creating a utopia as it is about allowing space for complexity and celebrating those meeting places.

Much of our scarcity seemed to come from loneliness.

The gifts of each are more fully expressed when they are nurtured together than alone.

“reparations must be interpersonal and ongoing,” and that the honest redistribution of our resources must be a commitment in our everyday lives.

Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, exploring ideas of mutual aid that were based on his observation of animals and their communities. In his writings, he rejected Darwinist claims that all species are in competition with one another for survival. Instead, he observed that our sense of solidarity is deep, intuitive, and ingrained.

Many Indigenous-led collectives, such as Seeding Sovereignty[*] and Weaving Our Paths,[*] are doing ongoing mutual aid work today, and we must be grateful for the Indigenous communities who have always understood that community is an interspecies, intergenerational, interconnected necessity of life.

Charity depends on a hierarchy of power and asks people to inherit a power-over savior complex.

Engaging in mutual aid is committing to an ongoing redistribution of resources, tapping into our ingrained sense of solidarity, demanding equity in an unjust society, and imagining the infinite possibilities of what is to come.

Noticing the miracles around us is deep inner-child work. It allows us to reconnect with our childlike curiosities.