indieHealer

What is “WOO WOOO”? Part I

11:50 PM

I can’t go to bed at a decent hour.

My 9-5 consists of computer administrative tasks with creating or recreating documents for clients to engage in meaningful conversations with their colleagues in hopes to humanize their work space. I facilitate these conversations, too. I am back and forth in front of people on a screen or IRL or just in front of a computer.

Maybe I can’t sleep.

I facilitated a session today—one that was so easy I could do it without showing up. No, that is an exaggeration. Afterward, I called my boss, the owner of the organization I work for. I had to make a slight pivot in the design.

She is the designer. She’s great. Organizational development meets youth development, restorative justice, experiential learning, charisma, growth mindset, research evidence-based practices that are trauma-informed. I can go on. But it’s 12:10 and I can’t sleep.

The spiritual communities I find myself in, mostly online and sometimes we gather in person, many would call “woo woo.” That term I learned recently is actually derived from a lineage of women sages, priests, shaman from the area of the Himalayas. Westerners somehow came across their ritual, ceremonial goods. I will call it goods because we live in an extractive world.  But what those westerners learned and saw from these wise women was “out of this world”. Esoteric practices that didn’t make sense to their worldview and therefore termed it different because anything outside of the supposed norm- is different, weird, to be feared?!( does this story sound familiar)? Anything outside of the norm is coming from the “woos”. It’s “woo woo”, it’s“crazy” blah blah. 

Now, I wonder if folks might change their mind about that term now? It’s not a new age “fake” religion that spiritually bypasses the troubles of the world. Woo was a thing, a practice, a state of being that wasn’t understood by colonizers, imperialists that centred violence, extraction, exploitation, enslavement, genocide, ownership. The woo was more than polar opposite to this, it was the medicine and antidote to this. It was the thing that responds to ones thinking and behaving as non relational, separate beings. The woo is the embodiment of our wholeness. Our sacred reciprocal connections to it all.

Of course, it was out of the scope of their ( Westerners) norm. They got rid of their “woos” too. Long ago.

Now, how the woo shows up is, it comes from an understanding. An embodied knowing. An understanding that a few get when they have enough leisure time to be present with themselves. To sit in silence. To feel the wind and hear it cry. To observe the tree swaying and dancing with those cries while the birds sing and bees buzz. The flowers dying and blooming. The squirrels bury, eat, and stare. The spider catches its prey and rolls it up in silk, almost as if it’s a decorative piece of garland on its plate before the first bite.

To be clear the woo is no different today than it was then. Just like the human atrocities on this sacred Earth are no different today than then. Depending on the region and seat at the table, the privileges we have afforded ourselves still come at the expense of another. Human, animal, and Earth. From the computer I am typing into, the clothes I am wearing, the privileged air I am breathing. It comes at a price.

Ok. I am tired and it’s late.

I have to be up in the morning with a fresh face and to complete those documents, attend those meetings, facilitate those sessions and one thing I will explicitly share here is I am complicit to those exploitations and privileges.

No, I didn’t sign on and say, I want a mining company to extract a certain piece of mineral from the Congo so I can have my iPhone 14 Max. No, I didn’t consent to someone exploiting workers to make billions off of people who think they need the convenience of everything being delivered at their home. ((Although, some do, need this.) BUT! I participate and give my money to some of these companies. I continue to buy, get deliveries, be entertained, text, and take pics to capture my days with these technologies and unethical platitudes of human design. This is what I mean by “privilege”. Many of us have it and some social power, especially in the Northern Hemisphere and it’s not a word to berate ourselves or judge but rather an adjective of awareness to have the option and take a choice of making certain decisions. I will always say, ‘do you.’ I am not judging you for it and we are all complicit. How we live ( most of us) is at the expense of others and most of us feel helpless to do anything about that. Yet, those willing to actively sit in some layer of discomfort, can say no, to those conveniences. And I will share some of those I named are very hard for me to say, ‘No” to. Others are quite easy. We get to choose. Some of us have so many options to choose.