Tag: culture

Speaking Words of Wisdom Without Having to Die First

Yvet YoussefLeave a comment

We tend to gobble up wisdom from dead 13th century poets. From deceased men we call philosophers whose work is nestled safely in the stone strata of our human history. We celebrate the wise sages who can no longer speak back. We like our wisdom antiquated, with a layer of dust that we can feel proud to wipe away before somebody else did. “Look what I found; a profound word, it’s so old!”

But wisdom, spoken from living mouths, feminine, passionate, creative, poetic, loud and confident, sensual and vital, alive – iiieeekkkkk oooh nononono… suddenly wise words evoke staggering, heals in sand, stubborn arms crossed, scorn, ridicule and judgement.

“Don’t you think you are a little arrogant for saying that?”
“You sound so sure of yourself, you think you’re all that?”
“I don’t like it when people speak like they know some sort of truth.”
“It’s not that you are wrong, it’s just that you think you are right that’s problematic.”
“Ugh, you sound so teacherly, it’s really annoying.”
“I am just so allergic to those vague spiritual terms.”

And so we float around in pools of ad hominem fallacies. The grand orchestra of silencing the living, so that they refrain from shining too brightly, too confidently, too much empowered. “Nobody shall at any point here think they have something of real value to add to the conversation,” as we raise our hands and take an oath of mediocre superficiality for the sake of all things mundane and undisturbed.

I suppose a dead poet’s words of wisdom have transcended the chains of personality, of character flaw; their words now live on their own in a timeless vacuum of abstracted knowledge. But, they arose in a living human, a real person just like you and me. Not a saint, not an exclusive-collector’s-item-edition of the human form, not a special rarity: A real person. A poet is a living being. A mystic is a living being. A philosopher is a living being. They are not separate from us.

Wisdom is not something anyone can own. It is something we can choose to tap into, to cultivate a relationship with, to grow towards. What name do you want to give it? Awareness, Consciousness, Presence, Loving-Kindness, Divinity, Spirit, Unconditional Love? Whatever word you want to use, it is never dispensed for the sake of personal gain… not if it’s true wisdom (because, again, nobody owns it!) That is not to say that people cannot earn a living from sharing wisdom, or that all philosophers, witches, sages, truth-tellers and mystics should live in destitute poverty in order to be taken seriously. Nah, that’s an old-school myth rooted in a paradigm of scarcity and lack. It’s time to move on.

The intention of sharing wisdom is always loving. Have teachers and gurus abused their power? Yes. Remove them from their pedestals. Obliterate hierarchies with a spirit of Radical Equality. That means you do not place anyone above or below you; it means you do not place yourself above or below anyone. That’s not to say we cannot point out when shit is messed up. Compassion is not coddling or infantilizing. It just means we recognize and respect the inherent worth of life in all its forms. Learn what you can from those who offer their teachings to you. Don’t dwell for too long in resentment around the wrongdoings perpetrated by human suffering. Inquire into the nature of that suffering, look it in the eye, see where it is coming from. Recognize that same pain within you so that you can make the choice not to pass it unwittingly along to others. The most honorable job in the world and, I believe, our greatest responsibility.

Understand that the age of esoteric exclusivity is over. You don’t need some sort of membership to an elusive secret society shrouded in mysterious shadows to know a thing or two about the grand scheme of things. No. The field of mystic knowledge is wide and open, and anyone can at all times choose to walk around there to touch its vibrant dancing grasses. We all have access to wisdom. It’s the very same source those deceased mystics and poets tapped from: A collective consciousness, a Universal Truth, simple, clear, all-encompassing: Love. That’s it. Do blockages to this Love exist within us? Yes. Do we sometimes stubbornly refuse to feel it? Oh, hell yes. Do we still have access to it if we are willing to open the window a little bit? Absolutely.

The reason why these living mouths, these luscious humans, these blood-pumping-sweet-hearts would even dare to speak words of wisdom, is to further the human cause. It’s for the sake of Evolution. It’s for the sake of Everything and Everyone. We need each other to grow and heal and evolve. That’s what I know I came here to do. And I want your heart-glowing-sparkling-wisdom, sweet one. You show me yours and I’ll show you mine. Let us infuse each other’s wise words, weave ourselves into the fabric of our shared existence. So we can Love each other and ourselves as fully and deeply as we can muster in courageous tenderness. I am not asking for much; just everything you are, just your soul-fire, just your reasons for Being. Thank you very much.

Antifascist Clubbing

Yvet Youssef2 Comments

Going out in Berlin with borderline bronchitis while surprise bleeding a week off schedule, my dear friend and I stand in line to enter a club at 2 in the morning. I am generally not one for ignoring my body’s needs, but right about now I am pissed off at my perpetually failing immune system this winter, and my desire to go dancing in Berlin overrules this coughing, aching body. Just this once, just this twice, just this week, OK? I have never waited in line for a club before out of principle, but here we are. It is freezing outside, with that humidity that cuts through your bones. Berlin is gritty. We talk to two guys in front of us while figuring out what we are actually standing in line for. Who is playing and what are they playing? We SoundCloud through the list of DJs on a smartphone and decide it seems danceable enough for our taste and good enough to warrant our waiting in the freezing cold, for now. We will see how long this lasts.

We manage to reach the front of the line where a thin guy in a black hat starts speaking to us in German. I stare at him somewhat amused at how such a slightly built character can have such an intimidating presence. When it becomes clear he wants me to respond to something I say: “Sorry, my German is not good enough for this”. He goes: “Alright, in English then: We are a leftist club…” “Oh!” I interrupt “thát is why that guy is on the wall” pointing to a graffiti stencil of Karl Marx next to us. “Yes” he responds firmly, looking me directly in the eye: “du you like him?”
“I do, actually!” I say with an enthusiasm that is clearly out of place and does not fit the vibe of the location. More aloof, Yvet, this is fucking serious, alright? The guy continues to explain the politics of the club we are about to enter: “no homophobia, no sexism, no racism. Are you OK with these terms?”
“Absolutely.”

Something in me actually quite appreciates these politics as door-policy. All performance aside, these should be the conditions for entering all public spaces. Just stating these terms with clarity at the entrance grants a feeling of safety, like an insurance, and that, I notice, feels remarkably welcoming to me.

We are allowed to walk to the next station two people at a time. Even though the two guys we were talking to technically stood in line before us they let us enter first as my friend joyfully exclaims: “ladies first!” Which she immediately half-jokingly, half-seriously withdraws: “or, maybe not, I don’t know if they allow that here…?” We arrive at the next station, right hand on an imagined Communist Manifesto, where our bags are searched and our phones get stickers over the cameras and we are told we can’t take photos inside the club. Onward to station three, the cash register. This is where the Marxist Idealism ends and good old capitalism requests €15 a person to be able to enter the club. I am not smart-assed enough in this moment to ask whether there is a sliding fee for low-income guests or if we are going to keep our leftist radicalism just slightly hovering over class issues for the sake of making a profit?

Anyway, when we are finally inside the typically old and dark and grungy smoked out rooms of the Berlin club scene, we dance. I am wearing my usual all-black attire, which in the Netherlands sometimes feels a little grave in comparison, but here looks so similar to the German Antifa uniform, I fit right in. Germany is interesting like that, there are still Punkers, and Altos and general rawness. You hear that Nethies: Too many smooth hipsters, not enough grungy Antifascist grit. The techno beats sound through the old industrial building doused in black paint and thick smoke. I dance the wild radical dance of a totally sober, sick, and bleeding body refusing to miss out on some live Berliner EDM. Like a leftist badass.

I am contemplating the performance of radicalism, the limits of leftist politics, the lack of leftist voices in Netherlands, the synchronous bullshit AND importance of it all. And I am imagining Karl Marx in line of a self-proclaimed leftist nightclub in 21st century Berlin, standing in the dark smoky hallways observing groups of drug-addicted youngsters huddling together in genderless toilet stalls with overflowing toilet bowls and never any damned toilet paper. Escaping from something, somehow. Or reaching for something, somehow. Would he laugh a giant belly laugh or sternly shake his head at the silliness of this scene? When in fact, we know quite well, it’s dead-serious, everything is so very serious at the root of it all. It’s just not serious like staged performative aloofness. It’s serious like the deeply human struggle for meaning while we are here in these bodies, making sense of our existence, or eagerly running from it. We are alive, all together now comrades, and it is horrible, and silly, and so much fun, simultaneously.

Also Netherlands, a footnote of gratitude: Let’s be long-term real here – thank you for the smoking ban in your clubs and public spaces ❤ ❤ ❤ I, for one, deeply appreciate it. I will take the sweat and fart stink over the total annihilation of my lungs and tar lodging into every pore on my body any day. I have washed my hair three times since Berlin, and I have yet to arrive at something that doesn’t smell like death. I love going out dancing too much to be slowly killed by it.

Evolving Consciousness

Yvet YoussefLeave a comment

I am not perfect. I get stuck and hooked and I trip over myself plenty. I don’t know everything. I do not have all the answers. There have been times I’ve felt shame around this. How can I be whole without being perfect? There are still moments where I think I should not speak my truth before it is perfected. Who am I to use my voice? To write about the Sacred? To point out the wounds of our world?

Then something in me goes: Wait a minute, that sounds like a tune that you picked up from our cultural command of unworthiness: “Don’t you dare think yourself worthy because it will mess with a system predicated on your perpetual sense of insecurity!”

But, dear one, worthiness already lives inside of us. It is a birthright, no matter how much our societies have tried to oppress or obscure it. Our work is to re-claim our worth, to stop hiding from it, to stop rejecting it, to stop repressing it. What are we so afraid of?

We are evolutionary creatures. Everything we do is a path, not towards a perfect destination, but towards growth. Beyond what we can now imagine as some type of destination lies still more path and still more possibilities for expansion of consciousness. My only job here is to commit to that path with reverence, gratitude and conscious presence as an evolutionary being who is always learning. That is how I serve the whole. That is the place from where I can legitimately speak. Not because I claim to have all the answers, but because we are all in this together, like links in a chain, connected. We grow towards healing together and we evolve together. When I stretch out my hand to reach for you and pull you up, you may accept it, just like I rely on the pointed finger of someone else to guide the way onward. We build ladders and throw out ropes and make signposts along the way because we need each other, and, quite frankly, this whole experience is a lot more fun with loving company.

“She Feels the Music”

Yvet Youssef5 Comments

Some weeks ago I found myself at one of the most mesmerizing concerts. The sound was perfect, the music was pure excellence, and the venue was beautiful. World class musicians producing sparkling melodies and stirring rhythms. Imagine yourself in this space for a moment. Can you see it? Soul uplifting gloriousness. While I am taking in this incredible soundscape, a group of tall Dutch white men gather several feet away from me. I notice they gather so close to me because I was dancing, and they kinda took my dancing space… I get slightly irked when people invade my dancing space whenever there is actually plenty of room everywhere else. It’s like being in a long row of completely empty toilet stalls, and the next person entering the bathroom picking that one stall right next to you. And now your pee won’t come out until they leave, so you are just staring at the shoes of your new neighbor thinking: “Of all the stalls, in all the world, you had to pick the one right next to mine?” And I know they can tell I am being exceptionally quiet, so there is this awkward silent standoff happening until one of us flushes first. Yeah, OK, so I have public-toilet-issues, I know some of you out there know what I am talking about…

Anyway, I digress. We were at a concert. The men were closing in. But that was not all. In a completely silent concert hall, where everyone is moved by the gorgeous sound, these men begin an absurdly loud conversation amongst themselves. Let me tell you this: Nothing gets me out of musical ecstasy quite as fast as a group of insensitive men talking way too loud about absolutely nothing to each other through a performance. Let’s call this the sonic equivalent of man-spreading. It is incredibly annoying and energetically invasive. Since I feel like I can no longer afford being very shy about making my needs known to people, I begin frantically waving at these guys to please be quiet. But, as was already clear from their irreverent talking, they were not aware enough of their surroundings to notice me. I try to immerse back into the music while attempting to ignore their chatter. The band announces their last song, and as they begin playing the men start talking yet again. I decide to tap one of them on the shoulder and gesture my request for their silence during this last song. One of them nods at me. They stop talking for a while.

As I go back into the soundscape, I feel thankful for getting to witness this music. I close my eyes and my body naturally sways to the beautiful melodies when suddenly a voice interrupts from behind me. One of the men. This guy had apparently been observing me dance and felt the pressing need to unsubtly inform his pals: “She feels the music” – followed by one of those utterly stupid Beeves and Butthead type of chuckles: huhuhh huhuh. I don’t visibly respond to this, but again jolted out of my communion with the sound, I think to myself: “What the hell else is a person supposed to do with music?”

At a different location I am attending a concert by an incredible band that plays some of the best psychedelic rock of this generation. I notice the crowd exists primarily of men and that the venue is a little bit too crowded for my taste. My friend and I find a spot in the back that has slightly more wiggle room. As should be clear by now, I am pretty particular about space during concerts, and if I don’t have at least a little wiggle room, I will likely leave. The reason for this is that I feel the need to move my body when I hear good music, and if I am prevented from doing so in an overcrowded space I get pretty intense claustrophobia. Additionally, I find that if I can’t move freely with the music, I am less capable of receiving it completely. I want to hear it with my ears but, since I have the physical ability, also with my spine and my arms and my legs. As the concert ensues, I look out over the crowd and notice that 95 percent of the people is standing completely still. Two young guys are standing still in front of me. One taps the other on his shoulder and says: “You could also play this” – in a tone that reveals a certain criticism of the sound. As if the fact that this music is playable by other musicians is somehow reducing their ability of enjoying it. 

I try it out for a while, to stand completely still, no movement, just observing. The music comes in through my ears and stops at the brain. I experience the music maybe at a 25 percent, if not less. As soon as I move my body with the melodies I start feeling the music more intensely again and start enjoying what before was merely alright.

Then it hits me. In our intellect driven world the experience of live music for many people is also reduced to an intellectual affair. The very art form that is meant to move every cell in your body and vibrate your entire Being to a different level of consciousness has become, left in the hands of the cultural descendants of the European enlightenment, something to merely observe with the mind. So if you are not feeeeeling the music, then you must be thinking about it: …Is it good, is it not good, can I play this or can’t I play this, which guitar brand is that, how does it compare to the record, are the band members interacting with each other, I think I think I think I will give this performance a 6.6 on a scale of one to ten… 

I look around the static crowd and suddenly feel sad. Because this precisely illustrates the biggest problem of our time. Our inability to feel. Feeling, our society instructs, is something not to be taken seriously, something to be made fun of, ridiculed even. Especially (though not exclusively by any means) by men, who have been systematically trained to repress their feelings and to rely entirely on intellectual capacities for “survival” in a hyper-rational world. A woman intensely experiencing music and swaying her body to the sound is so peculiar that someone feels the need to comment on it followed by an awkward chuckle. Because the feminine, the creative, the physical, the embodied, the sensual has been repressed for so incredibly long it makes people feel uncomfortable.

We are collectively so afraid of the body. So afraid of sensuality. So afraid of expressing ourselves in abundant bliss. We have created repressive barriers where unbridled ecstatic flow should be. (And BTW, this also includes the fear of peeing in public toilets for the strange anxiety of someone else hearing you during the most basic and essential task in human-body maintenance…) We have this idea that we live in relative freedom, but we don’t take into account the ridged complexes of our collective culture of emotional, spiritual, and sensual oppression. And we are primarily just talking about dancing here, but think about what this means for the ways in which people make love to each other…. Holy shit…. That’s really awful. Hyper-rational sex, anyone? I think I’ll pass, thank you very much. I don’t want that. I don’t want that confinement. I want to move. I want to sway. I want freedom.

I have lived for decades with detailed instructions from the headquarters of our culture on how to hate my body. I have been told time and again to “act normal” – which is actually the commandment of invisibility. Don’t show yourself too much, don’t express yourself too much, don’t enjoy yourself too much. I have spent decades struggling to unlearn those messages, and to learn how to love my body regardless. It’s an ongoing process. We are here on Earth in physical form for a short amount of time. Nobody really knows what happens afterwards. Can we afford to let our time here be controlled by fear of our own capacities? Or do we wake up from our disconnected slumber to wholeheartedly, profoundly, and unapologetically FEEL the music?