SURRENDER YOUR ANXIETY TO WATER

Transcript of the lecture-ritual performance for OIKOS Opening seminar of the research project “OIKOS. A Cultural Analysis of Care and Crisis in the 21st Century at the Copenhagen University.

03.03.2023

Alice Walker’s Anxiety Soup inspired this ritual exercise I am about to deliver. I read it at a moment of great anxiety in my life. I was going through different high transitions I could barely keep up with while trying to simply survive. I was drawn by that title, anxiety soup. I told myself, hey,that’s what my life looks like at times, anxiety soup! 

It is becoming more visible to us that our younger generations (but not exclusively)  live in their bodies fully anxious constantly. It is not that we are more anxious but rather, it is more visible everywhere that our lives are full of multiple anxieties. From our self deprecating, sarcastic, pessimist, confessionary-like social media culture engagement to dissociative feminism. Thank you ‘flea bag’! To van-gogh paint throwing as anticapitalist critique activism, to new indigenous insurrection movements contesting fascist governments and environmental racism, to my black transfem comrades fighting police brutality and being crushed. In this modern age, we can see it all at once. In this modern age, we have access to all of these examples and more in a space of a few seconds. We can literally disassociate into hours of catching up with world news feeling completely useless, impotent, overwhelmed, enraged, dispossessed of agency, grievous.

We are also collectively anxious because our bodies require interpersonal physical connection (that is community as this is how we are wired as humans) and grounding directly from land, and we are not getting them sufficiently. 

Self-care has been a “productive” solution for treating anxiety, yet, self-care has been co-opted into capitalism, I was reading the other day. Ditch your self-care practice! That is a bold idea! My eyes bludgeoned at that concept. And the more I read, it started to make sense. 

Ditch your self-care practice for collective forms of care because “we were never meant to take care of ourselves alone” (Ayesha Khan writes). Uh uh uh. She writes: “Sometimes, self-care looks like people pulling back from the hustle & grind to slow down & prioritize rest which is critical. But, then what? Thinking of ourselves as individuals in an already individualistic society is innately more limiting than it is helpful. When we embrace that we are interdependent beings just like any other life form— a whole world of care opens up to us even if it may take practice to seek it out & ease into it. We need a lot more than the absence of work to survive & that missing piece is community. “Ultimately, the “self” in self-care further enables the colonial, capitalist fallacy that we can & should look out for ourselves when care is only something we can give each other”.

Returning to Walker’s ‘anxiety soup’, I will be creating a recipe that can be shared collectively and I hope that you will be willing to share this moment with me.

The first part of this ritual is to create an intention to surrender your anxiety to water. Water as your main supporter, an ecosystem that provides care,  and you can add other companions of care such as herbs also if you enjoy herbal cleansing baths. Cleansing baths purify what you don’t need. Cleansing is a supporter of pausing. Pausing to re-enter yourself. Pausing to call presence. Rituals aid us at welcoming us back to ourselves. Ourselves also carrying our ancestors and tending to that connection.

So your first ingredient is intention.

The second is water and the third is our herbs here. I brought mint, and salvie. They are all companions of care here aiding us in this collective ritual.

So we put them here and we mix them together, and already within this action of picking them, dropping them, and mixing them, we return slowly to the body. So I call this part softening the anxiety. We keep stirring up a little longer and then we let it be.

As I was designing this ritual with the help of Walker, Malidoma Somé, my ancestors and other beings, Khan was also speaking with me:

She devised a practice-question: Think of something you categorize as “self-care”. What are all of the factors & pieces that enable that action that extend beyond you as an individual? I firmly believe that there is no complete act of care that is solely created or enabled by the “self”. It might take a minute to think about all the sociopolitical, environmental factors that enabled that act of care beyond the precise moment that you received said care. It might take some conscious de-centering of the self to center community that already sustains us in ways we may not realize. Are there actions or activities you perform in your daily life that you have come to realize are a form of community care? Are there ways you’ve been more intentional about engaging in caregiving & caretaking which has also allowed you to feel cared for?” 

And within this question I thought about the role of my ancestors and my recently added family members I met for the first time when I visited Senegal and Guinée Bissau earlier this year. And that if it wasn’t for them, I wouldn’t have understood even more deeply the urgency of connecting with my land, water, foods, the sun, and the alchemy in that calling as it brought me closer into a caregiving. Such caregiving is embedded in the way I work with my collaborators or I utter my words to strangers, in the food I cook and share with others, in the cleaning I do at home or even in my art that later becomes cultural offerings to communities of people. 

Did you breathe today? That was care you received from plants who generously sustain so many living beings. Did you eat today? That was care you received from other living beings. The microbes in your gut that call you home helped you digest that food & process the most critical nutrients you need to survive. It is an injustice to dismiss the contributions of other beings who intentionally pour in their love, time & energy into keeping us alive. Such simple day-to-day basic acts of community care are often overlooked.

Khan “emphasizes the contributions of the land because capitalism frames the ground beneath us & the sky above us as inanimate, lifeless, worthless objects that can be harnessed, extracted & exploited for selfish gains. This is the core ideology that drives environmental crises & the destruction of our planet. This isn’t a “future threat”- the harm is ongoing. Communities are being harmed right now & to pushback we have to start seeing ourselves as part of the land & not separate from it. Even if you don’t have a direct connection to land or a land-based communal context, sustainable care requires you to think about how you can give care (to land & community) as part of receiving care. When we realize that we NEED connection to land to survive, the pursuit of that connection itself is liberating & freeing”.

Your next action is to bring this water into your face and that of your neighbor (with consent of course!) Raise your hand if you do not wish this in your face. I’ll spray you now. Close your eyes and keep them closed for a moment while I go through you. I’ll ask you to help me with this task (disinfect your hands after you pass the spray bottle) and pass the spray bottle around asking for the assistance of your neighbor and then vice versa and the disinfectant.

Your next ingredient is to massage your face with this water and call on your intention to return home and recognize the trail of care in this action. From the water, to the assistance of your neighbor, to the herbs, to the intention and other elements that brought you here today.

Take some time with this part, and sense how your body receives it.

Thank you for your practice.