Dear Chloé, your Theory of Enchantment has long transcended the US and reached us here in Germany, as you will surely know. Hopefully, you can see this as a further sign of success and of the power that lies within your work.
That you are experiencing such hard times now with the changing of government is sad and aggravating to hear. In the first year of the pandemic, I experienced a steep decline in client numbers myself (I am working in leadership and communication training). So I know the feeling. Makes you uneasy some days. But then the days pass.
I haven't yet experienced the Theory of Enchantment firsthand, but from what I’ve heard in your public appearances, it certainly seems like the right approach. I was in a position adjacent to those promoting Kendi-style organizational trainings and suggested they consider your work instead. Unfortunately, it was impossible to get them to even entertain the idea, the standard DEI approach was treated as infallible, even when that was clearly not the case.
I had (perhaps naively) hoped that the Trump administration’s backlash against traditional DEI would create an opening for your work to take center stage, offering a more unifying narrative to bring people back together. I still hold out hope that this will happen. Maybe it’s just a matter of being ready when the dust settles?
I’ve been meditating on anger a lot too lately, wondering about how to culturally carry I. Tyson Yunkaportas phenomenal book Sand Talk touches upon this when he shares the stories of the aboriginal ways of living, where ceremonial knife fights are practiced. He says in a recent podcast with Aubrey Marcus that those who really fight are the women and cultures where the women are considered as the weaker sex are domesticated. In Indian culture, the dances dedicated to Shiva and Kaali are a deeply spiritual way to give room for that shattering rage.
How can we in the west give sound place to rage? How can it be ceremonially practiced? How can it be part of our devotion to Love? Anger is a power that goes beyond the intellect and other means than intellectualizing it are needed. I think we need to meet it with our bodies.
You are in it, all at once. Physical struggle and literal cold, financial uncertainty, loss of loved ones and a full restructuring of society that directly affects your income. All I can say is that you are the embodiment of light. You are wisdom personified and we, the collective, needs you. I know that when chaos reigns people seek out grounding calm and truth with a capital T. This is what you teach and this is needed more than ever. I feel certain the language of these overblown bans will loosen and allow for programs that create deep powerful awakening and connection to re-enter (or enter) in the place of what was once divisive education. The wave of abundance coming to you is on its way and until it does, you will remain in my prayers and heart.
Thank you dear Chloe. Your words shed light on my “spiritual bypass” of painful events in my life and now in our social world. I am too evolved to feel ‘lower’ feelings I tell myself while refilling the Chardonnay.
I would love to assist you in this.....I'd love to give you a free cognomovement session. Check out what I do.... www.cutelisart.com. Cognomovement is a healing modality that allows your entire brain to look at the problem and within one session you walk away with a new understanding of the situation. love your work and yes, this is a huge opportunity...you've got this.
Dear Chloe, I have been listening to your core message for some time now, from Norway. I hear your anger today and I really can relate and identify. More than ever, your message matters, and more than ever, we need to unite and continue, transform our common anger into the energy necessary for hope to re-ignite our obscurity, re-humanise our deserts, re-spread beauty and kindness etc. WE - each of us - own both light and darness. We need all the light parts we can muster now. EACH of us, there we are. Love
I am chanting for you, you brave warrior for peace who truly inspires this 58-year old Black Buddhist Mama! Suffer what there is to suffer but NEVER EVER LOSE HOPE!
This may not seem related at first, but it's a direct response to where you say "The only way to counter this is to learn how to get in right relationship with your feelings, learn to hold your suffering and transform it without projecting it onto others.”
In 2018, there was a reboot of the Halloween horror movie series. I'd just become a parent a few months earlier, and the oxytocin-rush of putting my face to my then-baby daughter's then-tiny beautiful nose felt sacred.
I stumbled onto the preview and watched out of curiosity. Compared to holding this soft, delicate, giggling baby close, the wanton, gory destruction of life in this movie felt like a direct affront not only to me, but to my child, and to... life itself. It really freaked me out and got under my skin. I was enraged. "Fuck the people who made this," I huffed to myself.
As your kid grows older, you have that eureka moment where you realize they can be annoying, so you come back down to earth a bit. Not everything feels so high-stakes, so PERSONAL. But for some reason I found that hulking masked presence from Halloween triggering for a long time after.
One night about a year ago, while I was on-edge as the image of Michael Myers began to intrude on my thoughts, a phrase materialized into view: "There is nothing that isn't >all< of us."
In other words: whatever I was responding to --- and, indeed, projecting --- onto Michael Myers is also in me somewhere, even if in the primordial recesses where I can't see it.
And with that, the bubble burst --- all that fear and hypervigilance and THREAT just went >poof< and was gone.
What I'm trying to say is that this stuff works in reverse too. As you write, it doesn't help to deny one's anger, but I find it helps to remember that whatever I'm feeling activated by and reactive towards also resides in myself. I find it helps to kind of reverse-project, to take whatever's outside of us back into ourselves, even when it looks ugly and threatening enough to get angry at.
For whatever reason, that helped me kind of harmonize the polarity of a feeling that highly charged enough to be painful. Hope that helps.
I argued that the left created Trump. That the hatred of middle class mores and values would convince the voters that the Democrats hate them (unfortunately too often true). That Kendiangeloism would result in worse race relations and segregation. I got excoriated. We were correct. They are and were wrong.
I don't like Carl Jung. He published articles in Nazi newspapers about how Freud was too Jewish. Gershom Shalom forgave him, but I always thought that he was a bit of a spineless slug. I'm also angry, always so angry. Jello BIafra's article about going to Israel in 2015 helped. Olga also helped before she died of Lupus. I did get some enjoyment out of pissing off a writer that I called out for antisemitism (well I pissed off her sister but I know she's seen it) - https://marlowe1.substack.com/p/action-illinois-by-mary-gaitskill
Incredible that nowhere in there did you mention the Republican party. In your narrative, they have no agency, they're simply responding to what the Democratic party does.
Chloé is not wrong. The Republican PARTY in fact has no agency. The Republican-controlled Congress has abandoned the Founders' expectation of pride in its own power and now, its members are completely intimidated by online mob rule. Their PARTY has been captured by individuals who have used the party apparatus to seize power by generating hatred of the party previously in power. The problems with the left existed not only in government, but as Chloé sagely observed, in every niche of our system of higher education.
Dear Chloé, your Theory of Enchantment has long transcended the US and reached us here in Germany, as you will surely know. Hopefully, you can see this as a further sign of success and of the power that lies within your work.
That you are experiencing such hard times now with the changing of government is sad and aggravating to hear. In the first year of the pandemic, I experienced a steep decline in client numbers myself (I am working in leadership and communication training). So I know the feeling. Makes you uneasy some days. But then the days pass.
All of luck and Kalis power to you!
I haven't yet experienced the Theory of Enchantment firsthand, but from what I’ve heard in your public appearances, it certainly seems like the right approach. I was in a position adjacent to those promoting Kendi-style organizational trainings and suggested they consider your work instead. Unfortunately, it was impossible to get them to even entertain the idea, the standard DEI approach was treated as infallible, even when that was clearly not the case.
I had (perhaps naively) hoped that the Trump administration’s backlash against traditional DEI would create an opening for your work to take center stage, offering a more unifying narrative to bring people back together. I still hold out hope that this will happen. Maybe it’s just a matter of being ready when the dust settles?
Thank you Chloe ❤️
I’ve been meditating on anger a lot too lately, wondering about how to culturally carry I. Tyson Yunkaportas phenomenal book Sand Talk touches upon this when he shares the stories of the aboriginal ways of living, where ceremonial knife fights are practiced. He says in a recent podcast with Aubrey Marcus that those who really fight are the women and cultures where the women are considered as the weaker sex are domesticated. In Indian culture, the dances dedicated to Shiva and Kaali are a deeply spiritual way to give room for that shattering rage.
How can we in the west give sound place to rage? How can it be ceremonially practiced? How can it be part of our devotion to Love? Anger is a power that goes beyond the intellect and other means than intellectualizing it are needed. I think we need to meet it with our bodies.
You are in it, all at once. Physical struggle and literal cold, financial uncertainty, loss of loved ones and a full restructuring of society that directly affects your income. All I can say is that you are the embodiment of light. You are wisdom personified and we, the collective, needs you. I know that when chaos reigns people seek out grounding calm and truth with a capital T. This is what you teach and this is needed more than ever. I feel certain the language of these overblown bans will loosen and allow for programs that create deep powerful awakening and connection to re-enter (or enter) in the place of what was once divisive education. The wave of abundance coming to you is on its way and until it does, you will remain in my prayers and heart.
Thank you dear Chloe. Your words shed light on my “spiritual bypass” of painful events in my life and now in our social world. I am too evolved to feel ‘lower’ feelings I tell myself while refilling the Chardonnay.
I would love to assist you in this.....I'd love to give you a free cognomovement session. Check out what I do.... www.cutelisart.com. Cognomovement is a healing modality that allows your entire brain to look at the problem and within one session you walk away with a new understanding of the situation. love your work and yes, this is a huge opportunity...you've got this.
Dear Chloe, I have been listening to your core message for some time now, from Norway. I hear your anger today and I really can relate and identify. More than ever, your message matters, and more than ever, we need to unite and continue, transform our common anger into the energy necessary for hope to re-ignite our obscurity, re-humanise our deserts, re-spread beauty and kindness etc. WE - each of us - own both light and darness. We need all the light parts we can muster now. EACH of us, there we are. Love
I am chanting for you, you brave warrior for peace who truly inspires this 58-year old Black Buddhist Mama! Suffer what there is to suffer but NEVER EVER LOSE HOPE!
Stealing your Jung quote. And this is a perfect distillation of me in this time. So thank you, Kali.
Excellent post, one I will share. Sending prayers, good thoughts, and blessings. Baruch Hashem.
Life, and the smiles and bruises therein.
This may not seem related at first, but it's a direct response to where you say "The only way to counter this is to learn how to get in right relationship with your feelings, learn to hold your suffering and transform it without projecting it onto others.”
In 2018, there was a reboot of the Halloween horror movie series. I'd just become a parent a few months earlier, and the oxytocin-rush of putting my face to my then-baby daughter's then-tiny beautiful nose felt sacred.
I stumbled onto the preview and watched out of curiosity. Compared to holding this soft, delicate, giggling baby close, the wanton, gory destruction of life in this movie felt like a direct affront not only to me, but to my child, and to... life itself. It really freaked me out and got under my skin. I was enraged. "Fuck the people who made this," I huffed to myself.
As your kid grows older, you have that eureka moment where you realize they can be annoying, so you come back down to earth a bit. Not everything feels so high-stakes, so PERSONAL. But for some reason I found that hulking masked presence from Halloween triggering for a long time after.
One night about a year ago, while I was on-edge as the image of Michael Myers began to intrude on my thoughts, a phrase materialized into view: "There is nothing that isn't >all< of us."
In other words: whatever I was responding to --- and, indeed, projecting --- onto Michael Myers is also in me somewhere, even if in the primordial recesses where I can't see it.
And with that, the bubble burst --- all that fear and hypervigilance and THREAT just went >poof< and was gone.
What I'm trying to say is that this stuff works in reverse too. As you write, it doesn't help to deny one's anger, but I find it helps to remember that whatever I'm feeling activated by and reactive towards also resides in myself. I find it helps to kind of reverse-project, to take whatever's outside of us back into ourselves, even when it looks ugly and threatening enough to get angry at.
For whatever reason, that helped me kind of harmonize the polarity of a feeling that highly charged enough to be painful. Hope that helps.
I argued that the left created Trump. That the hatred of middle class mores and values would convince the voters that the Democrats hate them (unfortunately too often true). That Kendiangeloism would result in worse race relations and segregation. I got excoriated. We were correct. They are and were wrong.
I don't like Carl Jung. He published articles in Nazi newspapers about how Freud was too Jewish. Gershom Shalom forgave him, but I always thought that he was a bit of a spineless slug. I'm also angry, always so angry. Jello BIafra's article about going to Israel in 2015 helped. Olga also helped before she died of Lupus. I did get some enjoyment out of pissing off a writer that I called out for antisemitism (well I pissed off her sister but I know she's seen it) - https://marlowe1.substack.com/p/action-illinois-by-mary-gaitskill
Incredible that nowhere in there did you mention the Republican party. In your narrative, they have no agency, they're simply responding to what the Democratic party does.
Chloé is not wrong. The Republican PARTY in fact has no agency. The Republican-controlled Congress has abandoned the Founders' expectation of pride in its own power and now, its members are completely intimidated by online mob rule. Their PARTY has been captured by individuals who have used the party apparatus to seize power by generating hatred of the party previously in power. The problems with the left existed not only in government, but as Chloé sagely observed, in every niche of our system of higher education.