When was the last time you purposefully engaged in a respectful consensual dialog around a heated topic––a curious fencing match with someone with whom you disagreed?

I would venture to guess that few of us can remember the last time we engaged in that sort of robust and uncomfortable conversation. Censorship, canceling, and erasure create a preciousness and frailty within us individually, and in society at large, that tends to simply create more of the same. This frailty, in turn, undermines our sense of our individual wellness and our capacity to grow and learn. If we step into our jobs each morning aware of the threat of being canceled or called out, we are likely to become ardent censors of ourselves, ever-narrowing our risk-taking and growth. This is the antithesis of ecologically embedded ethical practice. And it’s also the antithesis of a healthy, generative society.

Who do you talk with when you’re facing an ethical dilemma? What do you do if you’ve done the wrong thing with a client and you need to get support and supervision? Have you experienced fear and/or shaming when you bring ethical questions to your professional communities?

Power and Ethics. This is complex and uncomfortable territory for many of us. As the divisiveness and extremism builds around the subject of covid and more specifically the vaccine, as communities and entire countries are establishing two classes of citizens, I am particularly concerned about the murkiness created within a culture that strategically disempowers its individuals in order to ensure ideological compliance and docile participation. Is it possible for us to stand in our ethical responsibility if we do not feel empowered? What do choice and consent look like in a culture that violently demands only one perspective?

For understandable reasons, most of us have a fraught relationship with our personal power. To name just two predominant themes, some of us believe we are entitled to a power we have not earned (and we wield it in a power-over way) while some of us cannot see the power we have (because we are wed to an identity that requires us to see ourselves as power-under). It’s no wonder this is true. As it is modeled and taught in Western Industrial Cultures, power is removed from its ecological embeddedness. It is a thing that is taken rather than given. It is a thing we use (and often end up misusing).

Ethical behavior, we are told, is the application of the morals, principles and values we each hold. But where do we get our morals, our principles and our values? In a human society like the Western(ized) industrial cultures most of us live in, the values, morals and principles we grow up with are often presented to us as unassailable requirements for all good people. In the current climate of rampant and proliferating orthodoxies and unrelenting cancel culture, our values, principles and morals are often as much a survival response to ensure we are not exiled or silenced as they are a unique expression of our particular experience of belonging, participation and responsibility.

When we fall into shame, we are no longer available to engage, nor are we capable of acknowledging the impact we’ve had or the harm we’ve caused. If we can’t do these things, then we cannot take responsibility for our actions or their impact. This makes it impossible to make amends or repair the rupture.

We do not make our way out of shame in isolation. In order to be ethical practitioners, we must surround ourselves with communities of diversity and fierce support. Communities that will stay with us when we have fallen into shame. And we must work to cultivate communities that do not cancel each other, exile or call each other out.

Join us starting August 31st for Embodied Ethics. In this 12-week course for practitioners and others – all those in positions of power and responsibility – we will explore the roots of our shame, how and where it lives in us, and some of the ways to make ourselves less hospitable to its damaging effects.

Your ancestors and mine have all practiced their own unique forms of animism––for them, the entire world was alive and ensouled. To be alive and ensouled means that each individual (whether that individual was Rock, Stream, Aspen Tree or Madagascan Pochard) has a soul of its own, including a unique destiny and intrinsic part to play in the unfolding of Life.

Within this cosmological compass our ancestors, all, had oral traditions telling stories of our celestial and chthonic parentage. Our ancestors came from the Earth and Stars, and were of the Earth and Stars. They answered to this eminence and were held in their accountability by this eminence. Your ancestors and mine oriented to a way of being that acknowledged this fact.

When I say ‘they oriented to a way of being’ I mean they acknowledged the paradoxical dance between individual will, desire and sovereignty and the fact that our every action impacts not only the other human individuals in our midst but everyone within the Web of Life: human and other-than-human. This Web of Life included the dead and the not yet born. There are many societies on Earth today that still practice this way of living.

In an eco-centric human culture, one that operates as if all participants play a unique and critical role in the continued unfolding wholeness of the system, ethics are unique to each individual. Of course, there are still consequences for every action. Some of these consequences are brilliant and generative. Sometimes they are tragic. Sometimes they are generative and tragic at the same time.

In our 12-week course Embodied Ethics starting on August 31st, we explore the possibility that a diverse, generative culture requires us to acknowledge that our ethics are as necessarily and deliberately unique to each of us as our fingerprints.

In this exploration we are assuming a few things that go against the dictums of our current society––that might even feel unethical to assume, let alone explore! We are assuming that ethics are not simply a matter of not doing the wrong thing or even simply just doing the right thing. We are imagining that ethics are, more importantly, a matter of doing the particular thing that needs doing in this unique moment – the thing only you can do.

There are many bite-sized pieces in the whopper of the above sentence. And we will take the time to identify, chew and digest many of them in our 12-week exploration. For today I am going to point out the last phrase: a thing only you can do.

About halfway through our last round of Embodied Ethics, we paused from our didactic learning to explore the intimate consequences of the carceral system as it lives uniquely within each of us. We acknowledged that for many of us within this system we have internalized this undermining narrative ‘it’s merely a matter of time before I am found out and the truth revealed: that, it turns out I am, afterall, a bad person.’

In this pause, we explored what it feels like to navigate the complex terrain of power and responsibility while living within this system of good versus bad, that relies on shame and the threat of exile should we make a mistake or unintentionally cause harm. We located, within the intimate terrain of our own bodies, where the fear lives most palpably: where that voice of ‘don’t let them see you! Just stay hidden and you’ll be safe!’ lives.

Then, we slowed down even more, closed our eyes, took deep breaths and imagined...how would I feel and what might be possible, if I lived humbly and transparently within a community that encouraged me to explore and develop my own ecologically embedded ethical compass, guided by my unique place within the community and my authentic responses, curiosity and longing?

In this quiet pause, we simply began to acknowledge our (often unconscious) embodied experience of ‘ethics’ as it has been taught and told to us. If we are to identify and nourish alternatives to the system of unquestioned obedience we currently have, this is a crucial first step: acknowledging the ways in which we are each shaped by the philosophies and practices of the carceral system. Acknowledging the fear, rage, and numbness, as well as the curiosity, longing and possibility.

Marketing, as an endeavor, is not ecologically embedded nor is it erotically intelligent. In fact, it is the antithesis of wild. Here, I’m faced with a deep conundrum. It seems to be seeding the worst kind of karma to enroll a course using tactics and strategies that go against the fundamental principles we are teaching. So, as is typically my way, I come to the pond (or the perennial garden, or the vegetable garden, or the fields behind our house where the great old Grandmother Tree stands) and I observe and listen. I let myself believe everything I ‘hear’ and see, everything that occurs to me in this deep listening place.

When it comes to ethics – the exploration of how we behave in ways that are beneficent, generative, and future-thinking, while staying right here in the present-moment, yet deeply informed by the impacts of the past – we are all merely humans together.