Our liberty is bound together, in Bristol and everywhere

I do my best to state my biases and positions clearly and visibly. That doesn’t mean that everyone knows them, of course. Most of my writing is ephemeral (gone in a day) on Twitter. But in my Twitter bio I call myself a zen Buddhist and this is something I do as a kind of signal to others with similar beliefs but also to say that I learn from practice. I question my beliefs and I seek to explore them.

Part of a zen Buddhist practice I follow has to do with the multipolarity of our personalities. We have different parts that are useful in certain spaces and others relevant to other situations.

A common example is about how someone is different in various situations. You don’t bring the same tone when speaking in parliament as you do when comforting a hurt child or animal. The idea to keep hold of here is that it’s not even the same parts of ourselves that come up for us in these instances.

My most recent lived experience of this was when I was moderating a conference a couple of years back. As a researcher, I have spoken at many conferences about higher education and student experiences etc. but moderating is different. A moderator’s priority is not the content, which presenters have to deal with, but the procedures.

You have to check that your presenters are available and ready; you need enough time for the question-and-answer session afterwards while trying not to disturb the person speaking too much as you tell them three minutes left, then 1 minute left, and then yes-you’re-done-now.

You then need to pick out people from the audience for questions and if there aren’t any, have some up your sleeve to get the discussion started. There’s a constant vigilance to it, which can’t be too strict because you want people to open up. But you also need to make sure that people stick to their timings because otherwise the next person has less time to speak or there are fewer questions.

At the end of the three-day conference, a man came up to me and praised me with a smile and his southern American drawl on how I kept a close eye on things. He said, “I saw you. You put a lot of effort into keeping things going right.” It was an acknowledgement, and it was a connection.

We were in that kind of space where we could connect. It was a very brief moment but that sense of we are not doing this alone struck me.

I thought of that as I was reading No Bad Parts by Dr Richard Schwartz. Schwartz has developed a new model of psychoanalysis called Internal Family Systems. The idea behind it is that, as we were all growing up, at certain points, our needs weren’t met. Some parts became hurt or traumatised and our bodies exiled them. If we were bullied or shamed, for example, we hid those bits away so we wouldn’t have to keep reliving the pain of them. To make sure that we didn’t relive them, we created protectors. These are strategies that we use to keep our vulnerable parts safe from further abuse.

I’ve read a few of Schwartz’s books and they are similar to the ideas that come in Zen Buddhism. As the latest book says, there are no bad parts. Even the angry abusive nasty parts of us, are functioning to protect us at some level.

Behind all of our parts, which arise naturally as I pointed out with the example of the different roles, is the Self. There’s something inside of us that is full of energy. There are religions that would talk of this as God but we don’t need to worry about that for now.

Schwartz talks about how even in cases of people who were tortured daily, there was still this element of Self that shone through and it was made up of 8 Cs. The 8Cs came up because when people were describing how it felt to them in therapy, these are the terms that they used: Creativity, Compassion, Confidence, Clarity, Connectedness, Curiosity, Calm, Courageous.

These 8Cs are what we are when we allow our parts to do something other than protects us. There are various ways we can do that, and there examples in his videos and exercises. The video I’ve linked to below has some great exercises that can be practiced, and very useful explanations.

What is also important though is knowing that when we become activists and reach out to help change things around us, we want to do it in ways that don’t hurt others. We also don’t want to be drained of energy. Having to deal with our own protectors and others’ can be very draining.

I remember going home to my parents after my politics degree, years ago now, during which I’d learned about multinational corporations destroying habitats and bringing death and suffering to so many. I told my father that I wanted to go fight these corporations; I wanted to help people. I wanted to save the world.

My father was a decades-long activist. He’d left Greece when it was under military occupation and ran a newspaper in Australia, which was then burnt down. He has never backed away from speaking truth to power.

He said to me, “Who are you to fight these people? Who are you to go there and deal with those corporations?”

It stumped me for many years. Was he trying to put me down? But what he was actually doing was pointing out what Lilla Watson, a Murri indigenous Australian, said: “If you have come here to help me you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”

Eucalyptus tree and leaves; native Australian fauna.

He was saying don’t be a white saviour. We are in this together. We are equal. Our liberty is bound together.

We all have our roles to play as activists, and we need to acknowledge that our different roles mean that we must go united but we don’t need to be the same.

Let’s go from Self. When we are Creative, Compassionate, Confident, Clear, Connected, Curious, Calm, and Courageous, we have a better chance to keep our activism going and a much better chance of finding strength in our unity.

There are tough times coming. We need to work together more than ever. Let’s talk about how to best do that.