The personal is political: You can’t change the world without changing people

Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash In 2012, my hope for the future of the world died. And yet, in that same year, the seeds of a new hope were also planted. On the Berkeley campus, I attended a talk by Aric McBay, Derrick Jensen, and Lierre Keith, the authors of Deep Green Resistance - Strategy to Save the …

Responsibility, power, and privilege

Photo by Christian Buehner on Unsplash When I first started dipping my toes into the personal development world, one of the things that didn’t sit right with the social justice warrior in me was the emphasis on personal responsibility. In the capitalism-can-do-no-wrong world of traditional personal development, personal responsibility is a bootstraps ethos. No matter …

Talking about spirituality is like dancing about architecture

Photo by Hans Vivek on Unsplash As a white, left-brained, cisgender, heterosexual, middle-class, college-educated, able-bodied man born in the United States in the latter half of the 20th century, and raised by an atheist step-dad, the circumstances of my socialization were ideal for sewing doubt into my consciousness for anything spiritual, new-age, or “woo-woo.” That is perhaps why …