Swimming Against the Current: Connecting to and Trusting Our Inner Wisdom
Angela Kim
“Intuition,” “unexplained knowing,” “gut feeling,” “Spirit” are all words connected to the idea that we possess an inner wisdom. It is not about the words we choose to call it, but the underlying idea that there is a part of us that knows how to act in the best interest of the collective and ourselves. A part of us that empowers us to act in ways that benefit us materially (in body) and nonmaterially (in heart). It is the voice inside ourselves that knows that the idea that we must sacrifice our wellbeing to “make it” is simply not true.
At Visionary Organizing Lab, we call that voice inner wisdom. Our inner wisdom is a super power that helps guide us towards a world we want to live in, in a way that affirms life. As amazing as it is, connecting to this part of ourselves can also be difficult in a world organized under a logic that prioritizes having over being. At times, listening to our inner wisdom can feel like trying to swim upstream or against a current, especially if you feel alone in doing so.
The currents we are swimming against are the currents of patriarchal racial capitalism (PRC), a system that denies the interconnected nature of life and the creative power of non-male people organized to facilitate endless economic growth, from which more white people benefit economically and from which all white people benefit socially and psychologically. The currents of PRC are strong because its values and norms permeate everything. The currents of PRC lead us to be obsessed with things like efficiency, urgency, individualism, autonomy, competition, “my way or the highway”, and a single narrative of progress (e.g. development as industrialization). Thinking of PRC as a current helps us see how we easily fall into these patterns as the default autopilot.
These values and norms are not bad in themselves, but PRC prioritizes these values at the neglect of other needs like collaboration, community, interdependence, belonging, and wellbeing. PRC leads us to prioritize our material needs and neglect our nonmaterial needs. It also increasingly limits the ways through which we can meet our material needs by making us dependent on money to survive. Because PRC is the dominant social system in which we live, it is inescapable, there is no existing outside of it.
If the logic of PRC is inescapable, what can we do? Following our inner wisdom is not a way to escape PRC but a way to learn how to swim against its strong logic that prioritizes material needs at the expense of nonmaterial needs. While we may still need jobs to pay rent and buy food, we can still connect to and listen to our inner wisdom in daily interactions in ways that affirm life. Listening to our inner wisdom is a skill like any other. This upcoming workshop and our next article offers tools to practice this skill. By practicing listening to our inner wisdom in small ways in our daily lives, perhaps one day, we will transform the current.
