Known for her willingness to sit with and speak uncomfortable truths with love, Rev. angel bridges the worlds of liberation, love, and justi
Jonathan Fields interviews angel Kyodo williams on belonging to yourself as a path to collective liberation. They talk about the relation between identity, identifiers, and labels to belonging. She focuses on breaking binaries so people can find their way in.
The conversation also touched on presence and holding space.
My favorite quote:
“I don’t want anything from them [the audience], I want something for them.”
Other quotes:
”Spiritual power is a power. And with great power comes great responsibility. And for me, the responsibility is to be really, really attentive to what it is I’m wielding and for what purpose, towards what end. And there is only ever one end for me … Liberation.”
On the long game of self awareness:
“[Self awareness] is a constant unfolding.”
“We give people all sorts of practices, but underneath, underneath the underneath, we haven’t fortified people’s ability and commitment--the commitment first and then the ability— to come back to themselves … and trust themselves, to trust the wholeness of their experience.”
”If I can’t trust my experience, then I’m lost, and everything else is corrupted; everything else is corruptible.”
Belonging to oneself as a sense of “fundamental OKness.”
On socialization:
”One of the reasons [for] the core oppressions of our times and our human existence sense and our own society … is because belonging has been corrupted. This essential, critical, developmental need has been corrupted. And, as a result of that, and our inability to see it and recognize it for what it is. So we allow ourselves to be shaped because belonging is so critical, so necessary,”
”You at least deserve to have an awareness that you have been shaped, and you are caught, and that your decisions are therefore not your own.”
“We have to have a belonging to ourselves as a fundamental starting point of being able to avail ourselves of any other kinds of spiritual practice, development, formation. Otherwise, we are subject to being corrupted beyond measure.”
My favorite moment:
Jonathan describes an image of a contortionist trying to fit into a box. Everything fits except an arm. So to fit inside the box the contortionist cuts off the arm.
angel says what we cut off is our humanity. "We leave behind our innate, organic responses of compassion to other people's suffering. We leave behind our sense of care and concern and connection for people because they don't look like us. That limb is our humanity. So I always say don't go and take up race training; don't go deal with misogyny or patriarchy that inhabits your life or transphobia or whatever it is. Don't go do it for them. Do it for yourself. Do it because you are committed to reclaiming that limb of humanity that got cut off for you to that box of the corporate office or your family …