by Bridgett Hart | SELF
Connecting to Spirit is the best way I've found to have hope even in desperate times. But that means a lot of different things to different people. After studying love for 15 years, I have a definition for Spirit that might make you rethink some of how you're connecting.
Why This Post Is the Sixth
It's funny too, because Spirit is even speaking through the logistics of this post.
This morning in the shower, I was reflecting on a recent conversation I had about global anti-Blackness. The pastor I was speaking with said he thought there may be a connection to the Pentecost in Acts.
I've been pondering this point all week, and then the scripture from Genesis 1:27–31 came to my mind. The only part I recalled at the time was "created in the image of God," which brought to mind the white Jesus so many follow, and what the statement "Black woman is God" incites in some groups. I mean, Black woman is the image of God just as much as every other human, including white man, right? Why so much resistance to the idea?
Then I sat down to write this post for you, and noticed that this is the sixth post in this series, and this topic was also the sixth post in a different series I wrote about a similar theme.
So I decided to research the meaning of the number 6, which I recalled meant something about man in Biblical references, and definitely in the worst sense. In numerology, the number 6 often represents the balance between the material and spiritual, and signifies healing, selflessness, and unconditional love.
This illustrates my point about why I had to reach beyond Christianity to pull The Hart Habits together, because the meanings for the number 6 are both quite varied and totally related.
On the one hand, 6 represents the day, in the Bible story, that humans and all life on Earth were created. The Bible says both man and woman were created in the image of God. Everything else was also created that day, and humans were to rule the birds, sea animals, and every creeping thing, and to eat any plant or fruit tree that bears seeds. Let's hear it for the vegans, eh?
There's a big emphasis in Christianity that 6 is the number of man and represents imperfection, while 7 is the number of God, man plus 1, and represents perfection. Imperfection is the most important message in this context, and the predominant takeaway is unworthiness.
In numerology and secular number systems, 6 represents a balance between material and spiritual. It almost syncs up with the Biblical meaning, but instead of being a lack of something, it represents a bridge between one thing and the other, or a fulcrum for them to balance on.
It also illustrates how differently that scripture could be interpreted when the emphasis is on our connection to every other living thing on the planet and in the heavens, as opposed to our lack of God, which is 7, the day of rest, actually.
If we are in fact created in the image of God, that includes every human on the planet, right? So do we look like God, or does God look like us? Is God us? Is God them?
As you can see, this conversation can go on forever with no real conclusion that everyone is going to agree on. But after 15 years of studying love through the eyes of various disciplines, sciences, and storytellers, I came up with a definition that finally made sense to me. Hint: yes, God is all of us, and every single other molecule in the universe.
My Definition of Spirit
To me, Spirit, by any name, is the energy that flows between us all that causes each of us to manifest our greatest creativity.
As I moved through my journey to study love, I found there were specific behaviors or Habits I could engage in that would increase this type of energy flow in my personal relationships.
Then I realized I could also access this energy through connecting to the parts of our universe that have no choice but to operate in their greatest manifestation, things like nature in its native habitat, or the stars, moon, and galaxies.
Finally, I realized that by connecting to Spirit intentionally myself, and then making efforts to connect to others in the same way, I could increase this flow exponentially around me.
Get Quiet, Get Connected
What do I mean by connecting to Spirit intentionally? In a nutshell, it's a simple, though not easy, two-step process: get quiet, get connected.
Get Quiet
This part is super important, and probably the most difficult, because our society does not operate in a way that supports getting quiet or still. You've probably experienced hustle culture since you were in kindergarten, being rushed to learn how to read.
If being able to quiet your mind or sit still for a period of time sends you into a mini panic attack, you may need some actual sleep before you're ready for the type of quiet I'm talking about. That's okay. Get the sleep. Come back to this when you're rested and ready to move into your greatest with confidence.
If you understand what it means to get quiet, you'll recognize some of these as good ways to get there: meditation, by far my favorite, most difficult, and most effective method; yoga; silent retreats; prayer; tai chi; nature walks; swimming; gardening. There are so many more, and I'd love to hear yours, but this small list will give you a few options to try.
It's also worth noting this practice applies to every facet of life. In order to listen, we have to be quiet. Spirit is always telling us what we need to know and do to get our greatest outcomes, but we often can't hear it because we're too busy talking, or listening to the loudest messages in our face instead.
One of those very loud voices in the U.S. is white supremacy culture. It's been a cancer in this country since our conception, and it has tainted every aspect of our society and socialization. That's why you'll often hear me say "listen to Black women" and "follow Black femme leaders," because their voices have been the most silenced and marginalized in this culture.
When Spirit speaks, it's rarely a yell or a scream. Often it's a whisper. The quietest voice in your heart, telling you the hard but real truth. The kid looking at you with wide eyes to affirm or validate what they feel. That feeling in the pit of your stomach, or the flicker of a friend's face in your mind. The realization that you have privilege, and that you should use it to shield those who don't.
It can be blatant and open too, like a favorite song, or a commercial that keeps coming on at the right, or wrong, time.
Spirit constantly offers the wisdom, but it's always our choice to accept or reject the gift.
Get Connected
We accept and apply that gift of wisdom from Spirit by connecting to the other life forms we encounter, very intentionally.
I say life forms, as opposed to people, because I want us to expand our thinking beyond our spouse, our children, our parents, even beyond the humans we encounter each day at work, school, shopping, playing, and in our neighborhood.
Yes, connecting more intentionally and deeply with all these people will help connect you more deeply to Spirit. And also: the plants, insects, birds, and animals that live in your neighborhood, on your block, maybe in your walls, can be connections to Spirit as well.
Understanding how recycling programs work in your area, and what happens to your garbage when it leaves your hands, can connect you more deeply to Spirit.
Learning the links between water, wind, earth, fire, and indigenous practices, both your own people's and those of the people on whose land you live, can connect you more deeply to Spirit.
You might notice that when I talk about connecting with Spirit, I'm not talking about a lot of doing, but more about being, especially in a state of reception, gratitude, and celebration of everything around you and about you.
Being in relation with, and learning more about, everything that is not you, will benefit and feed your connection to Spirit.
Yes, this could even include going to church, temple, or some other religious or spiritual service. It's just not confined to those types of environments or events. Those are a few examples, out of millions, maybe billions, of ways we've been gifted to connect to Spirit.
Bringing It Back to Self
To bring this post back around to the original topic of the series, How to Have Hope in Desperate Times, connecting to Spirit is one of the ways I teach people to look in the mirror, or get reconnected to their Self, the very first Hart Habit.
If you're a white person who lives in the U.S., I highly recommend the specific activity of following Black femme leaders as a way to get more connected to Spirit, because it's a way to listen to the quieted voices in our society.
When I talk about being connected to Spirit, it's not really an inside activity. It's not about the meditation, or the prayer time, or how powerful we are as a spiritual individual, or exactly how we quiet our mind, but rather about what those practices will, or won't, cause us to contribute to our community with our resulting behaviors. It's about how that energy flows between you and others, and about what you're both giving and receiving energetically.
White supremacy culture taught us to take and take and take from the world around us, as if that was our birthright. But it forgot about the give. The time has come where the universe is about to force the give, because that's the nature of cycles. But you can be on the front end of that by learning how to give first. Then it won't hurt when that pendulum swings, because you'll already be aligned with it.
Being well connected to our Self is crucial to having what it takes to find hope. I'll dig into that further in my next post, but remember: you are your own greatest asset in every regard. You are one of a kind. There is no one else on planet Earth with exactly the same set of experience, genetics, or circumstance as you. You are the prototype, and your imperfections are exactly what make you perfect.
Talk soon. I love you.
Question of the day: How do you connect to Spirit?
by Bridgett Hart | TRUTH
Have you heard the verse "the truth will make you free"?
Have you wondered why it hasn't made you feel free from your anxiety and negative thoughts yet?
I'm going to share the secret about truth that the people in charge never wanted us to know.
Why Some Truths Create Anxiety
Our white American society was built on hiding and avoiding the truth of slavery. We enslaved human beings to hoard, build, and generate wealth for ourselves, and we excluded everybody else from it, even the people who actually did the building. We did that for 400 years. How many generations do you think happen in 400 years?
What do you think that many years of hiding and avoiding the visible truth does to a society? What happens when we shrink all of that down into our daily lives? The fact that we don't know how to celebrate truth is chilling, but it also explains a lot about why we suffer so much anxiety and negative thinking.
Love Celebrates Truth
At the beginning of what became The Hart Habits, I came across the phrase "love celebrates truth." I had to sit with the word celebrate. What do we actually do when we celebrate something? We put it on a stage. We shine light on it. We put up billboards. We make a big deal. We highlight the good in it. We take the time to notice it, and pay attention to it.
Objective Truth vs. Subjective Truth
I like to talk about two kinds of truth: objective and subjective.
Objective truths are the ones we'd generally agree on as a group, usually based on facts, data, evidence, and statistics. The speed of light. The sky is blue. The grass is green. In reality, though, there are very few completely objective truths. Most things become subjective the moment we receive and process them for ourselves.
Subjective truths are the ones subject to our personal interpretation. They come through our eyes, ears, and senses, get processed by our brain, and are interpreted by our heart, soul, or spirit as true. I've talked before about the Reticular Activating System, and how the brain can lie to us to keep our reality matching what we expect. If you want fun, concrete examples of this, watch Brain Games on National Geographic.
Here's a subjective truth: I think I'm a tall woman. I'm five foot eight, which is tall compared to a lot of women. I'm often one of the taller women in a room. But if I'm standing next to a girlfriend who's six foot seven, she might look at me and think, you are not tall, you're small. That's true for both of us. It's true for me that I'm tall, because in most rooms I'm looking over people's heads. It's also true for her that I'm small.
How can I be both tall and small at the same time? Subjective truth. The truth has to come through my filter first, and through hers. Both are still true, even though they conflict.
The Plurality of Truth
You could search this as duality of truth, but I like to call it the plurality of truth, because every truth has more than two ways of looking at it. It's not just my way and their way. There are many different perspectives on any given situation.
Think about the four Gospels. Same story, four different people, different times, different perspectives, different messages. They tell the same story in different ways, and all of them are still true (according to believers), just shaped by whoever is telling it.
Here's the Point
Even when someone's truth is the opposite of yours, love celebrates truth. When you let other people hold their truth and choose to celebrate it instead of fighting it, everything works better.
That's their truth. You're not going to change it. Trying to is what's causing you the anxiety and negative thinking. Instead: shine a light on it. Pay attention to it. Highlight it. Understand it. Make your own decisions with it in mind.
You're free now. You get your freedom from letting them have their truth. You don't have to change them. You don't have to change their mind. You don't have to persuade anyone toward a different point of view. You're here to experience your own perspective and enjoy it as fully as possible, in service of your highest purpose. Gratitude helps with that.
What This Opens Up
Their truth being different from yours isn't a problem. When you can look at it honestly and celebrate it, meaning really pay attention to it, there are real benefits. You get to make better, more informed decisions about how you move forward, what you do or don't do, what your boundaries are, what Spirit is telling you, what your shadow or inner child wants, and how your strengths play into all of it.
You might notice that's the four components of the first Hart Habit, Self, the ones I walked through in the last several posts of this series. Truth is number two on the list instead of number one for a reason. You have to know yourself, love yourself, and embrace your own subjective truths before you can really embrace what other people believe is true too.
Soon, you'll get to a place where you can hold someone else's truth as true for them, and worth celebrating, simply because you want to live a life aligned with love. You'll make better decisions about how you move forward with people, and you'll find yourself more open-minded, more able to hold all the different truths, good, bad, and ugly, that exist in the connections and Spirit around you.
Recommended resources:
Dare to Lead by Brené Brown
The Reticular Activating System
Brain Games (National Geographic)
The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander
Question of the day: What truths are you avoiding, hiding, or trying to hide from? What would it look like to celebrate them instead?
by Bridgett Hart | TRUTH
Sometimes, knowing the truth hurts so bad we try to survive it by blissing out in denial. When the absolute truth of a situation is crushing, we look for something else to hold instead: shopping, social media, destructive behaviors, substances, or a thin layer of "love and light."
But sometimes we just need to feel everything the truth makes us feel. Angry. Betrayed. Scared. Afraid. Sometimes we have to embrace the shitty part before we can actually move through it and heal. And we owe our friends the same thing.
When "Everything Happens for a Reason" Falls Flat
Have you ever told someone you love that something felt wrong, and they answered with "I'm sure it's nothing" or "just keep thinking positive, everything will be okay"?
It's well intended. It also lands completely flat, and worse, it can feel like they're ignoring the actual words that just came out of your mouth. It's isolating. It can feel like nobody has ever felt what you're feeling right now.
Let me assure you: so many of us have been through the devastating thing you're going through, or sensing is coming. Miscarriage. Rape. Losing a big client. Divorce. Death. Bankruptcy. Chronic illness. Cheating. Abuse. We know. We feel you. And here's something more useful than a platitude.
Feel It
Whatever you're feeling, lean into it and name it. Angry? Betrayed? Ignored? Powerless? Afraid? Acknowledge it. Validate it. It's okay that you feel it, and there's a real reason you do. That reason is valid, no matter what it's rooted in, deep childhood stuff, the hard truth of the situation itself, or hormones. It's valid because you feel it. Full stop.
Observe It
While you're feeling it, try to also observe it. Look at what's coming up and think about what it might be trying to show you, teach you, or leave behind once it passes. You don't have to understand it yet. Just pay attention.
Document It
One way to observe it is to document it. Write, paint, type, scribble, color, dress, dance, stretch, swing - any of these can help you get a feeling out of your head and into something tangible. There's nothing wrong with any of them. Letting a feeling take physical form gives you a new angle to actually look at it from. I've written before about using art journaling this same way, and this is the same underlying practice applied to grief and hard truths specifically. It doesn't need to be shared or shown to anyone. It's not for anyone else's eyes, but it can truly help your brain process what you're going through in one more solid way.
Treat It
We go through genuinely difficult things in life, and we deserve the time and grace to move through them at our own pace. Healing isn't overnight.
So if you're angry, feel it first. Then, once you've actually processed it and you're ready, do something that helps release it. A rage room, throwing electronics against concrete. A boxing class. Playing with your kids. A massage. Lighting a candle. Whatever actually works for you.
And remember, therapy isn't for "crazy" people. It's for humans with complicated, layered realities who could use a little informed help navigating them without doing more damage to themselves or anyone else along the way. With the right therapist, therapy is always worth it as you move through the harsh truths life keeps handing you.
Question of the day: What's something well-meaning someone said to you that landed completely wrong, and what would you have wanted to hear instead?
by Bridgett Hart | SELF
I'm so glad to have you here again today. As promised, here's part two of my deepest, darkest secret.
Part one was that I've used cannabis most days for the last 25 years. I quit during pregnancy, breastfeeding, and through a few jobs along the way, but generally speaking, it's been part of my life for a long time.
Part two is harder to talk about. Harder to admit to. Harder for other people to hear. At the end of the last post, I asked if you'd still love me after hearing that first secret. Some of you told me you would. Let me be honest: a lot of people don't. It's hard for people to accept, especially openly, because once someone says "that's okay with me," they start wondering: wait, is it okay for me? For the people I love? For that person I judged harshly, or treated poorly, because of that same thing? Do I still love them? It brings up a lot of questions.
An Interracial Family
Many of you know my husband is Black. Our daughter is Black (American from the 1600s and Nigerian) and white (Polish, German, British, and Scottish). We're an interracial family, married ten years next month, together for years before that.
But if you'd known me as a young person, especially through college, you'd probably have known me as someone with a lot of Black friends, maybe even more Black friends than white ones. I thought of myself as progressive. I liked Black folks, that's who I spent my time with, and I didn't think much more about it than that.
It wasn't until I started building The Hart Habits that I really began looking closely at everything I was carrying, everything I had shame around, everything I still needed to work through. One of those things, coming up both in the wider culture and in my own life as I became a soon-to-be mother to a young Black woman, was racism. Was I racist?
Starting From "I Am Racist"
I've told this story before: the way I started learning about racism in America was to begin with the premise that I am racist, and go looking to find out if that was true. Starting from that premise, not from "I'm probably not," but from "let's assume I am and see what I find."
Here's the deep, dark secret: it didn't take long at all. Within moments of saying, " Okay, I'll just say I'm racist and see what comes up", I knew for certain that I was.
A lot of you would ask more about that, because if you knew me, you wouldn't have thought of me as a racist person. I was the person you'd have described as liking Black people more than white people, and honestly, that was true for a lot of years of my life. I've since landed somewhere more nuanced: humanity is humanity, different cultures carry different strengths and weaknesses, and there's a lot going on underneath all of it.
Redefining What Racism Actually Is
When I said "I'm racist," I expected to find evidence that I wasn't. I grew up in North Idaho, home of the Aryan Nations. I was used to defining racists as the overt ones: the KKK, the skinheads, the ones with the regalia, talking about white pride and white Christian brotherhood and not wanting to be "diluted" by Black or brown blood.
I was around a lot of very overt racism, which made it easy to separate myself from it. Obviously I'm not one of them. I don't hate Black people, I love Black people, I thought.
What I found, over time, is that racism isn't an admission. It's not "I don't like Black people." It's not a confession of feeling negatively about a group based on their race. Racism is an omission.
Racism is redlining policies that kept Black people out of neighborhoods that were growing and succeeding. Racism is when Black Americans make up 13% of the population but average only about 1% of a white American's core social network, per research from the Public Religion Research Institute. Racism is when Black Americans are roughly 13% of the population but around 32% of the sentenced state and federal prison population, per the most recent Bureau of Justice Statistics data. That's an omission. It's an omission of the people who should be at the table, consulted, listened to, advised with, on how to actually fix these problems, and instead, they're simply not there.
Racism is air blow dryers in public bathrooms that don't register dark skin, because nobody in the room designing them was Black, or in a position to say, this doesn't work for me. Racism is the school-to-prison pipeline for young Black kids. Racism is suspension and discipline rates 30 to 40 times higher for young Black girls than white or Asian girls.
That's racism. Omission. The omission of people from decision-making and power-holding in our own society. Bigotry and prejudice are their own separate things, and I found plenty of those too, in my own mind, my own heart, my own life, and ultimately in the society around me.
Deep Dark Secret Number Two
I am racist. I'm working actively to be anti-racist. But the only way to actually do that was to start in the mirror first: deal with my own prejudice, my own bias, my own defense mechanisms that would go up to keep me from hearing truths that were hard to hear.
There it is. My deepest, darkest secret. I am racist. I don't want to be anymore. I don't want you to be either.
If you're someone who's thought to yourself, well, I'm definitely not racist, drop a comment and say it out loud, or tell me you'd like to learn more. If you're ready to drop the defenses and see what might be under the surface, in your own mind, your own life, your own sphere of influence, either way, know that I love you, just like I love myself, just like I love my white father, my white brother, my white mom and sisters. We will create a new world together.
Question of the day: What would it take for you to start from the premise that you might be wrong about this, and see what you find?
