We moved the blog to Substack in November 2023. For current Healing America’s Narratives blog posts, please visit https://reggiemarra.substack.com/
Healing America’s Narratives: Injuring, Killing, Curing, & Corpse Disposal — for Profit
Photo by Jp Valery on Unsplash [Part of a series, this essay looks at some ways people make money in the context of Healing America’s Narratives: the Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow — Now available] What could possibly go wrong when the tools and systems of war, violence, injury, medical services, death, and corpse disposal are profit-driven? Reminder: The elements of the collective national Shadow of the United States we work with in this series include ignorance, arrogance, fear, bigotry, violence, greed, excess, bullying, and untrustworthiness. Two of America’s most powerful and profitable hybrid industries stand out as exemplars of America’s collective national Shadow. The insurance-pharmaceutical-medical-government-financial-lobbying…
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Healing America’s Narratives: What’s Love Got to Do With It? Part 2
[Part of our ongoing exploration of Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow, this essay continues our exploration of Chapter Twelve’s inquiry into the role of love — and its lack — in American culture. The book is available here.] In Part 1 of this inquiry into love, we introduced Br. David Steindl-Rast’s, Dr. M. Scott Peck’s, and Marianne Williamson’s respective reflections that love is “the joyful acceptance of belonging,” “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth,” and the absence of fear.¹ With the intersection of these views of…
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Healing America’s Narratives: What’s Love Got to Do With It?
[Part of our ongoing exploration of Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow, this essay explores Chapter Twelve’s inquiry into the role of love — and its lack — in American culture. The book is available here.] Regarding the subtitle’s question, the answer is, well, just about everything. Over the course of some twenty years I paid attention to others’ views on love. I listened to friends and family, read fiction and nonfiction including scripture from various religions, and did my best to understand what I felt through my own direct experience. Three particular views among many…
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Healing America’s Narratives: The Race for Violence — 2023
Photo © by Gayatri Malhotra on Unsplash [Part of a series, this essay looks at some current events in the context of Healing America’s Narratives: the Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow — Now available] The context of each of these “Healing America’s Narratives” posts is the collective national Shadow of the United States, as explored in detail in the book by that name. Briefly, America’s collective Shadow carries at least nine traits: ignorance, arrogance, fear, bigotry, violence, greed, excess, bullying, and untrustworthiness. These nine traits can be observed throughout history, beginning with America’s three foundational subjugations — of women, Native Americans, and African Americans — and continuing up to the present day with…
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Healing America’s Narratives: Thank You, Tennessee
Photo (c) by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash [Part of our ongoing exploration of Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow, this essay focuses on a school shooting in Nashville and related events in the Tennessee State Legislature that highlight our need for healing. The book is available here.] On March 27, 2023 a man with a gun killed three adults and three children at the Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee. School shootings — and shootings in general — are, as you know, a regular part of the American landscape. On April 7, the Tennessee State Legislature voted to remove two of the three legislators who had…
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Healing America’s Narratives: Unequal Protection of the Laws
Photo © by Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash [Part of our ongoing exploration of Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow, this essay focuses on Chapter 10 and the role that money and celebrity play in subverting the 14th Amendment’s “equal protection” clause. The book is available here.] Donald Trump turned himself in to authorities yesterday following his indictment by the Manhattan district attorney. In anticipation of turning himself in, much as he had done leading up to the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot, Trump incited his followers on social media to come to New York City and protest his…
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Healing America’s Narratives: Guns, Money, & Violence
[Part of our ongoing exploration Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow, this essay focuses on the roles violence and greed play in our collective Shadow. The book is available here.] The underlying premise in Healing America’s Narratives is that the United States we know in the third decade of the 21st century is inevitable. Viewed through the lenses of history and psychology, our violence, anxiety, depression, addiction, wealth disparity, bigotry, greed, excess, and our individual and collective trauma are anything but surprising. America remains an experiment: “We were conceived through the fertilization of ideas that gave voice to…
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Healing America’s Narratives: Assumption, Fear, and Resistance to Change
Photo © by Suzanne D. Williams on Unsplash [Part of our ongoing exploration of Chapter Eleven of Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow, this essay explores why it often feels like we’re immune to change. The book is available here.] We know that change can be unsettling, even scary, whether it’s exterior change imposed by events such as war, weather, or pandemic, or prospective interior change of beliefs, values, or view, beckoning for our attention. As we continue our exploration of Chapter Eleven’s foundational question, “So, now what?” we’ll briefly consider here a model of how and why we…
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Healing America’s Narratives: Moving Toward Collective Healing
[Part of a series, this essay continues our turn toward the collective in our ongoing exploration of Chapter Eleven of Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow.Now available.] In the previous essay, we introduced M. Scott Peck’s stages of community-making: pseudocommunity, chaos, emptiness, and community. Here, as we continue our turn toward the collective, we’ll look briefly at Theory U, a book and methodology by MIT professor and founder of the Presencing Institute, Otto Scharmer, who invites leaders — that’s all of us at some level — to explore their “blind spot” — the “inner place” and “quality of intention and attention” from…
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Healing America’s Narratives: Moving Toward Community
Photo © by Rita Vicari on Unsplash [Part of a series, this essay turns toward the collective as we continue our exploration of Chapter Eleven of Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow.Now available.] As we continue to explore America’s narratives and collective Shadow, it’s essential to remember and pay attention to the interrelationships among individuals, groups, and systems — with systems, as used here, including all of our natural and human-made environments — from the planet itself to big cities, to belief systems, to the technology you’re using right now to read or listen to this essay. From among those abundant…
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Healing America’s Narratives: Playing Whack-a-Mole in Politics and Celebrity Performance News
Photo © by ahmad kanbar on Unsplash [Part of a series, this essay continues our exploration of Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow. Now available.] The previous posts in this series provide evidence that the problems and mood of the United States of America in the third decade of the twenty-first century are not surprising and are inevitable when history and current events are viewed through a trans-partisan, developmental lens. A significant number of elected officials, including those I vote for and those I would never vote for, and a significant number of paid performance news commenters either do not know this (ignorance), do…
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Healing America’s Narratives: Trauma
Photo by Stormseeker on Unsplash [Part of a series, this essay continues our exploration of Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow.Now available.] In The Myth of Normal, Dr. Gabor Maté writes that “[t]he meaning of the word ‘trauma,’ in its Greek origin, is ‘wound.’ Whether we realize it or not, it is our woundedness, or how we cope with it, that dictates much of our behavior, shapes our social habits, and informs our ways of thinking about the world.”¹ Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, in The Body Keeps the Score, is clear that “trauma is NOT the story of what happened a…
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Healing America’s Narratives: Self-Compassion
[Part of a series, this essay continues our exploration of Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow. Now available.] Most of us who are more or less healthy have no problem extending compassion to — recognizing and engaging with the suffering of — others. Many of us, however, when it comes to our own suffering, struggle to offer compassion to ourselves. Kristin Neff, in her book, Self-Compassion, writes that compassion “involves the recognition and clear seeing of suffering….feelings of kindness for people who are suffering….[and] recognizing our shared human condition.”¹ Self-compassion, then, asks us to be mindful — so we can…
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Healing America’s Narratives: Self-Discipline
[Part of a series, this essay continues our exploration of Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow.Now available.] Knowing we are going to die, how, then, shall we live? The livings, indignities, and dyings depicted throughout Healing America’s Narratives and this series of posts offer examples of how not to live. As an antidote, Chapter Eleven of the book offers the potential benefits of paying attention to who we think we are, the stories we choose to tell and how we choose to tell them, the impact we have and how we are impacted, what we might not see — including, but not limited to, Shadow — who our people…
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Healing America’s Narratives: Intentional Practice, Addiction, and Escape
Library of Congress [Part of a series, this essay continues our exploration of Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow.Now available.] For the sake of this essay, we’ll describe practice as any thought, feeling, or behavior that is repeated on a regular¹ basis. Intentional practice is, therefore, any intentionally repeated thought, feeling, or behavior. So, for the folks captured in the above photo, let’s assume (despite the dangers therein) that they have intentionally created or purchased the signs they’re holding, and that they have intentionally shown up at this venue to make their views known. Beyond their chosen signs and…
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Healing America’s Narratives: Resistance: Sources and Resources
[Part of a series, this essay continues our exploration of Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow.Now available.] While we did not explicitly explore resistance in Healing America’s Narratives, it is implicitly present in every chapter of the book — always there any time we bump up against something that challenges our current view or way of doing things. Europeans resisted embracing Africans as equals and instead enslaved them; Europeans resisted embracing the indigenous peoples of what are now known as the Americas and instead lied to them, took their land, and tried to force them to abandon their cultures.…
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Healing America’s Narratives: The Power & Paradox of Silence
[Part of a series, this essay continues our exploration Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow, specifically in the context of what may serve the healing process moving forward. The book is available.] In “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” Audre Lorde wrote that “I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.”¹ Millions of voices have been silenced over hundreds of years by America’s narratives and collective Shadow. Yet, the mystical branch of every…
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Healing America’s Narratives: Background and Foreground, Context and Content
[Part of a series, this essay continues our exploration of Chapter Eleven (So, Now What?”) of Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow.Now available.] In the context of the history¹ of the United States, of the nation’s collective national Shadow and state of affairs in the third decade of the twenty-first century, and our reflections on who we are, the stories we tell and embrace, who and what we impact or impacts us, what we might be missing, who our people are, our inevitable death, and how we’re in relationship with all of this, what might we do individually or collectively in order to engage this healing and Shadow…
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Healing America’s Narratives: How Am I in Relationship With Everything in My Life?
[Part of a series, this essay explores a subheading from Chapter Eleven of Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow.Now available.] In an earlier essay, we considered six questions and statements that are important for the healing process. Here they are again, with the first five linked to a brief overview: We’re focusing on that final question here. Another way to ask the question is “What is the nature of my relationship with…” who I think I am or whether or not everything is a story or what I might not be seeing. Underlying the importance of relationship is the context of healing, which, as…
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Healing America’s Narratives: I Am Going To Die
Photo ©by Philippa Rose-Tite on Unsplash Part of a series, this essay explores a subheading from Chapter Eleven of Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow.Now available. We’re returning to Chapter Eleven of Healing America’s Narratives after our departures in the previous two posts — the inevitability of the current state of the country and the apparent belief, shared by both Democratic and Republican leadership, that they need never-ending millions of advertising dollars in order to win elections and defeat each other (for the good of the country). “I am going to die” is the fifth of six statements and questions that frame Chapter Eleven, which…
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Healing America’s Narratives: Money, Elections, Democrats, Republicans, & Money
Photo © by Maria Thalassinou on Unsplash Part of a series, this essay explores aspects of the idiocy that characterize America’s two-party approach to political campaigns. Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow.Now available. Note: I am an unaffiliated voter — I am a member of neither the Republican nor the Democratic party. I used to be a member of one of them, and am still more generally aligned on most issues with that party. This essay captures the essence of why I dropped my membership with one party and why I would never become a member of the other…
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Healing America’s Narratives: The Inevitability of the Current Mood of the United States
Photo © by tom coe on Unsplash Part of a series, this essay explores the inevitability that surfaced amid the research for and writing of Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow. Now available. If we begin with Jamestown, Virginia in 1607 and work our way forward through each day since then, especially those days not included in some of the more (in)famous years like 1619, 1776, 1787, 1830, 1865, 1868, 1920, 1945, 1964, 2001, 2003 (et cetera)¹ and into our current state of affairs in the third decade of the twenty-first century, where we are as a country is inevitable. Said…
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Healing America’s Narratives: Who Are My People?
Photo © by Brittani Burns on Unsplash Part of a series, this essay explores a subheading from Chapter Eleven of Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow. Now available. Who Are My People? In the perfectly integrated, comprehensive, inclusive, and balanced universe in which most of us do not (think we) live, we can hear the mystical cheerleaders’ rhythmic, enthusiastic, and obvious response echoing around the arena: EV-ree-one! Where most of us do think we live, it can be helpful to have a sense of who our people are — not in the unhealthy us-against-the-others sense that governs most finite games, but in the…
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Healing America’s Narratives: What Am I Not Seeing?
Part of a series, this essay explores a subheading from Chapter Eleven of Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow. Now available. In our previous three inquiries into subheaders from Chapter Eleven, “So, Now What?” we explored identity, story, and impact. Here we’ll consider what any one of us — or millions of us — might be missing with regard to our own lives and/or our country. “Shadow,” as it’s referred to throughout the book, is one reason, among others, an individual or a collective might not be seeing something. There are various ways to work with Shadow.¹ One hint that…
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Healing America’s Narratives: What’s My Impact & What Impacts Me?
Part of a series, this essay explores a subheading from Chapter Eleven of Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow. Now available. What’s My Impact & What Impacts Me? What’s my impact — what’s the nature of the wake I’m leaving as I swim, paddle, sail, or otherwise make my way along the river or across the ocean of life? How does my wake impact other vessels and the water itself, and to what extent am I aware of this impact? What impacts me — what is the nature of the impact on me of other vessels, the wakes…
Keep readingHealing America’s Narratives: Everything Is a Story
Part of a series, this essay explores a subheading from Chapter Eleven of Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow. Now available. Everything Is a Story Note your immediate response to this premise. Is it, ‘What do you mean — please explain?’ or, ‘Bullshit…?’ or ‘Du-uh, tell me something I don’t already know?’ Perhaps it’s ‘Thank you for confirming what I was beginning to see?’ Is it something else entirely? Whatever it is fine — it’s your story about the suggestion that everything is a story. Consider that if your response was in the general area of Bullshit.…
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Healing America’s Narratives: Who Am I, Really?
Part of a series, this essay explores a question raised in Chapter Eleven of Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow. Now available. Who Am I, Really? If you’re sure you know and are ready to dismiss the question, what follows may be a waste of your time — or exactly what you need. Here are five prospective responses. They are neither mutually exclusive nor exhaustive. Add your own. 1) I am a mystery that I explore more deeply every day. 2) I am a mix of elements that’s worth four or five bucks. 3) I am…
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Healing America’s Narratives: An Overview
Part of a series, this essay breaks from those that precede it and offers a “one-stop” overview of Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow. Now Available. Healing America’s Narratives presents the case that the mood of the United States of America in the third decade of the 21st century is inevitable when considered through the intersection of the lenses of history, developmental psychology, politics, and spirituality. Our current dysfunction, while worrisome, is not surprising. More to the point, the nation is cursed and blessed with competing (not just different) narratives that, even at their most oppositional, share…
Keep readingHealing America’s Narratives: So, Now What?
This essay is adapted from Chapter Eleven of Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow. Available now. Photo by Brittani Burns on Unsplash First, remember (or notice for the first time) that you have a body. Notice that you are breathing, and keep your attention there for a minute or so. Intentionally observe the inbreath, the pause, and the outbreath. Pretty cool. You are actually being breathed. You don’t choose or have to control the process, although you can play with — hold, quicken, or slow — it. Also notice your posture. Attune your attention to the alignment of…
Keep readingHealing America’s Narratives: How One Guy Unwittingly Invites Us to Heal
Photo (c) by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash This essay is adapted from Chapter Ten of Healing America’s Narratives: the Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow — Now available. Healing America’s Narratives’ exploration of our collective American Shadow began as a brief essay in September 2016, which made the case that the Republican candidate for the presidency, all by himself, embodied America’s Shadow elements — ignorance, arrogance, fear, bigotry, violence, greed, excess, bullying, and untrustworthiness. As the book’s direction emerged and evolved, his role and embodiment diminished in importance but offered both a gift and a threat. The gift manifests because, even when he doesn’t actually believe…
Keep readingHealing America’s Narratives: Bullied, Woke, & Canceled in the Polarized State(s) of America
This essay is adapted from Chapter Nine of Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow — Now available. An earlier version of this piece, which was a precursor to Chapter Nine, appeared in April 2021. In its healthiest manifestation nowadays, being and/or staying ‘woke’ refers to becoming aware of social justice issues that need to be addressed, and ideally, taking action that addresses them. More generally, being woke involves being increasingly able to see ‘what is’ beyond the limitations of one’s personal, familial, and cultural biases. No one that I’ve met, read, listened to, heard of, or been does this 100% successfully.…
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Healing America’s Narratives: And That’s Not All
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash This essay is adapted from Chapter Eight of Healing America’s Narratives: the Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow — Now available.¹ Both beyond and within the narratives explored in the first five essays in this series — selected excerpts from the histories of women, Native Americans, African Americans, the Vietnam War, and the post-9/11 “war on terror,” other manifestations of our collective American Shadow beckon. Each, as with those first five, deserves more consideration than it gets here. Again, we are exploring denial and projection — those tendencies to deny both historical and current American…
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Healing America’s Narratives: Lessons Not Learned
Photo (c) Associated Press [Part of a series, this essay is adapted from Chapter Seven of Healing America’s Narratives: the Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow — Now available] In September 2003, six months after the U. S. began bombing Iraq again, Jonathan Schell wrote a long, crystal-clear sentence, employing some 250 words and quite a few semicolons, that pointed out what “the basic mistake” of the Bush policy in Iraq was not. Schell then wrote a fourteen-word sentence, in italics and with no semicolons: “The main mistake of American policy in Iraq was waging war at all.”¹ Despite reports from two separate teams…
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Healing America’s Narratives: Dominos, Defoliation, Death, & Democracy
Photo © by Ryan Stone on Unsplash [Part of a series, this essay is adapted from Chapter Six of Healing America’s Narratives: the Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow (available October 2022)] Decades before the 2003 U. S. invasion of Iraq, the United States invaded Vietnam — initially with “advisors” and eventually with bombs, troops, and bullets. After its defeat in World War II, Japan was forced to leave the former French colony, Indochina — as Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia were then known — which it had occupied during the war. After Japan’s departure, France’s attempt to reassert control of…
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Healing America’s Narratives: Slavery, Civil Rights, and Whose Lives Matter
Photo © by Robin Jonathan Deutsch on Unsplash [Part of a series, this essay is adapted from Chapter Five of Healing America’s Narratives: the Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow (October 2022)] In the conventional history of the United States, we tend not to hear or read too much about the actual moments of invasion of African communities, the violent kidnappings, the wretched conditions for those who made it onto the ships, the watery graves of those who died in transport, the felt experience of any one of these human beings amid those unimaginable episodes, and the many subsequent episodes of being…
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Healing America’s Narratives: Trails of Tears and Broken Treaties
Photo © by Boston Public Library on Unsplash [Part of a series adapted from Healing America’s Narratives: the Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow (October 2022). This essay is an overview that scratches the surface of Chapter Four of the book.] Some five-hundred-plus years ago, European explorers began bumping into land masses now known as South, Central, and North America and the islands of the Caribbean. The indigenous inhabitants of these areas include the Taíno, Aztec, Lakota, Yucatán, Iroquois, Inca, Nez Perce, Huron, Apache, Cherokee, Navajo, Olmec, Inuit, Toba, Quechua and Chibcha, among many, many more. These peoples had been…
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Healing America’s Narratives: Fear of the Feminine & the Subjugation of Women
Photo © by Katherine Hanlon on Unsplash [Part of a series, this essay is adapted from Chapter Three of Healing America’s Narratives: the Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow (October 2022)] True for a boy as well, a girl born in 1774, 1862, 1917, 1963, 1971, 2001, 2017, 2022,* or any other year received cultural givens and expectations that were unique to the time, place, and familial, ethnic, racial, and financial circumstances of her birth and childhood. That she was born a biological female provided an additional given that would impact what was expected of and available to her. While…
Keep readingOur Collective National Shadow
[Adapted from Chapter Two of Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow by Reggie Marra (October 2022)] In mid-March, 2003 I sat with Animas Valley Institute’s Bill Plotkin and others in Payson, Arizona, for five days of an experience entitled “Sweet Darkness: The Initiatory Gifts of the Shadow, Projections, Subpersonalities, and the Sacred Wound.” On the evening of our first day there, the United States began bombing Iraq. So while we were exploring our respective individual Shadows and projections, our country’s collective Shadow and projections — “the evil out there” that we tend to see in other nations,…
Keep readingCultural Givens & the View From Here
[Adapted from Chapter One of Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow by Reggie Marra (October 2022)] Everything we do or say arises through our worldview, which arises through our experiences, beliefs, values, relationships, aspirations, and development. It includes those aspects of ourselves of which we’re not yet aware — our Shadow. Each of us, in our earliest moments and years is given a view of the world — “cultural givens,” — direct experiences of and beliefs about the world that our family of origin holds to be true. These experiences and beliefs include everything from ethnicity…
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Healing America's Narratives 