Article published on the Communities Magazine, By Gabriela Fagundes Moreira
I can remember my first day at University, a bright blue February day in Minas Gerais, southwest Brazil. The fresh breeze of the humid summer blew on my neck. The sun was so piercing you had to squint your eyes or use your hands to shade your forehead. Sitting here, in front of this computer, four years and two months later, I can still see myself going to the bathroom and looking at the mirror. As I stared at my eyes I noticed them gradually filling with a thick wall of fluid. I only had one thought: Why am I here?
My tears that day were not from sorrow, something I dared not feel for fear the sorrow would never end, but instead the tears came from clarity. I’m living someone else’s life.
I decided that day to live a life of my own, one made by my own hands. I was well prepared for failing. It was time to move forward.
Joseph Campbell describes that for those in whom a dominant mythology still works, there is an experience both in accord with the social order, and in apparent harmony with the universe. If the symbols and signs of capitalism, for example, work for you, then you have a set of associated values, and there is a path you can take: working for a corporation, having one or two children, owning a house, taking vacations. For some, however, the authorized signs, such as church, money, and having a linear life, no longer work. What inevitably follows for these individuals is a sense both of dissociation from the local social nexus, and of quest, within and without, for life, for “meaning.” There begins the Hero’s Journey.
When I look at my generation, what people call Generation Z, I see that most of the signs, symbols, and paths offered don’t work any longer. At the same time, my generation doesn’t have the time or the guidance to undergo our own hero’s journey, so a lot of us get stuck in a place of no meaning. At this point Intentional Communities and Initiatiatory Process into Adulthood play crucial roles.
When I was around 12, I started reading about ecocide. One day I asked one of my teachers: If the system is killing animals, plants, all kinds of life, and most people are unhappy, why are we still doing the same? Why am I going to school? Why are you going to the work you hate? Why are we not trying something else? When I was 15 I discovered that we, as a species, organize ourselves in a way that makes us completely dependent on our life in the very system that is killing the future possibility of life for human and nonhuman beings.
Later on, when I was 19, I went traveling around the world and started to spend time living in communities. I discovered human beings have a secret deal to keep ourselves sleeping and sacrificing everything—the time with the ones we love most, the trees that give us oxygen, the soil that provides us food. The deal is, we sacrifice all in exchange for receiving luxuries and comfort stuff that would not have been dreamed of by any Roman king or even anyone 150 years ago: instantaneous transportation and communication, entertainment via more than eight billion channels, refrigeration, food at the supermarket...
I grew up thinking that the food I ate came from the grocery store, that the water I drank came from the tap, that the computer I was typing on came from the store, and the shelter I slept in came from a business. I believed that I had to become somebody, doing things that I had to do and that I hated, so that I could earn money to buy food, water, and shelter, so that I could survive.
If you experience that the water comes from a tap and your food comes from the supermarket, you will defend to the death the system that brings those to you, because your life depends on it. Simultaneously you will put up with any indignity because your life depends on it. As Derrick Jensen incisively observes, the system inserted itself between us and the source of life. We got used to all the comfort of cities and we cut our direct connection with the source of life itself, the planet earth.
While living in intentional communities over the last three years, I gained experiential learning and material knowledge of Life and how to live. On the external level, learning basic earth skills such as planting crops and vegetables, killing and preparing meat, helping build a hut, constructing a compost toilet, making fire, learning to harvest water from the rain, gave me enough disidentification from the comfortable life I was used to in big cities. I fished for the first time and looked at the eyes of this animal as he was dying in my hands and giving his life to feed me. I spent days sleeping outside in a tent, close to a river, and experiencing that if I don’t have money I’m not gonna die. I learned about permaculture and how to cultivate crops in a way to get the basics to eat. I’ve learned to build a tiny house using clay and wood. I experienced that the food I eat comes from the soil, and that the water I drink comes from the springs; and that the computer I’m using to type these words comes from the mines, where there are slaves working and dying everyday.
One of the initiations into adulthood I went through, when living in a community in the south of Brazil, was joining a Rage Club. In this space I was initiated into feeling from 0 to 100 percent of my anger and I learned to own my anger, instead of being owned by this energy. I gained the capacity to stop being a victim of my feelings and from there I could take more responsibility in my life. The way this manifested practically was that I started to ask questions I have never asked before and make offers that scared me. I asked a person, “I want to hold your hand. Do you want that?” I stopped faking when I’m scared, and laughing whenI want to cry. I saw a man trying to force his partner into a taxi in Mexico and I came over to him and said with 35 percent anger, “She said no. Let her go. It is her decision.”
In this self-made curriculum I’m on over the last years, I experienced transformational and initiatory spaces and learned internal skills as well that created a stable structure in my being so I could take higher levels of responsibility. I learned to feel, from 0 to 100 percent, my anger, fear, sadness, and joy, pure and unmixed, and use their energy and information to communicate, ask, write, create. I learned how to navigate conflicts and separate what is mine and what is from the other person. I learned to be centered and grounded. I learned to choose what is not offered on the menu and to create a circle out of hierarchical structure. I learned to hold space and navigate transformational and high-level feelings. I learned to be in the ongoing alchemy of my underworld and use it as a resource for creativity and non-linearity. I learned to be able to generate money anywhere, out of nothing. I learned about my non-material values and that I can find a roof and food wherever I am in the world. I learned to fail, and learned to love being incompetent in things.
This could be the basis for the education of young adults in the 21st century.
In this century, it is more than time that we young adults take a stand to learn the skills that this time requires from us. The education and formation that Universities offer nowadays, in general, is obsolete. It does not prepare you for what is to come. It does not build any ground for you to be connected with the source of Life and serve the gifts you bring into the world and to your community. We did not evolve to be sitting in chairs in front of screens for hours every day.
Education nowadays could be about offering tools and guidance for young adults to utilize in their journey of inventing and discovering their path. Education could be about Initiations: process, training, and experiences that enable the person to take more responsibility, to be more fully conscious in action, in Reality, in daily life.
Bio: Gabriela Fagundes Moreira graduated from a residence high school in Rio de Janeiro, spent three weeks (too many) studying Tourism at UFMG (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais), and since then has designed her own curriculum from Life—traveling the world to live and work in communities, do training in regenerative design, permaculture, theater, communication, and writing, and become a Possibility Manager. Today she works with reconnecting the physical, mental, emotional, energetic, and archetypal bodies and catalyzing shifts in consciousness with the purpose of allowing us to create Regenerative Cultures. She does this through creative, evolutionary, transformational, and healing processes for individuals, couples, and groups in training and coaching sessions.
To learn more, visit:
www.gabrielafagundes.com/en ,
