The Future is Ancestral and Ancient: Healing Justice London

My name is Farzana Khan, one of the co-founders and Executive Co-Directors at Healing Justice London. Today I’m going to be sharing about preparing the ground and really looking to how our ancestral and indigenous technologies and wisdoms support our futuring and wayfinding that we need to do in these urgent and critical times.

Bismillah. 

So, in recent times, a Huni Kuin Elder reminded me that the future is ancestral. And I agree, the future is ancestral and the future is also ancient. This by no means is an invitation to nostalgically fetishise the past, or the lives and cultures or traditions long before, that have no contextual coherence with our current reality or context.

Rather, it’s an invitation to collapse the colonial and capitalistic understanding of time and space in its linear configuration, and bring it to a deeper awareness and interfacing which is deeply entangled and interdependent as our indigenous and spiritual traditions remind us. If we want to vision the future, then we have to be in perpetual acts of remembrance. 

This remembrance is not looking back to pick and mix facets of historical artefacts, or archaeology to weaponise against one another, or to calcify into lineage-based factions. That is not the work. It is actually an invitation on how our ancestral technologies can help reveal and repair the tools and skills needed for the times ahead, which are uncertain, fumbly, messy, complex, contradictory and ever-changing: all the conditions that have been lived and wayfound already. It is a reminder on how to move with that which moves us, and at its most loving, it is a dance. At its most rigorous, it is a spiritual warfare. Sometimes it’s both.

In a recent conversation with the formidable and brilliant Indy Johar of the critical Dark Matter Labs, we were discussing the future- what it will be or not be, whether we should look at it or not: all questions that I deeply cherish. One of the many things Indy does brilliantly is articulate the role of technology in the future, and really speaking to the fact that it is neither inherently good or bad, but fundamentally it is the orientation of its direct impact and its direction and how we use it and why we use it that matters. How could we be using technology to generate our most desired and abundant futures? 

In our conversation, I reflect back my musings on this: I share with him, ‘Why do we not consider the technologies of our ancestors as technologies?’ What I mean by this is the technologies that support our spiritual flourishing in order to make and unake the world aligned with life and her longings. If we are to return to our indigeneity, or what systems thinkers now often discuss as ‘entanglements’ or ‘interdependence’, then there is only one-ness. There is only a deep state of collective consciousness that is self-perpetuating, and consentually also feeding back to us. Here, by consent, I am referring to what our unconscious and conscious parts broadcast and by into, and that can either be in the direction of liberation and expansion and evolution in its highest or truest forms, or its moving away from this.

From this positionality, the organisation of our entire reality is underpinned by connectedness or this idea of soma, which Staci Haines, one of our partners and a brilliant somatic practitioner -particularly politicised somatics- articulates soma as the living changing organism in connection and relation to body, mind, spirit, land, each other.  

For me, in my lineage as a Muslim, and from the Sufi tradition, the concept of Tauhid, which is the total state of oneness, the collapse of all separations, including those that bound us in a human experience, such as space and time. 

From the location of Tauhid, soma, interdependence, oneness- whatever you want to call it, we are able to really see and be in a different conceptualisation of reality and therefore able to transform it in a different direction.

If there is only connection, if there is only this state of absolute oneness, then our visions are in fact memories, and our future is also deeply our past. The linearity that we experience, or the time in relation to time, serves to have direction at its most successful use. However, right now it is sadly that time is used against us. Time is used as failure from a decline logic. In this arc of linearity, it is used by capitalism to create a sense of loss as we are experiencing time. But more dangerously, it pulls us out of rhythm and synchronicity with life, aliveness, the rhythms, the musicality of the universe. The universe is one song: Uni-verse.

In this state of dispossession from life, life-force, we are moving as pieces at paces that are fundamentally violent to our souls and the spirit of life. The pace of this has been actually sped up in direct correlation to profiting the supply, demand and material consumption of the world at rates that require the speeding up of time. We often compute or understand this as ‘urgency culture’, and yes, we are in caffeinated petro-states that rely on the urgency of our bodies to produce and accumulate more and more and more. 

But more insidious is the way they propel us out of time. What I mean here is the way that they keep us out of our own embodying capacities in right relationship. What all systems and structures of oppression do is push us out of time so we are unable to attune or hear the clock of the world, as the visionary Grace Lee Boggs might say, or as the Bungla mystic and poet, Lalon Shah, talks about in his song Shomoy Gele. Shomoy Gele, meaning the passing of time, really speaks to how we end up experiencing impoverishment- spiritual impoverishment but also material impoverishment- when we misuse time because of our inability to be in relationship with life.

I’ll read a little bit of an extract from Shomoy Gele, and this is my translation, so I’m sure some other Bengalis may want to correct me- and I really look forward to your feedback. 

In Shomoy Gele, he says:

‘If the time runs out, or passes by, there will be no fulfilment including spiritual.

Why did you not care to, or did not learn to, do the practice of self-enrichment in time?  

Oh mind, don’t you know, that if all the waters dries out in the pond or in the lagoons, and the fish does not stay there anymore - what good is it expecting a barrage on the river mouth, or the place where the river meets the sea if it is all dry?

What good is it putting in your futile labour for nothing in cultivating, doing untimely farming? 

Even if the plants grow by virtue of a strong seed, there will be no harvest.

If a day comes up when the full moon rises, on the day of the dark moon, that will be the day of the final destruction.’

Lalon says at that time there will be no single moment for fulfilment. Again, it is this marrying, this coupling, of how being in relationship with time, temporality, is also about being in connection.

The loss of time and the ways in which capitalism and colonisation and all forms of systems of oppression dispossess us from our bodies, our lands, so we are fundamentally unrooted. From this place, we are in a constant state of collective disassociation. We are disassociated from our bodies, the container by which we experience consciousness, life spirit- again, whatever you want to call it. We are unable to be present. In this absence of presence we are unable to generate accurate assessments that align with our contexts. Therefore, we stay contextually incoherent. We stay unreadied, unprepared, ill equipped.

We cannot move with our reality, and most importantly its guidance and loving, because we are not in it.

The work of remembering our spirit into our body or our souls, into our lives, is no easy task. It is discursively understood as somatics or sometimes embodiment (moreso these days). But again, this work of bringing the terrestrial and the celestial matter and spirit together has been in our ancient wisdoms and indigenous technologies since time; It is not new.

In my humble understanding, and for the ease of following this for whoever’s engaging with this piece, I want to just share how I reflect on rituals and practices in a more distilled way, and see how rituals and practices can be understood as supporting three key primary capacities.

The first is that they are preparatory practices. They prepare us, and they do the work of bringing us into body, mind, land, spirit. They’re doing that piece of relational connection and interdependence.

The second is they help us in processing our emotions, our realities, our experiences. They help us transition, shift, transmute. They’re the inter-space for moving between states. 

The third is that they help us create openings, help us create and generate from these preceding two areas of processing and preparing. Most commonly, they help us find, create and connect across geographies and traditions. 

Within the first one, the work of remembrance through the physical site of the body, as the interface across all connections, can be found in many traditions.

For me, Salah, or Muslim daily prayer, is a process of emptying and receiving, replenishing, straight from source, or spirit. The prayer mat is where we go to time travel between space and time. The Adhan, the call to prayer, is the song of the universe that the birds hear first, calling us to deeper soul stations so we can harvest and sustain from them.

In the Adhan, here a phrase that is repeated, ‘hayellah khallah’, and what this repeated calling is, literally is ‘come to success’. Hayellah khallah, come to success.

Only success within this framework of Islam is the lightness of the soul, not the heaviness or the density from material accumulation and acquisition. It is the lightness of the heart which is our knowing centre that accounts for a measure of success. So, holding this frame, Salah is a tool throughout the day that helps us practice emptying out and resourcing. It’s marked against celestial timings, five times from dawn to dusk, so you have that touchpoint and you can move through the world without accruing as much density, noise, separation- you get to receive and call home. So it becomes this space of replenishing, resourcing and accessing deeper wisdoms and connections.

In a different way, and in another example, is the somatic techniques me and my team at Healing Justice London use, as guided and informed by the brilliant Nkem Ndefo from Lumos Transforms, as well as Staci Haines. Both of them, in their visionary practices around somatics and trauma and social justice, help us find new ways to practice together, to develop new patterns amongst ourselves.

In their work, we learn to notice and track what are our stress responses or what are our default condition tendancies. Then we get to invite ourselves, through that noticing and tracking, what somatic tools or techniques we need to invite ourselves into a more settled nervous system when our responses are not congruent with our contexts. If we are overreacting, how might we settle that reactivity, especially around things beyond our control, or if we’ve gone into states of collapse, despair, freeze, how might we clarify and generate our energy in order to be able to move and repattern. We do this work, not just cognitively, but also physiologically because these responses are biological.

Through this use of these techniques, which are already in our traditions, from shaking and tremouring, to many other tools, we can start to access our most creative selves- collaborative selves, curious selves, and connected selves. All of these are fundamental competencies for being able to practice community, or life-affirming societies.

It is from being in more resourced spaces that we can practice consent, growing neutrality, reciprocity amongst ourselves and whole life. Also that we are able to practice new choices instead of the default conditioning that all of us have internalised, we can ask ourselves what would we like to do here that is more aligned with our longings of life and life-force, than what has been internalised for centuries by separation, fracturing, domination, oppression, or what Daniel from Civic Square has shared recently, chronic atomisation?

The second area of practices and rituals that I want to touch on is the capacities to help process, complete, metabolise, integrate what we’ve encountered. These can be things like grief rituals or initiations that help us transition difficult and new or hard changes or situations. For example, we can see this in Shia Muslims or the Dagara people of West Africa, best articulated by the works of Sobonfu Somé.  

Within the Shia tradition, one of the things that we can see is how the month of Muuharam is a communal practice of lamenting. It is a collectivised process of mourning, to transmute collective grief that is lived and living through us and carried by us genetically but also in our consciousness and in the ways we’ve shaped the world. 

In a similar but different way, we see how the Dagara people use collective practices of grief rituals that include dance, song and storytelling, as ways to transition and move through things like conflict or disruption, but also the necessary parts of life that we experience, and let that not be held as a collective injury, but as an opening for deepening into connection with one another. 

So, what I’m really wanting to speak to, is that there is an important site here, and there are many many examples of this from our dancing to our breath-pattern work to our tremouring to our shaking. Sometimes there’s instinctive responses to hurt and harm, but what we’re really drawing upon when we work with ritual is to transform our experiences. 

When we’re allowing ourselves to complete our emotional circuit that has wisdom in it, the rituals and practices -whether it’s mindfulness or fasting- are tools to remove the distraction, whether it’s in our mind or whether it’s something we do through consumption- that allows us to be more present to the wisdom the emotion has to carry, and the way in which it wants to express. Once they have expressed what they need to share with us, they become less aggressive and more subtle.

However, because we have lived centuries of patriarchal violence that has disconnected us from our emotionality, and we’ve been socialised to pathologise emotions into hysteria, or barbarism, as opposed to the sensory capacities that allow us to know more deeply ourselves and one another, and to free ourselves from the density, the weightedness of trauma. When the emotions get metabolised or integrated or transform inside our rituals, they support us to move with clarity and guidance.  

One of the most powerful things about grief rituals that I personally have really come to appreciate is the reminder that when we are grieving, we are crying, as well as raging, and the grief is a gesture towards water, and water being life, and where there is water there is life. And so many of us have been dried out from these systems of oppression. We are like walking prunes. To bring dried fruit to life we have to soak it in water, and letting us be grief-soaked then allows the body to come back to itself. It can come back to itself from a self-generating river or source inside, from our own tears, from our own water supply, or khaltar as discussed in the Qur'an.

The final aspect of ritual I want to touch on is creative, and openings and possibilities, and the way that ritual supports us to envision and fashion in new ways. There are many different tools we could talk about, and I’d just encourage you all to get curious about your lineage, your histories, what your parents practiced, what people practice in your community: what are the practices that have been used to activate and open these portals of knowing and seeing and creating? There are so many. 

Many of our indigenous technologies have forms of communal singing and dancing- that collective vibration of movement and sound opens up to potential of feeling and knowing differently. If we consistently calcify the same words and the same shapes, we do not know how to move, or speak, or be different. 

The acts of creativity that help us shapeshift, or find new language or find new shapes, take us through movements, through our songs, through our poetry, to feel and sense into different forms, different shapes that are also life-giving gestures and creatures and organisms. 

Again, in the tradition I can most speak from, located within the Sufi tradition, we have Dhikr, which is literally ‘to remember’, but it’s the act of rhythmic chanting, remembrance. And what is really beautiful about the use of Dhikr in our lives is that one of the applications of it is you call upon, or you chant, the names of the divine. But the instruction is only by what you need, and all the names of the divine are actually needs. They’re very human needs. These needs, when they’re spoken and chanted, vibrate in our body and manifest the qualities in ourselves. So, I love to chant on Ya Latif.

Latif is the subtle grace, and especially in times where we have so much explicit violence and messiness and complexity, I love to work with the subtle grace. Ya Latif is so subtle, and the one who saves you so subtly you did not know you were in danger. And so I love the quality, and trying to generate the quality of Ya Latif- this vibration of subtly changing, bringing spaciousness and grace, pre-forgiveness, capaciousness, into our lives. So I chant on Ya Latif to work with this quality.  

But in a similar way, I was trained in classical Kathak dancing and Batek Natin which is in my South Asian heritage, and also within the Bungla tradition. It is a dance that helps you carry the stories in shapes through your body of your lineage and ancestry. These stories are in some ways to be in reverence with our ancestors, but also to carry the stories as we are being genocided and colonised.

Kathak dancing was actually suppressed by colonisers and Christian missionaries, who were anti ‘nuch’ meaning anti dance. In certain aspects, Kathak became an underground movement and dance forms that was part of spiritual warfare, both to gather the reservoir of resources. But the dance moves they cut, they are sharp movements and they cut out the presence of oppressive dynamics through their sharp shapes and their feet hitting the ground, calling the land to rise up and support it. The rhythm with the ghungroo, the bells on your feet and the land, create a vibration to unsettle and move anything that is transgressing or trespassing. I love the way that these dances, and chanting and movements allow us to find fugitive and subversive strategies to be in the long fight of liberation, and towards the abundant and generative futures we want to co-create.

There’s a plenitude of ways in which dance and music are part of our creative capacities and open up our connectivity and also create these fugitive roots for shaping and changing the world and our context.

I want to conclude this piece with a subtle offer of grace. We are in a time of compounding consequences, of multiple forms of oppressions, and this will only get intensified before it starts to ease.

What we need is these ancestral and indigenous and ancient technologies. I’ve only touched on a few for simplicity and points of reference.

As the ways in which we get to grow our robustness and stamina for what is ahead, our preparedness, our creativity, I am under no illusion about what is coming and what is already here.

If you were to ask me what is the thing I have most evidence for, the thing I have most evidence for is ordinary people doing extraordinary things. I am living testament to this, as is my mother, as is my mother’s mother. When I draw upon the strength of these lines, I am able to stand, as many, in my truest shape, which is the alive memory of infinite possibility.

Thank you.