WE ARE MYSTERY & MATTER IN MOTION

About the Artist: Sunkosi Galay-Tamang (suna)

is an artist, arts educator and new mum of mixed Indigenous and settler ancestries living on Turtle Island. On her mother’s side she is Tamang clan from the foothills of the Himalayas in Nepal. On her father’s side she is Dene Métis from Buffalo Narrows, Saskatchewan (Dënesųłinë́ , Scottish and French), with Jewish-Ukrainian and German-speaking Dutch bloodlines. She is currently based as an uninvited guest between unceded Interior Salish Syilx-speaking Okanagan lands and the Coast Salish homelands of the Sḵw̱xwú7mesh, Səl̓ ílwətaʔ, and xwməθkwəy̓ əm Nations, where she was born.
Suna’s land-based practice centers around investigating the capacity of art to function asceremony and the body as pedagogy, within the context of displacement from one’s traditional homelands. She works through the lenses of clown, hide tanning, birthwork, and astrology as tools towards reclamation of ancestral skills, physiological wisdom and communal health.

Introduction

“Kinship moves in cycles, the land moves in seasonal cycles, the sky moves in stellar cycles, and time is so bound up in those things that it is not even a separate concept from space.”

~p 39, “Sand Talk” by Tyson Yunkaporta

This set of exercises is an invitation to dance with the unknown; with the mystery inside you, and between you, and everything.

When everything is in constant co-constitutive movement, as it is with life on a planet in perpetual motion within a larger constellation of landmasses spiraling around one another, it can seem like chaos - but there are worldviews which propose it is emergent, with principles which express its nature. These can be understood as articulations of natural law, made up of principles of physics and physiological phenomena.

All biological beings have an inherent nature that is both scientific and imbued with the mystery. A key example of this being the ability to grow and birth new life.

As an introduction to the work I’m presenting here, I invite you to read this essay titled “The Mask of Modernity”, written in November 2023. Initially I was invited by the GTDF collective to participate in the Catalyst Program Climate and Nature Emergency (CNE) of the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at UBC, which involved attending the "Facing Human Wrongs: navigating the complexities of social and global change" course. However, when collective members Vanessa and Dani learned I was pregnant, they understood the sensitivity and ceremony of that time, and I was instead invited to read Hospicing Modernity, and then write an essay about the birth of my child, and the death of modernity.

The essay introduces some of the work I was investigating throughout the Reactivating Exiled Capacities inquiry through the Spring and Summer of 2024. It was an inspiring starting point with many possibilities, but further work revealed itself to be difficult to convey with integrity to the embodied practices, and pedagogical choices which maintain its vitality. Two key considerations were that the work is taught in groups, in person, and that the pedagogy is layered within experience. This allows for a gradual process of building permission through observation and revelation of the natural phenomena of the mystery in motion through us. These frameworks create what I hypothesize to be a process for neuro-decolonization through acetylcholine-driven learning. The embodied discovery and direct experience enables a sense of ownership with the learning, which helps the evolutionary growth process to root in and take place. Essentially, it’s a process of letting the body lead through experience and the mind follow with understanding.

Currently, we do not have the privilege of time together, in person, to do this work in the way it was designed. And the stakes are much too high; sharing these valuable pathways to discovery, with the intention and hopes that it may help in some way to protect life and move us towards decolonial futures, is worth the possibility of misunderstanding.

So the exercises I have been able to translate within this timeframe are shared with a different approach, in an effort to make them accessible and effective through an online, asynchronous platform. The pedagogical choice here is to enlist the mind to lead by understanding what we are doing, as we approach doing it, building awareness and a growing sense of visceral response-ability through accountability to the awareness.

That means there is a lot of content to sift through, so please be generous and gentle with yourself as you take in what you can, and I invite you to consider doing these exercises more than once, so you do not have to carry the burden of ‘getting it’ all at one time. You are welcome to experiment with what information you take in each time. The pace at which one learns is different for everyone. So the additional framing provided here is to help contextualize the teachings to our shared inquiry, and to aid the process of validating what, exactly, is happening and why it is valuable.

The questions and seeds guiding my personal inquiry in relation to Reactivating Exiles Capacities and neuro-decolonization are:

How can we embody the Earth’s Dream for humanity?
What is in the Emptiness around us?
Being in relationship with the Mystery
Taking up space in time (Jessica Lanyadoo, Ghost of a Podcast)
My working credo: “Nothing belongs to me: everything is a gift, and all gifts come with the responsibility to take care of them.”
Land, and all its biological manifestations, as the source for guidance, animation, protocols and eldership
Any creation process can only manifest what it is already doing - so if the process is fragmented, the outcome will also be fragmented. in the context of decolonial futures, how can we get as close to embodying decolonial futures, amidst the impossibility of living decolonial presently, throughout the creation process?
Orientation, and reconciliation. How do we approach reactivating our exiled capacities? To reactivate, we need to first meet the exiled. These are capacities and identities which have been exiled for political reasons, which forced them into hiding to ensure their own survival. They lived in a fugitive space and developed invaluable skills and perspective. A part of us, whether consciously or unconsciously, endorsed their exilement. This has nothing to do with where the force that required their exile came from - regardless of whether it was out of an autonomous choice or enforced by white supremacy, it is our responsibility to reconcile. Now, it is our work to consciously initiate repair, and to rekindle a relationship of permission, with discernment, respect and tending to any wounding that has taken place.
Acetylcholine is a neurotransmitter that plays a role in memory, learning, attention, arousal and involuntary muscle movement. It’s an excitatory neurotransmitter. This means it “excites” the nerve cell and causes it to “fire off the message.”
Ceremony builds new patterns in our brains, our bodies. Ceremony is the antithesis to colonization. Ceremony is neuro-decolonization. (Leanne Simpson, “Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies”)

I am deeply grateful for the mentorship I received throughout this inquiry from my clown teacher and Elder, David MacMurray Smith.

PROTOCOLS FOR THE WORK

“A commitment to the interruption of harmful habits of being is similar to a commitment to running a marathon (as opposed to a sprint). It will require discipline, endurance, stamina, patience and humility. For a different relationship with the land, with each other and within ourselves to be established, it will require a rearrangement of desires in the intellect, the body, and the psyche/unconscious. It will require a recalibration of our vital compasses (our hearts) and our radars (our guts) away from separability and towards the individual and collective shit that needs to be composted so that it becomes new soil.

Consider this process as a practice of attention, intention and attunement with the wider living metabolism we are part of; like a doula assisting with both death and birth at the same time, whose work emanates visceral responsibility (before “choice”), genuine humility (without humiliation), generosity (that is not charity), compassion (that is not transactional), patience and accountability (that are not virtue-signalling) and surrender (of our self-images and ways of life) without collapse.”

- Haruko Accord, GTDF collective.

Learn more at: https://decolonialfutures.net/portfolio/the-haruko-accord/

Protocols

Elder - a biological being or material which holds certain principles within its very nature that teaches through the natural limitations one meets by being in relationship with it and learning how to use it appropriately. Also can be an individual who takes responsibility for guiding others according to certain principles that exist in nature.

Protocols are a helpful aspect of container building for any process that intends to rewire, repattern, transform, generate, and/or regenerate. Protocols indicate the boundaries and limitations of a living process. There is value in respecting them as the Elders who hold the life within and between, and allow the life to extend and explore (grow), without serious risk to its physiological and psychological safety. Protocols offer protection, so the guidance can emerge within the process to speak for/animate itself. They become the structure that holds steady while you work, soften, stretch, and relax into a new shape; a new perspective of a changed mind.

Protocols can be seen as the frameworks and agreements that hold a practice. They provide a framework that does not change, but invites change by guiding the one who practices within them into a new shape; a new way of perceiving the world; a new way of filtering stimuli and light as it enters your Listening Body.

These protocols and exercises are offered in service to cultivating a Listening Body that is available to respond to the arising needs of the land, and operates in response to the natural law of reciprocal relations embedded within that ecology; that taking care of oneself and others is a foundational agreement to sustaining interspecies life on earth.

You are invited to relate to this work, and all the invitations that emerged within the Reactivating Exiled Capacities inquiry, as ceremonies towards neuro-decolonization.

The protocols entail how we enter and exit the work. For the time we set aside to do this work, we intend to relax our habitual patterns, to allow and see what else is possible.

Concepts to consider

Orientation

Being able to orient yourself is a necessary skill for functional navigation of personal internal and shared external realities. The principle of acknowledging transitions from one arena of attention (frame of reference; scenario; location; event) to another is valuable for the psyche. It presents opportunities to take presence and build capacity to be present within the places ‘in between’.

The Exit exercise assists with the natural process of decompression, sifting and articulation of experiences. It also validates that there is a place ‘between’ this and the next thing.

Beginner’s Mind

Set aside expectations, associations, or ideas about what this exercise is, what it reminds you of, or what it might mean. Approach it as an opportunity to gather and observe the facts of your experience, rather than searching for predefined answers.

The Listening Body

Shoulders dropped, arms hanging loosely, relaxed anal sphincter and jaw, tailbone untucked. Standing with hips over knees over ankles. Relaxed breath.

A Listening Body entails the agreement with all collaborators (including the self) that the conscientious focus is on fluency and facilitation of movement towards a shared intention, within which no one is harmed.

When working solo, or with others, any historic relationship and social customs (such as efforts to make the other feel comfortable, smiling, image management) are to be dropped from focus

Work

in this context, refers to practices which work with a source as inquiry towards the function to declutter, decenter and disarm the ego. The work is embodied in how we approach these exercises: the intention is to cultivate a quality of focus that senses with eyes of honesty, humility, humour, and hyper-self-reflexivity as we move through the invitations.

It can also be referred to as Heart Work and/or Source Work. When working with a source, we trust that we are tethered to the source as a frame of reference, and then explore wildly within that (without causing harm to oneself or anyone else) to mine information about our relationship to that source.

Impulse

Incitement or stimulus to/causing action. Arising from some state of mind, feeling, or circumstance. Sudden or involuntary (pre-conscious) inclination or tendency to act, without premeditation or reflection.

Impulse imperatives

The driving elements of an impulse which are seeking fulfillment; Direction, Speed, Rhythm, Shape, and Momentum in the Physical, Emotional and Psychological areas.

Gesture

The ordered expression, manifestation, of an Impulse describing the Attitudes, Thoughts, Feelings, Movements of the Listening Body.

To Enter

To mark the transition into the work, the first three exercises are useful to facilitate shifting from a more pedestrian body into a decluttered, attuning Listening Body.

To Exit

When you are approaching your exit from this work for the day, you will need to mark the transition.

As you complete the exercise, observe what is happening in your body, and what you can see, feel, hear and touch. Tune in and resonate with what you are experiencing. Be present in this place between what you have done and where you will go next.

Then, bend at your hips and reach your hands to your ankles. Inhale and imagine you are peeling a costume off from your ankles up your body and off your shoulders and shooting it straight up into the air, with a big exhale. Do this three times, or as many times as you need to, until you feel like the energy from your inquiry has neutralized. Reach down again and this time imagine you are pulling earth energy of soil, dirt and plants up through your bones, grounding your energy.

Now you are invited to record your experience to collect information that will help you to track and see your patterns. Take note of any insights, impressions, confusions, frustrations, and wonderings that you noticed, in a notebook or other form of recording information that works for you.

Before doing that, take a moment to get a drink of water or go to the bathroom, to mark your exit from an embodied Source Work.

( *The languaging, concepts and interpretations for Entrances and Exits range from loose to direct quotes from David MacMurray Smith, shared in live pedagogy or his written companion curriculum notes: Clownage Notes through Fantastic Space Enterprises. Some of his pedagogical concepts have been adapted to weave with the GTDF pedagogy.)