V i n a B a r h a m

manalig | trust

MANALIG.

M A N A L I G

Trust.

Trust that voice within you.

It’s the voice of your ancestors guiding, 
leaving you breadcrumbs 
for the return journey home.
It's the Divine whispering, 
singing,
reminding you of who you are, 
who you’re becoming 
and who you’ve always been.  
Hindi nawala ang ating mga anito. 
Hindi nabura ang katotohanan ng ating mga ninuno. 
Trust that part of you 
that remains 
soft
in a world full 
of armors.
 

M A G T I W A L A.

Ang sayaw at luksa mo ay dasal kay Bathala.
Ang ligaya at luha mo ay alay kay Diwata

L I S T E N . 

It’s the voice that colors outside the boxes, 
betrays the linear 
reimagines the binary.
It celebrates the cycles,
the spirals,
the waxing and waning,
the ebb and flow.

M A N A L I G.
M A G T I W A L A.

Ulan.
Bagyo.
Araw.
Apoy.

Lahat yan - kapwa.
 

This Need To Be Good + How We Disrupt It

Today I’m realizing I am still so addicted to this perceived need to be good aka perfectionism.
 
Some years ago, when I started dancing again, I got reconnected to my body and experienced JOY as physical sensation. Dancing was such a pleasurable experience that I stopped after a month of taking classes – I hadn’t built up my capacity to take in pleasure like that.  
 
And then a few months later, I started taking classes again (because once you taste it, you just can’t go without it.)
 
But of course I decided to get certified to teach dance fitness, because you know, you can’t NOT monetize shit you enjoy (sigh) and after a year of “failed” teaching (not bringing enough $ in) and then being super sick while pregnant with my second child, I quit dance altogether.
 
Sad.
 
I’ve danced a bit here and there since. But it seems that I associate motherhood with martyrdom and success/work = money.
 
I’m finding that these associations go so deeeeeeeep. They may be ancient. Perhaps my ancestors had to parent this way to survive.
 
It’s an everyday conscious work to identify my patterns and disrupt it, to enjoy my time with my children, to embody play as learning, to *unschool* myself from the idea that work must be hard, must be disconnected from pleasure, must either bring $ in or save $ and that above all it must be rooted in doing the right thing (aka being good.)
 
After all these years, choosing what feels good in my body still doesn’t come naturally. Slowly though, I find myself naturally drawn to what fills my body with joyful sensations. And I take baby steps towards that.
 
It’s just that I still STOP MYSELF.
 
I still second guess the steps I take.
I still linger on actually acting on my desires.
 
But sooner or later though, I find myself back on pleasure’s path.

::Pause::
The good news is that this backtracking process is becoming shorter and shorter. I catch myself second guessing and the Universe is quick to remind me to choose MYSELF.
10 years ago, when I started on this journey of awakening to my body (thank you pregnancy for literally waking me up to my womb) — I wrote something down in my journal:
 
“My desires are sacred and they will lead me home.”
 
It’s been 10 years of learning and re-learning this and I feel like maybe I’m starting to move beyond understanding this in my head to knowing what it feels like in my body.  
 
The need to be good is still there, I don’t know if it will ever go away.
 
But maybe over time, it will just be me, knowing what I want and knowing that it is good.
::Pause::
The thing is, I think we are born this way: knowing what we want and knowing that it is good.
Just look at the babies.
They know what they want and they make no apologies for it. They will fight and scream to be fed, held, cleaned up, loved. It doesn’t matter if it is at 2 fucking AM.
Until we condition them NOT to. Until we let them cry and scream it out, beat it out of them, shame them, punish them, withhold love from them to coerce them to what we think is right.
We pass on this need to be good to our children and we break them out of their inherent knowing +  their inner guidance for what feels good for themselves. We rob their agency over their bodies. They learn to question and doubt themselves and they start looking for external validation of their thoughts and feelings.
Until we disrupt the pattern.
And this is why parenting is so damn hard. Especially for those of us doing the work of healing and reparenting ourselves. It is impossible to do alone, without support of other people working to disrupt this shit.
So let’s keep disrupting together.  Let’s celebrate our desires. Let’s keep choosing ourselves.
Fuck this need to be good.
We already are.

Notes on Unschooling as Liberation Work

Note: I am currently hashing out my thoughts about our Unschooling life as it pertains to Love + Liberation. And I hope to post bits and pieces of my thoughts around this as part of my own process in working through with what I believe and how to move forward in our Unschooling journey centered on Love and Liberation for all.

Our life as unschoolers is a big part of my liberation work.

What I mean by liberation work is twofold.

First, I mean liberation from institutions that are oppressive at its core (like forced education) + from the conditioning we all have received about learning, agency and childhood.

And second: liberation as having the freedom to create and materialize the visions we have for our life and a more just and fair world.

The truth is, we can only create more of the same if the tools and training we receive come from the same oppressive shit.

Our children deserve better.

These systems, frankly, need to die.

::Pause::

So some questions I am often thinking of:

What would it mean to be real partners with our children in their own development? What does it look like to honor our children’s autonomy and agency in choosing how to spend their days based on what calls to them? What does it mean to trust our children to lead their lives, to trust in their wisdom, their innate curiosity and drive to learn what interests them? What would it look like if we truly deeply honored all kinds of intelligences and gifts and abilities and bodies and skin color? What would it take to make this truly accessible for all?

::Pause::

When I first started this Unschooling journey many years ago, I mostly asked the personal equivalent of these questions. As in, how do I practice this and live these questions as it pertains to our own family.

But as I have gained deeper awareness of systemic injustices all around me, the scope of these questions naturally expanded beyond the personal.

Because our personal liberation is always connected to the collective. My child can’t truly be free unless all children are free.

But we can’t get to the collective without first working through the personal.

So if we are going to fight for all of our children’s future, let’s start there.

Lessons I’m Learning On How to Resist and Thrive

So lately, I’ve been focusing my energies on three things:

  1. working on dismantling my internalized racism/anti-blackness (yes even as a NBPOC, I have also been conditioned towards implicit bias towards whiteness and the work never stops)
  2. loving myself, taking care of myself and my family and reconnecting with my Filipino roots before colonization had colorized and Christianized our way of life and
  3. working on identifying and weaving my gifts and how I can be of real service in creating alternative realities to these g-dd-mn systems.

I’ve been learning a lot about my own fragility, my own tendency towards saviourism, my capacity to posture and be performative in how I show up for those who are more marginalized than I. I’ve seen how I can co-opt struggles that are not mine in my attempts to show solidarity. It’s easy to fall into.

Again, the work never stops. We keep waking up over and over because there’s always something new to learn about ourselves and each other.

Through this, I have gained a bit more empathy for those who struggle with wanting to show up but unsure how. I’ve taken to heart that I can be just as complicit in someone’s oppression as the next person. We all share this ability as human beings. Just as we share this capacity to choose humility, understanding, empathy and radical love.

I’m learning how to examine my own oppression more clearly while also practicing deep gratitude about the privileges I hold and that has helped me be where I am today. I know that the clearer I am about both, the more I know how to show up in ways that are more authentic and in alignment to love and justice. Knowing who I am at the core and honoring my boundaries are also both essential to sustainable activism.

I’m still angry about a lot of things. And I am still following the news. And doing what I can to resist.

But I also know that my resistance needs to be rooted in deep self-love and knowledge, in real solidarity, in humility, in continual learning and growth.

I was all about Fire element the past few months, raging and ready to burn everything down. But Fire alone is not enough. We need to ground ourselves deep into Earth wisdom, swim in the intuitive depths of Water and gain clearer insight as we take a higher perspective, a birds eye view if you will, with the Air element.

Slow. Steady. Soulful. Strategic.

We’ve got this.

PS Print show above is available in my shop.

Who Am I Before

Who am I
Before they came and
Declared my people
Savage
And in need of
Saving

Who am I
Before they turned me
Against my mother tongue
So that I would find it
Shameful to speak with my lips

Who am I
Before they convinced me
My ancestors’ ways of healing
Of being
Of magic-making
Were less than
And Never worthy until
Proven
Sanctioned
Declared
by those who claim authority

Who am I
Before I saw the land that bore me
And raised me
As a place that couldn’t sustain me
And my dreams
And my liberty

Who am I
Before I started to
Believe that my freedom
And happiness could Only be found
Somewhere else
And made my home
Among the people
Who ravaged mine

Who am I before I
Became someone
who swallowed up
This sweet tasting poison
of whiteness
Until only the darkness of my skin
Remained the thing they couldn’t
erase
touch
Bind
Who am I before I
was asleep
To all
The indigenous women
Within

Now I know

The wise
The Powerful
The angry

The multitudes that live inside me

The love
The potential

The beauty
And the fucking brilliance

All That is me

Mothering As Resistance

If I let the number of times I was convinced I have f*cked my children up keep me down, I wouldn’t be here at all.

My children would be motherless.

Because the truth is, I fight this voice in my head that constantly says my children are better off without me. This belief that I am worthless if I can’t be perfect is real. I know it’s a lie, but it still takes a lot of work to live like it is.

And it is damn exhausting.

:: Pause::

My therapist says that the bar I set for what I consider good  parenting is not only somewhat unrealistic, but very much white-centric.  And daaaaaaamn she is right. I didn’t consider how my mothering intersects with my own lived experience  as a Pinay daughter growing up in a deeply colonized culture, as a first generation immigrant teenager and now as a mother to Filipina-American daughters living in a very gentrified city.

How could I have even considered that?

I unconsciously worked hard to become assimilated throughout my teens and adulthood. I swallowed up the message of whiteness until I thought it was the core of who I am. I drank that shit up over and over even when it kept poisoning so many parts of me that I am now working hard to heal.

Slowly I am beginning to understand how moving to America has shaped me in ways I didn’t ask for. I’m beginning to understand that my oppression is different from other sisters of color, that I can be complicit in perpetuating oppression to others if I don’t do the work. And now as a mother to two daughters who are going to grow up swimming in the sea of white supremacy, mothering them has become a way of resisting systems designed to condition them to doubt their capacity and diminish their worth.

So between all of that and constantly breaking free of this nagging voice in my head that tells me I am not good enough (in general)…I feel emotionally wasted.

And I just want to give up.

::Pause::

But here’s why I keep going:

I look at my children and I know they don’t deserve this shit.  None of our children deserve this shit. 

And that maybe my mother, my lola, my lola sa tuhod….maybe they all thought the same when they were close to giving up. So we keep falling flat on our face and we keep picking ourselves up because it all comes full circle. Someone fought hard so I can be here and I’m sure as hell gonna do the same for my daughters.

We just got to learn how to do it together, in all our messiness and shit.

Or they don’t stand a chance.

SIGN UP TO GET MY MUSINGS ON THE BLOG


LET’S CONNECT