Vodou Culture 201: Authenticity and Ego
One of the acts of violence done across cultures, whether US majority or any other, is to mask, subdue, and punish expressions of authenticity. We learn fairly quickly that what we are allowed to do has a much narrower range than what we could do, whether that’s the US majority (white) culture’s tendency to punish most of emotional expression to cultural proscriptions about gender that are used to punish men for vulnerability or women for aggression. It does not take long for most of us to absorb the rules from the people around us and begin to police ourselves.
As I’ve started to develop a practice as a priest, I’ve talked to people about their experience of this and it is (so far) universally something they find wounding: they feel ashamed of doing things which occur to them to do, and ashamed again that they have any sort of feeling about it, and then ashamed again that they’re even talking about it.
It’s reminding me strongly of being a dominatrix. Most of my clients when I was doing that work felt the same way about sexual expressions that were often surprisingly innocuous—wearing women’s underwear, for instance. I gave the same response on this topic to those clients as I did to the clients who needed someone to bleed to be aroused.
I’m not going to judge you. Fear of judgement and shame have no place in a bedroom, though they sure do invade it often.
The reason I can still give this advice has changed. When I was a dominatrix, my argument was that you aren’t doing anyone harm if you have consent and stay within the negotiated boundaries. If you are wearing women’s underwear, you aren’t doing anyone else any harm. If you and your partner have negotiated something with knives or scalpels, you are free to make that choice and behaving ethically to get your needs met.
What it might look like to the neighbors is irrelevant. You aren’t fucking them.
Now, having retired as a dominatrix and become a priest, the reason I don’t judge has changed. If you’re doing something that has negative consequences, it’s because you are in a place where it seems like you should. Part of my job, if you’re one of mine, is to offer you a way to get out of that place. You’re free to reject my help. It’ll just mean you’ll either find another helper or come back to experience the lesson again in another life.
Either way, it’s not my problem to fix nor my lesson to learn. I’m here to help, not take your problems from you.
There is a more serious problem than social judgements here. That little policeman we internalize, who tells us what we are allowed to do, is recognizable for a different reason. I recognize it as the ego, one of the fundamental opponents in our fight to elevate. We do not, as human beings, have many actual opponents to elevation. We certainly don’t have a lot of human opponents, just people who dislike and behave negatively toward us. They cannot stop us from elevating.
It is one thing to act in a way that helps us get along with others and another to have that internal policeman shaming us, telling us that what occurs to us to do is not just not appropriate to the situation, but is actually proof that we are bad, defective, morally unfit.
That is, by the way, one of the ways you can recognize ego at work: cycles of emotions that, like a treadmill, go nowhere but drain your energy.
One of the fundamental battles is to understand the difference between you as you understand yourself, and the ego. You are not that policeman. The policeman is no friend to you and in fact gives advice that is often not appropriate to situations—causing you to act on rules that simply don’t matter in the current situation and to try and tell others how they should behave or waste energy judging them and being afraid of how they will judge you.
The job of a priest or spiritual worker often involves pointing this sort of thing out. I’m not eager to watch people suffer needlessly.
