My new book is entitled Waking Up Alone: Navigating the Narrow Passage Through Master-Slave Narratives. When people hear the title they often say something like, “Wow! That sounds like a lot.”
It is a lot.
It is a lot to uproot the internal oppressor, to notice the unconditioned in a world of conditions, to discover the Presence we are seeking is resting within.
I just finished listening to a two part series on the Epstein files created by Amanda Doyle on the podcast, We Can Do Hard Things. The series outlines the criminal actions of Epstein and his associates, from start to finish, putting all the details in one place in chronological order and then discussing the case with the survivors’ lawyer.
Listening to Amanda’s report I am reminded of the long line of women at my back. It reminds me of our beginning here in the United States.
In the beginning, white and male and power used female and Black and Indigenous to create more resource for white and male and power. And in the beginning, white and male and power created a story. The story seems to be about me, about my value, about the conditions that make me more or less human, but the master-slave narrative is actually about white and male and power. It is about the master’s need to protect himself from seeing himself, as a person using persons, as a person who feels broken-hearted and small. The master is too afraid to turn toward the mirror, to turn in toward his pain, to let his pain be a door. The master is human.
But I did not write Waking Up Alone to help the master. I wrote the book to help myself.
“I come from a long line of slaves, sex slaves. These women knock at my door. They ask me to unlock it, invite them in, to listen deeply to their stories. They mean for me to realize the pattern, the ways their lives reverberate throughout mine. They want me to see. They sing me their songs with the repeating refrain: ‘Your life is not your own. You are a reflection of what has come before. Wake up and set yourself free.’”
I began writing Waking Up Alone in 2016. I was caught, giving my power to power, hunting acceptance, belonging, and comfort, finding myself trapped again in another kind of brothel. And I saw myself afraid to follow the quiet, deep, knowing at my center that urged me to stand true and risk standing all alone.
The writing became a tool, a practice of illumination, clarifying the intricate inherited pattern that kept me caught in the master’s mind. Resting out of thought into the body, I noticed pain can be a door, a place to adore, a portal into the unconditioned. Waking Up Alone is for all of us who have inherited narratives describing our value as conditioned; it is for everyone who wants to leave the inherited cage and claim their lives, sacred.
SO grateful to be waking up alone, together.
Nicole
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