Last month, YES! hosted the 11th Education Transformation Jam, a four-day virtual experience. On the third day, my teammate and I made space for the group to explore The Four Rs1, developed by Jodi Lasseter:
Image created by Hanzade Germiyanoglu for YES! Jams
Reform: Making change within an existing system. Examples include policy development, resource redistribution, electoral work, and human services.
Resist: Confronting the current system. Examples include community organizing, campaign work, and other direct action such as protests, boycotts, and vigils.
(Re)create: Generating new systems. Examples include democratic schools, restorative justice processes, local economies, and open source technologies.
(Re)image: Conceptualizing new systems. Examples include the arts, creative processes, media, academia and cultural and spiritual traditions.
In this Ed Jam session, we shared about the reality of on-going tension within social change work about which strategy is the most effective, and how the Four Rs framework invites us to see each one as necessary and complementary for the long arc towards our liberation.
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Recently, at the beginning of a Community Dreamwork gathering, my mind raced with criticisms:
How is this having any direct impact on the incessant violence? I should be doing more.
So this is how I use my privilege and resources? How nice for me.
Seriously? Who has time to daydream about their dreams? And for what?
By the end of the gathering, I noticed a remarkable difference in myself—slowing down and softening; feeling connected to community, land, and Spirit; less in my head and more in my heart and body.
In that moment, I realized, this was enough, this was the medicine for those of us who showed up for our hour together to nurture the (Re)imagine of The Four Rs, feeding forward the energy needed to engage in the other Rs, in whatever way we each felt called to.
Community dreamwork exercises the muscles of our imagination and creativity, a disruption to modernity’s attempts to assembly line us into unthinking compliant cogs of the colonial capitalist machine. Consciously engaging in Community dreamwork as a strategy to (Re)imagine nutriates the ways in which we Reform, Resist, and (Re)create.
“Without new visions, we don’t know what to build, only what to knock down. We not only end up confused, rudderless, and cynical, but we forget that making a revolution is not a series of clever maneuvers and tactics, but a process that can and must transform us.”
― Robin D.G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
“There’s only so much we can do with our linear thinking. So working with dreams and working with the imaginal, working with symbolic language is something that overrides something of that limited linear thinking and that allows for a greater awareness, a greater capacity for revelation and for integration of wisdom. And it’s just, it’s really, it’s remarkable.”
— Wilka Roig, End of Life University, Ep. 395 Conscious Dying, Dreamwork, and Death Doulas in Mexico with Wilka Roig
Also, as I’m writing this, I’m catching my own need to rationalize connecting to my dreams and being in community, something as natural to my aliveness as breathing—what a fine example of internalized colonial capitalism, LOL!
“Our creative dreams and yearnings come from a divine source. As we move toward our dreams, we move toward our divinity.”
—Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity
So, yes to Community Dreamwork as an example of engaging in The Four Rs.
And yes to simply being curious about my dreams and wanting to share it with others.
Both are in service of Life.
From the NC Climate Justice Collective and the YES! Jam Facilitation Manual on The Four Rs. The entire manual and other resources and media can be found here: https://yesworld.org/links-and-media/
Saving this!!! 💜 thank you