A Frequency of Justice: Interrupting White Supremacy Within Our Bodies

By Jordon Johnson, PhD

An Insight Into WPC27 Keynote

What does a frequency of justice mean especially in relation to white supremacy and racial justice? When I was sitting in a ballroom of 1,900 people from around the world, I realized the significance of being with a different frequency related to our work in addressing white supremacy. A frequency that we, as individuals and a collective, can decide to engage with or not, as it travels through our emotional and physical bodies.

As I pay attention to patterns that emerge and a resistance to change, what I notice is an uncomfortableness to not being in control and walking through the world in an unfamiliar way. Hesitation arises to move forward in a profound way. I am speaking about a path that focuses on elevating the wisdom and gifts within our being and our community. I am not simply focused on the oppressive patterns projected on people or the privileged positions of individuals.

As I reflect on what is lingering in the subconscious and traveling through my sense of self and other individual’s bodies, I sit with the deep wounds that exist within our bones. The historical conditioning and beliefs passed down from generation to generation that leaves people struggling, in survival mode, and putting their energy into materialistic aspects of their lives. Chaos and reactivity have become normalized which generates a mentality of fight, flight, or freeze with others. There becomes a need to complain about a person or situation to fill space, in order to find comfort in the nervous system, instead of sitting in a space of uncertainty and feeling what emerges. Actions associated with chaos and being reactive tap into a familiar pattern and way of being that has been systematic embedded into our everyday lives––systemically immersed into our emotional bodies. It taps into a feeling of control, where people feel a sense of comfort and lean into this familiar traumatized space, or pattern, that is infused with an illusion power, disassociation from one’s body, and a deep disconnect from one’s feelings. A disconnection and separation from a collective movement based in healing.

What I am tuning into more and more is how a deeply seeded belief system based in white supremacy, a hierarchy of human value, is embedded in organizational thinking and two operations. When attempting to centralize racial healing, shifting a narrative and engaging in transformation, individual’s feelings of uncomfortableness emerge igniting fear and uncertainty because historical patterns, subconscious beliefs and attitudes have been interrupted. The work ahead in our community entails offering an opportunity to bring attention to where those subconscious patterns settled in the body. This keynote provides insight into ways of interrupting historical and generational patterns of suppressing people’s purpose in life and gifts that they have to share with us all. It will address the resistance to shifting the cultural environment to an awakened-based system, which is noticing how feelings and subconscious patterns are playing out.

A dominant historical narrative has been persistently creating an illusionary system, known as white supremacy, and the system was designed to make people believe our humanity and our spirits are disconnected from each other. This dominant belief and narrative are deeply held within the body and consistently reiterated in relation to who has privilege and power. These components have been instrumental in shaping individual behaviors, patterns, and feelings that have been traumatizing whether through emotional, physical, social, cultural or spiritual violence. This dominant belief and the language used to reinforce certain attitudes, thoughts, and feelings over the course of time, subtly produces a way of being. “If you string a group of related beliefs together, they form your perception. So your perception of reality is a sustained state of being that’s based on your long-standing beliefs, attitudes, thoughts and feelings.”¹

There is a collective pain that is being felt and circulating amongst many people. Our social and cultural landscape in the United States primarily fosters disconnection from ourselves, other people, and feelings of possibility. The process of pulling people’s attention away from the outer world, the materialism, to the inner world, our sense of self, is difficult because people are addicted to stress hormones, the feeling of the rush. Joe Dispenza states, “This addiction reinforces our belief that our outer world is more real than our inner world.”² By embracing an awareness-based system and actively coming together as a collective group of people, it begins to change the mindset and a dominant cultural narrative, practice, situated in individualism and the ego. It disrupts the separation of our social change efforts and begins to weave together our three sacred interconnectedness to implement transformative practices and sustainable systems for humanity.

I propose interacting and connecting with a frequency of justice, not based or stuck in the past, yet a frequency elevated by our collective healing process. Through making this decision of where to focus our time and energy, it interrupts white supremacies subtle presence in our bodies that are polluted with being hungry for power and control essentially. When a nervous system is constantly activated, the subconscious needs to be in control, which has seeped into the fabric of our society and this sense of being in control manifests itself through each of us. It is destructive and puts forth a sense of needing to attach to external things. It breeds anxiety, which creates mass health issues.³ Expectation is a form of control and can lead to disappointment, which erodes a foundation of desire and believing in possibilities. “Our perceptions create an unreal world. It is our perception of the world we see that is separate from our true reality.”⁴ Do we want to engage with a frequency of control or a frequency of justice?

This keynote is an invitation for us all to pause, notice, and shift the narrative and interrupt the feelings of separation from one another. Each and every one of us are a work in progress. Our collective movement to address racism and lift up social transformation practices needs to shift our attention to our thoughts and feelings, where we can decide to engage with a deeply awakened system within our bodies to generate collective racial healing.

1 Joe Dispenza, You Are the Placebo: making your mind matter, (California: Hay House, Inc., 2014), 162.

2 Ibid., 151. 3

3 Gregory Nicholas Malouf, Silent: The Power of Silence, (New York: Morgan James Publishing, 2013), 154.

4 Ibid., 216.