Today was the wrap up of the Blackstack Book Club study for Playing the Game: Embodied Brilliance Beyond the Moral Limits of Race in Sport. A special thank you to Gary F. Green II, PhD for writing this cultural relevant book and sharing it with the Blackstack community.
Here’s the replay from the Salon today, start with this meditation and let everything else just flow.
Warm-Up Prompt: What is your love language and how do you demonstrate that love back to yourself?
My love language is attentive detail, I am learning that I desire a love that sees me in my wholeness. I give myself that love on a daily basis by providing myself with a level of attention and care that honors my mind, body, and spirit. Checking in with my body to find out what I need in that moment, for that day, and setting intentions for myself to honor that need. I pay attention to myself and the emotions that I feel in the moment, that’s how I gather the detail allowing me to be more attentive to myself rather than just forcing myself to suppress the emotions or power through the feeling without honoring it in real time. I love all parts of myself, and I’m learning attentive detail is how I love myself intentionally. I give to myself what I once desired from a partner, and through that I am allowing myself to receive and give attentive detailed love to myself and the people I am in community with.
“Personas are conscious deployments of self that are meant to constitute something in the world, even if another’s worldview…as much as our presence pushes back on our cultural surround.” p. 96
Journal Prompt: Name a persona that kept you safe in spaces that were designed to suppress you, use storytelling to tell that story from a higher perspective now that you are on the other side of this situation.
A persona that has kept me safe for years was Trap, she has protected me in ways that I did not know I needed protection over the years in situations where I was harmed at the hands of Black men many times. She became my masculine protector, the one that learned to load and shoot a gun, the one that was never caught slipping. I have carried her with me over the years even as I’ve move out of some of those unsafe spaces. I don’t want to get rid of her, instead I learned how to integrate her into my current identity in new ways. Yes I still carry a gun, yes I still protect myself and do not allow myself to be caught slipping, however, the intention I move with allows me to be protected from the situations I once experienced in those unsafe spaces. From the higher perspective I realize that the reason Trap was developed was to keep me safe so for that I do not shame her for the trauma we have been forced to live with and heal through because she was doing the best she could to protect us in spaces that were designed to suppress us.
“Breath sustains all embodied performance…Because breath, like all iterations of life, is sacred.” p. 115-116
“But play has another side…In other words, it must maintain some sense of deniability if it is going to ‘live to fight another day,’” p.144-145
Journal Prompt: How do you personally play the game?
For me, I play the game to win. I play the game for longevity, to allow myself not a seat at the table, but the opportunity to gather the materials, develop the skills and build that mf for myself and my people. This world we live in is not designed for our success, and Trap knows how to protect us as we navigate those spaces, Jacquie has the charisama and charm that allows us to enter into rooms that were supposed to keep us locked out of, and once we cross the finish line and we celebrate the milestone wins — all of the personas, all of the versions of myself become one. And for me, that’s winning this game. Living life free of the societal norms, living in my truth, living freely for myself and allowing my lineage to experience life in this freedom. That’s the goal, this work of liberation is not selfishly for myself but intentionally for the generations that will come after me. I play the game not to win only this one game, but to be the champion.
