Week 1: Satisfaction
This is part one of our 6-week Love-a-thon for Justice, our year-end campaign to share in Liberatory Practice and to support the Center. It takes all of us to do this work, and your presence makes new things possible!
Click to download a PDF of this week’s Liberatory Practices.
Satisfaction, in a society that teaches us we are not enough, is a radical act.
We decided to start week one of our six-week calendar of liberatory practices with the theme of satisfaction.
Satisfaction, as we define it, is not equated with what is tolerable. We know it is not reduced to the compromises offered by the so-called justice system or by versions of redemption based in punishment. Satisfaction is not pacification.
Getting clear on what it means to be satisfied helps us clarify what we are fighting for. Getting clear on what satisfaction feels like helps recognize when we’ve achieved something on the road to liberation, when it’s time to celebrate a win.
We know the results of the election won’t solve centuries of systemic oppression, violence, and divestment... but we still can allow ourselves the space to feel this tiny win...to breathe perhaps a tad more freely... to allow our shoulders to drop and our butt cheeks to unclench.
To be satisfied with where you have gone, where you might go, and where you are runs against all the unjust, death-making systems in play that work so hard to suppress your brilliance. Imagine the unstoppable force you (we) are and bask in the satisfaction of it. Allow yourself joy and pleasure and all the feelings of warmth that are so easily taken away because we are never taught how to cherish them. Satisfaction is not synonymous with ignoring injustice. It is an act of self-care, an act of celebration for all you encompass, and an act of self-preservation for all that you have poured into yourself and into the world already.
Satisfaction is also an act of collective care. It is drawing deep fulfillment in the journey, in the process, in the struggle—that “our work together should be good medicine.” The way we get there is just as important as where we are going.
To practice satisfaction is also to practice rest and completion. In many traditions there is a day of rest. Rabbi Brant Rosen frames this as an abolitionist practice: “The notion to cease from creative work every seventh day is an exceedingly radical concept.” An intentional practice of satisfaction “commands us to take one day every week to leave the world as we know it and experience the world as it should be.”
On the day of rest and satisfaction, we get to experience a taste of the “world to come.” In other words, this is “not merely a day of personal rest and replenishment. It’s a day in which we pause from our efforts to change the world so that we may dwell in the world we are praying and working and struggling for: the world as it should be.”