What Is Domestication?
As a young woman in the late 90’s, I was expected to fall in love, get married, have children, buy a home, finish graduate school, identify a successful career and establish my worth in the world by checking off a specific list of milestones established by my social and cultural conditioning.
And I attempted to comply — but when my husband, whom I loved with my entire being, suggested we start having children, I panicked. Not because I didn’t want to start a family, but because I didn’t know how I could actually become superwoman without collapsing.
How could I possibly remain devoted to my evolution and spiritual path in addition to balancing my passions for having a meaningful career, nurturing my marriage, caring for our dogs, stocking our home with our essentials, pursuing my love for athletic competition — and, on top of all that, add a baby to the mix?
I thought I had to choose, since I saw no way to have it all — at least with any sense of sanity and joy.
I worried that if I sped up my life any faster, I might push myself beyond my capacity into complete burn-out and depression.
I worried that my husband and I would become non-sexual housemates, like so many of the couples we knew.
This led me into a spiral of shame and self-doubt.
What if I can’t do it all? What does that mean about me?
Unveiling the matrix
What I now see is that I was struggling with the matrix of social and cultural conditioning — I was drowning in a world of "shoulds.” I had lost contact with my authentic needs and desires. Which, unbeknownst to me, was a subconscious strategy to manage a fear that I would be exiled if I courageously colored my life outside of the lines of culturally normalized expectations.
The matrix is a systemic repression of our wildness. A seductive force of mind control that manipulates us to think, feel, and behave according to principles that indoctrinate, brainwash, and domesticate us.
From birth, we’re handed a prescriptive menu of boxes to check off our list. We’re told that if we complete each step successfully, we’ll ensure a life of happiness, success, and freedom. And, if we don’t — well, then we’re a failure.
As a result, many of us drift away from our authentic center and become trapped on a hamster wheel of busyness and compulsively seeking externally for our worth and value.
These consistent pressures launch and reinforce cycles of anxiety. And before we know it, we’re attempting to control our lives (and each other) as a strategy to mitigate our fears of failure and inadequacy.
I believe this is why we’ve become a society highly addicted to striving, accumulating, and consuming.
Let’s talk about you — have you felt the confinement of an invisible cage?
Have you experienced yourself suffocating in the stale air built by outdated beliefs and expectations that disconnect you from your true self?
Are you afraid of your own passion? Do you fear where following them might lead you?
Have you ever felt guilty about your deepest longings and dreams?
If you courageously follow the beating of your own drum, what might need to fall apart, die, and change?
Does it feel like your life belongs to other people — or to your to-do lists — more than it belongs to you?
I’ve been there. And, I continue, every day, to listen to the call of my whole being and to further embody my wild nature.
That’s why I’m so passionate now about helping you to:
Understand how domestication binds you, so you can make conscious, authentic choices rather than respond from conditioning.
Re-wild from the internalized influences of the matrix of social and cultural conditioning, including domestication, disembodiment, and trauma. To re-wild from the beliefs and behaviors that block you from hearing the needs of your own heart, body and soul.
Stop enduring in your life, and instead emerge into your passion, purpose, and aliveness as a way of breaking out of your inner prison.
What is domestication?
Domestication is the absence of being wild.
I use the term domestication to convey the experience of what occurs when we lose connection with our wild, sovereign, authentic self. This is a common outcome when we make who we think we should be more important than who we are at the core of our being. When we lose connection with our passion, purpose and ability to dream, create and evolve, we may be under the spell of domestication.
Domestication is an attempt to create powerlessness. It can also be used as a tactic to achieve dominance and power-over other people and instill a a toxic and influential group-think, like Hitler created during the Holocaust. He dehumanized a population of people by claiming himself and his kin superior.
Domesticating messages quietly and unsuspectingly convey “Who you are is wrong.” The messages are composed of a unique mosaic of “shoulds” that bundle us into tightly bound ropes of an idealized self.
We’ve been indoctrinated by our cultural conditioning and handed a menu of what is ‘appropriate’ to believe, think, and feel — as well as how we must behave in order to ensure our worthiness in the world.
Domestication is curated by internalized perceptions of who we think we must be in order to be lovable, valuable, and feel our belonging.
Over time, these messages become hardened into our own belief systems — even when these ascribed roles don’t match our deeper desires and authentic yearnings.
To cope, we learn to compartmentalize aspects of ourselves that we feel ashamed of or that don’t fit into these social and cultural expectations. Each time we banish a part of ourselves, we fragment from our wholeness.
This causes many of us to feel disconnected from our true self, passion, curiosity, playfulness, and wonder.
To be wild is to remember and embody the fullness of who we are.
This wholeness is not limited to an identification with our self-images, but an intimate melding with the depths of stillness and wisdom that live within each one of us — regardless of our status, physical appearance, or perceived success in the material world.
Domestication is enacted through hidden messages
When domesticating messages remain unchallenged, they silently become an invisible prison of fear, control, shame, and blame.
For instance, I grew up in an environment that told me, “Don’t be real, be nice instead.” I was taught that it was better to withhold my true feelings, bite my tongue, and repress my voice, rather than embarrass or make anyone uncomfortable. Can you relate?
The pattern of people-pleasing is one very common response to domestication – and it suffocates us. Over time, we don’t even need the original messages to be verbalized, because our fear of rejection and abandonment has constructed an inner critic to carry it forward for us. What was once external becomes an internalized voice designed to recirculate disempowering messages while reinforcing shame and self-doubt.
This subliminal phenomenon of brainwashing causes us to lose access to our inner authority and whole-being wisdom. This is what Bob Marley, Jamaican singer and songwriter, calls mental slavery. I love his famous line:
What are the domestication scripts that have imprisoned you?
When society, or our internalized voice of ‘I should’, tell us what is or isn’t possible for our lives, it’s common to fragment, go numb, and forget how expansive and powerful we are.
Domestication scripts hold numerous invisible double-binds. The following are common doorways to explore these scripts:
Gender — What is socially expected of you based on your gender orientation? Do you feel trapped in roles that don’t actually fit your authentic desires, but are expected of you because of your gender?
Career path — Do you feel inspired and enlivened by your career path, or are you doing it to prove yourself or please someone else? Do you strive to climb a ladder and by doing so, neglect other important aspects of your life such as relationship, health, rest, or creativity? Have you abandoned your deeper creative dreams for the sake of a more profitable or proven path to success?
Finances — Does your worth feel tied to how much money you make? Do you secretly feel shame for not achieving certain financial milestones by a certain age?
Health — Do you feel pressured to eat the “right way”? Go to the gym so you can look the “right part”? Do you abide by social standards of what health and beauty should look like or your own internal barometer?
Partnering — Do you stay in a relationship that looks good on paper but doesn’t meet the longing of your heart? Do you get married or ascribe to a monogamous relationship as the only ‘appropriate’ option — even if you feel there is a different model that would be more fulfilling for you?
Parenting — Do you carry forward all that you learned from your lineage of parents and grandparents without exploring how your conditioning serves or does not serve? Do you feel pressured to be the ‘perfect’ and infallible parent?
Education — Do you feel that your opinions and creations are only valid if they’re backed up by academic achievement, education, and professional accomplishments? Do you identify with your education, or do you judge others based on where they went to school or the kind of college degree they obtained?
Personal development — Do you continuously feel a need to improve yourself or fix and heal your wounds? Or reach the next spiritual breakthrough? Do you adhere to principles that dictate that your value is based on how spiritual, conscious, or enlightened you are?
To take a journey into exploring the specifics of gender domestication, read my article The Domesticating Traps of Gender Expectations and Norms.
Domestication leads to disembodiment
Disembodiment is a form of compartmentalization — a loss of direct contact with the fullness of our whole-being wisdom.
Culturally, many of us have been taught to value our intellect, disregard our feelings, and treat our body like a machine, often driving ourselves into illness and burnout.
Even though I’m female, like many men, I too was taught to disregard my feelings. In my twenties and thirties, I was a triathlete. Though I spent countless hours training my body to do what my mind wanted it to do, I wasn’t in touch with my whole-body intelligence. In fact, I treated it like a machine. This wasn’t sustainable. It was abusive, and an unconscious way I was compartmentalizing and allowing my mental goals to overrule the rest of me.
In contrast to disembodiment, whole-being wisdom represents multiple channels of our intelligence. This includes logic and reason, and extends beyond to encompass our intuition, gut feelings, heart guidance, inner knowings, natural rhythms and our sensory awareness, which are all ways of tracking subtle energies and unseen but influential data.
We can’t access this wellspring of wisdom when we’re disembodied. If we’ve been conditioned to dismiss our inner wisdom, we may numb or shut down these parts of ourselves. This smart strategy allows us to avoid criticism, embarrassment, and shame. However, the cost is access to some of our superpowers.
In other words, disembodiment is a form of dissociation, an unconscious compartmentalizing or scattering of our awareness, leaving us partially available to our present experience. Dissociation is a genius attempt to cope with overwhelm and anxiety by jumping out of our body. It’s an automatic physiological impulse to a threat response of freeze or flight, to avoid intensity. It can present as a spacey state of floating, a lack of presence, and a sense of fuzzy confusion.
How many of us cope with overwhelm by shutting down, numbing out, or compartmentalizing so we can move on?
The defensive posturing that have the power to reinforce disembodiment
Collectively, we’ve become accustomed to chronically high states of pressure, fear and anxiety. Disembodiment is a silent killer of joy, trust, hope, creativity and passion. States of disembodiment will truncate access to our higher-self, body intelligence, and present-moment awareness.
When we are highly stressed, and conditioned to ignore our bodies, we will default to one, or a combination, of the following three strategies:
Freeze: Are you spacey? Are you bumping into furniture, misplacing your keys, or forgetting appointments in your calendar?
Fight: Are you angry at yourself, others, or the world and unable to feel love or connection? Are you seeking to blame someone for how you feel?
Flight: Do you want to run, hide, or pretend that you’re fine even when you are not?
Do you know your patterns of disembodiment? Do you endure when you’re exhausted, sacrifice your needs to please others, or repress your authenticity in order to belong and maintain a self-image?
How do you manage your activated states? Do you know your triggers? Do you have tools to help you come back into more embodied states of being?
Two significant root causes of domestication
To be human is to experience the highs of love, devotion, connection, creativity and joy as well as the hardships of loss, rejection, fear, betrayal, isolation and loneliness.
How we navigate these states is the distinguishing factor between suffering and feeling punished, versus empowered and accepting of our hardships as necessary fuel for our awakening, embodiment, and integration.
Two significant root causes of domestication and disembodiment are:
Unresolved trauma — including three types of traumas: personal, ancestral, and collective traumas.
The matrix of social and cultural conditioning — including externalized messages that induce shame and fear, as well as internalized voices and conditioned behaviors.
1. unresolved TRAUMA
Trauma is anything that disconnects or fragments us from our authentic selves and sense of wholeness.
It’s typically the result of a shocking event (or a series of repeated disempowering events) that overwhelm the central nervous system and change how we react to feelings of threat, anxiety, and overwhelm. It can fracture our sense of safety and well-being, and imprint us with vigilant states of tracking for danger, even when we’re not aware of doing so.
Trauma is not always big and obvious like a car accident or loss of a loved one. It can be silent and stealth-like leaving a wake of pain, loneliness, isolation, and suffering. When unresolved, the impacts and fragmentation that trauma causes can be expressed in a few directions:
patterns of inertia, disassociation, and loss of passion and purpose
self-aggressive thoughts and behaviors
externalized-aggression directed towards others or agendas that fuel greed, power-over, and violence
Learn more about trauma in my article What Is Trauma? and its related series.
2. The matrix of social and cultural conditioning
The matrix of social and cultural conditioning is the most pervasive form of trauma on the planet. It’s a system of mind control that manipulates us to think, feel, and behave in specific ways.
Without realizing what’s happening, we become drugged by a fabricated and conditioned reality. One that recklessly distorts our feelings of wholeness and creates a sense of painful separation and aloneness.
The matrix has attempted to turn the masses into puppets dangling on strings of I should. As a result, many of us have learned to repress our authentic needs and desires.
The matrix gets us to do the dirty work, by subliminally encouraging us to internalize voices of criticism and shame. To liberate ourselves we must first see how the voices of domestication are reinforced from the inside-out. If the matrix had a voice, it might say things like this:
“You’re broken and sinful. I know better than you — do as I say and you’ll be safe, protected, worthy of love, belonging, and celebration. If you try to step out of line, you’ll be punished and humiliated.”
Explore the matrix and how to unmask its effects in our lives and psyches in my article, Awakening to the Matrix of Social and Cultural Conditioning.
A personal and collective hero/heroine’s journey
In each lifetime, we may undergo a thousand heroic journeys. Some are small and almost imperceptible, while others sweep wide and deep, resulting in a complete reorientation of our reality and sense of self.
Two years after I left my marriage, I attended my first meditation retreat in the Rocky Mountains. This adventure was precipitated by discovering a book called Turning Your Mind Into Your Ally. The title grabbed me because I indeed felt like my mind was my enemy. Lashing me with repeating thoughts of self-criticism, shame, and behaviors of busyness and striving.
I didn’t want to be at war anymore.
For over eight hours a day, I sat on a meditation cushion, observed my mental patterns, allowed big waves of emotions to move through and allowed physical discomfort to teach me about my beliefs and suffering. Over the days, I felt something subtle open — a realization that my entire life, I had been in conflict between what was expected of me versus what I authentically desired and longed for. To manage these internal dilemmas, I got busier, swept my passions under the rug, and almost entirely lost access to my authentic needs and wants.
Inside of my head, I literally heard the sound of a metal lock click open. This happened the moment I recognized that my worthiness was not dependent upon whether I did something productive, achieved something extraordinary, or checked off the boxes of culturally prescribed success.
Yes, indeed, the truth can set you free. I felt it happening right there on my meditation cushion. When I experienced this reality shift, my heart and mind opened in a way I’d never known. On a break, I wandered into the woods, slid up against a Ponderosa tree and wept with relief.
My realizations became my get-out-of-jail free card. I didn’t just intellectually understand that happiness is an inside job, I felt this truth in my whole being. From this day forward, the only one who could truly take away my freedom was myself. This was a significant realization that would take years to embody.
Now that I had exposed the roots of my suffering as my conditioned reality and belief system, what was next for me?
This great mystery lay before me as I asked the question: How do I slough the dead skin of my domestication and set flame to my wild embodied self?
Two months later, I left my corporate job in Chicago, rented out my home, and moved to Boulder, Colorado.
Once I arrived in Boulder, I unexpectedly encountered a health crisis. I was exhausted and in extreme physical pain. Doctors and tests failed to diagnose or treat my issues. For two years I explored various treatments and healing modalities and still nothing shifted.
Through a series of synchronistic events, I ended up in a cabin in Bonny Doon, in the mountains of Santa Cruz, California. There, my illness pulled me underground for a few more years.
It was a time of shattering confusion. I see now that my life needed to fall apart on every level, so that I could rebirth myself, and become someone more aligned — pure and true to my soul instead of my conditioning.
This was the beginning of a 17-year-journey that would take me deep into my body in unexpected and beautiful ways.
Through somatic-based meditation practices, I visited reservoirs and pockets of trauma, grief and pain stored inside me. All of this pain had been waiting for me to slow down enough to bring my loving presence and attention to the healing and integration I needed.
I cried with joy. I wept with despair and helplessness. I screamed with rage.
I connected with my body in ways I’d never experienced as an athlete. I discovered that my body wasn’t a machine, it was a universe of wisdom, love, and ancient history stored in my DNA.
I was tired of being at war with myself. I had to surrender. I needed to let the gravity of my illness carry me inward for healing. I wanted to stopped fighting, or trying to fix what I couldn’t control.
To do so, I crawled into a cave of my own making. I dug deep into my own psyche exploring wormholes within the matrix. One by one, I exposed the social and cultural idealizations that had successfully molded me into who I thought I should be and away from who I was beneath all the conditioning.
It was shocking to see how many disempowering messages I swallowed without even knowing it.
I collapsed into rock bottom. I learned that sometimes aspects of life must die. Some relationships need to end. Organizations or family systems with toxic dynamics need to be walked away from and dreams must be shattered. In fact, sometimes, it’s the only way through to the other side. If we don’t consciously transition from misaligned situations, life will lovingly and painfully do it for us.
Suspending my habitual ways of operating became the medicine and sword of strength I needed to shatter my internal jail cell. Striving for the next ‘thing’ that would make me happy no longer fooled me. And, it was excruciating to see through the habits of chasing the next shiny object as a means to provide happiness. This pattern didn’t actually comfort me but rather it spun me in circles — the game was up. I saw the cycle of suffering too clearly now.
A hero or heroine’s journey isn’t about arrival or completion. It’s filled with hardships, fears of the unknown, loss, and grief. But it’s also about rising again and again to live, love, and embody our fullest heart, wisdom, and destiny.
And although awakening to the truth of who we are is a deeply personal journey, it doesn’t happen in isolation.
There is a massive movement underway in which people across the world are aflame with a similar mission and purpose. Each time we find one another, we strengthen our reserves and plug our life into the larger electrical current of a tipping point of consciousness.
Finding liberation together
The matrix has birthed a collective movement of domestication. This has caused many of us to disembody from our whole and wild nature.
Over millennia, the evolution of our species, and all that has ever existed on this planet, including the earth herself, have been in a dynamic process of birth, death, and rebirth. Those of us on a path of raising consciousness are helping to end ways of thinking and behaving that cause painful suffering for all beings on the planet.
We’re at a brink as a species. Can we reach a tipping-point in human consciousness?
With each death, there is an opportunity for rebirth.
What kind of world will be birthed if enough of us interrupt the patterns of shame, domestication, and disembodied ways of living?
Re-wilding: Busting the cages of domestication
Over millennia, humanity has been indoctrinated to seek freedom and validation externally instead of internally — thus forcing us to forfeit, or disregard, an intimate relationship with the sensitive and attuned instruments of our whole-being wisdom.
We are wild creatures in a world that is often seeking to tame, shame and box us in. We cut, tear, and shred the boxes that confine and suffocate us.
To re-wild is to remember and embody the fullness of who we are.
Wildness can be mistaken as being self-serving, neglectful and not concerned with how one’s actions impact the whole. This is better defined as disembodied carelessness. To be wild is to embody our primal intelligence and open-hearted care for the whole.
The journey of re-wilding is a path of unifying and welcoming any exiled part of ourselves back home into the center of our heart and whole-being. Embodiment allows us to see through the distracting charade of being overly identified with our self-images and personas instead of the core of our being.
When we give our inner authority away to external sources it’s easy to forget who we are. As a result, we may slip into a trance of identifying with limited versions of ourselves or idealizations of who we think we should be.
To be wild is to be free. But free of what, exactly?
To be wild is to be untethered by habits and beliefs that fragment your sense of wholeness and reinforce self-domestication.
Each time we welcome home an exiled aspect of ourselves we reclaim another piece of our power and we strengthen our sense of wholeness.
By intentionally expanding our self-awareness, we activate the x-ray vision needed to scan for the banished parts of ourselves. This is how we dismantle habituated ways of reinforcing domestication. This is how we remember our wild and embodied self.