Em's Story
I'm Em Chiappinelli (she/they), a human in my early thirties, descended from Italian, Irish, and Jewish ancestors, born and raised in Seneca Nation in Western New York, and currently living in a farming community on the homelands of the Manahoac, Shawnee, and Piscataway tribes, bordering the Blue Ridge in northern Virginia.
As someone who grew up without many cultural practices or a spiritual story to fit life into, I found myself constantly attracted to matters of consciousness and interconnection. It kicked off with early work in impact measurement - a way to evaluate the social or environmental impact that organizations intend to have on the people, communities, and land they interact with. I was drawn to understanding the difference between what we do, or intend to do, and what actually happens on the ground. As I learned more about how complex doing that kind of work is, I wanted more tools to understand how we know what is "true" and how to work with the limits of our awareness; how the ways we were differently raised to think effect the actions that we take in the world. This led me to study and practice Buddhist insight meditation, eventually at the monastery of the beloved Burmese meditation teacher Sayadaw U Tejaniya in Yangon, Myanmar. My studies in the monastery cracked open a layer of perception I had never experienced before: it was like a fog that had unknowingly lived in my awareness was gone.
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From there, the floodgates opened into a decade of exploring consciousness and connection from different angles, with the enormous support of many, many different schools, courses, programs, and teachers, both formal and informal.
For three years, I lived in a spiritual community committed to awareness practices which showed me ways that spiritual practice can be woven into everyday life. While living there, I also began years of coursework with a separate consciousness school that offered ways to deconstruct the mechanisms of personality and to anchor in something larger. This is also where I began training as a breathworker, to be able to support others (and myself) with consistent access to nonordinary states of consciousness and the clarity they provide. The psychic realm was opened up to me with the help of a clairvoyancy school, and the training provided there deepened my relationship with the mind's eye and expanded my understanding of what can be perceived. This strengthened my desire and effort to connect with my ancestors, something I never knew could be possible, and which I found support with through the school Ancestral Medicine and an explicitly decolonial ancestral connection study group. All of these schools opened up something above me and beyond me - confirming my suspicion that there was way more going on than meets the eye, and that there are seemingly endless ways to explore it.
At the same time, I began to shift my focus to land. I had never been able to feel very connected to land while living in cities, and didn't even really know what connecting with land might mean, despite cities also being "land." I moved to the Mid Atlantic and began learning about how to relate to land on a personal level, through courses, trainings, and meeting people who came from cultures that had more reverence for land than mine. I began working on land-based projects and initiatives, and organized conferences to connect people living on different land-based sites in the Mid Atlantic. Something started to open up, this time from beneath and around me: a sense that there was an actual thing there, that I had not consciously felt before. I still remember the first time I actually felt a tree, felt its presence beyond just seeing it embedded in the ground, from afar. It was weird.
As I got deeper into land-based work, I also learned more about the impact of colonialism in all aspects of life, and in a very pronounced way on all issues related to land. I went through numerous hard confrontations that opened my understanding of white supremacy culture, and how deeply, subtly embedded it is in myself and the structures I participate in. The pain of these awkward awakenings motivated my ongoing pursuit of trainings, workshops, and group spaces that offered a political education beyond what I learned in school, and that created a practice space for making the messy internal shifts required to recognize and remediate culturally-conditioned blind spots. As these shifts happen, the barriers that were bred in me also shift and I find myself more and more connected to other people.
All of these explorations of consciousness and connection helped me to see that the categories of spiritual, emotional, political, social, and environmental are not truly separate, despite the lines that have been drawn between them. Many of the schools I was in offered one slice of the consciousness pie, but were often lacking in other types of consciousness. Some were spiritual to the exclusion of social/political, or focused on land without a connection to the spiritual or the historical context we find ourselves in on whatever land we live on. Beyond that, I started feeling the flip side of all of the seeking I had done and the enthusiasm I had brought to my exploring: the exhausting amount of disconnection created by the systems we exist within, that I was reacting to, and acting from, on an unconscious level. Disconnection began to emerge, for me, as a foundational characteristic of the dominant culture. I started to see it everywhere, and how much it motivated my earlier exploring. Now, I understand disconnection as a kind of relational deadness: one of the effects of systems that over centuries have worked to create separation from each other, ourselves, the land, and some overarching sense of what holds it all together.
Accordingly, I also now understand connection as an overarching medicine; a north star that can offer endless guidance to see where our solutions are lacking. I believe there is always more that we can be connected to, always more that we may find we have been, consciously or unconsciously, disconnected from. That feeling is what motivated me to create Dismantling Deadness. I hope that Dismantling Deadness can be a place for people to practice growing their awareness toward the goal of conscious connection across divides: those we discover within us, between parts of ourselves, and those we navigate within the culture we find ourselves in, between ourselves and the aliveness of the world we inhabit.
Thanks to all of those who supported me to arrive where I am now, for better and for worse along the way, and thanks to you for being here. May we encounter each other in some real way soon.
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