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COMMON FEELING GARMENTS





















Drop 2--10.14.2023
; I Dream of A Global Indigenous Solidarity
; Slowly & Urgently
; I’m Trying my Best
; Who Is Your Hopeful Landscape For?
; Liberate Our Palestinian Friends
; I Need Positive Feedback










Drop 1--06.26.2022
; Recovering People Pleaser
; Incompetent Docile Slut
; Loyalty Over Love
; I’m Sensitive Talk To Me Nice
; No Oriental Hanky Panky





Guiding Questions

How can direct messaging catalyze our capacity to critically reflect and imagine anew? What are the implications of inflammatory language in creating a discard culture. Alternatively, what are its potentiality for political organization? 

Reflections

re: on learning how to be a better communicator -- and listener. 

This tank top was screenprinted and beddazzled by hand in New York City and is a one-of-a-kind creation. Wearing this tank top signifies you are connected to others around you. Through your life experiences, you resonate with the phrasing on this shirt. Many others may resonate it with it as well. You have jumped a quantum leap to better understand those around you. Thank you for taking the time to listen.

Peace Treaty is a communication technique I’ve been practicing in order to have deeper and more spiritually fulfilling relationships whose learnings come from “The Art of Communicating” written by Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh. Peace Treaty is a practice where you share directly with a person who has hurt you the specific ways in which they hurt you by using compassionate but explicit language - Hello ______ I was hurt when you didn’t communicate your true feelings to me but instead avoided me which led to eventual ghosting. I was especially hurt because we have been building our relationship on the foundation of love and trust through friendship over the past 8 months.You then ask the person who has caused hurt to reflect on and look deeply into the hurt they have caused.Can you look deeply into the hurt that has been caused and the suffering that I am experiencing as a result of it?Finally, you ask the person who has caused the hurt to reconcile that hurt with you (as in, as a partnership) at a later date and in a calmer frame of mind. Can we make time in the next week to evaluate and look at this hurt together? How does Friday at 1pm sound? What do we have but the continued evolution of a conversation of a situation that has caused suffering? What do we have if we don’t do converse with others and in witness of others, especially those that are entangled in the original suffering? How can we grow and prevent future suffering by practicing the relief of that suffering in the present moment with compassion?

I’ve learned from my own previous communication failures that we need to be communicating with each other in order to heal. Healing alone can only take you so far, but healing with each other will be the vessel to truly take us back home to ourselves. We need to be communicating with each other with calmness and intention in order to grow. We need to be communicating with each other with intelligence because communication is one of the few tools we have to intercept the brain waves of another human in order to connect and understand them.We also need to be creating the foundations of trust and love to lay the groundwork of healthy communication when conflict arises. Without this foundation, any attempts of effective communication, especially in the face of a disprecancy of communication, will dissolve quickly. To this end I ask for self-reflection --

are you creating the foundations of a safe communication stream through consistency, integrity and honesty?

are you practicing deep listening to those expressing their experience to you?

are you leading with your heart forward?

are you aware of the power of communication as both a tool for liberation and a weapon of destruction? are you aware of your responsibility in using this tool? and finally --
are you communicating to create understanding as the end goal?

I fear a lack of deep communication will continue to feed a culture of emotional avoidance that perpetuates isolation and individual suffering. I’ve learned there is a balance from needing space to process in isolation and being emotionally avoidant. Our blockages of emotional attunement are manifesting in our interpersonal relationships and at a global scale. Until we breakthrough this blockage, hand-in-hand, spirits and souls aligned, heart-centered and leading, our perception of the lonliness we feel that feeds our illusions of disconnect will continue to plague the evolution of our collective human spirit.