Fuck what you call "science"

And also fuck credentials.

I’m profoundly unscientific. (Maybe.) I don’t take other people’s words for something. I need to try it myself, and I need to experience first hand that it works.

I don’t care how much peer-reviewed research you shove at me, my own personal experience trumps all.

If it’s pragmatically, tangibly, helpful in my own personal experience, then that’s all the credentials I need.

In fact, credentials exist BECAUSE OF lack of trust and lack of integrity. They IMPLY a system built on this scarcity and mistrust. They say “Humans are scams, imposters, and shills unless externally exonerated by a regulating body.”

I just refuse to think of humans as fundamentally bad. And when science/academia is basically operating on an “original sin” and “external salvation” model, I bounce.

When I’m looking for a practitioner, I give fuck-all about your academic/institutional credentials. I want to know: Have you lived even bigger than I have? Have you survived the circumstances I’m currently struggling with? Do we share similar challenges? Is your inner world even bigger, more complex, more integrated than mine? Ok, if so, then, you can hold me.

I have NEVER found therapists bigger than me. (Not to say that they don’t exist.) But my mentors and coaches all have been people of incredible lived experience and the bone deep wisdom that forms from having lived through something.

My MOST helpful humans are MOSTLY unconventionally “credentialed.”

My mentors and coaches have awed me with their stories, of prevailing, redemption, of ways twisting and turning, of their descents and ascents. These are people who are living mythologically.

I first encountered my mentor on a podcast, where she was telling a story of great grief and upheaval in love. She was telling the story of her own death, her long living pause, and regeneration. I too was dying a death, and I needed someone who understood that the living also die.

My mentor was the only one who wasn’t afraid of my anger and my terror. All the therapists I’d worked with previously were visibly rattled by it and/or took it personally.

That’s why, even though Stephen Porges is regarded by a quack by a large portion of the medical community, and I personally do not resonate with the way he engages with Autism, I still work with the polyvagal theory. Because when I applied it to my own life, I saw results. I felt truth.

We have been severed from our own gnosis. I laugh a little bit about the idea of the separation of church and state because state has become the new church. There’s an irony in how desperately people cleave to the medical model and a Cartesian worldview.

Science has become the new religion. I’ve come to see: anything you follow blindly, lean on so heavily, give your authority away to, refuse to challenge or evolve - that’s science as religion. Actually, it’s personal, subjective bias. The brain doesn’t like what’s unfamiliar, what doesn’t match our past and our conditioning.

When you hold up science as the end all and be all, don’t forget you’re only holding up science as humans understand it, the same way that when religious folks hold up god as the end all and be all, they’re really only holding up their limited human conceptualization.

Here’s what I know - my own gnosis: I am a person who likes evidence. Who looks for evidence. Where there is evidence of pragmatic usefulness, then that is what I take with me, who I work with. I especially like the evidence of my own personal lived experience.

When I seek practitioners, I want to hear their stories. Because their lives are their credentials. The way their energy meets mine is the true test.

When I engage modalities, I want to see proof that these modalities get results, change lives, give folks relief. And the place where I most need to see evidence, is in my own life. The alchemy of the modality and me.

I’m experiential, experimental and evidentiary. I’m not scientific. I’m courageously experimental. I’m relentlessly experiential. I’m evidence-seeking and evidence-driven. There’s a difference.

Science outsources authority (and my dear friends, is largely controlled and limited by by capitalist interests). The 3Es (experiment, experience, evidence) cultivate inner authority and inner gnosis and are not controlled by corrupt external systems.

(The 3Es also need openness, willingness, curiosity, growth edges, to remain unsiloed and unstagnant.)

Personal stories are my biggest evidence.

(Their) personal experience is my primary criteria for my mentors.

A liberated fuck-you to institutions and credentials. Yes, they give the illusion of safety. But real healing and real liberation are wild. They demand risks. Demand trust. Demand a deep mythological exchange (aka they will take something from you).

Do you even know who is the right practitioner for you? Would you know them if you met them? Do you know what you need? What you are seeking? Do you know what is right for you?

Written by a heretic.

Inspired by and must give credit to Kari Burch’s own writing project of “Unseemly Truth Telling.”