Soul Expanding Reflections on Breaking Cycles

This is a guest post from Manuela Popovici, who attended this morning's plenary session.

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Sitting and listening to the first panel of the first plenary session in WW2011, I feel my soul expanding, my feminist spirit unfolding from the rather scrunched space it usually has to function in. It reminds me of how I can breathe in twice as deeply after a yoga session. This is my soul breathing in deeper, and the souls of a thousand and more women here in the Convention Center.

Andrea Smith talks about how the system has set us up to be against each other, so that the only way we can survive is on the backs of others, like economic migrants that come to Canada and live on Indigenous land, or NGOs that have to compete with each other for funds. But she also talks about how we can, we must build our own alliances, hold on to each other.

Our souls expand because these women – Andrea Smith, Devaki Jain, Tanya Tagaq, and Joanne St. Lewis - they call it as it is, they talk about what we all experience and feel – the oppression, the need for decolonization and healing, spirituality and community, building alliances and movements, and our power and strength. Looking around at this amazing group of women who have come from all around the world, it is not hard to believe in all of that. I am even more excited now about what’s still to come in WW2011.

Just like these women’s words before, Tanya Tagag’s song is now
speaking straight to our souls.