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nisha purushotham

Failing Free

Published over 1 year ago • 5 min read

Failure: A Liberatory Path

Dear one,

Happy Full Snow Moon! This full moon invites us to shed what no longer serves us and plant seeds for the future. Snow Moon also calls us to connect with our inner strength and resilience during the darkest and coldest nights and to re-member we have the power to endure and thrive.

One thing I’m shedding is fear of failure. Like all of us, I’ve been conditioned to fear failure by systems which practice supremacist power. Take racial capitalism in the u.s. for example, a system founded on a government-led genocidal campaign against indigenous peoples and the enslavement of Africans and their descendants.

Racial capitalism requires allegiance to monetary transactions for our basic needs of food, shelter, and preventative and palliative medicines and punishes those without adequate monetary resources with eviction, displacement, denied or delayed medical care, and/or incarceration. In this system, being paid for your work, rather than the work itself, is what gains you access to nourishment, home, and health “care”. While some of us work in spaces where innovation is encouraged, most of us don’t. To fail at work may threaten continued employment and put you and those dependent on you at great risk. In this context, fearing failure is understandable. And yet, as we witness the accelerated dismantling of government institutions and programs designed to address structural inequities, it feels like not risking failure has kept us in our place but not safe.

​adrienne maree brown teaches us that “things are not getting worse, they are getting uncovered, we must hold each other tight and continue to pull back the veil”. Ironically, it is the fascists in power today who are pulling back the veil on the extractive, exploitative, and exclusive values and practices of american democracy. Work raids, deportations, and the criminalization of undocumented immigrants were as much a part of the Obama and Biden administrations as they were the first Trump administration. Soon after Israel launched its genocidal war on Palestinians in Gaza, President Biden met with King Abdullah II of Jordan to discuss the forced resettlement of Palestinians there. What democratic administrations tried to do under the radar, Trump and his billionaire associates are doing as spectacle.

We are learning in terrifying ways that there is no safety for those who fall outside the bounds of who the ruling oligarchs determine are the most valuable. In this context, anyone who is not white, a cis gendered man, able bodied, straight, economically wealthy, christian, and a u.s. citizen fail just because we are.

My practice is to hold my outrage and grief over this while also being guided by the clarity that when I am stripped of illusions that encourage me to collude with ways of being that dishonor life, I am able to see and sense what is needed to repair our relations and reimagine new worlds. My particular view of repair and reimagining is shaped by the gifts and skills passed down by my lineage and developed in my life journey.

A week from tomorrow, I’m offering Attunement, a new experimental sound healing workshop, into which I’m pouring my love and imagination. I’m doing so with the understanding that I’m risking some things that I’ve long valued. These include being competent, being an expert, being taken seriously, being excellent, and being in control. I am grateful for this opportunity to fail at these ways of being.

I used to believe that these ways were pathways to belonging. With the veil pulled back, I now see these as pathways to acceptance within systems and cultures that elevate and privilege the rational mind, certainty, linear development, and power over our intrinsic nature. I now know that to fail in these ways of being opens paths of liberatory possibilities. The possibilities most enticing to me are:

🌕 playing in my voice in ways that reconnect me with my body’s wisdom

🌕 improvising new soundscapes, melodies, and harmonies and feeling the joy of emergence

🌕 embarking on a sound journey that will unfurl in ways that transcend my planned outcomes

🌕 making room for the wild in me and others in the service of our collective liberation

If you are enticed by these liberatory possibilities, i invite you to join me for Attunement. Register here. Only a few spots remain!

Sources
Rose, S. (2024, November 17). Spiritual Meaning of the Snow Moon. Wisdom of the Spirit. https://wisdomofthespirit.com/spiritual-meaning-of-the-snow-moon

Hagopian, A. (2024, November 19). Trump is promising a deportation surge. How many people did Obama, Biden and Trump actually deport? Independent. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-deportation-numbers-obama-biden-b2649257.html

Wazwaz, N. & Hirten, K. (2025, February 7). Trump Wants the US to Take Over Gaza. What does it mean? The Take Al Jazeera. https://www.aljazeera.com/podcasts/2025/2/7/the-take-trump-wants-the-us-to-take-over-gaza-what-does-that-mean

Offerings

Attunement - Join me on Saturday, February 22, 2025 from 2-4 pm at The Angel Nyack, 18 S. Broadway, Nyack, NY 10960, for an experimental session that aims to connect you with your authentic voice and give expression to it in ways that nurture their joy, belonging, sense of agency and practice of reciprocity. Register here. Space is limited.
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Coaching - I’m taking on new coach partners/clients. In my coaching practice, I specialize in attuning to and expressing your authentic voice and releasing grief and other blockages that limit the flow of your life force and your embodiment of your unique and essential purpose. I work primarily but not exclusively with women and LGBTQIA leaders of color. You can book a discovery call with me here.
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​Moving Through Chaos and Complexity: Network Weaving for Social Healing in Times of Great Change - I’m co-facilitating this Interaction Institute for Social Change hosted webinar with my dear collaborator, Curtis Ogden. Come join us on Thursday, March 27 from 3-5 pm EST to explore strategies to build stronger networks, so you and your community can move through these challenging times with clarity and connection. You can register here.

What is enchanting me

Practice

I recently completed a life changing liberatory entrepreneurship coaching journey with Heddy Nam, Founder and Chief Transformational Officer of Rosalee Consulting. Heddy’s unique coaching is a potent mix of small business expertise, a decolonial analysis and heartset, and practical tools for shaping your business in ways that allow you to work in sustainable and enlivening ways while supporting your clients’ transformation and growth. In one session, Heddy shared that her own business revenue model is guided by the guidelines of the Honorable Harvest. Deeply inspired, I revisited Robin Wall Kimmerer’s writing on the Honorable Harvest. This has sparked reflection on the ways i can build a business that gives as much as it receives. One small way to do so is highly recommend Heddy Nam to any one who seeks to start or grow a business that supports you in living out your purpose with a liberatory entrepreneurial vision and values aligned best practices.

Music

​Ethio Blue - A dear Ethiopian born sister friend shared Meklit’s latest EP with me noting that the singer songwriter’s music "touched a place deep within her". I’ve been listening to the EP on repeat for two weeks now. To give you a taste of this EP’s medicine, here is a line from the opening track “Antidote”:

Antidote, antidote, antidote

Take the power from the poison

Remind them of what is inside them

Courageous ones, we have enough

For all of us at the table

When the suffering of the world begins to take you to a state of overwhelm, i recommend pausing what you are doing to listen to the prophetic and compassionate vibrations of this earthy and ethereal songstress.

Readings

​The Year of the Snake: Myth, Faith, Symbolism, and The Dangers of Divinity - My latest journal post explores both the repressive and liberatory power of stories within our lineage and religious or spiritual traditions and focuses on generational, biblical, and ancestral understandings of snakes in honor of The Year of the Snake. The writing of this post took me into an enchanting dream state.

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I live and work on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the Ramapough Munsee Lenape, Mohican, and Schaghticoke peoples.

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nisha purushotham

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