Em Chiappinelli Dreams of Chaos
On enhancing consciousness and spiritual connectivity to life, the universe, and everything.
Dreams of Chaos is a series of Q&As with folks who are engaging with chaos in their work. Sometimes that means they love the chaos and use it as an engine for creativity. Sometimes it means they struggle with the chaos and are trying to harness it in whatever way they can. I’m interested in the ways in which we, as people, acknowledge the messiness of living in the world. And I’m excited to share conversations with those are thinking about this as well.
I first met Em Chiappinelli about a million years ago, when we were both living in Boston. At the time, I was working with a (now defunct) collective of women-identifying classical composers to break down ideas about how and where “classical” music should be performed and experienced.
We did a lot of cool things in those years, including partnering with an organization called Groupmuse to host concerts/ragers in basements and living rooms. We packed the rooms back then, filling other students’ homes with electric cellos, interactive motion-sensitive software, painters free-improvising works in response to the music being made. It was mad, and fervent, and hella fun.
I met Em at one of these all-night octet extravaganzas, and we connected right away. We were both in a moment of youth and seeking. I didn’t know what I was doing with my life, but I had a feeling it would be about asking questions and challenging norms. Em was working for an organization she liked but didn’t feel like the right fit. She was getting into some more spiritual stuff, not sure where it would lead.
We hung out a few more times, speaking about the meaning of life and how we wanted to change the world (as one does in one’s 20s). Then our paths diverged. When we reconnected this year, it was after each of us had gone on a long and winding walk towards ourselves.
I invited Em to join me in the Chaos Palace because I think they1 have a fascinating way of thinking about how we are all connected to one another. They’re asking questions about what reality is and if perception is the key to relinquishing ego and finding true compassion.
At the Chaos Palace, I’m interested in folks who are dismantling the frameworks they’ve been given, breathing life into a new world of their creation. Whether that’s through spiritual exploration or breaking down ideas about gender, everyone who Dreams of Chaos here is, in fact, dreaming of a reality that’s malleable. A reality of their own design. I hope you find this conversation with Em as heart-opening as I did.
Tell me a bit about where you’re from and how you found your way to spiritual work.
Originally, I'm actually from Western New York, near Canada. When I was a kid I was sort of obsessed with magic. I still am. When I was young I almost exclusively read epic magical literature. You know, I have this memory from elementary school of trying to convince my friend that I could conjure the wind by standing on a table and calling to it. I had no idea where that was coming from, but what really stands out to me is the feeling of inner dread that the wind wasn't going to come. I think that was the beginning of my grappling with the problem of not having a coherent cosmology or organizing principle in my life. There was no general meaning making that accounted for the things that I can directly see with my eyes and hear with my ears and how they’re connected to something bigger. I had some sense of connection to other things, but no framework to put it in.
Sounds like you’ve always felt a sense of something ethereal out there.
Yeah, I think that’s true. I think the thing that was really becoming clear to me when living in New York City was how I kept hitting a wall when it came to the spiritual life I wanted to have. I think, to me, the connection to the land is crucial to my spiritual development. Not that you're ever not on land, but like living on land versus living in a city — there's something deeper about it that I’m still learning. When I was in Brooklyn I got my permaculture design certificate. I think a part of me just realized that I'm a sucker for everything that New York has to offer, but that meant I didn't really have an inner practice, even though I did like meditation retreats and stuff.
Around that time, I learned from a friend about this farm in West Virginia. The organization was interested in exploring permaculture as a way of preserving the legacy that they had built in their spiritual tradition. I just flung myself into it. It was a really wild, spontaneous, huge opportunity, and a real challenge in a lot of ways. Leaving everyone and moving from Brooklyn to West Virginia… it was hard but also exhilarating.
So, you were on this journey, seeking truth and understanding in different areas. What are some of the places in which you sought meaning?
Yeah. I think, importantly, I wasn't raised with a spiritual practice in my home or any sort of religious tradition or culture. That lack of a defined framework really motivated more of a generalized seeking. I feel like that’s common to a lot of folks who grew up without religion or spirituality. I also think there's something very limited about sticking to just one philosophical configuration; in these modern times we have access to a plethora of ways and ideas. For me, a generalized search for meaning has been a lot more resonant and useful.
At first, it was easiest to connect to “nature2.” As a kid, I spent time running around by myself in the woods; as an adult, that turned into caring about environmental issues. But my search evolved. It stopped being about any specific cause. That was, I think, when Buddhism was really introduced into my life.
At first I was into Theravada Buddhism. I did meditation retreats, had a meditation practice, and then eventually went to live in a Buddhist monastery in Myanmar. That's where I began to focus on a generalized awareness of literally anything, strengthening my capacity to be aware. I began to perceive insights that came from a heightened cognizance. That capacity always really stuck with me.
When I came back, though, I realized that I had no sort of healing framework and that I had a sort of militaristic approach to Buddhism. So, I became interested in schools of consciousness and integrative breath-work as a healing modality. I've been training to be a breath worker for six years now. As the idea of healing got introduced into my spiritual life I began to expand my understanding of what healing means. I moved beyond just me, began looking around and learning more about white supremacy, and different types of repression, and excavating white supremacy along with all its cultural characteristics.
All the while, I was going through a bunch of conflicts in my personal life, and some of these ideas were helpful supports when they were needed. But, to me, spirituality is not limited to just the idea of support — it's the expansion of awareness across every conceivable category. During this time, I was broadening my consciousness in all kinds of ways. I was continuing with land engagement, meeting people who had deeper, more intact relationships to land. They were teaching me how to listen from my heart, how to perceive more. I remember the first time I really felt trees. I knew it because I felt like they didn't like me.
I knew that meant I was becoming conscious of this other thing that was being run through my self-loathing lens. Still, there was something exciting about feeling the presence of beings — even though they could judge me, the indication of their presence was pretty amazing.
I also did a lot of sort of sacred sexuality work. That work, along with my land work, really came together to show me how I had messed with my conceptualization of sexual energy at all. I suddenly understood that life-force energy is a real thing. It runs through us as sexual energy, it runs through plants to help them sprout and grow. Sacred sexuality work and a connection with the land really go hand-in-hand to me.
I've done a lot of ancestral reconnection work, too. I was in a mystical Jewish time cohort for a bit, I’ve done ancestral reconnection work, I joined a cohort that was specifically geared towards white people of European descent. All of that came together to combine my spiritual work with my understanding of social justice.
One thing I’m exploring here at the Chaos Palace is the idea that we can expand so much more as creative, spiritual humans by inviting chaos into the mix. Why is it important to your spiritual journey not to adhere to a single path or a certain worldview? Why is it important to incorporate lots of ideas?
Yeah, I guess I have been on a chaotic spiritual journey. I love chaos, too. I think it really speaks to a trickster wisdom when we leverage the role that chaos, or disruption, or shock can bring into the patterns of our minds. It’s not our fault that our minds receive information, store it, and then reference it for future experiences. But I think that system of archiving is completely limiting in terms of what we're capable of perceiving.
The idea of chaos makes me think of something Alan Watts once said:
“What happened was […] when we separated events into separate bits, you see, we forgot that we had done that in order to talk about the event. [When] you give names to different, say, bays or capes or mountains on a territory: that naming doesn’t actually separate them.”
There's always this tension between understanding the world in a static way so we can have footing to navigate from and being expansive about what we're capable of perceiving and believing to be possible. That tension between groundedness and expansiveness is really what always felt way more important to me than any static dogma or methodology. Or even tradition.
I’ve always been more interested in focusing on the content of an inquiry instead of the form. When I'm focusing on content, it's juicy. I don't, personally, feel loyalty to form at all. I think that's kind of my trickster self.
There are great reasons to be loyal to form or tradition: Because you love the community, because you really support an institution, because it connects you to your people. For me, it doesn’t feel necessary. I've been so voraciously seeking things that form feels inhibiting. I want to see if ancestors are real. I want to see if there are spirits there. I want to see if I can read with my mind.
There’s a book called Shaman of Tibet, where the author writes that “reality is the effect of imagination,” and that’s been my experience time and time again. To me, that's not an idealistic or hyperbolic thing to say. Any place your imagination ends is where your perception of reality ends, they’re one and the same. That’s why I feel it’s more important to be in an experience than to be loyal to a form.
How did that understanding lead to the work you're doing now with Dismantling Deadness?
I’d been in all of these different spiritual schools, living in a spiritual community, doing all this work. And I began to feel all these limitations in traditions that didn't seem useful to me. Certain spiritual focuses wanting to be apolitical, or disengaged from justice or liberation, for example. Or a framework that’s focusing on the environment without having a spiritual relationship to the environment. Or a tradition that’s focusing on social justice without regard for spiritual life or a person’s internal emotional experience. I was finding all of these missed opportunities and really thinking about how dissatisfying I found the endeavor of focusing on one particular category.
At the same time, I was noticing these structural issues in the spiritual schools I was engaged with. I felt a subtle displacement of my own inner authority whenever I was subscribing to or participating in a spiritual school. If you're not someone who was raised with your own inner spiritual authority, then you're really vulnerable to seeking external meaning from someone in a leadership role, instead of learning that you already hold the meaning in you.
It feels a little cliché to say, but the fact that a human has awareness is the entire crazy phenomenon. That's the magic. That's the capability. Those are the answers. The more I thought about it, the more I realized I had all of these personal examples of how getting in touch with awareness was the solution to a lot of the problems we experience in our inner conundrums and the ways in which we interface with the world around us. Being disconnected from our own awareness can be the reason that we are struggling with whatever is taking place.
One of the most defining characteristics of modernity is an overall disconnection from source, or G-d, or love. Rumi talks a lot about his relationship with the Beloved. In my understanding of his words, the Beloved was everything, was felt in the experience of anything that could be experienced, and the disconnection from the Beloved was what created pain. That is what I think happens when we are disconnected from the home base of our own awareness. That is ultimately what hurts so much, because it is through our awareness that we are connected to anything at all
Through Dismantling Deadness, I’m inviting people to reconnect. Let's look at this thing and how big it is for a while. Let’s build our desire for reconnection, not to a particular category, or cause, or concept. We're connecting to land, ancestors, other people. More awareness leads to more connection; there's more you're perceiving and, thus, more to connect with.
I offer an awareness journey that I call the Modern Consort, because it is built around the idea that our own awareness is our ultimate lover and guide, our personal consort, and always will be so long as we are conscious. I curate play prompts into different types of awareness, and participants take the time and space to explore their own capacity and power. And then I’m with you there because it can be really disorienting and destabilizing to become attune to this kind of consciousness. It evaporates the boundaries of true and not true, real and not real. It can be hard to feel grounded in that melting of boundaries.
For me, though, it provides a lot of relief. If this is all true, if life is just the experience of awareness and whatever is arising in my consciousness, then life and death just evaporate. When you move through that instability, it can be really hard but really liberating. That's the whole thing.
Sounds like your consciousness feels like it’s bleeding into the universe a little bit right now. The boundaries getting mushy.
That can be a real a real dynamic. In more recent years, my seeking has been super broad and now I'm redefining myself and maintaining a sense of contact with myself. That’s been really nice, but there's something also endlessly thrilling about the ever-changing and permanent dynamism of reality. It's hard to build a life around that, but the idea of energetic continuity kind of means you never die. Which is exciting.
It kind of like liquidates the ego.
Yeah, it does on some levels. I'm now thinking about what what underpins our conception of death. Is it actually the experience of ego death, more so than it is a cut to the body? Is the pain that comes from actually the ego that's dying? Because ego death happens all the time.
How do the Dismantling Deadness experiences work on a practical level?
It's a virtual decentralized awareness playschool. Basically, it's a journey I curate. Every week of the three months that we're in the awareness journey together, I send out an overarching awareness experiment along with some play prompts for people to experiment with. All prompts can be modified or changed according to life situations and what you're drawn to. I also send a quote and resources for going deeper, as well as personal reflection questions and discussion questions for the group.
Every week folks can join weekly virtual touch-in where we run the experiment with other people in the group or just share our thoughts. And at the end of each month we have a big debrief, as a group, where we share what we tried and learned. Also, in real time, there's also a collective journal where people can share a voice memo or a text to reflect on something they’ve tried and participants have sharing buddies who they can connect with one on one.
We do that for three months. The whole impetus is to be in a really intimate relationship with awareness and hold that space for each other. I provide all these curated ways of doing it, but the intention is to actually have a space to live in a paradigm where enhanced consciousness is normal. It's about playing, and tasting, and trying, and encouraging each other, and being vulnerable.
How many people are in this cohort?
This one is nine. The last one was 12. I have aspirations to grow it a lot more. My dream is for 1000 people to be out in the world running these experiments together. But I'm also really learning every time I do it, like how to do it, so it’s nice to go slow.
I love that this is built in a way that's accessible to all sorts of people with all sorts of complicated lives.
I find the inaccessibility of spiritual offerings so frustrating. Why should it be so hard to afford a spiritual life? For me, it's not about like a new methodology. You're in a work meeting? Run the awareness experiment. It could take one second or a full hour. It's totally up to you. The point is to have added this layer into what you're already doing in your life.
It’s really important to me to be clear that I'm not showing up as a teacher. I'm participating with everyone else. I've curated this journey, but you can modify it, you can respond, you can suggest different things to we do. I think it's more honest, you know? I need this, too. I don’t have everything figured out.
I also think a really important thing for spiritual programs to consider is that a fixed price is so different depending on your economic position in this society. I've had to grapple with how to make money off of this and how to support myself through it, while not perpetuating all the problematic dynamics that exist in this society. Right now, I have a sliding scale. I invite people to reflect on where they're at financially and I talk to every single person about what they can afford, what a payment plan would be. I think the culture of what you're offering takes a huge hit when it’s financially inaccessible That doesn't feel like an option for me.
Em Chiappinelli is a facilitator and co-adventurer. She organizes and offers ideas built upon the inherent wisdom and lived authority abiding within each of us and is interested in exploring them together.
Em has been drawn to everything that is happening behind the scenes for a long time. They did not grow up with belief systems that included the invisible. As they got older they had the privilege and ever-louder need to find the experiences and institutions that would expand her belief systems; she wanted a worldview that matched her heart and filled in the blind spots and disconnections she sensed were within her. They had some strange experiences that hinted things were way cooler and more alive than I had thought, as I had always hoped they were. They’re still exploring those experiences, and hope many more people will join their adventure.
A clarifying note for those less familiar with alternative pronoun use: Em uses both she/her and they/them pronouns, so you’ll see both sets interchangeably throughout the interview.
Quotation marks are from the original transcript.