collective care – Embody Peacebuilding

There is a growing tide in the social change ecosystem that recognizes the role of self and collective care as necessary not only to support the sustainability of activists and social movements, but also to be in integrity with the vision and mission of the work. Such an approach to activism has been described in different ways in different contexts. A powerful current of this approach is that of healing justice. Cara Page and the Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective describe healing justice in the following way: “Healing justice…identifies how we can holistically respond to and intervene on generational trauma and violence, and to bring collective practices that can impact and transform the consequences of oppression on our bodies, hearts and minds.”¹ The cultivation of practices that support the transformation of trauma and violence and nurture healing at individual and collective levels is a crucial pathway toward sustaining activists and movements seeking peace and justice.

For individuals, organizations, and communities engaged in social change, a question thus arises as to how are such practices cultivated and sustained. In contexts filled with urgent and competing demands, and risks to personal and collective safety, accessing and prioritizing care practices is often perceived to be a distraction from the ‘real work.’ It is only through attending to our own care, healing, and wellbeing, however, that we can be sustainable and in integrity with our work toward the building of just and dignified futures.

To support the development and consistency of care practices, I wonder if it could be supportive to intentionally consider specific elements of practice. Beginning in January of this year, I began a journey through which I have been learning about the nature of practice in new ways. These learnings and reflections are by no means intended as a definitive claim about practice, rather they are insights that have emerged through my embodied experience and about which I am curious in how they can be applied to other realms of practice.

Over the course of last year, I followed my friend Julie’s journey from vertical to vertical, from standing on her feet to standing on her hands. The journey unfolded through 365 days of daily practice, slowly building the strength and developing the balance to hold a free-standing handstand. I was curious and inspired. It was a joy when the coach and guide, Damien Norris, extended an open invitation to participate in this journey by making the instructional videos available on YouTube.²

January of this year marked the beginning of my handstand journey. It also marked the beginning of what has proved to be fairly challenging year, one filled with seasons of grief, displacement, and isolation. Most of the year, I was able to easefully integrate the training into my daily routine. Some days and weeks, however, I have not been able to train due to travel, sickness, or other circumstances. In both the regularity and inconsistency of my training, I’ve become deeply curious about the nature of practice.

Practice holds inherent a repetitive quality, requiring a regularity of participation. In the case of the handstand journey, the invitation is extended into daily practice. Each day, there are particular movements to train, beginning with hollow body holds and slow progressing over time. And yet, the days and weeks in which I was unable to do the training, the practice did not disappear. The practice has been as much in my active participation in the training as it has been in my choice to return to it, be that each day or after a week away. The essence of practice has been not only in the training, but in the choice of return.

Fairly far along into the handstand journey, I am confronting a new obstacle in my practice. Having recently dislocated my elbow, I am unable to bear weight on my left arm. For the first couple of weeks after the injury, I drifted from the daily consistency of my practice, disappointed and unsure when I would be able to return. Eager to continue in the journey, but uncertain of how to do so in these new circumstances, I reached out to Damien, who graciously offered a variety of suggestions to adapt my training.

Returning to consistent training has felt amazing. Whereas my body feels challenged by some of the new movements, the felt sense of return to the practice, which has become a source of sustenance and stability through this year, has been one of comfort and a deep settling in my core. Although I continued to move and train in the days and weeks since the injury, I would not have been able to return to the specificity of handstand training so soon were it not for external accompaniment and support. The guidance and encouragement were essential in a circumstance where I was in doubt about my ability to remain active in the practice.

While I remain far from the ability to hold a free-standing handstand, as I find my way there, I am learning deeply about the nature and components of practice. At this moment, I am present to three key components that facilitate and comprise practice, namely, the physical act of training, the choice of consistent return, and accompaniment along the way. As I continue in this handstand journey, I am curious of what more I will learn.

Enacting and sustaining generative change, whether at the individual or collective level, requires shifting habits of being from those that perpetuate harm or dis-ease, to those that support healing and wellbeing. Such change involves the integration of new practices into our lives. This is much easier said than done. Emergent from an understanding of the nature and components practice – behavior, accountability, and accompaniment – we might invite ourselves into a set of inquiries that help to identify not only the activities and processes that can support us, but also the conditions and mechanisms of accountability necessary to make these practices sustainable. These inquiries may sound like:

For individuals

What are activities or experiences that support my wellbeing and bring me joy?
What conditions need to be in place for me to consistently and regularly participate in one or more of these activities?
Who can support me in to remain consistent in my practice?

For organizations

What rituals, policies, and processes can support the wellbeing of employees individually and the organization as a whole?
What conditions need to be in place to ensure these practices are regularly and consistently upheld?
Who within or outside the organization can support consistency of practice?

For communities

What activities, traditions, and rituals can support the wellbeing of our community?
What conditions need to be in place for these practices to be regularly accessed?
Who in our community can support consistency of practice?

As we seek to adopt new practices to nurture care and support transformation, perhaps any clarity emergent from such inquiries could support us, illuminating what will enable greater accountability to ourselves and each other as we strive to embody and bring forward greater peace in ourselves and justice in the world.

accountability

consistency’s key

practice is in the return

each day, try again

¹ To learn more about the work of the Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective, you can check out their website, http://kindredsouthernhjcollective.org/.

² If you’d like to start your own journey to handstand, you can find Damien’s guidance through all 365 days available here.

Moving along paths that meander through a sequoia forest, I delight in the nourishment the space offers to my senses. Feeling the clay earth beneath my feet, softened with newly fallen leaves and branches, echoes of a recent storm. Hearing the gentle whisper of water flowing in a nearby stream. Receiving cool, damp air into my lungs, laden with the fragrance of life renewing itself on the forest floor. Relishing in the colors and contrast that fill the space: emerald moss blanketing rock faces; amber oak leaves and auburn sequoia needles underfoot, the bright jade of new growth extending from branch tips, not yet darkened by the seasons; and inky shadows tucked into the pleats of tree trunks.

Navigating the forest floor, I cast my attention from the smooth crest of a new fern unfolding from the soil to the towering canopy of trees hundreds of years of age. I listen for lessons of arboreal resilience.

Burls and Wounding

When a tree has been wounded, when a branch is cut or the trunk damaged, the tree adopts a new pattern of growth around that space. The burl that grows in swirls and lumps is a wood stronger than that of the rest of the tree. In enveloping its wounding, a tree finds a new strength.

How might we learn from the wisdom of burls? How does this wisdom live in us?

When we experience wounding, physical or emotional, we develop new patterns of protection around the space of injury. In the case of a physical wound, our cells coordinate to promote repair. When a bone has broken and is supported to heal, it knits itself back together and that area of bone becomes denser, stronger than it was before. In the case of emotional injury, we develop adaptive mechanisms to navigate and protect ourselves from the harmful dynamic. These mechanisms are myriad and may look like heightened sensitivity to the body language of others to detect potential threat, difficulty trusting others and/or oneself, or disconnection from one’s internal landscape because that space has been filled with too much pain. These processes occur through the innate wisdom of our somas to enable our survival. Such adaptive mechanisms may be helpful for immediate survive, however over time they may deepen into patterns that become harmful to ourselves and people in our lives.

To facilitate healing, conditions must be created in which repair and transformation can take place. If a bone is broken, to heal the physicality of the injury, it is most supportive to set the injury in a cast so the body can be undisturbed as the wound mends. Creating a supportive and nurturing environment in which we can address and transform wounding in our somas is a more complex endeavor.

Perhaps people in our lives are unwilling to create space for or recognize our healing. Perhaps the wound is too raw or too deep, and more time is needed before we are ready to engage in healing work. Perhaps the layers of stress in our lives are currently too numerous and too heavy such that our resources must be allocated toward making it through each day, not delving into wounds we carry. If external and internal conditions arranged in a way that devoting effort toward healing is possible, staying steady on a healing path is an arduous practice in itself. The self-protective patterns we have developed and no longer serve us are powerful, they may be the only way in which we have come to know safety. The journey of healing is one of spiral form, a circling path. With slight adjustments in each rotation, we gain new perspective and train new helpful patterns of being within ourselves and with others.

Through our experiences of wounding and healing, how might we attend our spaces of wounding in such a way that, like a burl grows on a tree, envelopes the injury with care? How can we engage in our healing in a way that does not attempt to resolve or erase our experiences of injury, but enfolds them with strength and adaptive patterns of growth? How might we nurture slow, steady, spiraling integration of our wounds as parts of our beings?

Navigating Loss in Collectivity

The growth of a sequoia is one of encircling community. This is particularly pronounced when an elder tree has been felled. Around the severed trunk, new trees sprout forth. The loss of the mother tree creates space for new growth, not just of one new stalk, but many.

What might we learn from the wisdom of encircling community? How does this wisdom live in us?

The emergence of encircling community in the wake of loss is reflective of our individual and collective responses through grief. In teaching about the nervous system, our primary responses to threat are often named as: fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. A fifth response exists that is less commonly named: flock. In the shadow of the loss of a loved one or a large-scale disaster, as humans we find solace and shelter in community. Our coming together, at wakes, funerals, and through other forms of ritual, creates spaces where we can be supported ourselves and support others. As a collective gathered in shared grief, we find resonance in the emotional experience of those around us. Such rituals allow us individually and collectively to begin to integrate the deep heart wound that is the loss of a loved one.

The importance of gathering in the wake of loss has been brought into sharp relief particularly during these difficult months of isolation due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Too many lives have been lost, most of whom have passed away alone, unaccompanied by their loved ones. For the family members, friends, and communities who survive, they are unable to gather in their grief, to come around one another. The healing journey through grief is thwarted, as the rituals we turn to are no longer safe or permitted.

The COVID-19 pandemic has wrought immeasurable pain for millions of people. So too has it illuminated strength in and of community. Through seasons of self-isolation and physical distancing, mutual aid networks emerged and strengthened. In response to the threat of COVID-19, exacerbated through social structures that place black and brown bodied people and impoverished people at particular risk, communities find protection and support through coming together. Communities have mobilized in care to ensure community members’ needs would be met, particularly those most vulnerable.

Through our navigation of trauma and potentially traumatic events, how can we find support in community? Whereas trauma isolates, fragments, and disconnects, how can we nurture spaces and communities of care to extend support to one another, particular our members who are suffering? In a society that praises individualism and discourages vulnerability, how can we be radical in our collectivities and the authenticity of our communication of how we are (when it is safe to do so)? How can we engage in healing processes that help us re-member ourselves, individually and collectively?

Discerning Inspiration

Through the process of photosynthesis, trees and other plants absorb light, water, and carbon dioxide, transforming these elements into oxygen and chemical energy that is stored in the plant for food. This chemical energy is stored in the form of carbohydrates, contributing to the cellular structure of the plant. It is in absorbing light, water, and carbon dioxide from the external environment, a discerning inspiration, that trees and plants are given the necessary energy to grow.

What might we learn from the wisdom of the discerning inspiration of photosynthesis? How does this wisdom live in us?

We are shaped by the environments in which we are raised and the environments in which we live. This includes factors such as our familial culture, dominant societal culture, epigenetics (the way in which our ancestral history lives in our bodies), the physicality of our environment, and many more. As we navigate through life, there are factors influencing us about which we are aware to varying degrees. The extent of our awareness is often reflective of our societal positioning. The nature of privilege and oppression is that they obscure the very structures by which they operate and suppress a questioning of these structures by those who benefit most from their existence.

In the United States, a powerful factor that shapes the social, political, and economic environment is that of white-body supremacy. This form of violence, which, as Resmaa Menakem shares, is not a question a race, but a question of belonging in humanity, weaves through the structures and relationships that constitute this country. To the extent that it is part of the environment in which we live, without an awareness of how white-body supremacy works on us and through us, we continue to inhale and enact the values and practices it upholds.

Through increased awareness of the factors that shape our environment, and thus shape us (such as white-body supremacy), we can become more discerning about what we absorb and integrate into our somas. In photosynthesis, a plant does not absorb every element in its environment – it absorbs that which it can integrate and will support its growth. How might we invite the same discernment in that which we absorb and integrate into our beings? How might we recognize what in our environment nurtures our growth and what impede connection and perpetuate harm? How might we be discerning about what we have absorbed, integrating only that which nourishes our individual and collective flourishing, and expelling that which does not serve us?

On Arboreal Resilience

Opening to the wisdom of the trees, the teachings of arboreal resilience are many. As we are of nature, this wisdom is inherent within us as well. May we look to the world around us for guidance to remember the depth of knowing we hold within our individual and collective bodies.

Arboreal resilience reminds us how we can tend to our wounds with patience and strength.

Arboreal resilience reminds us how we can and do turn to one another to navigate through moments of difficulty, of loss and of disaster.

Arboreal resilience reminds us that we can be discerning about how we are shaped by the world we inhabit.

Arboreal resilience reminds us that this knowing is not a construct of the mind, but a wisdom held in the fiber of our beings.

May these reminders support us in co-creating a world that centers healing, community, and belonging.

tend arboreal

resilience. adaptive

growth, patient and strong.

References

adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies

Tag Archives: collective care

Practice is in the Return

Arboreal Resilience