I am Kiri daughter of Jill, daughter of Nancy, daughter of Kate, daughter of Nancy, daughter of Brigid. In 1850 Brigid Culhane, dairy maid, age 27, single, travelled on the Sir Robert Sale from England to Australia.
compassion
Ancestral pilgrimage: Beginning
I am a fifth generation Australian settler and I am in the UK, in the lands of my ancestors, on a quest of healing.
It is a quest in the sense that the outcome is unknown to me. I do not know what, if anything, I will discover while I am here.
Village camp
On the first day,
You don’t really notice,
You’re head’s too full of human. Continue reading
Subjugation
There is a force that has gripped the planet for hundreds of years. It is the force behind every marching army, every man who raises a hand against his wife, every school yard bully, every iron-fisted leader. It is the force behind slavery, behind colonisation, behind prejudice. Let’s call it… subjugation. Continue reading
Wild Mind 2015 – shame is a gateway
Wow, what a weekend. Last year’s Wild Mind was a transformational experience for me so my expectations were running fairly high for this one. As the day drew closer, I began to get a sense of exactly who would be there and my excitement levels rose and rose. It was looking like an impressive bunch of folk, not just for their skill and talents but for their big hearts and courageous ideas.
Something about having all those conscious, open minded people in one place at one time, inspires your heart to open no matter how much you want to resist. The emotional core for me was a two hour conversation about shame. It was beautifully, courageously facilitated, blending individual stories of shame (led by the facilitator and drawn from the group) with a more intellectual conversation about the role of shame and how to handle it.
We started by talking about how we each define shame. “Shame is born of our relationships and can only be healed in relationship, even if it is through our relationship with our self.” is one that has stuck in my mind. My own definition was based on a recent experience of psychodrama where I discovered that my sense of shame obscured my vision and the object of shame turned out to be something of a gateway to transformation and wholeness.
There was good consensus in the group about the need to hold ourselves with compassion in the experience of shame. People used a variety of different words to describe a similar process of observing our feeling of shame with compassion. I use the words ‘large self’ and ‘small self’ (where the ‘small self’ is not inferior but inspires me to give myself the compassion I would give my son in the same situation). Others used the word ‘home’ to describe their large self and avoided giving a label to the self that experiences shame.
There was a profound insight for me in the observation by one group member that ‘shame’ and ‘vulnerability’ are adult words that most children don’t understand, including the child in us. Vulnerability is a wound that stands in the way of our self expression but to get past the wound we must express the feelings of the child we were when the wounding took place. That might require us to find a simpler language to describe our feelings of vulnerability. For example rather than saying “I feel vulnerable” saying “I feel scared of saying how I feel because I worry that you might not talk to me anymore.” This takes more courage but when I used it with my partner later that evening I found she was much more able to offer me the compassion I was craving and I was more able to identify my feelings.
Even the fact of talking about shame seemed to inspire feelings of shame within the group. At the end of the conversation there was some lengthy discussion about how to ‘end the session’ without ‘leaving people in shame.’ Some of the suggestions seemed to indicate a desire to make everyone feel better which really jarred with me (I being one of those who had opened up a raw experience). It’s quite hard for me to allow myself to feel so raw and I was wary of shutting myself down when I was surrounded by such a loving community. I knew that if we closed the circle I would be able to keep processing and possibly release something powerful. In the end we agreed to sing together, a song about light shining on us, not fixing or healing, just shining.
Fox walking with Maya Ward was another highlight.
I spent the evening further processing the experience with fellow Wild Minders, dancing to gentle music and participating in cuddle puddles. I am deeply grateful to all at Wild Mind for cocreating such a beautiful space for our mutual unfolding.
You can read another slice of Wild Mind on Geoff Berry’s blog White Fella Dreaming
The magic of empathy
Last week I posted about tears so it seems fitting that this week the theme for me is empathy. I came across the above video last year some time when I was completely obsessed with Brene Brown (note: I am still in love with her ideas but I tend to mention them weekly now instead of every hour). The way people respond to our grief, vulnerability and emotions in general can have a profound effect on us.
For me there is a very clear link between numbing our emotions and a host of environmental issues from problematic consumption to our inability to respond appropriately to extinction. There is also a positive aspect, that when we are connected with our hearts we are more able to come up with creative solutions and cooperate with our fellow beings (human and otherwise).
The first step in becoming empathetic with people around you is learning to sit with the discomfort of vulnerability/strong emotions. Being able to genuinely support someone else through tough times requires an ability to be uncertain and avoid slipping into the trap of ‘fixing’ what is going on for them. This is something I have been guilty of many, many times throughout my life, I have written poems about my addiction to ‘fixing’ people. Who doesn’t love the ego trip of knowing that you’ve sorted out someone else’s life for them and the hook of knowing you are needed?
This week I have had the privilege of witnessing a number of precious humans in varying states of vulnerability and it has brought home to me again and again the power of being present, of witnessing and reflecting their words from the heart. In practice these things don’t feel like much, I often feel quite helpless as I reflect someone’s difficulties a response like “Wow, it sounds like you are feeling really vulnerable.” or “Oh it must be so scary that your mother could die any day now.” seem kind of lame. Even as I write those words I am feeling a little teary at the enormity of what some of my friends are going through and as I listen to them I am regularly speechless. Instead of rushing to avoid my anxiety I have learned to sit with it, to name it (as the video suggests), to be comfortable with my own silence or to name my deeper feelings.
What I also see in my friends though, as well as their pain, is an opportunity for love and openness. “You are feeling this grief right now because you love your mother, that’s a beautiful thing.” “You are feeling uncertain right now because you are daring to take a different path in your life.” Being able to reflect that larger context is an important way of holding them in the discomfort of the present. I am aware of being very delicate with this though because it is a short step from here to ‘silver lining.’ It’s important not to use the larger context to negate their feelings or rush them through it.
The final thing I offer, and this is taken straight from Brene, is ‘me too.’ Advice is terrible but stories are brilliant. Advice says “I know better than you.” Stories say “I have been there and this is what happened.” Stories allow space for other people to take what they need from your experience, sometimes you will know what they are going to take but sometimes it will be something completely unexpected. You have to be open enough and humble enough to share your experience and let the other person make meaning from it. You can tell them what it meant for you and what you feel you learned (the deeper and more honest you can be the better) but you can’t tell them what they should learn.
The act of empathy feels sacred to me, it is holding space for others to unfold. All humans are empathic, if they don’t demonstrate it it’s because they have learned to shut it down. The only way to open them up again is to create safe spaces for them to step into. Everyone has the means within themselves to overcome what ever they are facing. All this week I have witnessed people coming to a place of calm and finding that they already have the answers they seek. To me it feels like magic because what is required of me is actually very little, as though I’m just standing next to them while they fumble with their keys and open the door. They just need to feel safe enough to trust what they already know.
Humans are nature 