Let us be weavers of healing
Our lives are rich stories, built upon the strong longitudinal threads of our values, norms and rituals; our stories weaving over and under, finding the edge and turning again. The holes we leave, the parts we skipped, remain an eye to traumas we experienced. This act of weaving is replicated by us all and it’s the intricacy of those patterns that form the basis for connectedness across our society.
Throughout 2020 we have suffered many upheavals, during which I questioned how we find ways to grieve together, but these unexpected collective events have damaged the way in which we are weaved together. Collective trauma, a concept with its roots in Durkheim’s work, speaks of these structures of interconnectedness. The warp we have created for our connection is directly shaped under societal conditions over generations (for better or in many cases worse) — as these structures evolve, the stressors influence how we deeply weave injustices and unspoken truths in the day-to-day of people’s lives.
However, it’s also these very shared values and patterns of life that enable strong connections for movements such as Black Lives Matter or Marriage Equality that last generations, without those threads that tie people together there would not be new healing stories of change — ones that not only change individual lives but lay supporting structures down for a slow re-threading of our values and perspectives on life.
As people, our ‘cognitive imperative’ demands of us meaning in every experience. These shared traumas see us seek solace in temporary new connections; ones that fuse us together in these experiences and often ones that do not provide the same guidance and familiarity of the weft we’ve been using. It’s then that our feedback loops start to betray us, things feel unstable, the inadequate representation of the guiding warp we have relied upon sees unravel once more.
These profound changes or ‘debonding’ as Gordon calls it are multidimensional across time, intensity, pervasiveness and to the extent to which we have lost sacred connections to loved ones, nature and our spiritual world. And the colour quickly fades.
In this exists three opportunities for us if we only reach out and take each other’s hand:
- An opportunity to rediscover the guiding structures that connect us in our communities — the people, the patterns, the rhythms that have bound us in shared identity, purpose and passion.
- An opportunity to rethread the guiding lines in society that produced as Ansari describes it, deeply entrenched ways of being, knowing, and doing to address socio-ecological crises, including climate change, economic inequality, ecological destruction, and cultural subjugation.
- An opportunity to collectively reimagine the intricate patterns of the future we can shape before us.
That means that each of us must both seek to connect and reflect to heal; both of these things can be uncomfortable. We know that by simply removing the stressors, does not mean we have removed the stress. So how can we start to cultivate the conditions in which both ourselves and others can do this in such rapidly changing and unpredictable environments?
- Enable safety to individually and collectively regulate. We’ve been running and hiding from a world that feels as if it’s attacking us; for some, they’ve been under attack their whole life from different angles. In every day, we must enable ourselves to complete these stress cycles one at a time — to release that energy, self-regulate and re-centre to find those guiding rhythms we’ve been unable to hear over our beating heart. This might look at creating safe spaces for greater physical activity, deep and purposeful breathe and thought, or the safety to know it’s ok to cry.
- Reconnect to sacred rhythms. Return to rituals or cultivate new ones that celebrate those ways in which we identify, shape our purpose and ground ourselves in the collective.
- Build shared support for reflexivity. It is time for us to individually and collectively address our frayed and threadbare corners of society, to decolonise knowledge systems, address power asymmetries and to act with humility. Collaboration is often hampered by ego, it’s time to open ourselves up to different experiences of the truth, to see the world as a partnership and bring forth the birth of co-possibility and a plurality of wisdom.
- Act in healing centred ways. Design slow and conscious restorative experiences, ones that acknowledge the spiritual, social, political contexts we place meaning in. Acting in strengths-based ways to enable a view of what’s possible, celebrate the gifts people have to offer and to steward endings, of what no longer serves us, in compassionate ways.
It’s through these ways that we can each play a part as a weaver of healing, one that recognises we all hold trauma — but through strengthening the weft in which we navigate our lives and the diversity of those connections that hold us together — we will evolve collectively with a stronger and more beautiful fabric.
