Deep Ecology Practice: Speaking of Grief

When we hold our grief inside, we may feel isolated. Does pain ever cut you off from other people? Perhaps you think that they do not care about what is causing you pain, whether that is injustice, climate change, animal exploitation, extinction or another trouble happening in our world, to humans or to other beings. Many of us are taught not to talk about painful subjects because it’s depressing. This means we do not get to experience the enormous relief of communicating about what matters most to us, and finding that others do share these feelings.

The very pain that seems to isolate us is an expression of our connection and kinship. When we share it with others, creative energy is released that can have a transformative effect.

Is there someone you trust with whom you can speak? A heartfelt conversation could be had about how it hurts to live in a world knowing that species are going extinct, habitats destroyed, climate disrupted, terrible weapons devised and used on the innocent, people exploited and living in hardship while a few hoard wealth to no purpose. We know all this and have to live with it.

Perhaps it seems difficult to speak of this pain. You might not want to be perceived as complaining. We may fear being judged. Because of the highly individualistic culture that dominates today, expressing sadness on behalf of others is often seen as a personal failing.

I might be thought of as too sensitive because I am disgusted by slaughterhouses or because I am anxious about how climate change will affect my children. Why shouldn’t I feel that? Yet it could be ‘diagnosed’ as an illness of my mind, such as a form of depression. I am not depressed, but sometimes people think that feeling sadness about extinction or climate is really a displaced expression of personal pain. This shows how far this culture has gone in terms of isolating people into separate egos and denying our radical connection with one another. As writers including Joanna Macy and Charles Eisenstein have affirmed: There is nothing wrong with you for feeling this pain. You are not sick. Our world is sick, and you are responding in an intelligent, appropriate way to that sickness.

Yet the stigma of suffering can make it hard to have an open conversation about it. And we may not know how to express pain in a healthy way that does not shock or even harm the person with whom we speak. There are resources available to help. For example, the Work That Reconnects creates a supportive, non-judgmental framework for honoring pain, and moving us from there into empowerment and connection. You can find workshops offering this process online and in-person, facilitated in different languages and different styles. They create a form of container in which these necessary conversations can happen.

A simplified form of the Work That Reconnects has been developed by Chris Johnstone, and is explained in the practice below.

Practice: The Spiral of the Work That Reconnects

With another person, set aside some time for calm conversation, anything from 15 minutes to an hour. Agree to respond to four open sentences, beginning with the phrase and continuing as feels right to you. Each person in the conversation may take it in turns to speak, or speak all the way through the four prompts before switching roles.

The open sentences are:

Some things I love about being alive at this time are…

Looking towards the future, my concerns include…

What I hope for deeply is…

A part I’d like to play in support of this is…

Pain is expressed in the second part, with gratitude and purpose forming a container for it, so that we do not get trapped in pain.

Listen, and allow one another to speak. I recommend that you do not try to introduce arguments into this conversation. Don’t try to convince the other person of an agenda. Simply express how you feel.

Ask to be heard without the other person trying to address your pain as though it were a problem to solve. There could be a temptation for the listener to try to comfort the speaker, but sometimes listeners offer comfort because they feel uneasy. The speaker may not want comfort, but rather an opportunity to express themselves. And they probably don’t want to be told not to worry about it, it’s not so bad, or other such responses.

Listen to one another in a structured way, taking it in turns to speak through the prompts, rather than responding directly to what each other say. Responses could come afterwards, if appropriate, when the full expression has been allowed.

More deep ecology practices are listed at the end of this article. Follow me on Medium for updates.