Loosen, Loosen, Baby

You know the story of Pavlov’s dog, starting to salivate whenever it heard a bell ring? Well, recently the sound of a bell made me burst into tears… 

When last I wrote, I was about to go on retreat to focus on ‘active hope for humanity’. It is now nearly two months later. I’ve spent the last four weeks off work as a direct consequence of the retreat. I have shed so many tears between the start of the retreat and today. I have so many stories and reflections to share, I literally don’t know where to start. I think this may end up being a letter about tears. 

I think the right place to begin is to say that I was crying on and off for days after I left the retreat. I was so touched by the compassionate community that was created there, by the experience of being held by strangers and being able to let go, that I didn’t want it to end. A new friend said in the days after the retreat, “The magic is fading and I want it back.” I want it back too. 

Leaving the retreat, it was so clear that I had experienced something new to me - a profound experience of the sort of deep community is possible between humans. I have been doing community power work with the Gateshead Bridgebuilders for five years. Before that, I was doing community organising work in Australia. I have been working to build community for over a decade, and yet on retreat I saw and I felt something I’ve never experienced before – people working together with more depth, more honesty, more openness and more vulnerability than I’ve ever witnessed; a deep commitment to working with mutual compassion and support, rather than the blame and judgement that often accompany ‘individual accountability’; a real focus on growth and on accepting reality as it is, rather than as we wish it could be. 

For me, a core part of this was a sense of being seen, accepted, and valued for who I am, not what I do. It was an absolute tonic to hold no leadership position whatsoever, to just be able to be a participant, and to show up with all my colours. It was so affirming to have this group of strangers respond so positively to me even when I wasn’t doing anything particular for them. As you may read between the lines, I appear to have a deep and not necessarily balanced need to feel that I’m ‘doing for’ others – and this constant giving is a large part of what has left me quite empty. Being able to step out of my normal ‘doing’ environments and into a space that encouraged me to simply ‘be’ was eye-opening. By feeling we have to ‘do for’ others (which I think is sadly pretty common for leadership positions), it can lead us to be separated and isolated from the very things we’re trying to build. 

Across the week, I had three big bouts of tears (and plenty of smaller ones). The first was in a Truth Mandala, an activity inviting people to step into the space inside a circle of people and share the grief, the fear, the anger, and the emptiness they’re feeling currently. I stepped into the centre and shared my grief over our miscarriage last year, my delight at the fact that Georgi is pregnant again, my deep fear about the state of the world we’re bringing another child into and my anxiety about not being able to prepare my children adequately for the world they’ll be inheriting. 

The third came at the end of the week, when we were invited on what we wanted to be different for ourselves in a year’s time. With the focus of this activity being simply on me, I found myself incredibly blocked because I rarely give myself space or permission to focus just on me. To try to alleviate the blockage, I took myself out to stretch my legs. As soon as my bare feet touched the damp grass, I burst into tears at the realisation of what I have been doing to myself for so long. 

The second is the one where the sound of a bell made me cry. 

We were meditating three times a day. On this particular day, the focus of the meditation was ‘kindness’. I found myself reflecting on kindness to myself. I had been so touched by the kindness and attentiveness of these strangers across the course of the week, people noticing when I needed something and offering it without my having to ask. It was something very different to what I experience in most of my daily life. I feel I do a lot of holding it all together for other people. I hold a number of leadership positions and we are culturally conditioned to not see – or not want to see – our leaders’ emotional needs. And I’m not great at self-care or asking for help. So, when we were meditating on kindness, I felt such a surge of emotion about the way I was being held that week and how nourishing I found it, that I just burst into tears. I cried throughout the rest of the meditation, kept crying while people filed out of the room ahead of dinner, and cried some more while I was alone in the room. 

Now straight after this meditation was dinner. As part of the weekly duty I’d signed up for, I was required to serve dinner at 6pm when the bell sounded. As 6pm approached, my sense of duty, of needing to be there for others, got stronger and stronger, urging me to ‘pull myself together’ and to go and do my job. But I had to prove to myself that I could ‘let people down’ and these amazing people would pick up the slack for me. I had to show myself that I could prioritise looking after myself, even when it meant not doing what I had committed to do for others. So, when the bell rang for dinner and I forced myself to stay where I was, the tension this caused in me provoked a fresh eruption of tears and shaking. 

When I eventually got through the emotion and went through to the kitchen for my dinner, not only did I find that dinner service had happened just fine without me, but also that a plate of dinner had been put aside for me, and a friend immediately joined me in the kitchen to check how I was doing and to invite me to sit with her. When she left the kitchen, I burst into a fresh wave of tears, touched anew at receiving such gentle attention and kindness. 

Many of the people, myself included, were called to this retreat because of burnout. This retreat was not about magically restoring our hope for a bright future. Rather, it was about being honest about what we see and the burdens we’re carrying, finding a way to put down those burdens without lapsing into ‘giving up’ or total despair. Halfway through the retreat, we were introduced to a song which became our anthem for the week. As well as several organised sessions, people would suddenly start singing it at random intervals (guilty) and, every time, other people would join in and sing it with them. The song goes, 

Loosen, loosen, baby. 

You don’t have to carry 

The weight of the world in your muscles and bones. 

Let go, let go, let go. 

That is a message that I really need to hear. As I wrote last time, one thing I’m trying to give up is the cherished belief that I can save the world. This is something I’ve definitely been carrying in my muscles and bones. It’s what caused my shoulder to tear, and the months of pain that followed. As our way of living starts to fray, it’s very understandable for us to cling to, “We must fix this. I must fix this” and for that to be a weight that we carry around with us every minute of every day. And that weight will drown us. It will drag us into burnout. It will drag us into despair and hopelessness because we can’t fix this. I can’t fix this. The cat is out of the bag. But what does that mean for those of us in the ‘justice’ space, who are actively trying to build a better world? 

In the Truth Mandala, I heard so many stories of the deep and complex pain about the state of the world that so many of us are carrying. We rarely have an outlet for it, let alone a like-minded community with whom we can openly share. Across the whole ceremony, there was so much crying, such an outpouring. There was also anger, despondency and a lot of laughter. Some people were just very, very funny about the state of things. Pain and joy, grief and laughter. These things go together rather than always being separate. 

Possibly the most confronting experience came immediately after I left the retreat. I was dropped off in Stirling train station, having just had one of the most connected, supportive, spacious weeks of my life. It was shocking to see what ‘normal’ life looked like through the new eyes I’d developed. The station seemed so loud. The advertising messages, so brash. And the people! I went from a week of eye contact and gentle smiles to suddenly nobody looking at me, nobody noticing me, everyone on their phones. I was shocked to feel how profoundly disconnected our culture actually it is. It felt so painful. I had another little cry in the waiting room. In the days and weeks that followed, I felt such a sense of loss – loss for the deep community we’d been able to create in that curated space through ‘the work that reconnects’. I’m left with a deep desire to experience that sense of deep community again – that sense of being held and accepted by others – and a desire to actively create that community with others. And I don’t want to ‘do this for’ others – I want to be part of it, a peer, a participant. I don’t know where these desires will lead me, but these are the clues I have currently about what the next phase might have in store for me. 

The other clue I am working through is something a new friend wrote to me in a note at the end of the retreat: “Your radical sharing and vulnerability is cool as fuck.” I try to be open with my stories and my pain. I’m not afraid of being seen to cry – even though I have often received negative reactions to doing so. I feel that, as a man, it’s even more important that I develop this side of myself. When I’ve shared this note with friends, they have been very excited and supportive – “This is the path that’s opening up for you…” 

So this appears to be what’s next for me: participating in the creation of deep community, through radical sharing and vulnerability. If anyone has any idea of how to actually go about doing this, I would dearly love to have a chat with you!