Spacious Solidarity Blog: Day 81
In the early morning hours I wake from a dream. I’ve been swimming in a river with my teacher and we get caught up in some rapids. There are people in the river up ahead and I’m trying to see how they successfully navigated their way through the churning waters.
The last thing I remember we’re hurtling towards a waterfall, but as we get closer I realise it’s not as bad as it looked from further up the river.
We survive and eat cookies to celebrate.
I spend the morning on the phone with the team of a retreat centre wanting help with how to use Zoom. We talk around the usual tips and tricks as well as more subtle things like how to create presence and connection.
The rest of the day I’m writing and catching up with friends on Zoom. Then it’s time to run an event I dreamt up just a few days ago with a friend of mine called “Holding Compassionate Space in Solidarity with BIPOC.”
It’s for white identified and white presenting folks (that’s me – light-skinned Latinx who doesn’t identify as white) to feel into the discomfort of being white right now. It emerged as an offering through a text conversation with a Black friend of mine who was asked to hold space for BIPOC folks in the UK right before a planned action.
We agreed I would offer to hold a parallel event for white people at the same time to show our solidarity and that we are up for the work of sitting with discomfort in the face of police brutality and state sanctioned violence against Black people.
I’ve got a friend who’s also holding the space with me. We get on the call and are joined by about forty others, mostly women.
I lead a practice where I invite folks to connect with the breath, and what a privilege it is to be able to breathe. I invite them to allow the breath to support understanding more deeply where there is still work to do both within and without.
Then we feel into the ground, and the quality of stillness there. Allowing stillness to permeate the whole body.
Then space, allowing the body to relax into space, filling the space all around us.
Then I invite feeling into the heart-centre. A placing of the hand on the heart and connecting with our own deep heart wish for an end of suffering for ourselves and others.
Often when we connect with our deepest heart wish there are other parts of us that emerge in the space of awareness. More shadowy parts that seem to say, “but what about me?” These parts are also calling for our attention.
I invite a welcoming and allowing of all these parts. The doubt, the fear, the anger and confusion. The discomfort and resistance, the numbness and stuck parts.
The practice is to allow all of it in. Both our ideals that we hold for ourselves, others and the world, and everything that reveals itself in contradiction to the ideals. Everything that is not yet resolved in the world and is yet to be resolved in our own hearts.
This is the beginning of the work of feeling into the discomfort of now. Admitting that we, others and the world are not as we’d like them to be. Holding the tension of that admission.
Engaging in that tension, without indulging all the parts of us that want to ignore it, make it ok, fix it, come up with a plan, make it go away.
We stay with the tension for a little while and then widen out again, to include space and earth.
While I’ve got the group in break-out rooms I make a sign. In bright, purple letters I write Black Lives Matter on a big piece of construction paper and stick it in my front window.
When we come back from groups there is lots of tender sharing and then people start asking for resources to help them with having tough conversations about race and racism. We share some and the chat box fills up with others and then our time is up.
Afterwards there are lots of messages and emails from folks thanking us for holding the space. My friend holding the BIPOC event texts to say it went well, she had fifty-eight folks there and she played Bob Marley and it felt healing.
I send her a message back telling her a bit about how our event went. She’s going to hold more and wants to have a parallel space for white folks again. We’ve started something and it feels good.
That’s it. That’s what I did today. It isn’t enough. But it’s a start.