Cultivating Belonging through Togetherness, Mindfulness, & Grief

Apr 26

Togetherness is temporary and unique.
Togetherness heals and rejuvenates.
Togetherness creates true belonging.
Togetherness is energetic, mindful, and soulful.

This past Saturday, I facilitated an amazing group of the University of Northern Colorado’s Earth Guardians students who gathered together for their weekend retreat.

It is always sacred to me when I can hold space to sit in our climate grief and eco-anxiety to experience all the emotions and find our way back to genuine belonging to ourselves, each other, and Earth. As a former professor at UNCo for over a decade, these students and their journeys are near and dear.

Together, we created a nature sculpture [see pic at the bottom] to honor all the Nature Beings (ourselves included as we are wilderness) on Old Man Mountain. We found clarity of heart and soul in our intentions, strengths and gifts, and healing as we all do our specific work as activists and advocates for climate and racial justice.

Outdoor circle time and activities to cultivate community and connection.

For the record. To know me is to know I love playing in the intersection of:

Love for our Mama Earth,
Belonging as/to/with Nature and reciprocal healing,
Collective grief and trauma in our bodies,
and burning down oppressive systems and culture, esp in higher education.

Which is, in part, why I had to leave higher ed and live my journey as a #recoveringacademic so that I can have these critical conversations as my academic field and administrators turn their heads away from climate justice.

I want to share some highlights from our time together as I was invited to facilitate my Embodied Climate Action work.

When we are disconnected from Nature, it is so easy to get disconnected from our bodies, our life’s purpose and values, each other and true community. That disconnection harms us individually, collectively, and our Earth. The longer I am away from higher education institutional culture, the more I see how this disconnect is perpetuated by the system in order to keep folks in concrete boxes churning away on a hamster wheel without time, energy, and focus to create meaningful change and positive growth that would shake the foundation of an antiquated system. I’ve talked before about how the system perpetuates Imposterism which then consumes folks in overworking and over functioning - how the fuck can anyone change the systems when we keep being told we have to fight to be there in the first place.

Through intentional time together, we heal individually and collectively in this fleeting human journey on Earth. We have the capacity to experience the brevity of the life cycle that includes death and grief as well as growth and hope. Yet, all too often we prefer to bury our heads in the sand and look away when it’s not all roses and happiness. To truly feel the joy, we have to open our hearts, bodies, and minds to experience ALL the emotions. Mindfulness and contemplative practices remind us how to be present and embrace all the emotions rather than ignore and stay in anxiety/fear/flight/flight cycles of harm and hate.

Grief and anxiety are lessened when we can share and feel validated and seen within a relatively safe community of fellow empathetic souls. In the US, we are so fearful of grief, death, temporality, and emotions. I talked this past winter in Grow Boldly series about rebuilding resilience. And in Frances Weller’s Wild Edge of Sorrow (2015), he wrote about how we’ve apathologized grief. I see that in how we use toxic positivity, faux hope, and emotional/spiritual bypassing all to keep it hidden especially in climate conversations and in higher ed spaces. When we hide emotions, they become shame work - see Brené Brown for that truth bomb.

Community and belonging have become rhetorical tools; yet, true community cultivates a sense of belonging at the intersection of open-heartedness, authenticity, Nature connection, and mind-body-soul alignment. As so beautifully expressed by the group, to be together mindfully and to do so out in Nature - especially in the winds, snowflakes, and the chill - was a coming Home. Too often now in higher ed spaces, community and belonging are tools to keep folks insular and institutional serving rather than teaching and role modeling how to be in service and reciprocity with community in and out of higher ed walls.

I could talk/write for days on all of this. I want to end with this sentiment. It’s an honor to have entered the elder phase of my one precious life as I learn how to be a soul-filled guide in my community so that others may be alive in their life, purpose, and soul’s work. I have come Home.