How to make transformation inevitable
I’ve just completed a training course on transforming climate trauma. Knowing I’d have to show up week after week to grapple with climate emergencies and presence people’s trauma, I wondered if taking this on would be overwhelming and make me more distressed, especially while processing some grief of my own. My reaction, however, surprised me. As the course began, I experienced primary feelings of excitement and hope. How, I asked myself, could something so heavy and daunting as traumatic impacts of inevitable climate catastrophes caused by our own human doing (and not doing) possibly elicit positive feelings?
A topic I explored recently in a Zen practice group offers one answer. As a group, we spent weeks coming back to something the late Rep. John Lewis said in a noteworthy episode of the podcast On Being. While sharing about his experiences of racial violence and finding beloved community to fight against injustice, Rep. Lewis shared:
“I wanted to believe, and I did believe, that things would get better. But later I discovered that you have to have this sense of faith that what you’re moving toward is already done. It’s already happened. And you live that you’re already there, that you’re already in that community. If you visualize it, if you can even have faith that it’s there, for you it is already there.”
“It’s already there” is such a powerful belief to embody when used as a way to summon us rather than pacify us. But this belief requires a sense of trust to see it, presence with what it takes to be it, and a determination to bring what’s “already there” out to the world. That’s why I believe grief — the wide container of sensations, emotions, and experiences that result from processing and navigating loss — is a critical part of this process.
Without grieving, we can get trapped:
- in a state of perpetual denial (ignorance is bliss, la la la, I don’t wanna know!)
- in a place of seeking suffering, where we redirect our desires for transformation towards thinking we or others should suffer for not having learned our/their lessons, and/or
- in debilitating despair, feeling too overwhelmed by the terribleness of everything to do much of anything
(If these sound familiar, it’s because they’re essentially the primary responses to trauma: flight, fight, or freeze)
Allowing ourselves to grieve (aka healthily process loss) in whatever forms it takes helps get us un-stuck from these places. Grieving helps us restore our sense of faith and come to see transformation as inevitable, as proven by our own experience of changing and progressing out of loss. And that’s part of why I felt, dare I say, good amidst my climate trauma course: because a hundred of us showed up believing that we are teachable in how to transform climate trauma. Because we recognize that us humans have spent millenniums living in relatively healthy relationship with this planet. Because I’m surrounding myself with examples of how we're able to heal each other, in heartbreak or sickness or violence or climate disasters. If we believe there are people who know how to do this, we therefore can know how to do this. And thus, in that sense, it’s already within us. It is already there.
What might our actions look like when they from this place of knowing transformation is already there?
Here’s a practice you can use to put it into embodied action:
Take a few deep breaths. Use your breath to connect with your intuition and/or third eye. Visualize your aspiration — something you want or want to see in the world. Spend a moment there. Then bring your breath down to your gut (you can place hands on your abdomen/lower belly to help bring awareness there). Say to your gut, “What I visualize is already there. I am willing to become it, and able to be it.” See what your gut says. Repeat this phrase whenever it’s helpful.
