CIIS Public Programs Podcast

TRANSCRIPT

Our transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human editors. We do our best to achieve accuracy, but they may contain errors. If it is an option for you, we strongly encourage you to listen to the podcast audio, which includes additional emotion and emphasis not conveyed through transcription.

[Cheerful theme music begins]

This is the CIIS Public Programs Podcast, featuring talks and conversations recorded live by California Institute of Integral Studies, a non-profit university located in San Francisco on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone Land. 

Majority cultural norms in the United States suppress our ability to truly feel our grief and each person’s experience with grief is as unique as the grief itself. Writer, somatic practitioner, and artist Camille Sapara Barton’s take on grief speaks directly to the ways that BIPOC and queer communities and individuals disproportionately experience unique constellations of loss. In their work, Camille honors every experience: The loss of displacement from homelands, severed lineages and ancestral ways of knowing. The grief of colonization and theft. The deep heaviness that burrows into our bodies when society tells us our bodies are wrong.

In this conversation with author, educator, activist, and intuitive healer Michelle Cassandra Johnson, Camille shares ways we can tend to our grief both alone and in community, drawing upon their new book Tending Grief, written specifically to center and hold the grief of BIPOC communities.

This episode was recorded during a live online event on August 2nd, 2024. You can also watch it on the CIIS Public Programs YouTube channel. A transcript is available at ciispod.com. To find out more about CIIS and public programs like this one, visit our website ciis.edu and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms.

[Theme music concludes]

Michelle Cassandra Johnson: I'm really happy to be here with you. Camille [Ka-MEE] is how you say, yes Camille. Okay.


Camille Sapara Barton: Camille [KA-mee] is all good, yeah. There's different ways people are saying– Yeah.

Michelle: Very different ways but Camille [Ka-MEE] if that's what you prefer I will stick to that. First I want to thank you for your labor and for your wisdom and I have your book here for your book, your work, your practice, and all the ways you talk about Tending Grief which resonate deeply with me and how I feel about the world and the way that I approach things. I think grief is such an important experience for us to turn toward and to process and to work with and we'll dive into all the reasons why based on your work, Tending Grief. But first I want to ask you how you are and how your heart is right now. I'm really interested to hear what's present for you right now.

Camille: I'm glad to be here with you. And in this moment I am not 100%. I am recovering from COVID right now. So yeah I know it's definitely still going around and I really hope that we can yeah find ways to practice harm reduction together as we continue to navigate this public health experience. But I'm grateful that I feel energized enough to be here and to have this conversation. And my heart feels tender. Yeah really tender with all of the deep horror and brutality of this time. With the genocides unfolding in Palestine and Sudan and pain in various places of the world right now. Yeah it feels that a lot is being revealed. I don't think that things are necessarily getting worse but they're so visible and sort of present in our consciousness in a way that they haven't been necessarily on this level before and it's quite a lot to take in. So I feel very tender with that and still connected to the wonder of life and the abundance of the land in this time. Where I am in Amsterdam everything is blooming and there's a lot of beauty as well but a lot of, a lot of pain and I'm really feeling the yeah the complexity of all of it. 

Michelle: Yeah thank you for locating yourself in the sense of letting us know what's present for you right now. How you're feeling and uplifting tenderness and wonder and beauty and the amount we are being asked to take in, to respond to, to feel right now. Yeah I appreciate the naming of that and it just makes me sort of feel into you know what it means to be alive right now and if one is awake at all, right, to what's going on as you said what we're being asked to hold so thanks for sharing some about the tenderness and centering it which I feel like is so related to everything you've written in Tending Grief and the importance of it and I want to ask a question about you know people often avoid grief or try to bypass it or are afraid to feel it or overwhelmed and overcome by what's happening, their own grief of course, and the grief that you spoke to that is in response to the losses we're experiencing as a collective and in Tending Grief you've written about grief being a– grieving being a generative process and experience and I'd love for you to share some about why, like why is this process of making space for grief and to grieve a generative process. 

Camille: Thank you for this question. I suppose I want to begin by saying that I think you've kind of shaped it in the question but just to emphasize that I don't see grief as just related to bereavement. I think that can be quite a dominant association in the West where we just feel like oh you only grieve when someone you love has died but in my experience when I look at what's happening in the world it feels quite clear to me that there are so many ways that grief can arise that relate to more systemic forms of harm, the loss of former versions of ourselves, illness so many different happenings that take place in our life can also create huge amounts of grief and I don't think there's often a lot of permission to to be with that because it's not often validated in the Western context so something I wanted to do with the book is to kind of make a bit more space for that so that we can feel a bit more permission to to honor the different types of grief that arise for us to feel yeah that we we can lean into that. And yeah I think some folks who have been incredibly influential for me in the ways I think about grief are Sobonfu Somé and Malidoma Somé who are both Dagara elders. I know that Sabonfu actually has been on CIIS Public Programs I've enjoyed listening to the podcast many times with her on it. And while Sabonfu and Malidoma were alive they spent a lot of their years spreading Dagara grief practices in the West because they really saw a need for it. There wasn't a lot of space to really be with grief in public or to have tools or practices to really metabolize it so there was a lot of it becoming stuck and kind of calcified and in their writing in their talking they would really name the the damage they would see this kind of calcification this stuckness with grief was doing to us collectively in the West and yeah a few of their their views that really resonate with me is this idea of grief being a generative force like something that when we lean into it will allow us to grow to to grow through and out of the pain that we that we access in the grief to get clearer on what we really care about ,what what matters to us and having some kind of energy to move towards that and really be in right relationship to that. They'd also see it as a site of ancestral connection and wisdom when we feel into our grief that we can tap into the the lineages that we're connected to, that there's something of a sense of being bigger than the individual when we're in that kind of space of being out of control with with grief and with the sorrow that comes with that. And yeah another point which I really feel is important for us in the West to kind of get to grips with is is this notion that untended grief will create harm in the collective. This is something that the Dagara really emphasize and due to this they would have a monthly grief ritual together and everyone was expected to show up and really tend their grief regularly because they saw the ways that if people didn't do this it would actually become violence or other the impact of the whole of the society and when I look at that and apply that to the kind of Western context that we find ourselves in it yeah it makes a lot of sense to me in many ways that there's been so much that's been suppressed so much severing and just moving on sweeping things under the rug even with COVID which is you know still this ongoing thing right we've not had any public or state-led kind of mourning processes or acknowledgement of the millions of people that have died, the huge amounts of people who now have long COVID, now have chronic illnesses, you know there's there's not been any kind of feeling into that it's just been okay let's go back to normal, you know? And I think there's a fracturing and a cognitive dissonance that becomes very normalized when we continue to just try and bypass these deep wounds these deep these deep painful collective experiences that we go through. So I do really believe that this that this lack of grief tending has massive societal implications, and in terms of coming to your question you're part of the question around you know what what can it create when we lean into it, when we tend our grief, I feel that we can move out of pervasive numbness when we move into grief tending or regularly. I think that many of us in the West are kind of oscillating between being numb a lot of the time or being completely flooded with emotion. There's not a lot of kind of space in between and I'm interested in that space in between how we can build more capacity to be in these other states but I think many of us are numbing to function in various ways whether that's through work, I definitely have historically loved to numb through work it's still something I I'm trying to repattern. Some people numb through alcohol other substance use or shopping or social media there are so many ways we can distract and shut down and move away from our sensations and emotions and so by dipping in intentionally to our grief, noticing it, spending some time with it, I think it can move us out of this pattern of of constantly numbing moving away and over time actually connect us to more emotions in general including the so-called positive ones. Things like joy and connection and intimacy. I think there's a deep intimacy when we tend grief and when we allow ourselves to be vulnerable in that with other people. I haven't felt the level of closeness with friends or loved ones kind of really top and when someone is holding me and I'm crying my heart is breaking and yet they're just with me in that moment accompanying me and I can be completely falling apart and there's such a deep intimacy and being witnessed and held in that which then in turn has really strengthened our relationships and the connection that we that we can access in other states as well as that and I think there is a again a fracturing a fragmentation in many of our relationships because of the amount of masking we're doing having to pretend to be okay to hold it together all the time and not really having a space that's safe enough to be in our wholeness be in our fullness and so I think that grief tending yeah can lead us towards being in our messy wholeness in our different shades and really starting to notice what moves us notice where the sorrow is and how that connects to what we love how that connects to what we want to see more of in the world when I am grieving these ongoing genocides I'm very clear that I love life, I love people, I love I love the idea of living in a world where all beings can live with safety, dignity, and belonging. I would love to see a world where we don't have pervasive war, when we don't have genocide. My grief is very connected to that, it's clear to me what my alignment is and I'm like okay well I have to try and find ways to move towards that world, towards that love, and ultimately I think tending grief can help us in repairing not just our kind of interpersonal relationships with other humans but our relationships to the land, our relationships with our ancestors and our lineages, moving back into relationship with all that we've been conditioned out of in this kind of project of modernity, and I think yeah there's a lot of muscles that we have to rebuild and sensing is one of them and I think that grief tending can be a vehicle to sense more and to start hopefully being having more capacity to be with what's there and to do so in a way that we can move out of this binary of just being numb or flooded, to find ways to change shape and be with what's emerging. I think it's really needed in this time.

Michelle: Yes, I think so too, and there's so much in what you just shared and present to the calcification you mentioned and then, and I've written and talked about this too, the ways that we might replicate patterns of behavior or systems or create trauma that actually creates more grief for us. So it piles on top of itself and then present to what you named about I mean everything but the different ways we're grieving and what we're grieving and the way that some of us have been conditioned to think about grief or talk about grief or what's acceptable to grieve and what's not, which I think is really important as well, and also that what you named about community or communal grieving really and the necessity of for that to be grieving in community and what can manifest which is so much of of why you're feeling tender and I'm feeling tender and we're feeling tender right what can manifest when we don't have that space to grieve with one another or for someone to affirm that yes I'm feeling sorrow as well or I'm confused, right? Or I don't know why this is happening, why does this keep happening, and it made me think about when you were talking about that it really made me think about what sometimes what we call violence is actually people grieving out loud like people are actually expressing what has been repressed or there's been no space made for it or they've been told it's not real, right? Communities who've been marginalized or who are less proximal to social and institutional power over and over and over so it just made me think about that more when you named that and I and what you named about love and the world you want to see and I would say create based on what you shared here and of course in your book and your work and the connection between grief and love which I think is really important and powerful and that the process of grieving is an expression of love and as you were naming moving toward that world like this is a part of the work to get us there is to tend our griefs which I I you know I named that sometimes people move away from their grief or they bypass it and I it makes me wonder what would happen if more of us were taught to believe or taught to lean into this connection between grief and love or emoting, right? Feeling the things that we're told not to feel. And this is not a question that was planned but it from what you shared I I am curious, I think working with grief is I know there are many people who have worked with loss and grief and I feel like there could be a lot more people and I also think if you're going to tend grief that you embody the capacity to hold a lot of sorrow, a lot of trauma, not just for yourself but for the world to to receive and hold people and hold the planet and the way you talked about our relationship with the earth and I'm just curious to know because I think it we have to possess some specific qualities people to to tend the grief in the way you're inviting us to. I'm wondering if you would share a little about your path, like what it's not one thing so I know there's not one experience but I think it's just so unique to tend grief and I'm curious if you might share a little about the maybe windy road that that landed you here in your process of tending grief.

Camille: Sure. I always feel it's hard to find a beginning, isn't it? Because beginnings are so connected to endings and so I'm just gonna yeah intuit where I should begin. I mean I'm very much a product of the African diaspora and the triumphs and survival and the deep harm that is woven into many of our stories ancestrally so there is enslavement, migration, displacement in my family lines and there's a lot of grief in those stories and I think yeah I've just been aware of that from a young age so that was one piece that was formative, kind of speaking to what you named already there's so many griefs I think for African heritage people, right? That we haven't had permission really from from many other people to to feel to acknowledge to be validated and those things being real, and so yeah I think I was aware of the ways we people around me were coping with that, trying to cope with that. The finding of the silver lining, the kind of just keeping it moving keeping it going but then sometimes the the ways that would break down into seeing the eruptions of sorrow, and the harm and the pain of them. And at the same time I grew up in a very esoteric community context because both my parents have a very specific meditation practice that they have been in for the majority of their lives and so I was rooted I suppose in in an unusual way of seeing the world compared to many people who grew up in the west like yeah feeling a connection to spirit to something with a great mystery some people might call god, some people might call spirit, some people have other names for it but that was always a connection point for me but I was very interested in social change as well so I was trying to find the thread between the two and this would often be an ongoing conversation with me and my parents about what's really going to create change in the world and they believed okay it's spiritual practice, that's what's going to create change, spiritual revolution and I thought well I think the material piece is really important too and can't the spiritual fuel that? Can't it connect? Can't we create change in both realms? So that's been an ongoing question for me for a long time, but to really be in that question I think there's no way but to acknowledge the pain that is present in the material, the deep harms that are impacting so many people and have been for many many many years so I think I've just grown up having a connection a sensitivity to to the pain and to the the different dimensions of that the kind of ancestral piece and the present time destruction of extractive neoliberalism and yeah this project of modernity. And then like many people I have my own experiences of trauma and childhood survivor histories so I think that's all entangled to yeah lead me to having a real stake in trying to figure out a way to to be with this stuff and eventually it got to a point where I didn't feel like I had a choice, I just had to I had to do something about it, and I couldn't find many many many tailor-made practices out there to kind of help me be with this day-to-day I was very blessed to go to one of Sobonfu’s Dagara grief rituals when I was living in California, this was I think in maybe 2015, and that was the first time I'd been in a kind of held grief space and I think the Dagara cosmology is beautiful and the durational rituals are incredible but a few years later when I really needed something day-to-day, I needed something else that was going to be manageable for me to create and hold for myself and so that's kind of what led me on the exploration really to experiment with and try and find bite-sized rituals that I could use in daily life to just tend to this yeah kind of volcano of different forms of grief that seem to be all flowing and entangled with each other and so it was a good six or seven years of really kind of being submerged in that and I feel like I'm now kind of emerging out of that particular moment but we're in a very big collective grief moment so it's yeah trying to find and situate myself now as we yeah seem to be going through some kind of grief portal. That was quite rambly, but it's just what was coming up to that question. 

Michelle: It wasn't rambly at all. I really appreciate you answering it and sharing more about your journey right into this space and also evolution and this emergence you just spoke of. You know, that you're continuing to grow in this way and also respond to what's needed, and I also love the way you talked about practice and I think for at least many people I'm in relationship with, you know, who are engaged in this kind of way of being that we're talking about acknowledging what is present and grieving it, that we have to find our way and we have to create the practices even if there's there are experiences that are introduced to us of community grieving as you named that based on what's happening for us and how we're responding to the world that then we create practices that are responsive to what we need at the time and also heard that in this emergence of what is needed now which we yeah which I feel like is so related to this question about the void. There's an entire chapter about the void and about violence and I feel like you cleverly wrote about the void and violence and mystery in a way it was just so intriguing to me the way you wrote about the void, as someone who thinks about the void and travels to other realms shamanically and it just struck me, and you wrote about violence in the void and sitting in the discomfort of the void, of the not knowing, of the darkness, of the mystery, and I'd love for you to share some and you've named some examples of this but I'd love for you to share some about the violence that emerges when people are confronted with the void but afraid of it, right, or unsure of how to work with it, as well as the benefits or gifts we can glean from leaning into the void. Nothingness is one way you described it, emptiness is one way, I mentioned darkness and the submergence into the into the void.  So I'd love for you to talk about both, like the violence that can emerge and the what might we gather from building our capacity to submerge ourselves in the void.

Camille: I– so many things I could say about this –  I feel that the way I framed it in the book was kind of in relation to whiteness, because I was getting really curious about all these conversations I'd heard over the years people I grew up around. It was really sparked actually with a conversation with one friend in particular um I think I was talking about my own ancestral practices and getting into this new stage of connection that felt really exciting and we have a lot of honesty between us and this friend sort of expressed some jealousy I guess at saying oh I don't I don't know any of my family and I don't have any ancestral connection to them and I wish I did, you know, I want that. And I thought oh this is so interesting and I ended up starting to write about it with their consent and and that's how this chapter came about because I'd kept on hearing this uh many white people in my life um or those who move through the world read as white even if maybe some of you listening don't identify that way but those who perceived or racialized in that way in this current system, I've heard many people express oh I I don't feel spiritual, I don't feel rooted, I don't feel connected to ancestors or family and um and that always struck me because it feels there that there is some kind of um a little like this feeling of emptiness of not being tethered, and then not being in lineage as a result, not belonging and what I've noticed from that is that can lead to things that maybe some might call cultural appropriation or this kind of exotic– exoticizing of other cultures, other spiritual practices, and I'm not you know saying that there's no way you can engage with another spiritual tradition that's not from your own lineage, I'm not I'm not that dogmatic in my own views about it, but I do think it is a pattern when you see many people who identify as white feeling like oh well I don't have any spiritual roots and so I need to go and follow this guru or I need to um learn Sanskrit or or whatever tradition it may be in order to feel like this is intact and I can I can root into this, right? This will make me feel more whole and I I sense that there can be a violence that comes from this, not necessarily intentionally but usually uh in the process of this, through this sense of entitlement to take and to not necessarily question what's being in right relationship look like, but also in the sense of maybe feeling empty that can be forms of superiority that I think then start to appear. Like I feel empty but I want to prove to myself I'm not, I want to prove I am actually superior, and that usually latches onto a lot of the current condition tendencies we have power over which might look like believing that bodies deemed as named as white are superior or more intelligent or should be able to access the disproportionate amount of resources that we see currently in our in our system in our world. We can you know say the same for systems like patriarchy, for ableism, for classism, I think there are many ways of superiority operate and I think this sense of feeling empty, feeling less than, can kind of mean a desire to latch onto that and double down on feeling or I'm I'm important because of this and then actually making someone else feel small in order to to not feel that emptiness and I sense that that although it's challenging to be with this emptiness and feel into it and understand it, if there were questions around where does this come from? What is this? How am I situated in relation to this? What happened to my ancestors? Where was that severing? Like how did we get here? How were my ancestors harmed? How were their practices taken? Who did they end up harming? What would it look like to repair? You know, there's so much there in that that exploration of the nothingness I think could lead to forms of repair, to coming back into right relationship, but it involves I think having to be with pain, having to be with the grief that you know European peoples were were also colonized and assimilated out of their traditions before they then ended up participating in or benefiting from the colonization of African heritage peoples and many other indigenous peoples around the world to this day, and I sense that yeah by feeling into the void we can ultimately begin to reconnect with our ancestral lineages, that doesn't necessarily mean having to adopt or be completely you know practicing in the same way as they were spiritually, but at least understanding how their lives impacted where we are, how we move through the world, some of the ways we could repair, some of the ways we could heal, and be in connection with other beings and the land I think there's a lot of richness there, but just ending or stopping at this point of okay I feel emptiness and therefore I'm going to go and find something else, actually prevents that work from happening, that deeper curiosity and that ability to really understand oh I'm part of these legacies of pain, this has happened to me and my people. What would it look like to find another way together and to move from a place rather than superiority or saviorism of realizing this has happened to us too? How do we get free together? How do we create something else together that benefits all of us? So yeah those are some of my thoughts about it. Yeah. 

Michelle: Yeah, thank you for sharing more about the the void and where this chapter and curiosity and conversation originated, and the pattern of oppression that you named that happens when there's a lack of practice or you know we're incentivized to deny our experiences and histories and to go along to get along in this way that just perpetuates so much of what we've talked about related to grief and collective grief and then again the tenderness you named and relating that to identity too feels really important and systems of colonization and and white supremacy and you named other other you have named others um systems of oppression as well. And also I just appreciate the naming of what we're internalizing too and how you related um superiority to this void and what happens when one feels um empty or not enough and lives in a culture where they're incentivized to fill up or to be better than, and there's a legacy of that, a lineage of that, um that has been passed on so I feel like it's such important it's such an important conversation um what you what you named and and uplifted, and what you named about what can happen like we can get free together if we if we actually get curious about our experiences, our lineages and are in conversation about these things as well, and of course doing our work based on the different identities we embody. Not that that's the whole of who we are but you you named how that shapes us and has shaped you and in your journey journey toward toward tending grief and I– this feels like it's it's connected to the um the next question which is about movement work organizing um which feels like a um thread, right, a wisdom stream in Tending Grief and um you've written about in Movements for Change, which of course what I gathered from what you what you offered in Tending Grief and what you've shared here, movements that are connected to our collective liberation, right, and how we get free that there are these patterns you've noticed and I have noticed this too of um, one not making space for grief but also not making space to feel joyful or um find pleasure or feel pleasure um so it's not just grief that we're perhaps um there isn't space made for it but also this like, we got to grind, we got there's a lot at stake right um and that there's no space made for joy, pleasure, ritual I would add to that list too as well, and yet we need I think in our particularly in organizing movements rooted in collective liberation, that we need these rituals, we need to access joy, we need to access pleasure, we need to have space to grieve communally so that we can continue to sustain our our work. um and So I'm I'm curious to hear about what you feel like we risk in in these movement spaces when we don't tend our grief and when we don't make space for joy and pleasure and ritual like what– and also there's another side to this question which is you know what movements are you connected to or do you admire that are making space for grief, joy, pleasure, you can answer either because I realize not a– there's another there are people who are centering ritual, who are centering joy, who are centering ceremony as they're doing their organizing work, so you can decide like choose your own adventure which part of this question which is kind of long you want to answer. 

Camille: I might go for the first part and we'll see if I can weave in a little bit of the other bit at the end. Yeah I sense that we are trying to– many of our movements in the west are trying to create change by operating in a similar framework to the culture that we're trying to change. I've noticed quite a almost like militaristic, rational, very mind body separation dominant approach to many movements, because this is seen as what's efficient and strategic, it's not seen as a beneficial to spend time feeling too emotional or to be too vulnerable, that that you know there's no time for that. It's like things are urgent, things need to get done, and that's what um the focus should be. And I can understand that. I can understand that sometimes that's necessary, but if that's the only shape a movement can take I think we have a problem because there'll come a time, and there already have come many times, where that approach isn't the best fit for the situation. It's not appropriate for the context so there needs to be an ability to change shape and to take the shape that's appropriate for the different moment that we're in at different times, um and some people might think of this as uh connected to prefigurative politics which is this kind of idea of trying to create the world we want to see in our daily actions in our ways of being with each other our ways of relating with each other, and so for me it's clear if I want to live in a world where joy is more abundant, where pleasure is more accessible to people without shame, where grief tending is a part of daily life, then I also would like to see that being experimented with even in baby steps in movement as well because you know if we don't do that this work now then it's not it's not going to become embodied, it's not going to become practiced, it's not going to become available something that we can grow and move into our institutions into infrastructure. I'm not talking about the institutions we have now but the kinds of institutions we vision and might need in the future. I don't think it's going to be this kind of trickle down process where like okay once we've done all the big stuff then we'll come to that later, it's like I think it needs to be woven in um otherwise we're not really creating a different way of doing things ultimately. So I do think it's important to be able to practice these other ways of being so that they're more embodied, more available, um and ultimately so that we have more skillful containers to to be with challenging emotions so that we can have the capacity to really focus on what we also want to grow, not just what we're seeking to prevent which I think is very important in the movement space but often becomes the dominant the dominant thing in many movement spaces of we're saying no to this, we're resisting this, and of course we need that sometimes but we also need to be putting a lot of energy into what we're growing, what we're creating, what we're choosing with each other, what we're investing in with each other, and um I think a lot of that has to be practiced it's not going to be overnight and it might not always feel amazing initially but we have to take leadership over that because the state isn't going to, you know? No one is coming to save us, we have to be creating the worlds we want to see and living that, and it might take time um but I think that grief tending and having that vulnerability, that intimacy with each other even if it's just once a month you know all movements will have different contexts different needs but finding a once a month container even for as little as 20 minutes, could be an hour, to say okay we're going to have a we're going to put some music on and we're going to facilitate this space to have a dance based grief processing moment or we're going to do a sharing circle and check in about and allow ourselves to move with tears if we need to for everything we've been holding or we're going to have a vigil. You know, there are various ways this could be done but just making regular space to drop in and have permission to be with each other in these feelings to let the masks fall and to allow the tenderness and the heart to break in a held way, you know? I think would would bring a lot of um of support into movement spaces and and this has been done before, this has been you know um I know BLM was was experimenting with things like this as well when I was living in the bay um with actually having a lot of public vigils and incorporating that into protests, incorporating that into this is you know the resistance piece. I think that was very skillfully and beautifully done and I haven't seen uh that many movements kind of replicate this um yet but I think you know it is it is a model, there are pathways there, and people who've been laying laying the the the foundations for this as well. um But also say that I think you know so much of this economic system that we find ourselves in relies on us being disconnected from our bodies, disconnected from each other, and really numb, disconnected from our ancestral practices as well, and the strength that can be that can be drawn from from being rooted in spirit, being rooted to the land, whatever kind of– whatever gives us spiritual connection and power. I also hope that can come into movements as you were saying it before I was like yeah I definitely could have mentioned spirit as well um yeah I think that needs to come in and again we've seen this happen, I mean the Haitian revolution was not just going to sit around and strategize I mean they were calling in ancestral power, ancestral magic and ritual in a big way, um and there are also many communities as well I know in the kind of South American context. I I'm really keen to actually learn Spanish and Portuguese in the coming year so I can learn from uh the incredible organizing that's been happening in this region for a long long time um from Afro and Indigenous communities who I think are weaving in a much more holistic approach that's maybe more around kind of pluriversal politics, so not thinking there is just one way in one world but how do we allow many worlds to exist many cosmologies and ways of doing things and yet move together towards futures that are livable. um So I have a lot to learn from yeah from these groups. And I know more about I suppose the Zapatistas because uh they have been doing a lot of bridge building and exchange and also sharing things in english which again is a privilege I have as a um as a mother tongue English speaker but also you know there's things I need to I need to pivot in order to actually learn from the wisdom of many who I currently can't learn from because of yeah being limited in in the choices and the context I've lived in and not having yeah learned yet. Yes, those are some thoughts about the the movement piece. 

Michelle: Thank you yeah for sharing um why it's important for us to make space for joy, pleasure, and to grieve, and what you described they aren't necessarily simple practices and yet you did name you know it could be 20 minutes, it could be a check-in, it could be a circle, it could be silence and witnessing and seeing one another, right? There are so many different ways and it reminded me of I used to work in an organization in the pacific northwest um and we were doing racial equity work mostly with organizations and I noticed, I'd been doing racial equity work for a long long time at that point um and I was working with people who were newer um to the work, um and I realized quickly that they had not been in spaces where people asked them like, how is your heart? How are you? What is present? And I was supervising many of them and started to create some circles for care and really the intention was for us to say What's present? We've led eight trainings this week which of course are more than trainings particularly for those of us who are in bodies of culture right and who are people of color right we're we're holding a lot um and care feels important if we want to continue to do our work and we can't hold it all, we need a space to release some of this or be affirmed or be witnessed, and so I love the way you described it. And it makes me just sort of dream into what would it be like if if in movements and and organizations and spaces who are you know interested in liberation um and connection and intimacy if you use that word a few times what would it be like in those spaces, what would they feel like if we made space to grieve and for collective care and to slow down enough to see one another and to just honor what we're holding and what we're stewarding? So thank you for for that and and this leads me to a question I want to– you mentioned embodiment um in that response and um there are many many practices in Tending Grief focused on embodiment um and why it's essential for us to engage in body practices um related to grief, related to joy, related to pleasure, and I'd love for you to to share um some about why being in the body, why embodiment um feels so essential right and vital um related to grief? I think you've named it actually in many different ways. I'm just curious if there's more you'd want to share and I'm asking this because I'm aware that um I have been conditioned to exist from the neck up and not from the neck down and to feel my body right and there's been this journey of I have a body, I'm in a body, there are other bodies right and not just physical right there are different layers to who we are, different energies and bodies and ancestors, right, and and that energy that's moving through so that's really where my question's coming from, like why is it essential for us to be in our bodies in the way you invite us um in Tending Grief?

Camille: I hope that that we can get more skilled at this because it's ultimately I think how we can learn to stay in alignment under pressure. I know in my own experience um and I still do I have ways of of uh navigating stress that don't always feel good and in terms of my values of how I want to be, conditioned tendencies as Staci Haines might call them. um I think a lot of these can show up for us uh often with our closest people, our families of origin, our loved ones, our partners, where we can get into these habits of not maybe being in integrity with how we're behaving because we're really stressed or we're under pressure. For me I've noticed that having regular embodiment practices or somatic practices um is helping me to have a little bit more space so when that pressure comes there's just maybe two seconds more where before going into that automatic way of responding a condition where responding there's a little bit of spaciousness to be like okay what's happening? I'm noticing I'm really stressed, is that is that supportive for this moment? If it's not maybe I need to do a practice to come down a bit to get to a point where I can be in integrity. So maybe in that two second space I realize I need five minutes and I go and take myself away to do what I need to do to be in a space where I can be more aligned with how I want to interact in that relationship um and this is a very small example but kind of collectively when we scale this and we think about how much pressure we are under with the decisions we have to make as a global community um about so many things we're already under pressure and I think it's clear that a lot of the ways we respond as individuals and collectively under pressure isn't maybe in integrity, isn't in alignment for the kind of worlds we want to build, and so we need to have some way of practicing, taking a different shape, finding another path, being responsive rather than reactive, and in my opinion that's the type of skill that doesn't come from just reading books or talking about stuff. That's the type of skill that has to be embodied that has to come from having more bandwidth in our nervous systems to be with discomfort, to be with that tension, so that we can meet that and stay in alignment and so to me that's the longer arc of embodiment of somatic practice. It's not about to me just feeling good or just relaxing it's about how do we change our shape so that we can meet the moment and stay in integrity and how do we learn to do that collectively? And so that applies to the movement piece but also in our interpersonal relationships. Also with the land on so many levels. And yeah it's not an overnight thing, so I think it will take a little bit of trust and investment for people to consider, okay am I willing to try and have a daily practice or three times a week practice even if it's just five ten minutes a day and see what this does after a year or see what this does after six months? Because I think it takes that kind of amount of time before you can really start to see how that's showing up in different situations that would have automatically just set you back into that conditioned way of being to actually start feeling a bit more space a bit more possibility to stay in alignment and to operate in integrity. And so I hope that's something we can we can collectively move towards more because we're really great at talking in the west we love to talk we love to make terms and write papers and um but I don't know if we're so great at practicing and I hope we can learn to practice more because I think we need to be practicing what we actually care about and what we uh what our values are and not just talking about it. 

Michelle: Yeah I um love the way you connected um actually gotten very stormy here right as you were sharing all that the wind like kicked up it's like yeah Camille talking about things that need to happen and shape shifting and that's happening right now here in North Carolina where I am. But I love the way you connected integrity to practice and um practice to move away from or at least notice our conditioned responses and and actually create different ways of being and and to remember um through practice and how that aligns us um so that we can be in integrity which I I love that connection and I've had people ask me before about practice and in fact ask what if my practice isn't working? Or how do you know if it's working? And I think my response was I don't know if it's working but I I'm going to keep showing up on my cushion every morning right in front of my altar and light my candle and pray and breathe and like come back to myself. That's what I know to do and practice is essential, so I just really appreciate the what you named about that. And I want to ask you– I began with a question about um your heart and how is your heart and I want to ask a question about um the heart again, but it's different and it's a question about how you're tending your grief at this time. You know you mentioned tenderness at the beginning so what are you practicing right now to tend your grief? 

Camille: I have a kind of I guess my baseline monthly grief practice revolves around my grief jar and I first got into a grief jar practice thanks to Tricia Hersey of The Nap Ministry. And um it's a really beautiful practice, very simple and I think it's a great access point for folks who might want to just start gently experimenting with a with a personal grief practice. So you can take any old jar from around the house, you might have been cooking with or something, clean it out and I have mine on my altar but you can place it somewhere that you see every day and um I have some small pieces of paper cut up next to the jar and a pen and so whenever some grief arises or some discomfort and I don't feel I have time to really be with it, which I think is a lot of the time to be honest because many of us are you know living quite fast-paced lives, I'll write this down on the piece of paper and put it in the jar, and then it's kind of like I'm going to come back to you later, and then I like to do a ritual on the full moon but it could be any time really that works for people um but on the full moon I will have a ritual of anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour and a half usually depending on what's moving, how full the jar is, um and I take some time after I've kind of grounded and done embodiment practice to just take out one piece of paper at a time, look at what's written on there, feel the sensations that come, because often the sensations that arose initially will come back again and just really feel where this sits in my body, what it evokes, any memories or words that need to be spoken, if there's tears that need to come and let them come, sometimes there's shaking that comes, sometimes there's songs that have wanted to come out, but I just let myself process in some way around this piece. It might not be that it's complete and it's ended but when it feels like enough for the moment that I'll let the piece of paper be submerged in a basin of water that I have with me and I kind of go through the jar like that until it's empty, and then I usually end with another moment of kind of connecting to my body and just noticing any shifts and how I feel afterwards, and that's kind of my baseline monthly practice. But in the last months um I've needed to grieve more often for various reasons and I've often found as well that whenever I try and dance, which I'm I'm grateful to have been doing a bit more recently now that it's uh warmer weather and there's more opportunities to dance outside, um I find that my body intuitively likes to kind of cry or seems to want to release when I'm kind of moving towards dance which is one of the most joyful things for me that I can do in this life. There's somehow this this this almost like this ringing ringing out of a sponge like if there's that saturation with grief and sorrow um that's there, usually the first 10, 15 minutes of me dancing there'll be tears coming and um things releasing as well, uh and I usually go with that and that creates a bit more space than for the joy, and the wonder, and everything else to build up but it it feels like I often need to start with with that release in order to be to actually be present with what's there and allow that to metabolize a bit um before I can kind of go somewhere else. So I think those are the two main ways that I'm tending grief at the moment.

Michelle: Yeah, thanks for sharing that and um I appreciate the acknowledgement of of you know needing to grieve more, and the I was thinking about the grief jar and the water and also the energy of dance and and fire which may not be the element you connect with it but I'm thinking about transmutation and like sweat that can happen when we dance and move in that way and then thinking about you know the energies of and polarities of fire and and water um so um thanks for offering those practices, and for tending your grief as you as you engage in this work with others. That feels important um not only to be in integrity but also to release or acknowledge what you need to um so you can sustain this work and and these important practices. And I want to um again thank you for well this conversation and connection it's been lovely to um see you and be in conversation with you and to thank you for your work and your practice and for working with grief and joy and humanness and what it means to be alive in these ways and offering us so many ways to practice tending our grief. So a deep bow of gratitude to you and all that led you to this place and moment and um to writing and making an offering in the way you have and I'm wishing many many blessings for this offering and for you as you continue your journey. So thank you Camille for being who you are and for being here with us now.

Camille: Thank you, Michelle. Appreciate you and really really happy we could do this together and yeah thank you for all your work and everything you hold because it's also a great yeah source of inspiration and I'm very grateful for you. 

Michelle: Thank you. 

[Uplifting theme music begins]

Thank you for listening to the CIIS Public Programs Podcast. Our talks and conversations are presented live in San Francisco, California. We recognize that our university’s building in San Francisco occupies traditional, unceded Ramaytush Ohlone lands. If you are interested in learning more about native lands, languages, and territories, the website native-land.ca is a helpful resource for you to learn about and acknowledge the Indigenous land where you live.

Podcast production is supervised by Kirstin Van Cleef at CIIS. Audio production is supervised by Lyle Barrere at Desired Effect. The CIIS Public Programs team includes Izzy Angus, Kyle DeMedio, Alex Elliott, Emlyn Guiney, Patty Pforte, Nikki Roda, and Pele Shalev. If you liked what you heard, please subscribe wherever you find podcasts, visit our website ciis.edu, and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms.

CIIS Public Programs commits to use our in-person and online platforms to uplift the stories and teachings of Black, Indigenous, and other people of color; those in the LGBTQIA+ community; and all those whose lives emerge from the intersections of multiple identities. 

[Theme music concludes]