Crying with Strangers Over the State of the World : My First Time

What happened when I entered a grief circle

As a British person, I have close friends who have uttered phrases such as: “I wish I could tell my father I love him”, “I wish my partner would propose to me — of course, I will never tell him I want to get married” or “I never tell people when they’ve upset me — I just stop replying to their messages”.

For many of us, the idea of expressing emotions in front of anyone — even our partner or best friend — can seem horrifying. The old idea of “keep calm and carry on” or the “stiff upper lip” has permeated into a culture where we try to bottle everything up, and this fear of expressing my feelings is something that I have had to work on, consciously and painfully, for years.

So why would I purposefully open up about my rage, grief, and fear about what is happening in the world in front of a bunch of strangers?

Well… I was taking part in a workshop for the Work That Reconnects — a powerful tool for helping people to process their emotions about climate collapse, injustice, suffering, and everything else happening in the world. In recent months, it has been increasingly popular within the Extinction Rebellion movement, but I feel that its combination of movement, roleplay, art, writing, meditation and talking are so powerful that they could be applied to almost any group of situation.

We had moved through the first part of the “Spiral” — Gratitude — into the second part: Honouring our Pain.

Joanna Macy, creator of the Work That Reconnects, recognised that our society seems to have an almost pathological avoidance of pain and suffering. We spend vast amounts of our time, energy and money on pursuing happiness, as well as on staying young and beautiful (to avoid thinking about our mortality) and on distracting or numbing ourselves from the things that cause us pain. There are several reasons for this, which she lists in the book Coming Back to Life, including fear of not fitting in, distrust in our own intelligence, hijacked attention, and a general fear of the anger, pain, despair and helplessness that might come if we were to only allow ourselves to think about everything that is happening in our world.

“Our culture conditions us to view pain as dysfunctional. There are pills for headache, backache, neuralgia and premenstrual tension — but no pills for this pain for our world. Not even a…