Tending grief and rebuilding our capacities to sense more deeply, ft. Camille Sapara Barton
How do we maintain our capacities to care?
“We haven't really got practices currently that help us to be with discomfort and grow with it and around it in a way that allows us to still be present and in alignment under pressure. That's one of the beautiful things that grief tending can do — is reconnect us to sensing and feeling.”
What does it mean to sit with and tend to our grief as a regular practice rather than something to “get over” — so we can stay engaged in the long-term work of collective transformation? How do we stay well amidst info overload and the increasingly fast pace of modernity — so we can contribute sustainably in ways that align with our values? How can we maintain our capacities to care for those we have responsibilities for and find things that bring us a bit more ease?
In Green Dreamer’s latest episode #429, Camille Sapara Barton invites us to dream with cultures of care and sense into embodied ways of being with our grief — both personally and with our communities.
Join us as we explore the nuances of confronting phone and social media addiction while continuing to stay informed about the world; the relationship between numbing for survival and sensing deeply as fuel for activation; the ways that capitalism and dominant cultures have molded people into becoming mechanized, “productive,” and obedient members of society — suppressing our attunement to our bodies and states of being — and more.
How might we engage in practices such as honoring our ancestors or creating altars that support a reconnection with our bodies, lands, and sensorial ways of knowing and healing?
View the episode transcript and references here, and dive into the extended version of this conversation, which includes Camille’s early inspirations, via our Patreon here.
We are also honored to welcome Camille to contribute an audio-guided practice on grief tending to our upcoming September cohort of alchemize: radical imagination for collective transformation. Learn more about the 10-week program here.
“Phone addiction is so normalized at the moment. We don't even really talk about it because it's such a collective experience. But it's one of the things I find very challenging — sometimes looking up around a carriage on a train and just seeing most people staring at a screen, hunched over, chest collapsed. It's harrowing.
I hope we have more and more strategies to use these things [like smartphones] as tools and not let them use us, because, at the moment, it feels like we're getting used — big time.” – Camille S. Barton
Camille comes full circle with…
a recommendation: “The book, Disability Visibility, edited by Alice Wong. I love this book. I'm also very excited to read Disability Intimacy.”
a personal inspiration: “Indigenous cosmologies. I don’t want to homogenize or flatten because there are so many different traditions and communities. But every time I'm spending energy learning about ways of existing with the web of life and in community that feel inspiring and generative and hopeful to me, they’re often rooted in Indigenous worldviews and lifeways."
and some words of guidance…
“Keep expanding the imagination and being in practice. There's a lot of things we're practicing every day that are unconscious, but even if it's just one or two things you consciously practice, [be] really deliberate about them and [allow] yourself the time to experiment to see what they bring, to see if it's adaptive.
If it's not, you can pivot. If it is, great. What are the fruits of that?”
Camille Sapara Barton is a writer, artist, and somatic practitioner, dedicated to creating networks of care and liveable futures. Rooted in Black feminism, ecology and harm reduction, Camille uses creativity, alongside embodied practices, to create culture change in fields ranging from psychedelic-assisted therapy to arts education. Their debut book, Tending Grief: Embodied Rituals for Holding Our Sorrow and Growing Cultures of Care in Community, was published in April 2024 by North Atlantic Books.
What inspirations or curiosities are still lingering with you from this episode?
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