January 21, 2021

Grieving

(Stagnating)

“Don’t just do something, stand there” George Shultz.

“The refusal to feel takes a heavy toll. Not only is there an impoverishment of our emotional and sensory life, flowers are dimmer and less fragrant, our loves less ecstaticâ but this psychic numbing also impedes our capacity to process and respond to information. The energy expended in pushing down despair is diverted from more creative uses, depleting the resilience and imagination needed for fresh visions and strategies.” This quote is by practitioner of engaged Buddhism, teacher and author Joanna Macy who has dedicated her life to the collective processing and healing of the personal and societal grief that characterizes our postmodern condition. Since the early 1990s she has been an antinuclear and environmental activist. With David Korten she founded the Great Turning initiative.

Macy’s eight published books include titles such as World as Lover, World as Self, Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age, and Coming Back to Life : Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World. Drawing from her influences in deep ecology, systems theory, psychology and Theravada Buddhism she arrives at a unique methodology for personal and societal transformation. Her teachings, which have been offered to small and large groups all over the world for nearly three decades, were originally called “Despair and Empowerment Work” and are now offered under the name of “the Work that Reconnects.” As the quote above indicates, Macy is devoted to providing students with a first- person experience of the reciprocal relationship between grief and power. Extending psychological theories of grief - such as Elizabeth Kubler Ross’s stages of grief, and the Buddhist practice of sharing suffering called tonglen - from the individual to the collective, Macy identified collective shadow - or unacknowledged collective patterns of suffering and despair - that accompany our late modern planetary consciousness. In demonstrating how grief that is acknowledged, experienced, and fully processed unlocks great reserves of personal power and joy, her work with thousands of people over the years has served as a psycho-somatic bridge from the consciousness of late modernity to that of post postmodernity.

First described in her book On Death and Dying in 1969, psychologist Elizabeth Kubler Ross’s five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance were drawn from near-death experiences of her patients that she described as a process of adjustment to one’s own death. This cycle was later extended to the experience of grief in relation to the loss of a loved one and even to losses in general. It is the generalized societal sense of loss of a future that inspired classic postmodern works by author-activists such as Joanna Macy and eco-psychologist Chellis Glendinning who authored My Name Is Chellis and I’m in Recovery from Western Civilization. Encountered on both the individual and the collective level, grief is most commonly experienced at the first stage — that of denial. Because grief is so difficult to be with, the cycle of grief often remains stuck in denial as we resist whatever needs to be acknowledged and felt. <Feeling - Armouring>

A lot has changed since Joanna Macy first began teaching her then-rather-outlier ideas and methods. In the intervening years grief work has matured into a methodological gift of postmodernity. In the face of global warming, consciousness of our finitude has inspired a new generation of grief activists notably the postmodern think/be tank The Dark Mountain Project founded by Dougald Hine and Paul Kingsnorth, and the emergence of Planetary Hospice founded by eco-psychologist, hospice provider and environmental attorney Zhiwa Woodbury. Further validation of the contemporary cultural embrace of grief work is the emergence of a range of grief workers such as Orphan Wisdom’s Stephen Jenkinson whose life inspired Tim Wilson’s film Griefwalker inspired many others to the work of death midwifery. Other examples of the trend include the Death Café, a global meet up group and Ask the Mortician. These exemplars of the individual and collective grieving process that most of the developed world is going through in our time. It’s a reckoning with our relationship with our planet and with our mortality. It’s a reaction to Modernity. I believe that we have to go through a grieving process before we can accept what is. Accepting what is is a precondition for our full participation in brining forth alternate futures. <Dying - Living>

Grief has amplitude. If we drop inside and really notice, we see that all change entails loss, and that grief accompanies all forms of change, even seemingly minor and insignificant ones. Emotional intelligence involves the capacity to integrate the constant and varied changes that life brings. The capacity to feel grief is correlated to the capacity to feel joy and vitality. Design that mediates individual and collective grief serves a critically needed social role. Designers, many of whom are masters of empathy, are well-positioned to take on the challenge of weaving griefwork into their conscious designing platform. As relational mediation and ethical situation, designing can take up the challenge of enacting the pain and vulnerability of an entire constellation of stakeholders. <Embracing - Releasing>

In my own experience, when I move from the stagnating, depressive state of denial “up” into anger, my life force flows once again. If you have experienced firsthand the transformative shift from the contraction and numbness of denial to the vitality of anger and the availability of acceptance then you may appreciate the value of emotional embodiment as a practice of daily life. You may appreciate how the darkness of grief can yield its own kind of exquisite pleasure. You may even have pondered possible ways that grief work might inform your design practice. How might your design practices invite and serve healthy experiential cycles of grief? How might your design practices aid and care for individuals in moving through the raw, temporal experiences of anger, bargaining and depression and free up the creative energies that come with both anger and acceptance?

 

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