The Weight of the World is Love

Last year my partner Jonathan participated in a powerful ceremony called ‘The Blanket Exercise.’

The Blanket Exercise is not a lecture, not a podcast, not an article, not a video. It’s a ceremony, something you participate in. You cannot watch it from the outside, as a casual observer. You have to step into the experience, take on a role, and interact with the other people in the room. By the time you are done, the intensity of what you have seen and heard lives in your body, in your heart, and in your cells. You are not the same person you were before the ceremony-the alchemy has done its work.

The Blanket Exercise emerged during the years of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that happened in Canada, “for the child taken, for the parent left behind.” The Commission was a comprehensive response to the abuse inflicted on Indigenous peoples through the Canadian residential school system, and the harmful legacy of those institutions. The final report of the Commission in 2015 described these acts of the Canadian government as “cultural genocide.”

Over the last fifteen years, the Aboriginal Rights Coalition worked with Indigenous elders and teachers to develop an interactive way of learning the history of this genocide, which most Canadians are never taught. The Blanket Exercise was the result; it has since been offered thousands of times, in schools, communities, gatherings of all kinds.

Sitting with my family in Florida a few nights ago, Jonathan shared his experience of this ceremony. His voice changed, as soon as he began speaking about it: it had more depth to it, more life, more feeling. As we listened to him, we changed too: we sat up in our chairs, gave him our full attention, and started breathing more deeply.

At the end of Jonathan’s story, there was a deep silence in the room. My ninety five year old aunt bowed her head, closed her eyes. She said, very softly, “So much terrible suffering…” We were there, with her, as she spoke, sinking into the feelings we were all sharing in that moment.

Jonathan got nervous then, and started to make a joke about how much unhappiness his story had brought us. I lifted my hand up and said to him, softly, “Stop. Give us space to be with this. It really matters.”

So we sat there and continued to feel the grief, the tenderness, the regret, the sorrow, for all of the terrible cruelty and the immensity of the suffering, that is a part of our human history. It felt to me like a deep moment of prayer, a sacred moment in which we were willing to drop everything and open our hearts to the brutal truth of what actually happened to these people. Feeling this, taking it in, is really the whole point of the Blanket Exercise. What people are asked at the end of the ceremony is this: “You didn’t know about this before. Now that you do know, what will you do?”

Our knowing is so different, when we learn in this way. When we take things in with our bodies, when we feel things deeply, our knowing does not let us slide back into numbness and denial. To know in this way is not easy. If we try to do it alone, we’ll probably fail. We need to share our feelings with each other—they are too deep and too intense to bear on our own. Our hearts feel as if they will crack and break, under the burden of the truth.

Sitting at the kitchen table in Florida, at my aunt’s house, opening to our sorrow together, I felt a new possibility come very softly into the room. This kind of sharing is what my family never did together, this is what I didn’t spend enough time doing with my friends and colleagues. We talked a lot about the world, but we never allowed ourselves to drop into our true feelings about what was going on. Sharing our grief, our sorrow, our anger, our helplessness, is such a simple act. It brings us to our knees together, in a profound acknowledgment of our shared humanity. And of our love. What I felt that night, running through everything else in my family’s kitchen, was the frequency of love.

Making room for these feelings is not just a therapeutic moment; it’s so much more than that. Connecting with each other on this level allows us to open to the truth of what we are a part of. It is an initiation that delivers us into a wider circle of caring, a caring that is not just momentary and sporadic. It’s only this deeper caring that can move us to take action that is effective, skillful and inspired. It’s only this kind of love that allows us to keep going, to not give up, even when it feels like so much is against us.

for the burden of life
is love,
but we carry the weight
wearily,
and so must rest
in the arms of love
at last,
must rest in the arms
of love.

–‘The Weight of the World is Love,’ Allen Ginsberg

 

with love,
Shayla