by Heather Plett | Feb 18, 2015 | circle, Community, Leadership, Uncategorized
“The moment we commit ourselves to going on this journey, we start to encounter our three principal enemies: the voice of doubt and judgment (shutting down the open mind), the voice of cynicism (shutting down the open heart), and the voice of fear (shutting down the open will).” – Otto Sharmer
Lessons in colonialism and cultural relations
Recently I had the opportunity to facilitate a retreat for the staff and board members of a local non-profit. At the retreat, we played a game called Barnga, an inter-cultural learning game that gives people the opportunity to experience a little of what it feels like to be a “stranger in a strange land”.
To play Barnga, people sit at tables of four. Each table is given a simple set of rules and a deck of cards. After reading the rules, they begin to play a couple of practice rounds. Once they’re comfortable with the rules of play, they are instructed to play the rest of the game in silence.
After 15 or 20 minutes of playing in silence, the person who won the most tricks at each table is invited to move to another table. The person who won the least tricks moves to the table in the opposite direction. All of the rules sheets are removed from the tables.
The game begins once again, but what people don’t realize until they’ve played a round or two is that the rules are different at each able. At some tables, ace is high and at other tables it’s low. At one table, diamonds are trump, at another clubs are trump, and so on.
Newcomers (ie. immigrants) have now arrived in a place where they expect the rules to be the same, find out after making a few mistakes that they are in fact different, and have no shared language to figure out what they’re doing wrong. Around the room you can see the confusion and frustration begin to grow as people try to adapt to the new rules, and those at the table try to use hand gestures and other creative means to let them know what they’re doing wrong.
After another 15 or 20 minutes, the winners and losers move to new tables and the game begins again. This time, people are less surprised to find out there are different rules and more prepared to adapt and/or help newcomers adapt.
After playing for about 45 minutes, we gathered in a sharing circle to debrief about how the experience had been for people. Some shared how, even though they stayed at the table where the rules hadn’t changed, they began to doubt themselves when others insisted on playing with different rules. Some even chose to give up their own rules entirely, even though they hadn’t moved.
In the group of 20 people, there was one white male and 19 women of mixed races. What was revealing for all of us was what that male was brave enough to admit.
“I just realized what I’ve done,” he said. “I was so confident that I knew the rules of the game and that others didn’t that I took my own rules with me wherever I went and I enforced them regardless of how other people were playing.”
It should be stated that this man is a stay-at-home dad who volunteers his time on the board of a family resource centre. He is by no means the stereotypical, aggressive white male you might assume him to be. He is gracious and kind-hearted, and I applaud him for recognizing what he’d done.
What is equally interesting is that all of the women at the tables he moved to allowed him to enforce his set of rules. Whether they doubted themselves enough to not trust their own memory of the rules, or were peacekeepers who decided it was easier to adapt to someone else who felt stronger about the “right” way to do things, each of them acquiesced.
Without any ill intent on his part, this man inadvertently became the colonizer at each table he moved to. And without recognizing they were doing so, the women at those tables inadvertently allowed themselves to be colonized.
If we had played the game much longer, there may have been a growing realization among the women what was happening, and there might have even been a revolt. On the other hand, he might have simply been allowed to maintain his privilege and move around the room without being challenged.
Making the learning personal
Since that game at last week’s retreat, the universe has found multiple opportunities to reinforce this learning for me. I have been reminded more than once that, despite my best efforts not to do so, I, too, sometimes carry my rules with me and expect others to adapt.
Yesterday, these lessons came from multiple directions. In one case, I was challenged to consider the language I used in the blog post I shared yesterday. In writing about the race relations conversation I helped Rosanna Deerchild to host on Monday night, I mentioned that “we all felt like we’d been punched in the gut” when our city was labeled the “most racist in Canada”. Several people pointed out (and not all kindly) that I was making an assumption that my response to the article was an accurate depiction of how everyone felt. By doing so, I was carrying my rules with me and overlooking the feelings of the very people the article was about.
Not everyone felt like they’d been punched in the gut. Instead, many felt a sense of relief that these stories were finally coming out.
In the critique of my blog post, one person said that my comment about feeling punched in the gut made her feel punched in the gut. Another reflected that mine was a “settler’s narrative”. A third said that I was using “the same sensationalist BS as the Macleans article”.
I was mortified. In my best efforts to enter this conversation with humility and grace, I had inadvertently done the opposite of what I’d intended. Like the man in the Barnga game, I assumed that everyone was playing by the same set of rules.
I quickly edited my blog post to reflect the challenges I’d received, but the problem intensified when I realized that the Macleans journalist who wrote the original article (and who’d flown in for Monday’s gathering) was going to use that exact quote in a follow-up piece in this week’s magazine. Now not only was I opening myself to scrutiny on my blog, I could expect even harsher critique on a national scope.
I quickly sent her a note asking that she adjust the quote. She was on a flight home and by the time she landed, the article was on its way to print. I felt suddenly panicky and deeply ashamed. Fortunately, she was gracious enough to jump into action and she managed to get her editor to adjust the copy before it went to print.
Surviving a shame shitstorm
Last night, I went to bed feeling discouraged and defeated. On top of this challenge, I’d also received another fairly lengthy email about how I’ve let some people down in an entirely different circle, and I was feeling like all of my efforts were resulting in failure.
At 2 a.m., I woke in the middle of what Brene Brown calls a “shame shitstorm”. My mind was reeling with all of my failures. Despite my best efforts to create spaces for safe and authentic conversation, I was inadvertently stepping on toes and enforcing my own rules of engagement.
As one does in the middle of the night, I started second-guessing everything, especially what I’d done at the gathering on Monday night. Was I too bossy when I hosted the gathering? Did I claim space that wasn’t mine to claim? Were my efforts to help really micro-aggressions toward the very people I was trying to build bridges with? Should I just shut up and step out of the conversation?
By 3 a.m., I was ready to yank my blog post off the internet, step away into the shadows, and never again enter into these difficult conversations.
By 4 a.m., I’d managed to talk myself down off the ledge, opened myself to what I needed to learn from these challenges, and was ready to “step back into the arena”.
Some time after 4, I managed to fall back to sleep.
Moving on from here
This morning, in the light of a new day, I recognize this for what it is – an invitation for me to address my own shadow and deepen my own learning of how I carry my own rules with me.
If I am not willing to address the colonizer in me, how can I expect to host spaces where I invite others to do so?
Nobody said this would be easy. There will be more sleepless nights, more shame shitstorms, and more days when my best efforts are met with critique and even anger.
But, as I said in the closing circle on Monday night, I’m going to continue to live with an open heart, even when I don’t know the next right thing to do, and even when I’m criticized for my best efforts.
Because if I’m not willing to change, I have no right to expect others to do so.
by Heather Plett | Jan 5, 2015 | circle, women
Sanctuary.
A sacred place. A place of refuge. A place where wild beings are safe in their natural habitat.
That’s what I want to focus on this year. Sanctuary. For myself and for others.
The word came to me while I was working on the prompts for A Soulful Year. One of the prompts is an invitation (in mandala form) to consider what you are most longing for in the coming year. Half way through my intuitive writing on longing, I knew what I want most and what I most want to create for others.
I want sanctuary.
First, there’s the practical, bricks and mortar kind of sanctuary. I want a space where I can work, create, write, and host conversations. I want a place of refuge and quiet, where my work can blossom, and my wild heart can thrive in its natural habitat. I don’t know what that will look like yet, but it is becoming more and more imperative that I move my business out of our house (which is relatively small for a family of five and has very little dedicated space for my work). It may look like a whole new house for our family that includes a space that can be used as studio/classroom. Or it may look like a rented studio/classroom. I’m open to the right solution and the right space.
And then there is the kind of sanctuary that I want to create. For you, my dear clients, friends and readers.
In all that I do – my writing, workshops, classes, etc. – I want to create safe, sacred space. I want to create the kind of space, both with my words and with my physical presence, where it feels like you’ve come home, to safety, to belonging, and to your own wildness.
Because we are ALL longing for this. We are ALL in need of sanctuary.
We need places where our hearts can crack open without fear of judgement.
We need places where our tears can flow without hindrance.
We need places where we know we will be held.
We need sanctuary. We need refuge. We need the sacred.
Last year, while visiting Oakland, California, I wandered along the edge of a lake and then stopped to visit a beautiful church perched at the edge of the lake. I was struck by the fact that both of those places were considered “sanctuaries”. One was a bird sanctuary, where birds were safe from hunters and predators, and one was a religious sanctuary, where the weak and weary could find spiritual solace.
I want the best of both kinds of sanctuary.
I want a spiritual sanctuary, where questions are welcome, where the hungry are nourished, and where nobody is judged for whatever spiritual path their on. AND I want a wildlife sanctuary, where the wild in all of us can run free and unhindered; where we can soar through the sky, or float across the water; where we can build our nests and tend to our young without fear.
In 2015, I will seek and create sanctuary in my work, in my community, in my family, and in myself.
I will make it a priority to find the right space that will nourish me, my family, and my work.
I will make it a priority to create sanctuary for my clients, whether they come to me for coaching, attend my retreats or workshops, sit in circle with me, or participate in my online offerings. I will welcome their vulnerability and cheer on their wildness.
I will make it a priority to create sanctuary on this blog, offering you, my readers, a safe place where you can come when you are hungry for stories that leave you feeling less alone.
I will make it a priority to serve in my community, helping wherever I can to offer sanctuary to those who need it.
Tell me… what kind of sanctuary are you seeking? And how can I help you find it? I would love to hear in the comments.
Note: I’m beginning the year by creating sanctuary for women in Winnipeg. I’ll be hosting an inaugural Women’s Circle (that will hopefully become a regular gathering) on Thursday, January 15th at 7:00 p.m. It’s free and all are welcome. Find out more here.
by Heather Plett | Nov 14, 2014 | Uncategorized
Circle art, created on retreat last summer
Yesterday, as I contemplated whether I should revive/re-write the book I set aside over a year ago, a hit of inspiration came to me. “Circling Around to This”. That’s the new title for the book.
And this morning, this is what poured out…
I keep circling around to this.
This longing.
This gradual awakening.
This ache for that which has no words.
I keep circling around to this.
This desire for understanding.
This hunger for faith that fits my feminine shape.
This question that has no answer.
I keep circling and circling
And gradually I am finding
That the circling is the thing.
The circling is the ONLY thing.
This circling is what teaches me
What awakens me
What feeds me
What holds me in the darkness.
This circling is my path to the Divine,
My path to myself,
My path to you,
My path to all that is holy.
This circling is the ecstasy
The agony
The grief
The longing
The delight
And all that lies between.
This circling is the Goddess
Gaia
Earth
Womb
Life
Community
Me.
This circling is what’s shaking me
Out of complacency
Into the edge of my imagination
Out of fear
Into my primal courage.
I keep circling around to this
and the circle is guiding me home.
by Heather Plett | Nov 13, 2014 | Uncategorized
Not long ago, I taught a storytelling workshop in a corporate environment. As is the case with almost all of my workshops, we gathered the participants in circle and started by passing the talking piece and inviting each person to share one personal story. Since much of the work this organization is involved in is conservation-related, I asked them to share a story about something they enjoyed doing outdoors – either as a child or as an adult.
When the talking piece (a simple stone with the organization’s logo on it) had almost completed the circle, one of the last people to hold it said “Is this talking piece magic or something? I now know more about the people in this circle than I’ve known in all the years I’ve worked here!”
When the stone came around to me, I spoke to his comment. “No, it’s not magic in and of itself. It’s just an ordinary stone.” I said. “What IS magic, though, is the way that the talking piece invites us to listen in ways we don’t normally listen and speak in ways we don’t normally speak.”
When a talking piece goes around the circle, only the person holding it speaks. Everyone else is silent and attentive. Even though you may be tempted to interject – to offer advice, another version of the story, or your own story to top what’s been said – you must wait until the stone circles around to you before you can speak. By then, your need to interject into someone else’s story is usually silenced and you speak instead from your own story.
What results is a space where each story is heard in its entirety without crosstalk, correction, or advice.
That’s a powerful notion. It doesn’t happen often in our day-to-day conversations. Pay attention the next time you are chatting with your friend, partner, child, or parent. Do you listen to their WHOLE story without interrupting? Do you let them share sad moments without rushing to fix them? Do you honour their story with attentive listening?
Brene Brown teaches that our need to fix other people is our own “defense against vulnerability”. In other words, when you share something hard with me and I am quick to offer advice on how to resolve that hard thing, I’m doing so because I don’t want to be vulnerable, I don’t want to enter into that hard place with you, and I don’t want to admit that I don’t have all the answers.
Peter Block went even further in a talk I heard him give a few years ago. “Helping is an act of violence,” he said, and then went on to explain that our efforts to help other people are often unwelcome attempts to change or fix something they haven’t given us permission to change. By fixing a problem we haven’t been invited to fix, we are violating that person. Instead we must learn to sit with them in the problem while they work to find their way through.
“Speak with intention. Listen with attention.” That’s what The Circle Way teaches us. It doesn’t say “listen in order to fix” or “listen only until you have a chance to interject” or “speak with the purpose of outshining everyone”.
When I sit in a circle with a dozen other people, I need to be prepared to listen 12 times as much as I talk – even when I’m the teacher. And when I am listening, I need to do so in attentive silence, holding their story as sacred and valuable rather than as something that needs fixing.
The more I practice The Circle Way in my work, the more it is influencing the way I interact with people in my life. I don’t get it right all the time (just ask my daughters or husband!), but I’m a work in progress.
If you want to bring the circle into your own life, here are a few things to consider:
- The next time someone shares a story with you, whether in person or on Facebook, honour their story with intentional listening. Pretend they’re holding a talking piece and wait your turn.
- Do not offer advice unless it’s been specifically requested.
- Do not try to smooth over someone’s grief or pain with platitudes about how it will get better. Just be present in the moment with them.
- When you gather with friends or family, try passing a talking piece (anything can be used – I’ve used pens, leaves, sticks, and even a small statue in the spur of the moment) so that each person’s story can be heard.
Want to know more about The Circle Way? Ask me! I’m part of an international network involved in this work, and would be happy to talk about upcoming workshops that I and/or my colleagues are offering.
by Heather Plett | Nov 10, 2014 | Uncategorized
“We are not going in circles, we are going upwards. The path is a spiral; we have already climbed many steps.” — Hermann Hesse (Siddhartha)
**Trigger warning. What is shared in this post may be disturbing to some.**
I hardly know where to begin. I want to write a blog post about the complexity and beauty and challenge that this Fall has been for me, but some of the things going on in my heart and my mind are too big, too complicated, and too unresolved for words.
On the one hand, it has been beautiful beyond words. My work is growing and I am being stretched and challenged and invited into a deeper and deeper understanding of the core of what I teach. I’ve hosted a storytelling circle in a corporate environment, I’ve led women into the hills for a lament ritual, I’ve taught a workshop on women’s power at a gentle retreat for women, I’ve gathered people in a virtual openhearted writing circle, I’ve taught The Circle Way to church leaders, I’ve delivered a keynote speech on the labyrinth, the mandala, and The Circle Way as creative practices for self care at a women’s wellness workshop, I’ve hosted an online seminar on Lessons from the Labyrinth, and I’ve launched a course called The Spiral Path: A Woman’s Journey to Herself.
Wow. All of that in only 2 months. No wonder I’m waking up slowly this morning, with my head spinning full of the goodness of the people I’ve met, the joy of doing the work I love, the excitement of what is still to come, and the humble astonishment that people are trusting me to have enough wisdom to teach them these big and sometimes hard things.
But there’s been something else going on under the surface that is also worth talking about. Something that challenges all of this work I’ve been doing and, in the hardest moments, makes me want to throw up my hands in despair.
I have been triggered. Again and again. In sometimes familiar and sometimes surprising ways. And I have gotten angry. And I’ve wept. And I’ve curled up in a ball in my room not wanting to face the world.
It started with the vigil for Tina Fontaine, the young woman whose body was found in the Red River in my city. I wept for her innocence, wept for girls like her who continue to be exploited by sexual predators, and wept for the many murdered and missing Indigenous women in our country whose lives don’t matter to those in positions of political power in our country.
I took that weeping to the hills of South Dakota. I invited other women to walk the hills with me, weeping and holding ceremony for the grief we carry from centuries of wounded, exploited, abused, and silenced women. We resolved nothing, but we gave ourselves permission to feel the weight of the sadness. We clung to the belief that releasing our tears opens a doorway to our collective healing.
But then, not many weeks later, our country was rocked by a story of another kind – a story that was both dramatically different and yet eerily connected to the Tina Fontaine story.
One of the most famous media personalities in our country, a man we all wanted to trust because he was smart and savvy and asked intelligent questions and had even taken women’s studies in university, was fired from our public broadcaster. We were in collective shock and many of us rushed to defend his right to make choices in the bedroom that we ourselves wouldn’t make. But then the truth exploded in our faces. He had a long history of being a sexual predator, of perpetrating violent acts toward women (and some men) without their consent, of harassing young female employees and getting away with it, and of using his celebrity status to walk away from everything despicable act like the Teflon Don.
Suddenly the world erupted with hundreds, maybe thousands of stories of women who’d been subjected to the kind of treatment that this man was being accused of and had never reported it. (Check the hashtag #beenrapedneverreported on social media) Every time I checked my Facebook stream and nearly every time I turned on the radio there were stories of sexual harassment, date rape, abuse of power, etc.
Two things happened to me in the middle of all of this. Firstly, I became rather obsessed with reading everything that appeared, wanting to understand this horrible story of how someone so popular and well-loved had gotten away with such heinous behaviour, and wanting to hold space for all of the women who’d been treated horribly by this man and others.
Secondly, I was triggered.
A flood of memories came back to me and I was in the middle of my own stories. I remembered the times when, as a young woman, I worked in male-dominated environments (a trucking company and a construction company) where it was almost a daily occurrence to have a man lean over me at my desk, ostensibly to talk to me about what I was working on but obviously to look down my blouse. I remember how it felt to put up with this behaviour because I needed the money and because sometimes the bosses were the perpetrators and there was nowhere to turn to and nobody who would take me seriously.
And I remembered how it felt to be part of a sexual harassment investigation against one of the senior managers in the government department I worked in early in my career, how it seemed strange to be talking honestly about how he treated women to investigators when I’d looked up to him as my boss just weeks before, and then how it felt a little like we needed to carry some guilt when he died just months after being removed from his job.
And then came the worst memory of all.
I remembered how it felt to lay on my bed after a man had climbed through my window and was brandishing a pair of scissors over my head threatening to kill me if I didn’t have sex with him. And I remembered the violation of his hands and penis on my naked body and the smell of him stuck to my skin.
And then the accompanying memory of how it felt to have my body poked and prodded by a doctor and nurse looking for clues that might have been left behind by the perpetrator. And how they shamed me for having taken a bath to wash the stink of him off my skin before coming to the hospital, because I’d probably washed off all the evidence.
And how it felt to have the two male police officers tell me that I should think long and hard about whether I wanted to formally report this as a crime, because I would be dragged through the courts and probably be made to feel shame for sleeping with my window open on a stiflingly hot day and for living in a neighbourhood that decent girls shouldn’t live in. And then how it felt to sit in the back seat of their police cruiser and listen to them tell racist jokes while they drove me back to my apartment to gather my bedsheet and the scissors he’d brandished above my head as evidence.
And how it felt the next day, to have to give up the triathlon I’d been training for, because I was shaking from trauma and my neck was stiff from when he’d tried to choke me to death.
Yes, I was triggered. And I was angry.
I was angry that there are still so many sexual predators who prey on young women in their beds, in their workplaces, and in the universities they attend. I was angry that so many of them get away with it because the victims recognize that it will be harder to report it and live through what the justice system puts them through than to go away quietly and focus instead on their own healing.
I was angry at the abuse women were taking in social media because they dared to step forward and call out a sexual predator who happened to be a well-loved celebrity.
And then another story emerged and I got even more angry. Two politicians were suspended for harassment toward women.
And suddenly I felt overwhelmed with how much women still have to put up with, with how much my daughters are still at risk, and with the ways that harassment and sexual misconduct of all kinds is swept under the rug not only in trucking companies, but in the halls of power in our country.
That’s when I began to feel despair. Is anything really changing? Is there really any reason for hope?
We want to believe that women have more rights and protection than they once did, but is the patriarchy just going underground and becoming more insidious in its way of undermining women’s power?
Just a few weeks ago, I taught a workshop on women’s power, and now suddenly I found myself wondering whether any of that was really going to make any difference. Sure it’s good to help women step into their power, but will they really be able to access it if the patriarchy beats them down again and again and weakens them by making fun of them when they stand up for what they believe in and ignoring them when they’ve been violated?
Is all of my work just a bandaid solution when the real disease is so very big and insidious and powerfully abusive?
I don’t know the answer to this huge problem. I don’t know the remedy to my despair. I don’t know if all of the teaching I’ll ever do in my life will ever make one iota of difference in a world that seems to be getting worse every day.
I don’t know how to ensure that the world will be more gentle to my daughters than it was to me.
And that’s when I returned to the teachings of Margaret Wheatley. Four and a half years ago, I participated in a workshop she was teaching and at the time she was grappling with her own despair. She kept asking herself what her efforts were worth when the world seemed to be getting worse day after day. In the time since then, she’s written a book about just that, and she’s come to the conclusion that it is best to give up hope of making change, and simply commit to the work because it is the right thing to do.
“My great teachers these days are people who no longer need hope in order to do their work, even though their projects and organizations began with bright, hope-filled dreams. As ‘the blood-dimmed tide’ of greed, fear, and oppression drowns out their voices and washes away their good work, they become more committed to their work, not because it will succeed, but just because it is right for them to be doing it.”
I re-read that, and once again, I lift my head out of my despair and I turn toward the work that is calling me. Because it’s all I know how to do and it’s all that I have to cling to.
Because I believe that gathering people into circles is the best way to shift the imbalance of power in the world and to bring women and men into spaces where they can speak about hard things and find healing together.
Because I believe the labyrinth teaches us that the whole journey is important – the hard parts that bring us far from centre and the gentle parts that circle closer to Source.
Because I believe that storytelling has the capacity to shift us away from blame and shame into deeper listening and more openhearted understanding.
Because I believe that we each have to do our inner work of healing and growth so that we can show up as warriors in a world that needs us to be courageous.
Because I believe that even if none of this causes the world to shift, it will at least shift the world for me and the people I sit in circle with and that is what matters right now.
Because I know that I couldn’t have healed from the wounds that man inflicted on me in my bedroom if I hadn’t found the kind of personal practices (journal-writing, mandala-making, mindful wandering, etc.) that I now teach others to embrace.
“Let us walk away from that mountain of despair-inducing failures and focus instead on the people in front of us, our colleagues, communities, and families. Let us work together to embody the values that we treasure, and not worry about creating successful models that will transform other people. Let us focus on transforming ourselves to be little islands of good caring people, doing right work, assisting where we can, maintaining peace and sanity, people who have learned how to be gentle, decent, and brave as the dark ocean that has emerged continues to storm around us.” – Margaret Wheatley
And so I invite you, once again, to commit with me, to gather in circle for storytelling and tears and healing, to have real conversations about hard things without shame, and to heal from all of these wounds one tiny bit at a time.
Because it’s the right thing to do.
