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Today along with my most recent drawing I’m posting some quotes from the book: The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan because on one of the Radical Compassion Challenge podcasts hosted by Tara Brach, actress Sandra Oh referred to The Joy Luck Club film, which inspired part of this drawing. I have been drawing while listening to the podcasts, and even though multitasking may not be such a great idea, it saved me time and I got to listen to the podcasts twice. Although I gave the book away a while ago during a recycling spree I re-watched the movie on you tube and realised that even though the book and film are about Chinese women’s experiences, the basic themes of oppression, sexism and power dynamics in marriages, immigration and communication barriers,  generational transmission of patterns and customs and the power of love and story to connect and create transformation and identity shifts, are relevant to many cultures.

“That is the way it is with a wound. The wound begins to close in on itself, to protect what is hurting so much. And once it is closed, you no longer see what is underneath, what started the pain.”

“Because sometimes that is the only way to remember what is in your bones. You must peel off your skin, and that of your mother, and her mother. Until there is nothing. No scar, no skin, no flesh.”

“But now that I am old, moving every year closer to the end of my life, I also feel closer to the beginning. And I remember everything that happened that day because it has happened many times in my life. The same innocence, trust, and restlessness; the wonder, fear, and loneliness. How I lost myself.”

“After the gold was removed from my body I felt lighter, more free. They say this is what happens if you lack metal. You begin to think as an independent person.”

“This house was built too steep, and a bad wind from the top blows all your strength back down the hill. So you can never get ahead. You are always rolling backward.”

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From A Brave and Startling Truth by Maya Angelou

When we come to it
We, this people, on this minuscule and kithless globe
Who reach daily for the bomb, the blade and the dagger
Yet who petition in the dark for tokens of peace
We, this people on this mote of matter
In whose mouths abide cankerous words
Which challenge our very existence
Yet out of those same mouths
Come songs of such exquisite sweetness
That the heart falters in its labor
And the body is quieted into awe………

Over the weekend I watched 1917, starring George MacKay and Dean-Charles Chapman, directed by Sam Mendes.  From the beginning of the film we are immersed into the horrors and stench of the trenches and battlefields of northern France as we follow two British soldiers venture into enemy territory in search of a brother and in order to deliver a message to their fellow troops to halt a potentially disastrous attack against the Germans in 1917. They move breathlessly through chaos from one unchartered terrain to another. They move against, exhaustion and time in a ‘hell created on earth’ terrain of a body strewn carnage, horse carcasses, vultures and rodents feasting on the dead, burnt down villages and uprooted trees, collapsing tunnels, barbed wire, and lots of mud and filth.

Everywhere they go life has been violently interfered with and they are faced with scenes of destruction –  a cherry tree orchard destroyed. a bombed out church, a bridge that has collapsed,  deserted houses. Domesticity and the rhythms of daily life and nature have been violently disrupted. The farm house they stop for a while has been looted, a doll is lying in the soot, the milk is still fresh in the pale, one lonely cow has escaped massacre, an enemy helicopter crashes into the yard. They rescue the enemy soldier from the flames, who then stabs the soldier tending him. The youth’s last words are of love for his family and mother.

Watching the film one wonders how humans can create such devastation and chaos while at the same time be capable of deep caring, compassion, altruism, courage and love till the end. There are many tripwire moments when we the viewers are startled within the safety of our seats, but in the more low key moments of the film we witness love, compassion and altruism in the bleakest of circumstances. In this Homeric odyssey the surviving soldier moves alone in the night through a purgatorial world. When he seeks shelter from the enemy in a basement he meets the only survivor, a young woman who has gotten attached to a stranger’s baby and is trying to keep it alive in the midst of terror and lack. This war film, which does not focus on battle scenes, but rather on the aftermath and the cost in human lives, the waste, the destruction of the natural world, the exhaustion, the grief and loss of hope, made me think that the opposite of war is not peace, but love and compassion, There is an interlude where a soldier sings a hauntingly beautiful song the Wayfaring Stranger. At that point in the midst of chaos and uncertainty we experience peace, a sense of communion and a glimpse of what could be.

Maya Angelou’s poem A Brave and Startling Truth comes to mind:

We, this people, on this small and drifting planet
Whose hands can strike with such abandon
That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living
Yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness

The film has at some level influenced the ink drawing posted here, but at a deeper level I already carried these images within my psyche. We are exposed to discourse, narratives, images and films about wars and conflict. We only need to look at the history of our own country to get an idea of how much historical violence, wounding and unspoken suffering has occurred over the centuries. If we then consider how this cultural and collective trauma is tightly interconnected with our individual and familial legacies we can understand that the repercussions of this experience manifest as residual energy in our bodies, as symptoms, as familial and societal narratives and practices, which are passed down through generations until people decide to acknowledge, break the silence and heal. One of the speakers of the Online Collective Trauma summit, Dr Scilla Elworthy, believes that personal and collective trauma drives war and that the cycle of violence in many places where there is conflict will only stop through personal and collective acknowledgement, integration of events and healing.

Read the whole poem here

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A little on compassion

“If we hope to go anywhere or develop ourselves in any way, we can only step from where we are standing. If we don’t really know where we are standing… We may only go in circles…”  Jon Kabat Zinn,

…the waking up story involves hitting one’s own personal suffering and the suffering of the system…Tara Brach

I was making this drawing when I logged into the Radical Compassion Challenge series hosted by Tara Brach and I realised I was working on some of the ideas and experiences discussed in the podcast.   In this podcast, in response to Dan Siegel’s personal account of how he stepped out of medical school for a period of time because his clinical experience proved traumatizing and disappointing due to his teachers and supervisors’ inability to have mindsight, and also, feel empathic concern for their students and patients’ subjective experience, Tara Brach commented that the suffering of society can block institutions from feeling compassion and exhibiting mindsight. She also added that the waking up story involves hitting one’s own personal suffering and the suffering of the system, which completely resonated with me.

The discussion evolved around how empathic concern could be viewed as a gateway to compassion, which involves holding another’s suffering and taking action, even if only to bear witness. In order to be able to feel compassion, differentiation with the one suffering is required, so as to be able to remain emotionally present and not to shut down or over identify with the other person and become overwhelmed. We are wired to simulate other people’s physiological and emotional states. The bodily state of another can come up through the right anterior insular and the vagus nerve and make a map in our brain of what is taking place in the other person’s body. It is our medial prefrontal cortex that allows us to hold a representation of the other person without becoming overwhelmed. Our increased capacity to be mindfully aware of our bodily experience activates our capacity to attune to others, which increases our capacity for compassion. Dan Siegel says that we live inside each other and we activate each other. Integration and healthy differentiation prevent our merging with the other. However, excessive differentiation can lead to a sense of separateness and disconnection even from Nature and it is time for us to wake up from ‘the weird slumber of the delusion of a separate self’.

Compassion seems to be inherently based on our awareness at some level or other of the interdependence of all living things and of our being part of an infinite whole which we call the Universe.  Kristin Neff writes: ‘A human being is part of the whole, called by us “Universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty’ (from The Einstein Papers, cited in Kristin Neff,  Self-Compassion: Stop Beating Yourself Up and Leave Insecurity Behind)

We are wired for compassion. It is part of our human make up even if there seems to be a deficit in the world at the moment. Compassion, kindness and caring for others serve evolutionary purposes. If we had no capacity to care for another and to feel and display compassion we would probably have already become extinct. Jon Kabat Zinn says compassion is already there. It is a core universal emotion. Our task is to uncover and realize it.  In this short video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7E7FBSlB1U  he refers to this, and like Kristin Neff, he quotes Einstein who believed that we liberate ourselves from false beliefs about reality and who we are through broadening our circle of compassion.