Healing Severed Belonging
“Our desperate efforts to enhance and protect this fragile self have caused an unprecedented degree of severed belonging at all levels in our society. In our attempt to dominate the natural world, we have separated ourselves from the earth. In our efforts to prove and defend ourselves, we have separated from each other. Managing life from our mental control towers, we have separated ourselves from our bodies and hearts.”
Tara Brach, Awakening from the Trance of Unworthiness
When I wrote my master’s thesis on the topic of Severed Belonging, I had no idea that years later I would encounter the concept of Re-emplacement as outlined in Craig Chalquist’s Terrapsychology theory as its antidote. The more I studied European history, the more I realized how fraught with disease, displacement, tragedy, war, and tyrrany it was. As the European populations spilled out into and colonized the rest of the world, they brought with them a sense of entitlement and disconnection, and a conquering mentality that can only be described as viral. Many of the things that happened to the ordinary people of Europe were also carried out in the lands the Europeans and the English would later come to dominate. The uprootedness of our Severed Belonging goes very deep, and very far back. Indeed, in the early 1800s Jefferson wrote about this land loss with regard to natives, and envisioned how to bring it about:
“To promote this disposition to exchange lands, which they have to spare and we want, for necessaries, which we have to spare and they want, we shall push our trading uses, and be glad to see the good and influential individuals among them run in debt, because we observe that when these debts get beyond what the individuals can pay, they become willing to lop them off by a cession of lands….”
Today, we witness with the credit crisis, loss of homes, increased medical bills, and high unemployment rates newer forms of this disease, and we can see how it is still very much alive. No amount of purchasing power, entertainment, or distraction seems to fill the void.
So how do we heal from this wounding, and how do we heal from the wounding we have brought to others as a result of our woundedness? This core sense of Earthgrief we experience must first be recognized and acknowledged. We need to know what we are grieving and why. It is a loss, the same as any other great loss, and it needs sacred and communal healing in circles, with communication from the heart.
I have developed a new workshop based on practices of Re-emplacement, because when we connect again with our land and with others, we will begin to see local solutions to the problems of displacement and Earthgrief. In my counseling work, I have seen the power individuals have of healing and solving their problems when given a good and supportive atmosphere. There is no one blanket answer–the answers that emerge are very specific to individuals and places. Practices that re-engage us are the necessary first work in healing Severed Belonging. These workshops have very specific practices around contemplation, sacred reading, re-emplacement writing, and group processing, all designed to slow us down and help us harmonize with one another and the spirit of the place we are in. All of our workshops have elements of these practices in them, and soon workshops specifically designed around re-emplacement will be posted to the website.
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