120 Seconds
The first installment of The Great Barrington Project begins next week. Right now -at this moment _ I'm surprisingly calm about it. It will be whatever it's going to be.
Last weekend, I had a beautiful experience that solidified how important it is to truly see and be seen. I co-facilitated a workshop at a weekend wellness retreat in Connecticut. It was on journal writing as a tool for vulnerability. We had a series of writing prompts, discussion and exercises around the topic of vulnerability. One of the exercises was to pair off with someone else in the group of 36 and silently stare in each other's eyes for two minutes. The only instruction was to try and let go of ideas of race. gender etc and see the other person as someone who wants happiness and love like all of us, even if they take different forms from our own ideas of love/happiness. Just two minutes. After two minutes, there was so much emotion in the room - people were affected in profound ways. I won't of course share what was discussed but being seen, truly seen, was seismic for everyone.
Now I will be seen and see for many hours over the next week. I'm okay with being seen and with being still, but I am a bit nervous about negative comments. Discussion of race is polarizing and for all the positive reactions to my work there are also some vocal negative ones. When I write the Huffpost article about growing up in Great Barrington, the editor told me to brace myself for the backlash and he was right. They were vicious, and I stopped reading them after about 20 ( there were almost 500 before they deleted some of the nastiest ones) after my friends told me to stop. That said, I also got SO many private messages and emails and texts etc, that said - "thank you for telling my story. I feel seen."
That's what this project has been about - looking deeper at the ways we bring associations and assumptions into play when we look at each other. The Great Barrington Project is most definitely about Blackness, but it's also about the ways we all see each other. It's also about connecting to the uneasiness when we realize bias is a part of our conditioning. Change and growth can't happen without some discomfort, that's a fact. But we can also flip the narrative that tells us we're bad when we notice these behaviors and realize awareness is the crucial first step in changing patterns.
My first silent meditation retreat, about twelve years ago, was at Insight Mediation Society and I was very lucky to have Sharon Salzberg as one of the instructors for that week. I'd never even meditated before, but had impulsively decided this was what I needed in my life. I was right. I learned to make a connection to emotions in my body and understand that" feeling good " wasn't always good, because our comfort zone ( what is familiar ) could be place of discomfort. So being vulnerable, sitting with emotions instead of escaping them, all of that can and often does feel uncomfortable. I want that kind of good discomfort to happen.
I didn't expect this update to go off in all these directions but I'm going to keep it anyway. I am excited about the speakers for the May 22 event and will update in a couple days about them - some are still being confirmed. This a day to "hear," not ask or question, the voices of Black people living in the Berkshires. I hope you will come and we can all be slightly uncomfortable together.