What Does This Have to do with My Grief/Anxiety/Depression Anyways???

aka Dear Paul, Thank You For Your Excellent Question

“What does collective liberation have to do with personal healing? What does caring about the suffering of strangers, (or not), have to do with our own suffering? What does keeping our hearts open to injustice have to do with our mental health? Everything. It has everything to do with it.”

A few weeks ago, I sent you, my community, a letter commemorating Juneteenth - a celebration of the ‘official’ end of Black slavery in the United States, and a deeper reflection on freedom, justice, and the ongoing struggles for liberation that grip our world currently, particularly for people of colour.

I wrote about how people of colour continue to face systemic racism in so many places, and noted the disproportionate detention and mass arrests of immigrants currently occurring under US government orders.

Thank you to those of you who sent appreciation for this piece - I appreciate your appreciation!! Another response came swiftly as well though - an email from Paul (last name withheld to protect his identity, first name given because he kinda deserves it lol)… who was likely new to this community and my work:

“I'm disappointed that u have politicized this site and made for more depressing news the immigrants entered illegally and broke the law!! How dare u treat them the same as the slaves.”
Sincerely
Paul

I breathed into my belly. (I wasn’t comparing detained immigrants to slavery, Paul. I was simply pointing out that POC are still experiencing ongoing oppression. But rather than argue my points, I thought, ‘maybe this is an opportunity to plant a seed of awareness…’

I wrote back:
“Dear Paul,
Interesting. What do you think about immigrants entering, perhaps “illegally” out of desperation to save themselves and their children, fleeing places like the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan etc where there is active genocide and displacement happening, much of which is either directly or indirectly caused by American interference or influence?
With Care,
Josea”

He responded:
“All countries must have borders it is not fair for others who waited for many years To come to this country we r already in deep debt and cannot afford to support illegal immigrants. And what does this issue have to do with depression??

You have not made my grief any better by politicizing this topic.

I will disengage from your site

Paul.”

I exhaled. His response was predictable - some mundane talking points about borders and legalities. A repeating of rhetoric fed to him directly by media and, well, T. Rump and his cronies.

I helped him by “unsubscribing” him from my newsletter, because sometimes folks don’t know how to do that themselves, and I am not interested in pushing my views onto anyone. Seed planted, that is enough for now, Paul, I respect your Sovereignty and your desire to disengage.

But I LOVED his question, because it contains so much medicine. This piece is my response, which I hope that you, dear devoted reader, will find valuable.

"What does this have to do with my depression anyway?” aka “Dear Paul”

I realized that Paul had asked one of the most important questions of our time, although I’m sure he didn’t know it, and most likely wasn’t interested in my response. But his question was GOLD.

What does systemic racism, genocide, apartheid, segregation, slavery and all the many systems of colonization & oppression have to do with individual depression? What does collective liberation have to do with personal healing? What does caring about the suffering of strangers, (or not), have to do with our own suffering? What does keeping our hearts open to injustice have to do with our mental health?

Everything. It has everything to do with it.

The Pandemic of the Closed Heart

What many spiritual teachers and psychologists have observed is that there's a phenomenon that has become pandemic in North America and much of the Western world: the closed heart. Many Tibetan teachers who have come to the West to teach have seen it and named it explicitly, and they have also named the cure.

When our hearts close down as a protective mechanism against pain, we lose our connection not only to others' suffering, but to our own aliveness.

We become depressed not because we feel too much, but because we've learned to feel too little.

Contrastingly, if we feel too much but don’t have the tools, skills and community to process these feelings, we might find ourselves chronically anxious or struggling with our mental health as well.

Tibetan Buddhism offers us the practice of Tonglen - breathing in the suffering of others and breathing out compassion. This ancient practice recognizes something our modern psychology is finally beginning to understand: that the antidote to depression isn't self-protection, but connection. Not building higher walls around our hearts, but learning to keep them skillfully open.

When we work with our own grief - when we tend to the Third Gate of "The Sorrows of the World" that Francis Weller describes - we're not adding to our burden.

We're remembering what it means to be human. We're reconnecting with the web of life that we've never actually left, but we've forgotten how to feel.

As I continue to intentionally bear witness to the apartheid and genocide in Palestine, and other places, and to work with my own grief and the grief of my community around this, I am working a lot with Tonglen, Ho’opono’pono and other practices that we use with all types of grief.

Through this process of witnessing, learning and grieving, I have been profoundly moved by the cultural integrity that Palestinians maintain despite over 77 years of occupation. They have their own grief tending practices, which include sacred dance, wailing and simply being together.

Witnessing the amplified genocide of the past 21 months in Gaza has also profoundly deepened my understanding of the systematic colonization that has been used against cultures and peoples across the globe for hundreds of years. I'm seeing not only how it currently impacts Palestinians, but how it destroyed the cultural fabric of many of our own Ancestors in ways most people have not forgotten.

I think the primary reason why so many people are turning away from witnessing and being present with what is happening in Palestine is because it brings up our own unprocessed Ancestral trauma and pain. It also touches heavily into what Rachel Rice names as the Sixth Gate of Grief - The Harms We’ve Done.

When we witness the genocide of Palestinians as citizens of the colonial nations, we must recognize that we are, as citizens of countries who are sending weapons to Israel, complicit also in this horror. This is a lot to digest, and so most people turn away, partly because we don’t have the cultural support and practices to metabolize our grief.

And this is why I believe grief work is the most critical work of our time.

Listen - the story unfolding in Palestine is not new. What is new is that the Palestinians are broadcasting - through remarkably talented journalism and technology that has not been, until now, widely available - the systemic colonization process that has happened almost everywhere across the globe.

Here is a potent example:

The Palestinians are experiencing mass intentional starvation. This was also done to Indigenous people in North America, to the Irish, and to countless other people’s across place and time. Previously, Palestinian culture was built on deep support, connection, and collaboration within large extended families and communities. This was so strong that when a dear friend of mine whose father was from Gaza tried to adopt a Palestinian child, she couldn't.

There were no orphans in Gaza before October 7th.

If a parent died, the extended family would immediately take in the child, without question. This was simply the cultural & social fabric - no child would be left alone or without love.

Now, amidst mass starvation, families are forced to narrow their circle of care to immediate family members. There isn't even enough food for the immediate family, let alone the extended family. They still don’t leave children alone, but it is much harder to offer food to your extended family when your own children are starving.

Imagine having to choose between feeding your beloved neighbor and best friend, your sister or your daughter.

Imagine how this choice tears apart families and communities.

Now feel into your own family and community. Can you see how, perhaps, if your ancestors went through this, this trauma could have been passed down through your family line?

Can you see why we might be reluctant, collectively, to dive into deeper relationships of mutual care and support with our neighbours?

I believe that many of us are carrying this trauma from a time we no longer remember.

Stories of starvation, war and genocide weren't talked about or passed down because they were stories of pain. Some families had only one or two survivors. Many had none.

Without community, culture and ritual, the only way forward was to pull up your bootstraps and not look back.

But now I think we can see quite clearly that this isn’t working - that we are missing something integral to the fabric of life.

In order to survive, we are going to need to embed ourselves into communities of care, of culture and of connection. We are going to need to belong ourselves, and belong to each other again, within but also beyond our immediate families and communities.

It is time to step into our place in the world and in the natural order of things.

But let’s come back to Paul and his depression for a moment.

From a somatic perspective, depression often manifests as a collapsed nervous system - a body that has learned to shut down rather than stay present with difficult emotions.

When we practice staying present with our own grief while maintaining nervous system regulation, we build our capacity to feel without being overwhelmed. This capacity naturally extends outward.

Here's what the research on embodiment tells us: the more we're aware of our own bodies, the more active our insula becomes - the brain region associated with empathy and compassion.

The more we can feel ourselves, the more we can feel others.

The more we can be with our own pain without shutting down, the more we can be present with the pain of the world.

This isn't just a theory.

This is the lived experience of anyone who has done deep grief work.

It’s why a lot of folks who go through deep grief end up wanting to create spaces and support others who are grieving.

As we learn to pendulate between feeling and resourcing, between opening and grounding, we discover something remarkable: our capacity for joy expands in direct proportion to our capacity for sorrow.

Our ability to love deepens as our willingness to grieve increases.

The Personal Is Collective, The Collective Is Personal

Paul was frustrated that I had "politicized" grief. Wondering what collective liberation had to do with his depression, he was experiencing exactly what happens when we try to heal ourselves in isolation from the world we live in.

He was asking me to provide him with tools for personal healing while he remained willfully blind to the suffering around him. He wanted to feel better without feeling more.

But here's what we know from the wisdom of indigenous cultures and the growing understanding of trauma-informed healing: we cannot heal ourselves apart from healing our relationships - to each other, to the land, to justice, to truth.

The personal is always collective, and the collective is always personal.

When we close our hearts to the suffering of immigrants fleeing genocide, we close our hearts to our own refugee parts - the aspects of ourselves that have fled from pain, that are seeking safety, that are desperate for welcome.

When we refuse to feel the reality of systemic racism, we numb ourselves to our own experiences (and those of our Ancestors) of being excluded, marginalized, or dehumanized.

When we turn away from collective grief, we lose access to collective joy.

Depression, in many cases, is what happens when we try to solve the unsolvable problem of being human while remaining disconnected from our humanity.

It's what occurs when we attempt to heal our hearts while keeping them closed to the very experiences that could heal them.

The Sacred Reciprocity of Feeling

In Tonglen practice, we visualize taking in the pain of others with every in-breath and sending out peace or compassion on the exhale.

In the process, we become liberated from age-old patterns of selfishness. This isn't spiritual bypassing or masochistic self-sacrifice. It's recognition of a fundamental truth: our wellbeing and the wellbeing of others are not separate issues.

When the man asked what caring about detained immigrants had to do with his depression, he was asking the wrong question.

The right question is: How can I heal my depression while remaining disconnected from my capacity for compassion? How can I open my heart to my own pain while keeping it closed to others'? How can I be fully alive while insisting that the suffering around me is not my concern?

The answer is: you can't. Not really. Not sustainably. Not in a way that leads to genuine freedom rather than just temporary relief.

The Revolutionary Act of Staying Open

Working with our personal grief while remaining connected to collective grief is perhaps the most revolutionary act we can undertake in a culture that profits from our numbness.

When we learn to feel our own pain without shutting down, we become dangerous to systems that depend on our compliance.

When we stay open to others' suffering without being overwhelmed, we become a threat to structures that require our disconnection.

This is why grief work is inherently political. Not because we're trying to "politicize" suffering, but because systems of oppression depend on our inability to feel - both our own pain and each other's.

They require us to be so overwhelmed by our personal struggles that we cannot attend to collective ones, or so shut down that we cannot feel either.

The practice of skillful grieving - learning to feel fully while maintaining nervous system regulation, building community containers that can hold intense emotion, staying connected to our bodies and our hearts even in the face of overwhelming injustice - these are not just healing practices.

They are practices of resistance.

Building Capacity for the World We Need

When we work with our grief using somatic tools like pendulation and resourcing, when we learn to feel our feelings without being destroyed by them, when we build community containers that can hold both our personal pain and our collective sorrow, we're not just healing ourselves.

We're building the infrastructure for the world we need.

We're developing the emotional and spiritual capacity to face the climate crisis without going into freeze/immobility/depression.

We're learning to respond to injustice with fierce love rather than reactive rage or protective numbness.

We're practicing staying present with the full catastrophe of being human in these times while remaining grounded in our bodies and connected to our purpose.

This capacity - to feel deeply without being overwhelmed, to act courageously without burning out, to love fiercely without being destroyed by the pain of loving in a broken world - this is exactly what these times demand of us.

“Take heart, mi estimados, you were born for these times…” Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes

You Can Start Right Here 💛

Take heart - if it all feels like too much when you look outside yourself, start right here. Start with yourself and your own heart, for sure. Just remember that is not the ending, but only the beginning.

As we heal our own hearts through tending our grief, something beautiful and inevitable happens: our circle of care naturally expands. We start with our own pain, learning to be present with it, to resource ourselves when we're overwhelmed, to find the support we need to stay present rather than shut down.

Then we extend this presence to those closest to us - family, friends, chosen family. We learn to companion others in their grief without trying to fix them, to hold space for difficult emotions without being overwhelmed by them.

But if we're truly healing, if we're truly opening, our hearts don't stop there. They keep expanding. We begin to feel for those we've never met but whose stories touch us. We develop capacity for the grief of communities we're not part of but whose suffering we can no longer ignore. We start to feel the pain of the land, the sorrow of other species, the weight of systems that cause harm.

This isn't because we're "bleeding hearts" or "too sensitive." It's because we're becoming fully human. It's because our hearts are remembering their true size, which is large enough to hold it all.

The Question Answered

So what does collective liberation have to do with your depression, Paul? What does caring about detained immigrants or people’s and cultures being genocided have to do with your personal healing?

What does staying open to the suffering of others have to do with your own wellbeing?

It has everything to do with it because you are not separate from the world you live in. Your heart is not separate from the hearts around you. Your healing is not separate from the healing our world desperately needs.

When you close your heart to others' suffering, you close it to your own aliveness. When you numb yourself to injustice, you numb yourself to joy.

When you refuse to feel the pain of the world, you lose access to the love that wants to move through you.

But when you learn to work skillfully with your own grief, when you build capacity to feel deeply without being overwhelmed, when you stay connected to your body and your heart even in difficult times, something remarkable happens: you become part of the healing. You become someone who can hold space for others' pain, who can respond to crises with wisdom rather than reactivity, who can love courageously in the face of an uncertain world.

Your depression isn't separate from the world's oppression. Your healing isn't separate from the world's healing. The grief you carry for your own losses isn't separate from the grief that needs to be felt for all we've lost and are losing together.

We are all connected.

This isn't just a spiritual platitude - it's a somatic reality, a psychological truth, and an ecological fact.

The question isn't whether caring about others' suffering has anything to do with your depression. The question is whether you're willing to let your healing contribute to the healing our world so desperately needs.

The answer will determine not just the trajectory of your own recovery, but the kind of world we're able to create together. And in these times, that answer matters more than we can possibly imagine.

---

"The heart that stays open (with skill, tools & support!!!) in the face of suffering doesn't become more wounded - it becomes more vast. Large enough to hold it all. Strong enough to transform it. Wise enough to know that this transformation is the work we came here to do."