Camille Sapara Barton: Tending grief and rebuilding our capacities to sense more deeply (Ep429)

Written By kamea chayne
“We haven’t really got practices that help us to be with discomfort and grow with it in a way that allows us to still be present and in alignment under pressure. That’s one of the beautiful things that grief tending can do — is reconnect us to sensing and feeling.”
— Camille S. Barton

What does it mean to sit with and tend to our grief as a regular practice rather than something to “get over” — so we can continue to sense and feel more deeply? How do we stay well amidst info overload and the increasingly fast pace of modernity — so we can contribute sustainably in ways that align with our values? How can we maintain our capacities to care for those we have responsibilities for and find things that bring us a bit more ease?

In this episode, Camille Sapara Barton invites us to dream with cultures of care and sense into embodied ways of being with our grief — both personally and with our communities.

Join us as we explore the nuances of confronting phone and social media addiction while continuing to stay informed about the world; the relationship between numbing for survival and sensing deeply as fuel for activation; the ways that capitalism and dominant cultures have molded people into becoming mechanized, “productive,” and obedient members of society — suppressing our attunement to our bodies and states of being — and more.

How might we engage in practices such as honoring our ancestors or creating altars that support a reconnection with our bodies, lands, and sensorial ways of knowing and healing?

We invite you to…

 

About our guest:

Camille Sapara Barton is a writer, artist and somatic practitioner, dedicated to creating networks of care and liveable futures. Rooted in Black feminism, ecology and harm reduction, Camille uses creativity, alongside embodied practices, to create culture change in fields ranging from psychedelic assisted therapy to arts education. Their debut book, Tending Grief: Embodied Rituals for Holding Our Sorrow and Growing Cultures of Care in Community, was published in April 2024 by North Atlantic Books.

Artistic credits:

Dive deeper:

Expand your lenses:

 
 
 

To support our show and tap into our extended and bonus episodes, join us on Patreon today!

 

episode transcript

Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Camille Barton: I sense that if we're going to experience the kind of culture change that's necessary to have us be in the right relationship with the web of life again, a core component is going to be us regaining our ability to sense and feel. And by us, I mean people living in the West and socialized in the West. But I mean, it's more and more of a globalized issue, as Western Universalism has spread particularly among folks in the West.

I think we've been conditioned to be quite numb and unable to sense very much at all a lot of the time. And a big part of that is industrialization, the ways our bodies have been increasingly mechanized to be more and more like machines. Silvia Federici has impactful writing about this in her book, Beyond the Periphery of the Skin where she talks about in early industrialization, some of the techniques that factory owners would use to condition their workers to obey, even if that meant they were experiencing pain. They were meant to still obey orders or actions that were detrimental to their body, to condition them to follow orders and to essentially override and bypass the needs that were coming up for them.

And I think that's just evolved to where we are now. So many of us have internalised capitalism, whether it's feeling guilty because we're not being productive enough, or that we get sick, or we are having a mental health experience that means we can't tend to our responsibilities in the way that we are told makes us a useful person. So I think that's a huge part of the culture of numbing, and enforced productivity. But with that has come this real inability to often sense what's going on with us. And if we do uncomfortably sense things, the tendency is often to numb it, to bypass it, to distract ourselves, or as a fantastic survival strategy, to find the silver lining, to count our blessings and move on.

We haven't got practices currently that help us to be with discomfort and grow with it and around it in a way that allows us to still be present and in alignment under pressure. And I think that one of the beautiful things that grief tending can do is reconnect us to sensing and feeling.

With somatics combined with grief tending, there’s a lot of possibilities to resource ourselves as we dip into sensations and emotions that may feel more challenging because we don't have a lot of space to practice being with them.

But over time, if we do that, if we continue coming back to that, dipping into the discomfort, dipping into the grief, and coming out, I think we can build more bandwidth to be with these sensations over time so that we move out of this kind of binary of numbing or being completely flooded by emotion, which then can often lead to more numbing, or just needing to get out of that because it's too much.

I'm interested in the space in between. Like, what does it look like to be able to rebuild that capacity to sense and feel so we can understand ourselves more, but also how we can be in the right relationship with each other? Because if we can't even feel ourselves, how are we going to coexist with others? How are we going to co-sense with the earth and the land and the ecosystems we're a part of that, in my body anyway, feel like they're screaming out for attention and care and shifts in our behavior?

So, although grief is a focus, to me it feels like it's tied into a much bigger project of reclaiming sensation and ways of being alive and in the right relationship in all capacities so that we can live in a different way and a way that hopefully is much more supportive for us all to live lives.

Kamea Chayne: And it certainly doesn't help that I feel like in the context of the dominant Western culture, intellectual knowledge and the mode of thinking seem to be valued disproportionately over intuitive wisdom and sensorial wisdom, where the latter is often suppressed or even gaslit in favor of intellectual knowledge, which also isn't created in a vacuum because broader sociopolitical cultural power structures oftentimes shape it.

I wonder what else you might have to add to this sort of suppression and gaslighting—systemic gaslighting—where I feel like a lot of our bodies know and can sense that things don't feel right. And yet at the same time, we're told otherwise. We're told that we should be grateful for how things are and that things are better than they ever have been before, but it's like, what measurements are you using for that gauge? And how about not quantifiable measures like our senses and how we're feeling?

Camille Barton: Yeah, what comes to mind when I was just hearing you speak to that is just the mental health paradigm in general, where there's so much pathology, so much kind of labeling and blaming of individuals. The World Health Organization (I was just reading actually, finding a reference for a piece I was writing) was citing that there's been a 25 percent increase in depression and anxiety pretty much globally since the pandemic. And this came out in 2022. So I don't know what the stats are now, but at least anecdotally from people in my life, I would say it's the same if not worse since then. So it's very clear that there are people that are going through it.

But instead of the lens in which we speak about that or think about mental health being systemic, like what's happening in our environmental conditions that could be causing said anxiety and depression, be causing people to feel hopeless and like they're in a spiral and stuck in a situation they can't get out of, we're rarely asking those questions. And by we, I mean people in positions of power, state actors.

There's so much investment in this model of the pathology of saying ‘you’ as an individual, there's something wrong with ‘you’ and your brain chemistry — as it has nothing to do with these social conditions of harm, genocide, racism, and ableism.

And so I think there is so much that is woven into creating this theoretical knowledge base that justifies and reinforces the system as it exists, instead of acknowledging how entangled we are with each other and how much our body-minds are impacted by our environment and the harm that's taking place. Like sure, my body is physically safe right now and I'm recording this with you.

But I'm also deeply, deeply impacted by the genocides happening in Palestine, in Sudan what's happening in Congo. I feel that in my body. We’re deeply connected, but because of this fixation on theory and making out that we're all just having these individualized problems and there's no commonality, it's sometimes difficult for people, I guess, to feel permission to see the systemic connections rather than blame themselves or internalize that there's something wrong with us as individuals having very understandable responses to these incredibly harmful systems.

Kamea Chayne: And when we take a pulse on the state of the world today, you start talking about numbing. I think there's a lot of violence that has become normalized and therefore even kind of invisibilized. And so there already has been a lot of desensitization going on, I think.

At the same time, we're also at a time when the technologies of recording and info-sharing have become a lot more democratized. So a lot of such violence, as you mentioned, the genocides in Palestine, Congo, Sudan, and so on, is being broadcasted and presented live in front of our bare eyes every single day, especially for a lot of us who choose not to tune out and who choose to be witnesses of what is happening.

And that can be very difficult to process, especially for people who are sensitive and do feel things very deeply. So I'm curious to hear you explore the fine lines of both ends of allowing ourselves to feel deeply, to feel rage, to cry, to break down, and then the numbing to part of that pain to even survive, especially for people who physically cannot opt out of their oppressive circumstances and have to kind of find solace in the peripheries, or even dissociate as a coping mechanism. So what does it mean to kind of balance staying deeply attuned to the violence of modernity while also honoring rest and joy as resistance?

Camille Barton: Something I feel is important is that all of our responses, our stress responses, can be supportive in certain situations. So I don't think there's anything wrong per se with dissociation or numbing. Like sometimes that is a supportive response. Sometimes that keeps us safe. Sometimes that keeps us alive.

The issue I find with it is when that becomes the normative default state and we don't understand that we're there all the time. I think that's the difference for me. I think when people are consciously like, I can't deal with this right now, I'm gonna check out, there's an awareness that that's happening and there's some agency over that, which suggests hopefully, that people might have strategies to also come out of that state if and when needed.

So I think for me, it's about being able to move between states and have the capacity and the skill to do that, which I know a lot of people don't have right now. A lot of people don't have that right now, but I hope that that's gonna change and is already changing with the socialization of political somatics and awareness of the nervous system, which are hopefully creating a bit more literacy around what it could look like to move between states more consciously. I think also with a lot of the context people have to navigate, whether it's work or just, you know, making enough money to meet your needs.

There are many situations that we wouldn't choose to be in, like capitalism and modernity can be quite coercive. So there's lots of compromises we're having to make. And sometimes choosing to disconnect or numb in those environments is the most supportive or adaptive thing. Then what happens when you come home or you come to somewhere where you feel a relative level of safety?

Is there an ability to move into a different state more towards relaxation that allows the system to soften, that allows there to be some kind of recovery from that state that can be helpful, but over time, if it's not moved out of, can cause health issues, can cause mental health challenges? So I think that framing is important for me. But also when it comes to looking at things on social media, I do think we have to be aware of the impacts that vicarious trauma has on our body and minds. I understand that there's a power in witnessing and staying informed. But…

We have to be careful about how we stay well, how we stay able to contribute in the ways that we're aligned with, how we can care for those we have care responsibilities for, how we can have the capacity to move towards joy or relaxation or the things that bring us ease.

And I feel the discourse in certain realms of social media can almost be this, ‘if you care, you have to bear witness and watch very traumatic videos every day for hours’. I don't agree with that. I don't think it's helpful. I don't think it's helpful for people who are watching that and actually who are going to be pretty impacted by that in a way that, you know, they might not have the skills to recover from.

But also I don't think it changes the conditions on the ground for people who are experiencing genocide. I think there are other ways we can show up, other ways we can participate in resistance, and other ways we can stay informed without having to do that. I think we have to be discerning and notice, okay, how is my body, and mind reacting to this? Is this sustainable for me?

Are there other ways I can get information about what's happening without having to watch hours or even thirty minutes of very violent videos every day? Something I was suggesting in a newsletter recently was that people maybe create little pods of trusted friends. It could be like three or four people and maybe one person on two days of the week is engaging with a few channels or other sources of news and is updating other people. So it's not like a daily necessity that everyone's doing that. They can support each other by checking in, talking about what actions they're engaging with, and having peer solidarity models that are less dependent on.

Just watching huge amounts of violent content because it's not a frivolous thing. It is impacting people's physical and mental health in quite pronounced ways. And of course, as an argument to say, well, that suffering is nothing compared to what people are experiencing under genocide. True. 100 percent it's not comparable. And also if we're going to be able to maintain a level of resistance or solidarity or have the capacity to change the conditions that need to be changed, we need to be resourced enough for that.

I don't think a lot of people are considering what that means and how long we may need to continue resourcing ourselves to do the work. So I would invite people to be discerning about what's supportive and how to get information, how to stay engaged without doing things that create a huge amount of vicarious trauma.

Kamea Chayne: I find it very affirming personally for you to name these things because I do feel like there's pressure for people to be socially aware, you should be watching these live videos of everything that is going on every single day and it was also very clarifying for me when you shared that the difference is really about the ability to move back and forth between states and maintaining the awareness of what is going on and intentionally choosing to tap out in moments or being more intentional about how we consume media, but not allowing for the underlying source of our rage and sorrow and dissatisfaction to become normalized and to become kind of the status quo of how things are.

And as you share this, I'm also just thinking about how there's kind of this paradox of how I feel like the medium of social media encourages reactivity in a sense, and just the way that it's formatted short-form content, you're scrolling one thing, a different thing, a different thing within a matter of seconds. And it feeds into the attention economy. And I do not doubt that that has an impact on our capacities to even be able to engage more deeply or there've been books written about our attention spans and how that is being impacted by the ways that we're engaging with media these days.

Yet at the same time, I know that social media has allowed for a more democratized form of engagement with media, as in anybody can start an account and kind of have a "voice” in these platforms as opposed to longer-form content. I feel more drawn to longer-form articles, documentaries that do a deep dive into storytelling, and so forth. But for longer-form content, I feel like there is more of a, not a monopoly, but power plays more of a role in terms of broadcast media or these established news outlets and who gets the right for them and so forth.

Not that there needs to be a conclusion, but I haven't really processed yet what this means for us that like social media allows for more people to kind of share their perspectives and so forth. Yet at the same time, the format of it, I don't think is supportive of our collective mental health and capacities. At the same time, longer form content, like the budget that goes into creating a film, the budget that goes into creating a more produced longer form content just because of the systemic barriers like their power, plays a lot more into the ability to create those forms of material if that makes sense.

Camille Barton: I think that social media is a very, very powerful tool. I see the impact of it in the last nine months, more so than I think ever before. So I see the power of it. And I think that we need to use our agency to manage the addiction that many of us have to our phones. Because, ideally, at least I'll speak for myself…

I would like to have the capacity to use my phone, the internet, and social media as tools and not have them use me.

And currently, we are all being used by corporate social media, right? Our data, what we like, and how we engage are all being used to make money and ultimately push forward potentially nefarious plans that don't benefit us, but benefit a lot more corporations and state actors. So I feel it's a kind of, again, a question of a case of being discerning. How do I want to engage with this? How much time will I give myself to engage with this every day? And maybe that needs to change at different moments.

For a long time for me, I had like a 30-minute maximum Instagram window per day. And recently having experienced, bereavement in my community, I just couldn't engage with it at all for a few weeks. I was like, okay, that's not possible for me. I have absolutely zero capacity to be in this space. And that's also okay. I think just being able to pay attention to what our systems, our bodies, and our minds are giving us signals of and responding to that is important.

And so if you're someone listening to this and, and you feel okay on social media, you spend an hour on Instagram and you feel great, then maybe it's not an issue for you. But if you come off after half an hour and you notice that you're having negative thoughts and you don't feel good about yourself, then maybe that's the sign to limit use a bit more and maybe install some kind of app that controls your use because I like to think that I have a lot of willpower but I currently don't have enough willpower to just control my social media use on my own.

I need to use limiter apps and I'm very grateful for those apps. It feels like a kind of reparenting thing for myself, understanding I know this is gonna harm me if I spend more than this amount of time. And so thank you for there being a boundary that's enforcing that and supporting me to look after myself. I would also recommend the book, How to Break Up with Your Phone, for anyone who wants a kind of 30-day guided process to radically change your relationship with your phone. I feel like phone addiction is so normalized at the moment. We don't even talk about it because it's such a collective experience.

I find it very challenging sometimes to look up around a carriage on a tube train or the underground and just see most people staring at a screen hunched over, chest collapsed. It's harrowing.

I just hope we have more and more strategies to use our phones as tools and not let them use us because at the moment it feels like we're getting used big time.

Self-awareness feels very foundational and also just our intentionality in terms of how we utilize and engage with these tools as you emphasize.

Kamea Chayne: And on capacity, something that I've also been sitting with is our capacities for grief. And of course, this is different for everyone, but broadly speaking, I do feel like a lot of aspects of so-called modernity have become dehumanizing and the pace and scale at which things operate are among those things.

So I think about how rather than just processing grief within smaller scale communities, we're having to process grief for intergenerational losses, for collective losses, cultural losses, for losses of communities across the globe who we might not have direct relationships with, but who we a lot of us nevertheless understand to be extended kin who are deeply connected to us especially keeping in mind how different bodies receive and alchemize grief differently.

I wonder if there is such a thing as a kind of threshold of despair and sorrow that we might be individually wired and capable of holding and processing. And then also, what does it then mean to expand our capacities for grief and sit with the mess of confronting the unprecedented immensity of losses that we have to now metabolize with our bodies?

Camille Barton: Yeah, I'm just gonna be honest and say I don't know. I do not know if there is a threshold for what we can hold and move. It also feels like a good moment to just name and honor Sobonfu and Malidoma Somé, who are elders who deeply inform how I think about grief. They're elders of the Dagaaba tribe who are indigenous to Burkina Faso, what we now know as Burkina Faso in West Africa.

And they spent a lot of their lives while they were alive, spreading Dagaaba grief rituals in the Western context. In the Dagaaba context, traditionally, the whole community would come together for a monthly grief ritual. And it's kind of taboo to miss that.

So it's kind of the opposite of the West where grief and death are still very taboo despite the high prevalence of grief that we're experiencing, we don't have these containers, as you were just mentioning, we don't have these spaces to go and be with grief. But in the Dagaaba context, you have that every month, and if you don't go, questions are being asked, because there's a sense that untended or unprocessed grief will become harm in the collective in the form of violence or other social ills. And so it's seen as a kind of collective responsibility to continually visit the grief and to move it through.

So I suppose for me, based on those ideas from the Dagaaba that influenced me, I don't see grief tending as a kind of one-time event. I see it more as a practice-based thing that we return to. Not necessarily like, ‘I’m going to get rid of all of this now and then it's done’ which I associate more with a kind of original sin, Christian overtone kind of approach to healing or trauma work or anything of just, I need to get it out of me and then I'll be pure. but more that we inherently have shedding and decomposition as part of the life cycle.

And so we have grief as part of our daily lives. We experience harm, we change, and we lose former versions of ourselves, dreams sometimes don't happen illnesses occur, and there are so many things in daily life that can bring up grief.

And so I suppose what I would love to see more of, and I hope we can build cultures around this and remember how to do this, is just to make regular time, whether it's once a month, or at some kind of regular frequency to dip into that, to not have to experience all of it and process it all at once, but just dip into what we can feel in touch into what we can resource ourselves enough to be able to do that without becoming overwhelmed, without becoming flooded.

And if we notice that's happening, then pause or stop, or maybe do an embodied practice to reconnect and center and go back into it if it feels good. But I like rebuilding this muscle to intentionally dip into grief and dip out of it so that it becomes more of a practice and a habit again. Because I think a lot of the issues I'm seeing at the moment in my communities and even to an extent, you know, in my process, because I'm still very much in process with all of this and experimenting with this on myself. I think because of the level of suffering and the lack of space to honor the suffering, such as the millions of people that have died during the COVID-19 pandemic to date to acknowledge that.

There's so much built up and shoved down and people trying to manically get on with things and furiously working and distracting and doing all this stuff to run away from this very stinky pile of rotting stuff that's there.

I think part of the issue is that we haven't tended to grief for generations. We were out of practice. We've lost a lot of the traditions to do that in the West.

And so a sense that there's a kind of reckoning we're faced with where the amount is just so unbearable that we have to do something with it. We have to learn to be with it in a different way. And so my suggestion is not that we try and get rid of all of it at once, but that we slowly, gently come into practice, come into a regular practice of being with so that we can relearn that muscle and hopefully over time get to a place where the future generations are not having to inherit this level of mess and repressed stuff, repressed harm, that hasn't been given a container or space to be felt and to be honored.

Kamea Chayne: I think something that stands out to me also is that a lot of us were never taught these things. We were never taught in school how to grieve. And it feels like a subject that's often swept under the rug or that we're encouraged to suppress or bypass so we can catch up with whatever else the world is demanding of us next. So to kind of translate our layered discussion today into practice, how would you invite people to get started if they haven't thought about a lot of these things that we talked about and if they don't currently have practices of somatics or tending grief?

Camille Barton: There are a few things I could offer. The first is a practice that I first came across from Tricia Hersey of the NAP Ministry. She wrote a blog I think called “Rest Supports Grief” and I love the practice offered here. It's called the Grief Jar and with Tricia’s permission, I was able to include an adaptive version of the grief jar in a resource I created called the Gen Grief Toolkit and also the book that's just come out, Tending Grief. And I have the Grief Jar as my baseline practice that I come back to every month. So it's very simple. You can just get an old jar, clean it out, and put it somewhere that you're going to see regularly. I have it on my altar.

If you don't have an altar, that's fine. You can just put it somewhere in your house that you'll see every day. And next to the jar, you can cut up some small pieces of paper and leave a pen there. And every time there's a moment of grief or sorrow or anxiety or whatever you would associate with grief, you can just write it on a piece of paper and put it inside the jar. And that's just a way to come back to it because really and truly, with the work pressures we have and the commitments we have, a lot of the time we might not have the space to go into it at that moment.

So it's almost just like ‘I'll come back to you’. And then once a month—I tend to do this on the full moon, but you could do this at another time that works for you—create a little ritual moment, which could be anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour and a half. The range is up to you. I end up kind of setting the space in a way that I like that sometimes involves incense, and lighting a candle for my ancestors. I usually do some kind of embodied grounding that might be touch-based practice, like squeezing my arms so I can gain sensation in my body or doing some shaking, something that helps me center and get a sense of where I am and what's moving in me.

And then I open up the jar and spend time with each piece of paper. And as I look at the piece of paper, I read what's on there. I listen to any sensations coming up in my body, often the same sensations that came up when I had the feeling of grief, present again. And I give myself time to release in some way that feels good. So sometimes there are tears that want to come. Sometimes there's moaning or sounds that want to come out. Sometimes it feels good to rock. Sometimes songs have come out, sometimes questions, but just spending time to kind of be with what's there.

And then, when I'm ready to release that, I usually drop the piece of paper into a bowl of water. If you have a fireplace, or if you would do this outside, you could also offer it to a fire. And I do that until all the pieces of paper are gone. And then I end up closing out the space in a way that feels good to me.

So that's my baseline monthly practice that I come back to. And it just helps me return to all these moments that I would usually distract myself from or move on to the next thing. But it just gives me the ability to take stock of what's been moving in me. So that might be something nice to try. Some alternatives could also involve finding something that you enjoy doing already and just giving yourself the intention to use that to explore grief.

So as an example of this, dance is one of my deepest loves in this life. And I have a dancing grief practice. This kind of emerged for me as a teenager navigating depression. I would sort of locate where things felt stuck or tight in my body or where the numbness was. Sometimes there'd be a story around it. Sometimes there wasn't. But I would just consciously move my body in a way to the music and dance that was in conversation with the sensations, with the grief, with the depression.

And there would be shifts. It might not mean that it was all gone magically, but there were shifts. There were ways that it was moving and metabolizing. Similarly, people can do practices like this, making art, whether it's drawing and trying to draw about grief or collage. I think there are lots of different access points.

Some people might feel good around singing or making noises. That intuitively happened on my way home today. I was feeling some grief around not having celebrated with my friends in a long time, not having been to a festival, and having recently missed an opportunity to kind of have some joyful communion with those in my life. And I just felt this kind of low moaning come out and I just allowed it to come out for five to ten minutes and it felt like some way of honoring it, being with what was there.

So I think there are lots of access points. I don't think there's one right way, but I would encourage people to just experiment with some kind of container that feels supportive for them. This might be a ritual, it might be something more art or movement-based, but bringing the intention for a set period to be in conversation with your grief and the sensations that you associate with that grief in your body.

And just noticing what shifts and moves, maybe doing some kind of journaling afterward to reflect on it. That's what I'd invite people into. If you would like any more examples of practices and any guidance around how to navigate, there are quite a lot of examples for individual practices or group practices in my book Tending Grief.

Kamea Chayne: Well, Green Dreamer, we are coming to a close here, but we'll have more references and resources from this episode linked in our show notes at greendreamer.com. And for now, Camille, thank you so much for joining me on the show today. It's been an absolute honor to have you and I’m just grateful for all that you do and speak to and inspire. As we close off here, what final words of wisdom do you have for us as Green Dreamers?

Camille Barton: I'd say keep expanding the imagination and being in practice, just getting clear on what you're practicing. There are a lot of things we practice every day that are unconscious, but even if it's just one or two things you consciously practice, just being deliberate about those and allowing yourself the time to experiment to see what they bring, to see if it's adaptive. If it's not, you can pivot. If it is, great. What are the fruits of that?

I'd also remind folks that the plants are there for us. They're a loving source of support. And so whether you need some support with anxiety, need some support with sleep, or support for your heart space in this time, I would invite you to turn to the plant kin because they have our backs. I think they can be a really deep and beautiful source of support at this time and hopefully, we can learn a lot by being in a relationship with them and building relationships of reciprocity with them as well.

 
kamea chayne

Kamea Chayne is a creative, writer, and the host of Green Dreamer Podcast.

Previous

Ben Goldfarb: Road ecology and the normalized violence of transport systems (Ep430)
Next

Tzintzun Aguilar-Izzo and Blake Lavia: Returning to each other and the remembrance of “Water is Life” (Ep428)