1- Truth Mandala

A Community Ritual for Honouring Our Grief, Anxiety, Anger, Hope and Love for the world

The Truth Mandala is a community ritual for honouring our grief and love for the world…

…with fear, anger, numbness, hope, care… and all your emotions, all your relations, all is welcome.

Origins:

The Truth Mandala provides a simple, respectful, whole group structure for owning and honouring our pain for the world. The practice emerged in 1990 amid a large, tension filled workshop near Frankfurt, on the first anniversary of the reunification of East and West Germany. On arriving to the workshop, ready to deliver the activities she had planned, Joanna Macy quickly noticed how the official reunification celebrations had triggered painful and unprocessed emotions in the workshop’s participants; she found people talking loudly at each other and realised it was important for people to have the chance to allow, express and process their feelings without turning on one another. In this moment, she abandoned her original plans and the Truth Mandala was born.

The Truth Mandala is a nourishing ritual from The Work That Reconnects that creates an all-welcoming, honest, honouring space to experience, witness and express (if you choose) your feelings about the conditions of our world, as well as feelings relating to your personal life.

It is rooted in the recognition that emotions – when not experienced or expressed – can create blockages in our bodies, minds and spirits. The Truth Mandala can be transformative and healing whether you opt to speak or not. It reminds us we are not alone, and can bring relief and release. It affirms the deep, reliable support of our interconnection with all beings and the power of community. It also can provide a chance to re-evaluate how we wish to meet our experiences, renewing our commitment to care and compassion.

Everyone is welcome, whether you have experienced a Truth Mandala before, or not.

The Ritual

People sit in a circle to create a containment vessel for holding the truth. The circle we make has four quadrants and each quadrant represents a symbolic object: a stone, dead leaves, a thick stick, and an empty bowl. 

The stone is for fear.  It’s how our heart feels when we’re afraid: tight, contracted, hard.  With this stone, we can let our fear speak.  

The dry leaves represent our sorrow.  There is great sadness within us for what we see happening to our world. Here the sadness can speak.

The stick is for our anger, for our outrage.  Anger needs to be spoken for clarity of mind and purpose.  As you let it speak, grasp this stick hard with both hands.  It’s not for pounding or waving around.

The empty bowl stands for our sense of deprivation and need, our hunger for what’s missing—our emptiness.

Maybe there’s something you’ll want to say that doesn’t fit one of these quadrants. You are welcome to give voice to it – be it a song or prayer or lines of verse.

You may wonder where is hope?  The very ground of this mandala is hope.  If we didn’t have hope, we wouldn’t be here.  

Together we hold sacred space for what wants to be shared: the space is made sacred by our truth telling.

With Deep Gratitude to the Work that Reconnects and for the opportunity to share these formats with you.

 Truth-telling is like oxygen: it enlivens us. Without it we grow confused and numb. It is also a homecoming, bringing us back to powerful connection and basic authority.

Joanna Macy

2- Cairn of Mourning

This group practice will be done outdoors for the GOOD Grief! Community Ritual with Gaia Speaking. Each event will have a slightly different format as we adapt to the natural site that we will be honouring.

We are each holding a question in our heart & mind: What is being lost in our world that I mourn for?, while choosing or creating an object to represent what this question brings up for us.

We come together as a group and open the practice, coming from the 1st stage of the spiral (Gratitude), before taking some time each to ourselves to find or create our object.

Once we are all together as a group – each with our object / image – we take a turn – one by one – to introduce our object or image to the group, describing what it represents to us, and expressing some of our feelings about it.

We may want to finish with some movement – walking, or dancing, or some song.

The Cairn of Mourning practice is also part of the 2nd stage of the spiral of the Work That. Reconnects. This second stage is known as “Honouring our pain for the world”. In the first stage (gratitude), we have created a strong grounding, and stretched into experiencing our interconnectedness through our appreciation and thankfulness. In this stage we stretch into experiencing the interconnectedness and care that our painful feelings can reveal.

The term honouring implies a respectful welcoming, where we recognize the value of something. Our pain for the world not only alerts us to danger but also reveals our profound caring. And this caring derives from our interconnectedness with all life. We need not fear it. It is natural and healthy to have feelings about the state of the world, because we are an integral part of this world. Through honouring these feelings, we can know and honour our belonging, from which comes the power to face challenges and to act for the sake of life.

This stage of the Work That Reconnects involves the following steps:

● Acknowledging our pain for the world

● Validating it as a wholesome response

● Letting ourselves experience this pain

● Feeling OK about expressing it to others

● Recognizing how widely it is shared by others

● Understanding that it springs from our caring and connectedness

The experience of interconnection that our pain can reveal prepares us to move on to the3rd stage of the spiral – “seeing with new (or ancient) eyes” – where we will be invited to gain energy from some new (or ancient) perspectives.