Nicole: Welcome to Modern Anarchy, the podcast exploring sex, relationships, and liberation. I'm your host, Nicole.
On today's episode, we have author Camille join us for a conversation about grief tending as a generative force for deepening our relationships. Together we talk about the power of tuning into your body. Imagining a new future of collective healing and learning to savor the small, daily pleasures. Hello, dear listener, and welcome back to Modern Anarchy.
I am so delighted to have all of you pleasure activists from around the world tuning in for another episode each Wednesday. My name is Nicole. I am a sex and relationship psychotherapist with training in psychedelic integration therapy, and I am also the founder of The Pleasure Practice, supporting individuals in crafting expansive sex lives and intimate relationships.
Dear listener, you know that I am always talking about pleasure in this space. So much of that comes from my work as a psychotherapist and working with a lot of trauma and particularly with sex and relationships coming from pain, coming from all that suffering. The whole healing arc is going all the way to pleasure.
And that is often something that our culture feels really uncomfortable talking about. And so I am often talking about pleasure in this space. But it is also crucial that we talk about grief and the pain, because the reality is we don't get to choose which emotions we feel. When we numb, We numb to all the emotions.
And so feeling more pleasure means connecting with more pain, with more grief, and hopefully doing so in community, right? To know that you're not alone. To be able to process and be seen in your pain is some of the most transformative ways of healing. And of course, working with the body is another crucial component to grief.
And I know there are so many big things going on in the world. I'm sure there are things in your community. I'm sure there are things in your individual life. And so I just want to invite all of us to take a deep breath
and just be with your body for a moment. Just notice, when you tune in, what comes up for you. Having curiosity, just bringing your awareness, no judgments, you don't have to write any narratives. Just noticing how your body feels today. And that practice of being with our body, of being with our breath, is exactly that.
A practice. Dear listener, it is impossible to live in this world today and not be pulled out of your body, whether you're scrolling or at work or dealing with other chaotic and hectic things. It is so hard in our culture to be in your body. And so I just want to invite you. Today. And in between now and our next episode To set an intention of being with your body this week.
Of noticing what is coming up, tuning in to what it needs, and following the pleasure that is speaking to you. Alright, if you are ready to liberate your pleasure, you can explore my offerings and resources at modernanarchypodcast. com. Linked in the show notes below. And I want to say the biggest thank you.
I have so much gratitude for all my Patreon supporters. You are supporting the long term sustainability of the podcast. Keeping this content free and accessible to all people, so thank you. If you want to join the Patreon community, get exclusive access to my research and personal exploration, then you can head on over to patreon.
com slash modernanarchy Also linked in the show notes below and with that, dear listener, please know that I am sending you all my love and let's tune into today's episode.
So then the first question I like to ask each guest is, how would you introduce yourself to the listeners?
Camille: Okay. Well, my name is Camille Sarpara Barton, and I consider myself a social imagineer, but currently I spend a lot of time writing, uh, making art and doing different forms of embodied social justice facilitation.
So I'm very rooted in politicized semantics. black feminism, ecology and harm reduction. And I feel dedicated to creating networks of care and livable futures. So kind of building, um, more of the culture change and different relational ways of being that we want to see, um, hopefully on a livable planet in the decades to come.
Nicole: Right.
Camille: And I've been tending grief since 2017, and during that time have been deep in my own process, but also in more recent years have developed public resources, some programs and tools to cultivate embodied grief practices with ourselves and also in community. Yeah, the last thing I would say is that I've just finished teaching or designing and teaching a master's program called Ecologies of Transformation, which was exploring socially engaged art making with a focus on creating change through the body into the world.
And um, outside of that, I'm now continuing to curate events and offer consultancy that's combining trauma informed practice, experiential learning, and uh, my studies in political science. So that's kind of what I'm up to at the moment.
Nicole: Lovely. You're in the right space. Right. I feel like I could pin any of those conversations and probably, uh, talk to you for hours about them.
So I'm delighted to have you here. Thank you for joining us. Hmm. Thanks for having me. Of course. So I would love, you know, before we dive into anything specific, I'd love to hear a little bit about your personal connection to these topics, how you got here. So. If you want to take up the space to tell your story for me and for all the listeners, I'd love to hear that connection.
Camille: Sure. So I sort of had my first deep dive submersion into grief in 2017 after I had an abortion. I felt really good about my decision to have an abortion. I was very clear and aligned with it. So I was quite surprised to feel this huge amount of grief. It's really visceral embodied sense of being kind of submerged almost underwater.
I had very little energy. I just couldn't really escape that feeling of being in this, in the emotions of this deep loss and the questions that were coming up for me around, you know, what matters to me? Where do I see myself moving in my life? Just everything seemed, um, suddenly in need of kind of reconfiguration.
So in the throes of this, I was really kind of aware of the need to, to be with grief in a way that could feel generative, that could feel, you know, that I was in process with it. But as I looked for resources online and in my community, I just. Didn't really find anything, you know, I would type into Google once, I remember typing into Google like abortion healing rituals and all I got were pro life, um, pro life adverts.
And I just felt, you know, how little space there is in many of our kind of Western contexts to experience grief in community, to have kind of practical embodied resources, to tend to it in an active way. I felt a lot of rage. about that, to be honest. Yeah. Even, you know, outside of abortion, which is a very common experience for many people, where I grew up in England and obviously in many other parts of the world, I was kind of shocked and outraged that there isn't more space for people to process this experience, let alone all the other forms of grief that are very palpably affecting people.
It just gave me the signal that, okay, I meant to crawl into a corner on my own and just deal with this.
Yeah. So pretend it didn't happen. And I, I sort of thought, no, fuck that, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to really project on giving myself the kind of container, uh, that I need to be with this and allow it to expand me and, um, enhance my life rather than shrink me and contract me.
Which is what I think the. general messaging around grief and the societal approaches around in the West end up doing. So yeah, I project on it. I nerded out. I bought all of the grief books I could find that seemed to have like practical tools and rituals. Yeah. Over a number of years I experimented on myself.
I just really kind of befriended this deep sorrow. That I was experiencing and in doing that, it seemed to create a bit of a domino effect. So what started as just abortion grief rippled and became all this other stuff that also needed to be addressed. Probably the, I guess, monumental for my sense of my life was actually having memories of childhood sexual abuse start coming back as I was focusing on kind of healing my womb and you know, balancing my body and having quite a lot of body work for the first time, these memories start to flood and come back.
And so then that set off, you know, this having to kind of rewrite the story of my childhood and make sense of things that, you know, had always been clues along the way that I had never really had access to fully before.
Yeah, it was just a very, Immersive grief experience. These last kind of nearly seven years now, there were other things that happened as well, such as losing my home to a house fire and having to, or not having to, but choosing to support My partner, um, through the death of their parent due to a terminal illness that kind of happened all quite quickly.
So I just felt in this last kind of seven years, there were many different forms of grief and, um, I've been in practice with just trying to be with that and develop capacity to engage with the sensations and really try and cultivate an approach where I'm not being overwhelmed and bypass it or bypassing
Nicole: Yeah.
Camille: But just trying to dip in and dip out. pay attention to and orient towards, but also then really try and ground and be in other processes, but just creating a bit of a space for grief to exist in my life and in the life of people I love. So yeah, that's my, that's my grief story.
Nicole: Yeah. Thank you for sharing.
Thank you for trusting me and for sharing that with all of the listeners. I really appreciate the vulnerability. Right. And my first question too, you know, is even just sharing the story, I'm thinking about the somatics, you know, how are you feeling in your body, even just to share it now, you know, like, is anything coming up or are you noticing anything?
Camille: I'm noticing that I feel. safe enough to share the details I've shared in this context and container. And I want people who listen to this podcast to have more of the unfiltered version. I won't always share this level of detail in every context I'm in. And as I move further on this journey of talking about the book and sharing the book, I'm trying to tap into, you know, when do I feel safe enough.
And when do I need to, you know, protect myself a little bit more and just discern, yeah, who I give this part of myself to. And I feel in alignment with what I've shared, but I'm grateful you've asked me because I think I definitely notice whether it's in the arts or in other contexts, there can be a way that we can over cross our boundaries without even necessarily knowing.
Nicole: Yeah.
Camille: And many spaces and industries, I think, actually thrive on that, um, that inability that we, that we can often have to discern, is this too much? Is this enough? Like, where am I in this moment?
Nicole: Right. Absolutely. Yeah. I got chills when you were saying that, cause I think that that's actually such a nuanced conversation, right?
When we're holding pain. That choice of do we open up to tell someone about this or do we hold it and navigating that? And I think sometimes even in my own experience, you know, it feels like, Oh yeah, of course I can tell them why not. Right. But not really, maybe even for myself, holding the full reality that when you do tell that story, it brings back so much, right.
We're connected to that or maybe not. Right. And that's why it's easier to share. But when we are connected to that somatic experience, it takes us back there. So, I'm curious for you, given your connection, you know, to your body and your somatics, how do you decipher, you know, like when do you open up and when do you hold that back?
Like what's that internal process like for you?
Camille: I love that question and I'm going to do my best to process it in words or communicate in words. So much of it's felt, I was really blessed to be given instructions on a body dowsing practice when I think I. Went for my kind of first sort of big plant medicine journey to, to sort of support my grief process, um, in 2018.
And one of the preparatory things was being taught at this body dowsing practice, which essentially is asking the body to demonstrate a yes, by moving in a certain direction, either forward or back or no order back, you know, it has changed for me many times. So I generally ask my body, you know, what's the yesterday, or can you show me a yes.
Then if I am in a new situation where maybe I'm not getting Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. enough information. I will use that practice to kind of discern, do I want to share this today? And usually the body will give me a very clear answer. I think the accumulative practice of that has just given me so much more sensation and ability to feel my body that I just didn't have before.
And didn't even know that I didn't have, you know, coming back. Um, yes. So I think I'm now kind of aware of some of the signals my body gives me when I'm feeling uncomfortable or when I'm feeling like I need to close off or shield. And that can be for me kind of my buttocks clenching, losing sensation in the lower part of my body, like under my pelvis and legs.
Um, and sometimes just a, yeah, general sense of contraction. So, those things can generally give me an indication, maybe I don't feel so comfortable right now, maybe I need to be really discerning about what I want to share, and there can also be kind of associations that are also giving me a sense of, no, this is okay, like, I feel expansive in my chest, or I feel my lumbar spine relaxing.
You know, these kind of things. So I think it can be specific to everyone, though there can be commonalities that at least I see from working people and speaking to people about these pieces.
Nicole: Yeah, I love that first going into the body, right? What does the body say here? What am I noticing? Am I tightening, you know, and then it was funny as you were talking, I was like, yeah, but also I've definitely been in classes where they do just even the basics of introduced herself and tell us a fun fact or something. And man, does my body lose it? I can feel my heart start to race. My chest gets tight and I'm like, damn, I just have to say my name, you know, but in those moments, even too, of like recognizing what's coming up with the body and actually working with it, I think can be such a, hopefully something to normalize even in this space, right?
That that's something I've always wondered like, Oh, why am I so insecure? But you know, it's such a normal, I think, experience to have that moment in the class where, Oh, Oh, it's me. The spotlight's going to be on me. And I think that the more we're connected to our body, whether it's disclosing a vulnerability, Or in that moment, you know, we, we build the practice of mentally in terms of, you know, the neuronal pathways to stay connected, which hopefully means we can regulate and move that energy, right?
Maybe after that class, I need to go for a run because I had all that adrenaline and I need to shake it out, right? Or take some deep breaths and just being able to build that practice, I think, is such a crucial component to. Everything in life. I talk a lot about pleasure in this space, uh, particularly because so much of my work clinically started with sexual assault trauma.
And so I've been so fascinated on what's the whole continuum. How do we get to the other side? But there is no discussion of pleasure without a discussion of grief, right? I don't think that you can just feel pleasure without also being connected to. All of the experience of our emotions, which means crying, sadness, all of that.
So I think that connection to our body is what is needed for both sides. There is no just pleasure here, you know?
Camille: Yeah. Yeah. I love that you said that and I really agree. I think especially having um come up and spent a lot of my 20s in kind of peak experience chasing context, you know, whether it's like the broader Burning Man community or just festival culture in general.
I now look at it with my current lens and sort of see the ways that because I was quite numb, I was always trying to have more and more peak experiences to feel something, you know, to feel a sense of release or wonder. And, you know, it's no shade to people who are, who are in that space, but I now from a kind of trauma informed or somatic lens, I'm like, Oh, okay.
I see that this was a, an aspect, at least for me, because, yeah, I wasn't getting much from the kind of daily mundane but delicious things like having a warm bowl of leek soup in front of a fire, like in the wintertime, which now I'm like, Oh, that's great. And I can really feel the like, ah, in my chest or something.
Yeah. You know, these small daily pleasures, I'm still kind of actively learning to, to feel them and savor them and actually be able to notice where I feel it in my body because that embodied information just wasn't available to me for a long time because of, you know, the very smart ways my body learned to dissociate to protect me.
But now there is that need to kind of reclaim and repattern into. Cultivating that sensation to be with these bigger. Yeah. These bigger emotions or sensations.
Nicole: Yeah, absolutely. I love that you named the wisdom of your body to do that. Right. I think I have so many clients who come in with such an attack on themselves of why am I like this?
Why am I like this? And it's like, you know, Your body is keeping you safe. You've gone through a level of an experience where you went into survival mode. And so you've been running for years, maybe depending on what your context is. And so being able to have that compassion, to know that our bodies are trying to keep us safe and we can do that work with them rather than attacking them.
And so being able to slow down into that and think about feel that experience is such a big part, I think, of my work because what happens when you're in that state is it becomes normalized, right? You get the shoulders up by the ears. That feels like your normal day to day. And like you said, right, you were in this context where you didn't even realize that, you know, you were searching for that peak experience because again, your body's been normalized to that.
So being able to slow down to feel the beauty of the more mundane and maybe even Peace, right? And I think it directly impacts also our relationships when you think about it, right? The people who enjoy those intense argumentative fight sort of relationships because it's in that state of existence that we know is comfortable compared to the other person.
Yeah. Safe, stable relationship where you're like, Oh, this is kind of boring. Like what, what's going on over here. Right. And having to go through that mental shift to find pleasure in that peace state is quite a journey, you know, I'm sure, you know,
Camille: Yeah, truly, truly, truly. I mean, for me with the book, that's one of my, my biggest hopes is that it can support people to move out of numbness at a gentle pace, you know, titration pace, because I definitely know in my sexual trauma repatterning process, it's still, you know, ongoing.
I'm in a different stage now, but it's an ongoing thing. There were moments where I was like, I just want to be fixed. I just want to be done with this, you know, like, why is it taking so long? You know, and part of it for me has been surrendering to the gentle unfolding of it or like removing the layers like an onion or something.
As I move along it, I, yeah, I really have this hope that for myself and anyone who wants to tend grief, that there's an understanding that this is kind of connecting us to more of the broad spectrum of emotions and to feel them all more deeply,
Nicole: right?
Camille: From sorrow to joy, everything in between. In that process, I'm learning so much more about what I desire, what I care about, what I long for.
And having the opportunity to contextualize. Am I in alignment with that? You know, how am I moving towards those things? If that's what my body really wants, if that's what I really long for. But for a very, very big season of my life, I couldn't discern embodied desire.
You know, that's not my fault, but I just couldn't track it.
And that had huge impacts on my relationships, but also just my way of being. In daily life. Yeah, I do. I do really think that grief tending can be such a generative force for our relationships and our connection to just who we are, what we care about, whether we're moving in alignment towards those things.
Nicole: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I appreciate you, you know, talking about with your sexual assault trauma, just the ongoing process of that, right? I've also came from a trauma experience and know, how I got passionate about this work, you know, that deep personal connection and, uh, just the ways that that gets spaced out over time as we heal, right.
In ways where it's not, maybe at least for me, not as prominent of a thought, not as prominent of a trigger and not as prominent of an experience. And yet, you know, Even just last week, I had this moment where I just was actually like triggered by something that came up into my brain. And you have that moment of, Whoa, like I thought I've processed all of this.
I've done years of therapy, years of somatic work, and it still does come up in these small moments. And I think even just pinning back to what we were saying earlier about having compassion in those moments of feeling that sort of like powerlessness of like, Whoa, I, I, I didn't see that coming, you know, and, and kind of, I'm, I'm trying to get to a space in my life too, where like, I'm not as connected to that, that label or that one experience.
Cause it was one, you know, moment in my life, a handful of moments under patriarchy. Sure. But like, you know, trying to get past that, but it does still come up. And so I think that I just appreciated you naming that, that, that ongoing relationship that holds space for ourselves in that process.
Camille: Yeah. Yeah, it is such a journey.
And yeah, I think, I mean, I don't know, one day I would really like to write more about sexual trauma recovery, but the sort of wild adventures that that brought me to in a way, and that it can bring various people to, because something I've observed is that many people will discern, okay, there's some block for me, or there's something here around my sexuality and my body.
ability to connect. So let me put myself in all these situations that will make me feel liberated. And I'll be like, I've done this thing. So now I'm sexually liberated, or this is a sign of sexual liberation. I'm wanting to chase these kinds of supposed milestones rather than starting at the core of like, okay, I don't feel safe in my body.
Right. I don't feel my body. I don't know what my body wants and actually having to do that descent to even have enough of a ground to even do the other juicy bits. And so, you know, that's kind of a bit of my story as well. I put myself in all these situations and I ticked all these boxes, but it didn't actually give me what I was looking for.
And now I sort of feel like now I'm at the stage where maybe some of that exploration from a grounded agency. kind of healthfully boundary place could happen. Um, but I'm very curious about, yeah, how this connects to our culture generally of, you know, chasing peak experiences, not having room for grief, not having really an acknowledgement beyond Me Too, which, you know, I think is There's complexity there beyond that, not really an acknowledgment of how pervasive sexual trauma is and how all of this stuff kind of molds together to, I think, put people in very particular types of behavior that I don't feel are really connecting us to our visions of pleasure or just, it just could all be so much more juicy and consensual, I think.
Nicole: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And I think the difficulty of that is thinking about. The connection that you have to your body now and the power and the insight and the enlightenment that that is And when we look back to our younger selves It's hard to know what could we have said in that moment to to actually hear, you know There's we could spout a million things.
But what would we have actually heard? you know if you I know this is the percolating book in your head, but if you could think back to that younger self, is there anything that you would want to say to them?
Camille: I'd probably say to them, the more you invest in figuring out what you like and what's interesting and pleasurable to you, the better your connections will be with other people.
And I say that knowing that. I would have loved to have that information, but I also feel this teenage part would have been like, yeah, whatever.
Nicole: Yeah, exactly. What do you know?
Exactly. That's the real talk over here, right? We know that we wouldn't have taken it. Yeah. I was thinking too, like for me, I just want to say to her, you know, like, her body is yours. You know, pleasure is yours, you know, and what would it mean to start from that space rather than the giving rather than the expectations and all of that.
And yeah, who knows how much of that would have landed of course, but, uh, you know, just the desire to give her a hug and hold her and tell her it's going to be okay. You know? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I know. Right. The younger I'm thinking too about the ways that We talked a little bit about how being more connected to your body is also what allows you to have better relationships, right?
Of course, in terms of being in connection with pleasure, right? Being able to name what is actually pleasurable for you to experience that in a dynamic is certainly part of that. But the other side, right? The less pleasurable side. Pleasurable side when you are getting into an argument, you know, what's happening.
Your body is tensing. Their voice is getting more activated and we have mirror neurons and we are co regulating. So as their voice goes up, your voice starts to go up and the ability to recognize that in the body is. Absolutely. What helps us to, uh, defuse that tension to say, okay, wow, wow, wow, I'm getting a little bit tight here.
I'm noticing my body's reacting. Can we take a moment to pause? Maybe I want to go outside and go for a walk and we're going to come back to this conversation. Maybe I need to go for a run, like really get it out and come back. But if we don't have that connection, surely with pleasure. Of course, it's hard to have that.
But this is also a deep part of connection in general. When we're getting into these more, you know, sensitive areas and dynamics, that connection is what allows us to have that deeper relationship.
Camille: Yeah, totally. Totally. And it's, it's, You know, this thing for me as well about grief is really noticing how multi generational and multi dimensional it can be.
And so even these things that we might associate just as a trigger for ourselves, if we look at our family context and the patterns there, There might be a whole load of generations who've been in that same dynamic. And that's when, to me, it gets really interesting, you know, like, okay, if there was the capacity and the spaciousness to respond rather than react to this, right.
And actually then practice a different kind of response that changes the pattern. I mean, there's a lot of power there.
Nicole: Yep.
Camille: It's messy. But it's, uh, I think really juicy and, and generative work. Yeah, I'm definitely trying to tend to in my own family system. I don't think I could do it without the body based practices, to be honest, because that spaciousness is really coming from that.
It's almost like my nervous system has more bandwidth, which is something that, uh, I One of my teachers, Nkem and Defo would say like has more bandwidth to be with these spicy things that maybe three or four years ago, I wouldn't have even noticed the rise of activation. Just be like, bam, I'm just in the pattern.
It's just there, you know? Whereas now I feel like, Oh, there's a pause. There's like a, an ability now to have maybe like three to five seconds. I'm like, Oh, okay. I feel the rush of energy. I feel I want to do this, but what's adaptive for me. Right now,
maybe I want to do a practice or a tool, maybe I want to bring this down a little bit and then yeah, go for that walk or say, Hey, I would love to talk to you about this, but I'm going to circle back to you or whatever it may be.
But it does feel like somewhat of a superpower when it comes to these really prickly generational patterns that so often it just passed down in families and like the water we're swimming in.
Nicole: Right. Right. Absolutely. It was, uh, scary to read about the research with epigenetics where. They, I believe they were rats or mice.
I'm not sure, but they had, uh, done some classical conditioning so that the mice would be afraid of a cherry blossom smell. And so they had done some sort of shock with it, you know, built that out. And then they didn't do that for the subsequent generations of those mice, but I believe it was either three or four.
four generations afterwards when they presented the cherry blossom, the mice would become afraid, right? So we're talking about epigenetics being passed down of that sort of level. And of course, we are not mice, right? So we don't actually know how much that translates, but that's also what we've done all of our research on, right?
So, so we're holding that, that, you know, even if We haven't experienced the trauma if it's in our family line and what's been passed down. And I'm sensitive to name that because I think that that then can create this level of powerlessness of, Oh, it's happened. So it's in me and I have nothing to do about that.
So I really appreciate, you know, what you're speaking to and what we're both speaking to here in terms of creating a new future. With that right being able to know that we can actually break those patterns with the intentionality and it's not easy right so our hearts go out to all of us that are actively working so hard to have that extra couple of seconds in between the stimulus and the response to break those generational patterns, but it is possible.
Camille: Yeah, yeah, I feel you. It's not sexy Instagrammable work.
Nicole: Yeah, not at all. No, no. But it's needed. It's absolutely needed. Yeah, because I'm not about to talk about pleasure on this podcast here without conversations like this, right? I think that that's not gonna actually get us to pleasure. We can't pick and choose which emotions we feel in the body.
Yeah, agree. Yeah, and I'm curious to, you know, I have so many different thoughts about this, but I'd love to hear your perspectives on processing grief and pain in community.
Camille: Yeah, I have so much to say on this. I feel that processing grief in community is essentially a return to one of the core foundational parts of feeling a sense of belonging.
Nicole: Yeah.
Camille: I think many of us yearn for, I know I have done, you know, throughout my life, often not felt like I belonged. And often been looking for the place or the people or the something external to me, right, that would give me that sense of belonging. And I've analyzed it in all the different ways and, you know, part of it having recent ancestral histories of migration and displacement, but ultimately, whatever the narrative, there is this hunger for belonging.
And I feel that grief tending in community can really tap us into some of the deep intimacy And feeling of people having our backs that has been denied to many of us growing up in the West in late stage capitalism. You know, we have such individualistic atomized societies. Most of us do not know what it feels like to be falling apart in floods of tears and to have someone just like with us with that presence without trying to, you know, say they're there.
That's okay. It's alright. And silver line it. But just being with us, like coming down into the depths with us and just being there, it's an opportunity to really cultivate deep intimacy and connection and to build trust on a level that many of us have lost access to in these processes of colonization, assimilation, displacement.
We've lost a lot of that intimacy and that ability to really be with each other and have soft places in which we can fall apart. And I'm not going to lie. I do think it's a skill. I think it's something we need to recultivate. I don't think it's as simple as people just reading a book and aha, we have the answers now.
It's really a practice.
Nicole: Yeah.
Camille: I hope that the book can inspire practice. But I, I feel that people will really need to practice at it and kind of rebuild that muscle because yeah, for many of us in the West, we've been very disconnected from those kinds of traditions and processes where we can enter these altered states.
So I do feel like grief can actually be a bit of an altered state in some ways.
Nicole: Sure.
Camille: It can really take you over. And I hope that we can create worlds in which we know how to practice harm reduction and care, whether it's In the process of grief or drug induced altered states or sexual altered states, you know, these big feelings, these big transformative processes to actually relearn the mechanisms to hold that well and with care is to me, that's what a core component of community building looks like, having that skill, having that dexterity to hold each other in these states with care and with rigor and.
tenderness.
Nicole: Mm hmm.
Camille: So, I, I really hope it's something we will be able to explore and it'll become more common in the years to come. One of the forms of fragmentation that I've seen over the years where I was more deeply involved in activism, I now kind of see as related to the lack of space for change.
grief tending. Common associations of activism in the West are often based on a quite militarized, logic centered, rational approach. Whether it's things like dancing or sharing emotions, I've literally been told by many men in those spaces, that's not what we're here for, we'll deal with that when the revolution comes.
Nicole: Oof.
Camille: Right? Rather than this. It's kind of pretty figurative politics idea of trying to live and create the world we want to be in which to me very much enjoys dancing and emotions.
Nicole: Right.
Camille: But there was never space for it. There was never space for it where I grew up in England. So I also hope that grief tending is something that can be woven into social movements.
So there is permission to kind of show up more as ourselves. But also really re pattern or kind of come back together from the legacies of racial capitalism and like Western imperialism, which has really disconnected us from our embodied and ancestral practices, which include grief practices. And these systems we're living in, you know, rely on us being numb, being disconnected from each other and ultimately quite despondent, which sustains the harms that come from these systems.
It might seem illogical or like, we don't have time for this cultivating that capacity to be with the emotions and for people to show up as they are. I think we'll only build the kind of trust and intimacy and sustained movement work that we're going to need.
Nicole: Yeah.
Camille: In the years ahead. Yeah. To regulate with each other, you know, to metabolize the challenging things that come up.
And, you know, build the capacity to focus on what we want to grow, not just what we're seeking to prevent.
Nicole: Mm hmm. Absolutely. The yes and to all of it. And even as you said, we don't have the time for this. I just, it's a rage, like, fueled within my body. What do you mean we don't have time to feel it? feel our lived experience.
What? You know, but, but yeah, that's the reality of me. Hey, you know, works on Monday. I gotta, I gotta go work, you know, like when am I actually going to, and that's the lived reality of our systems and how all of that impacts us. But it is quite absurd to think that we don't have space to feel our human experience.
And yeah, just thinking about the power of community as medicine. Right? We are social relational creatures being able to share our experience with other people and know that they are holding that in their head. And that's, in my opinion, what's going to make it different than AI therapists out there in the future, right?
Is that sure you get all the right words, but this is being held by another actual lived human in their brain. And they're seeing you holding that in their story. And you're known by them and in connection with them. And, you know, so much of what I see in the therapy room is often people who don't have, you know, healthy relationships and spaces to process this stuff.
Right. And we can talk about the capitalization of therapy as that, right? This is, here you go. Let's take your grief into just this room and this room only rather than your friend. friends and all of your community, which is like a really interesting trajectory for the world. Let's see how that goes.
Right. Even part of my training, you know, was learning how to do exactly what you said, right? Be with, I think if we're talking about a world of getting out of therapy as the only container for people to grieve and back into community and our relationships, part of that is. All of us getting more comfortable when people tell us these things to actually be there rather than like you said, Oh, it's okay.
It's going to be fine. It all works out. That's sort of bullshit, right? No, we have to be able in our own body to feel, wow, okay, this person is sharing this and I am feeling really sad and I'm comfortable with what that is impacting me with so that I can actually sit with them in this rather than fixing it because I'm uncomfortable and or maybe the more generous, you know, is I don't want them to be hurting.
I don't want them to be hurting. So I'm trying to pull them out. So I think talking about that in this space here as you know, one of the best things we can do when people are grieving, whether it's Death, you know, I think we also need to open up the space just for grieving of so many different types.
Right? We go through breakups. We lose a job like all of that. We've grieved a whole world of existential possibilities that we were dreaming of. And so we have to grieve. That experience. And so grief is around us in so many different ways, right? And so being able to be comfortable with the discomfort of that experience because of our systems, right, is how we're going to come back to community.
Camille: Yes, yes, yes, yes. So much to all of that. I think that was one of the things that tripped me out so much when I was going through my first grief submission is just how are people functioning?
Nicole: Yeah.
Camille: You know, how are people doing this without collective spaces to be with this experience? And you know, it all started to make sense of like, oh, this is why there's so much alcoholism in England, for example, where I grew up, or this is why people are numbing themselves with whatever it is, shopping, other substances, you know, and there's no shame or that because I think people are just trying to do what they can to feel okay.
But it, it makes sense to me that. You know, without these kind of spaces and without this skill, yeah, people don't know what to do with these feelings. Yeah, having a lot of therapist friends in my life, especially over the pandemic, I really saw how much they were struggling. I don't believe that the kind of framework of just having an elite network of professionals who are the people you go to if you have the money, the people you go to.
Yeah. to deal with this stuff, right? It's like, it's just not sustainable. I love my therapist. Don't get me wrong. They're great. I probably will continue working with them for quite a while, but I'm also, um, it's only been in the last few years I've had the resource to actually pay a therapist, you know, to pay someone with the skillset that I needed, someone, you know, with somatic experiencing background, you know, a lot of people with that skillset are not going to be on a random.
Waiting list system for, you know, whatever therapy that's available, which can be great for some people, but the more kind of intersections that you have, I think the least likely it's going to work out of the box. Yes. So, all the forms of collective grief, some of which you spoke to are not just around losing a partner or a loved one.
I feel a lot of grief around colonization and the ongoing legacies of that. You know, they've impacted my family that continue to shape so much of existing. And I think there is a, a power in being able to have these moments together where we can feel that and where we can allow it to kind of clarify what we care about and what we want to change and really start moving in that direction.
You know the current diagnosis that was added to the latest edition of A DSM, like prolonged grief disorder?
Nicole: Oh, yeah. Oh yeah. Don't you love that one? I get to decide if your grief is problematic.
Camille: Woo. If it lasts six more than six months or a year, you have a disorder. Now let's medicate you. It's like, I know.
I mean, it just, I know you know. It's just very telling, this kind of ongoing disciplining of the body and how in industrial capitalism there's more and more of a push to make us operate like machines, and that if we're having any kind of state, uh, in any emotional state that's not productive or impacts our ability to labor, then that gets pathologized and, you know, this isn't the world I would like to live in.
How are you meant to even hold space for your own emotions, let alone someone else? If you've never been given that permission to know it's okay, just feel how you're feeling.
Nicole: Right. Absolutely. Absolutely. As you were talking, I was just, yeah, let me just underline how absurd about the prolonged grief and all of that.
I'll just underline that again and again and again because wow And even within that system then going through various training Experiences where if I was moved by the cases that I was holding in the depth of pain this high level of professionalism of oh if I'm Brought to tears, not even in the session, but with my supervisor about the quality of what was going on, that I am somehow weak and that I am not able to hold the capacities of all of this.
Right. Because that's professionalism coming in that like, yeah, when my client has, I won't even go into the contents, but like heavy stuff and I'm a human, I'm not, you know, some sort of robot that goes through this, that can just give you the, like I'm impacted. And so being able to find thankfully, sites where I've been training where I'm able to actually cry with my supervisor and not have to be afraid that that's going to suggest that I can't do this work, right?
That's part of this. And I think getting even outside of the therapy context, talking about different intersecting identities and what it means to cry, right? For various people that might suggest truly weakness. And I think, Part of that then is also dismantling the systems that say these emotions are weak or there's something wrong with you to understand the amount of strength it is to actually be there with yourself in that rather than fighting it and living up to these high levels of professionalism and all of that.
Ugh. Yeah.
Camille: Mm. Mm hmm. I'm sorry you had to navigate that. That's. Ugh. It does make sense as to why there is so much numbing in a lot of these places too. Yeah.
Nicole: Yeah. And all of us, right? Um, the amount of things that will wake up to in a new cycle, particularly in America and the things that happen in our country and it just be expected to go to work.
Just be expected to go to work. Mass deaths mass things that happen. Yeah, just go to work. Just go to work, you know So I think we're all processing that whether you're a therapist or not Like you're going through this world where even if we want to go back to climate change, right? That's you know Right, like that's ongoing go to work.
Just fine. Go to work. Just go to work, you know, and so All of us are holding so much, which I think brings me back even to a little bit of what we were talking about earlier, where, how much of our life are we living with our shoulders up by our ears and not even knowing, because we are actively living under these systems so much so that it's become normalized that we don't even know.
And so when I think about, you know, like you had said, you know, dreaming of the future and trying to live into that. the world that we want to see. I, I think there is such a political and I'm sure you know this, you started out with this, but there's such a political force to being connected to our bodies and being connected to our pleasure because it also means grief.
But wow, what a radical revolution where people are actually feeling these things, becoming enraged by the systems and being able to use that energy for action. That that's a whole revolution right there. Yeah, I really hope so.
Yes, a revolution of pleasure and true embodiment and grief and all of the emotions.
Camille: Yeah. Yeah. And having that sense of belonging, that homecoming and that, that space just to be and feel okay and how you are. I think on various levels, there's so many masks that people are having to wear to just exist in this economy.
to do the professionalism thing, which has always confused me. I never really knew what it meant. And hearing your example now, I do feel like I can land on a good portion of it is numbing. Yeah. Yes. What does this mean? What does it mean to be professional? What are they talking about? Yeah. I think a lot of these relational pieces will.
We'll have to change. We'll have to break down for us to move somewhere else. And I think they already are. I mean, the bypassing, numbing, overriding, distracting dance that many people have been in does not really seem to be working for them anymore. It's just too much. And there's more and more people I'm connected to who are kind of getting to that breaking point.
Where they have to address what's happening in their bodies and how they are interfacing with the world. I really hope that there are more and more soft containers for people to do that, that reconnection work and that we can start to allow it to enliven us and connect us to all the, the things that we're often trying to chase in those peak experiences, but sometimes can be a bit superficial without that kind of deeper foundational work.
Nicole: Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Yeah. And as you were talking, I was thinking about when we're living under these systems and having to navigate spaces of professionalism and all of that, you know, what does it look like? I know we talked earlier about feeling into when we open up to people and talk about these deeper pieces and connecting to the body.
And I was also thinking of Brene Brown's example of putting marbles in a jar, right? Mm hmm. Where maybe you Drop a little bit of vulnerability and see how that person holds it. Right. We don't tell the whole story yet. Right. We don't share all of that. And if they respond well, then they've earned the trust of that second marble.
Right. And we continue to check in. Um, so adding to that marble example, what you've been speaking about, right. Of how does my body feel when I am doing this? How are they reacting? Are they trying to shut this down and make it simple? Are they. Being with me and I think if we have that sort of container of taking small steps, we'll be able to build the trust with the people in our communities and then be able to work around these systems that are so actively trying to make us a cog in the machine that's dumb and shows up as this professional aka non human being that does the work and the labor, right?
This is how we're going to be able to work towards that more collective community processing. Mm. Yes. Yes, yes, yes.
Camille: Yeah. Mm. I do really love the marble jar. Yeah. Analogy from Brene. Yeah. I use it a lot in my own great in my own life. Yeah. This is something I, I hope for with the book the World, is that people kind of use that marble analogy as they're practicing holding grief spaces in community that they, as the facilitators or space holders.
Notice, like, how many marbles they can hold. Yeah, that's a, yes. And people coming into the group space also go with the kind of marble analogy too. Like, maybe I'm just going to put one or two in and see what this container is like. But really kind of that building trust process, which I know can be hard to discern.
Especially if you're disconnected, but I think this could be a beautiful opportunity for people to practice. Maybe I dip my toe in here. Maybe I give a little piece of me, but not the whole thing, not the most like traumatic experience that has ever happened. So that's something I, I hope that people will do is really build that trust and find a container and cultivate that over time to hold these bigger pieces.
There's going to need to be a level of skill and embodied grounding and maybe awareness of trauma recovery skills. To, to actually give robust support. And so I think there will need to be a lot of discernment as grief work and grief tending becomes, is in this reclamation process and as that happens more, I really hope we can also keep the discernment around, do we maybe need to make a referral around someone who is going to have that skill set?
And so I think it will call for not just the kind of like Instagrammable, I'm an expert now because I read one book or I went on a weekend course, but really, Being in the practice and consistently discerning, you know, what can I hold and also what am I open to bringing?
Nicole: Certainly. Absolutely. And yeah, just do you have the capacity, right?
I think that is the tricky thing when I think about this world of getting outside of therapy, right? This is a sort of container where if we look at it as struggling with relational dynamics that created the mental health, of course, the systems as well, but created the mental health dynamics that are presenting the reality is that sort of relationship can be very energetically difficult, right?
Because maybe they're coming in that activated, they're coming in like that. And so when we're pulling more people into community, what does that mean when you're Holding all these different people and this person is needing more energy is needing more energy What does it look like to actually know in your body of Wow?
Okay. I don't have the capacity today How are you able to communicate that slash balance it out? And I just I'm deeply afraid of this world that is actively happening now Of when someone is struggling that much, you say, go to a therapist, right? So, so when we're trying to take on that weight as a community, what does it mean to balance that with your own capacities?
Trust that the community around them and that you're in is going to hold them so that you're not the only point person for them, right? All of that then I think does come back to, you know, what we've hit on throughout this conversation of where's your body? You know, are you connected to your body? Are you feeling like you're going to cry?
Are you feeling like you need a nap? Right? Like being able to feel into that so that you can know what energetic space you have and then being able to communicate that to that person and the community at large that we can hold people in this rather than, Hey, go see the therapist or, or, or maybe a yes and right.
Yes. And see the therapist and be held here.
Camille: Hmm. Hmm. Agree. I agree. There are processes we can take in our communities to kind of upskill around somatic grounding around having more capacity, more bandwidth in our nervous system so that we can hold a container that's more robust and able to, yeah, kind of give the support that we need.
That is needed in this moment. So I hope that we can, that we can figure that out and really invest the time and the, the resource and the practice in doing that so that we can build more and more robust containers, the things that we're navigating.
Nicole: Yeah, and your book will certainly be a part of that, which is really exciting to have that coming out as a resource.
So I'll be excited to check that out. And I want to hold some space too, as we're coming towards the end of our time. I always like to check in with each guest and just. Make sure that there wasn't anything still lingering on your heart that you wanted to share with the listeners. Otherwise I can guide us towards a closing question.
Camille: I hope that people can feel inspired from the book to research their own ancestral grief practices. And to figure out how to weave in some of those aspects, I really hope that that will happen as well in this unfolding.
Nicole: Yeah. May it be so. Well, then I'll guide us towards our closing question if that feels good to you.
So then the one question that I ask each guest on the podcast is, what is one thing that you wish other people knew was more normal?
Camille: I wish people knew it was normal to feel kind of disconnected and numb when you live in the West. And to not know.
Nicole: Yeah. Yeah. And then to have compassion when you find out years later and look back on that history going, Whoa, that was a lot of, a lot of life that I had no idea I was living like that.
Camille: Right. Yeah. Yeah. But also that it is possible to move towards reconnection and it's a cumulative. So to also know that it's totally normal for that process to take years and to just hopefully deepen more and more into a connection with the body and the land and the bodies of ecosystems that we're in relationship to.
And then yeah, ancestral wisdom and other cosmologies that might've been present for us and our people not so long ago. Absolutely. Thank you. It's been great talking with you.
Nicole: Mm-Hmm. , where would you wanna plug? For all the people that are curious about your book and your work, where can they find you?
Camille: People can find me either on Instagram at Camille Sapara Barton, or can also find me on my website, which is the power button.com. And you can find Tending Grief at most places you can find books or audiobooks. So if you like the sound of my voice and you want to hear me read the book to you, that's also an option.
Nicole: Great. Lovely. Thank you for joining us today.
If you enjoyed today's episode, then leave us a 5 star review wherever you listen to your podcast. And head on over to to modernanarchypodcast. com to get resources and learn more about all the things we talked about on today's episode. I want to thank you for tuning in and I will see you all next week.
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