Learning to celebrate collective healing
Content warning: Discussions of mental illness and suicide
When one of my best friends invited me to a mindfulness session at the Bahen Centre for Information Technology, I was wary. I was wary of mindfulness and its benefits, and I was wary of the space itself. After the latest death by suicide that had taken place there, my body rejected Bahen. I have class there each Wednesday and even before the latest death, I felt a degree of frustration and melancholia. Sometimes my stomach churns, or sometimes I dissociate from my surroundings and don’t think about where I am at all.
I live with generalized and social anxiety which means connecting to my body is difficult. It is even more difficult in a quasi-public space like Bahen’s multi-use space, which has no walls. If you’ve never been there, it is a section of a room that is closed off but not separate from the rest of the ground floor. The room is often used for multi-faith prayers. There are people constantly passing by. But because one of my friends invited me, I felt safer. I had done mindfulness, body scans, and grounding meditations in the temporary therapy I’d attended for a few months. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. By “work” I mean sometimes it de-escalated a crisis into some distress, and some distress into less distress.
On the cold floor of Bahen’s multipurpose room, with a yoga mat, I couldn’t relax; I couldn’t take my mind off the incidents and how the movement of people around the building seemed to erase the fact that they ever happened. No long-lasting memorials, nothing besides clean floors and a lot of people studying at once. People walked by, and because the room had no door, it got loud. With so many strangers’ voices crowding into my body, my jaw couldn’t relax. I felt my eyelids shaking. Frustrated, I gripped the knot in my stomach as it flexed up then down. The instructor said to breathe from my belly. It’s harder than it sounds, but once I did it, I started to feel my breaths actually escaping, the knot loosening. The instructor had us silently repeat affirmative mantras—statements like, “I am worthy of love,” and “I deserve to feel happy and safe.” We then extended these sentiments to our fellow peers and were asked to picture a friend and extend those feelings to them. This is where I felt a shift in my emotions and completely gave into the notion of collective consciousness, a sociological concept I’d learned much about in my classes.
The Bahen incidents are collective trauma, a psychological effect or possibly life-altering event that affects many lives, especially because of its repetitive nature. It may affect some more than others, but I believe the Bahen Centre is a space that holds this trauma and will continue to do so for as long as it exists. There are spaces like these in many other places. One example of a similar trauma symbol is the Caltrain that runs past Palo Alto High in California, a site of many student suicides in 2014 and onward. Once places are sites for death, they often become acknowledged as symbols for emotional pain. It’s hard to look at a place that has been the site for so much hopelessness and still want to step inside.
By connecting to myself within Bahen’s walls, I ultimately felt some of its pain move through me as I lay with my back pressed against its floor. I’d never done mindfulness practice in a room with more than one other person, and contrary to my usual anxiety of sharing space with others, the more I thought about them—the myriad of bodies and minds and the space they took up around me—the more I was able to relax. The voices from the hallway cocooned me and became white noise. I extended my thoughts out to everyone around me, and this might be a stretch, but I felt them extending their well-wishes to me too.
It’s understandable to be wary of mindfulness—especially in a setting like UofT—because it is something that demands you to accept it in order for it to actually work, kind of like a magic show or hypnosis. Mindfulness is often also not a long-term medical solution for various mental health issues, and it doesn’t work for everyone, depending on what your personal needs are. It needs to be used often to be able to impact your life, but it in no way replaces therapy and medication. That said, many of our associations with the triviality of meditation and body work is that they are caricature activities, perpetuated by eccentric media portrayals of Swamis and Yogis (which often stem from a place of Orientalism and othering, but that is another story/academic essay). In fact, mindfulness practice and meditation are rooted in science. Genevieve Tregor of mindful.org writes, “The therapeutic power of mindfulness lies, at its very heart, with the paradox of letting go of the need to fix in order to heal. Mindfulness is not therapy or a therapy mechanism, Tregor posits, as it does not invite mechanisms through which to solve problems and abolish mental illness. This notion is at the core of trauma work, the idea that healing is what’s necessary, not solving a trauma, because those don’t go away. Anxiety might not leave you alone for good, but you can work to heal the havoc it has wreaked on your body and mind. heart, with the paradox of letting go of the need to fix in order to heal.” Mindfulness is not therapy or a therapy mechanism, Tregor posits, as it does not invite mechanisms through which to solve problems and abolish mental illness. This notion is at the core of trauma work, the idea that healing is what’s necessary, not solving a trauma, because those don’t go away. Anxiety might not leave you alone for good, but you can work to heal the havoc it has wreaked on your body and mind.
The most beneficial aspect of mindfulness practice is that it teaches us to be aware of things and accept them without trying to change or alter them. For students who are often told to perfect everything from their assignments to their social lives, this acceptance is especially beneficial. “Mindfulness practice is ultimately a way of holding ourselves in service to — and as a witness to — our experience,” writes Tregor. Instead of living inside a moment of exam panic, mindfulness can help us to be aware of our panic, and not try to force it away. Suppression often leads to more serious issues. By being aware of our stress, we can go through its motions and assure ourselves that we, our bodies, are safe.
Awareness is a key part of the “checking in with yourself” rhetoric that has become so popular in recent years. But what about checking in with your community? The more I progress through my post-secondary life, the more I find myself craving groups, wanting to talk to and just be around other people. My sense of wanting to be alone is now overrated. I thought isolation was less stressful because I didn’t have to perform for anyone; my mantra was Simon and Garfunkel’s “I Am A Rock.” Sometimes, this still holds true for me. Other times, when it becomes a default setting, it does more harm than good. Though I do think that mindfulness works well as an individual experience that allows you to check in with your body and your own thoughts, I also believe it has a great impact in checking in with others. In teaching us awareness and acceptance, it can help us manifest empathy and community-building mentalities. These mentalities are so necessary in tackling the strategy of isolation that institutions like UofT use to advance their social and academic standings.
We must put forth an awareness not just of an individual’s body, but of the bodies that make up our worlds, the floors and walls that build lives and legacies. Our collective houses, if you will. It must be an awareness of a terrible tragedy, how the body reacts to this systematic failure of the institution it inhabits, and how it copes with it over and over again. How resilient it is. How it is surprised by a friend’s hug because it’s been so long since it remembered to be tender.
Mindful Moments at Bahen take place every Friday in October in the multipurpose room (BA1255). You can view the full lineup of Mindful Moments on campus here.
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