Heard & Held

Marigolds, ship metaphors, and transformation.

Oct 06, 2024

I wanted to give a gift. As sure as my heart beat in my chest, I wanted to share a token of gratitude with the 20 people sharing space in the yellowy room on the 2nd floor. Days were long, nearly 12 hours, packed with activity and thought, and as our plane of earth turned incrementally away from the sun, the days were also short, then even shorter, darkness falling fast and thick before the end of the last session. Time was both expansive and limited.

Leaving the brightly-lit building each night fabricated a sense of being set at sea, my body and mind a ship sailing into a black unknown (metaphor for the experience?) as I sought my car by the weak glow of my iPhone. I love that the Berkshires is so unlit. It allows you to see the stars.

What can I say about those four endless, fleeting days?

I signed up for the retreat because I was lost. An exchange at work had left me feeling hurt, slightly victimized. Why me? Again?! I wanted to do something about it other than launch a hunt for another job where the same patterns were likely to play out or worse. Few people are trained in management. Promotions are often a reward for hard work and hard won achievement. We’re sent into open water in a flimsy skiff, a battered life jacket soaked in dirty water, shoved under the seat. I guess this boat metaphor is going to stick.

The scholarshipped opportunity slid into my inbox one nondescript afternoon. I applied immediately. A few weeks later, I was informed I’d been accepted. There was no agenda. Where comfy clothes. Meals are provided.

Day 1

One the first day we went around the circle: Tell the group why you are here. I want to be better for my team, I said, words similar to others. Some people were burnt out, wearied by toxic work environments. Some were stretched so thin they’d blended into their organizations and could no longer define the edges of themselves. Others wanted to gain confidence, courage to use their voice. A few were looking for tools and knowledge to fold into their own programs. Everyone was a manager of some sort. Everyone was seeking support and guidance, steered by a desire to learn, improve. Leadership looks like a lot of different things.

Everyone thinks leaders get all the praise because they get nearly all of the recognition, said one of the facilitators. But shit rolls uphill.

We failed miserably at the first exercise. There was a lot of laughter and incredulous guffaws as the tent pole, resting weightlessly across 84 fingers (no thumbs or palms allowed), raised stubbornly toward the ceiling. The goal was to lower it to the ground. On the third or fourth try the blaming started. It was the tall people’s fault. The short ones were unable to keep their fingers connected to the pole. People were in the wrong order. It was the people at that end of the pole. No, actually it was everyone over there at that end. After half an hour the pole was taken away from us and it felt a lot like a group of children who started out playing nicely then ended up in a verbal brawl. It’s just a game, I thought, but I had no idea what was coming.

This is going to be difficult to explain, so bear with me.

Day 2

The second exercise was a simple game with complicated rules and potentially dire consequences. The goal was to shepherd the team from one side of a matrix to the other, a single floor square at a time, without knowing which squares were too fragile to hold human weight.

The catch was that these rules - along with other pertinent details - were given to a single person called out into the hall without warning or context. They were delivered without eye contact and then too much eye contact. They were spoken in rapid fire, punctuated with language about how the lives of the team were your responsibility, their deaths would not be memorialized. No funerals allowed. And by the way, you have only ten minutes, starting now. Any questions? Go!

I was smiling on the outside while my internal panic rose like an angry, salty wave. I think I asked two questions. The answers were something like no and no. It’s a game, I reminded myself. Breathe. Ok, I said and returned to the room where my group chatted happily.

I can only describe the next few minutes as though I were clinging to the sides of a sinking ship, a vessel under my charge that I could not save, and while everyone scurried around, trying to solve the puzzle, I participated beneath a mask of artificial bravery while my heart sank in the knowledge that these lives were already lost. They were lost before I reentered the room. Everyone one of us died.

When we circled up after to chat, adrenaline ebbing, tears flooded my eyes. I was aware that my body language was shifting, that I was curling inward, familiar patterns and thoughts setting loose wide sails into a reckless wind, and I was powerless to do anything other than physically press my limbs against myself to keep everything inside from gushing out. No one seemed to notice until the facilitator asked, Did anyone check on Elizabeth?

I was wrecked the rest of the day. Even in the wake of kindness from the facilitator, my peers, I dropped down deep to the murky seabed. Sometimes you have to sink, to find bottom, so you have something to kick against and rise again.

Day 3

The next morning, I stayed home an extra hour to journal and found myself weeping over my laptop as I emailed a friend about the experience. It wasn’t just my failure in leadership, my complicated (or perhaps not so complicated) relationship with “success” and its nasty, artificial ties to being worthy of love and acceptance - it was also that I suddenly saw in stark relief that I’d missed the boat entirely. Not once did I feel empowered to say, Wait. Slow down. Please repeat that. I took the situation at face value. I made assumptions. I never once, not even for a moment, paused to question or consider anything other than what was presented to and asked of me. And I know in my bones one of the reasons why is that he is a man.

Had the other facilitator given me the instructions, would I have felt more in control? More even footed? Possessed of some measure of autonomy and empowerment? Have I been cultured to believe that men hold more power and therefore are more dangerous and worthy of unquestioned respect?

The answer is obvious.

Your first team, he said on Day 1, was your family. The grooves those dynamics etched into your mountainside run deep.

One of the first conversations we had as a group was about power and privilege, about acknowledging the specific experiences afforded to a particular body. When a white male body walks into a space, that body will be perceived and treated differently from a body that is non-white and non-male. Same with titles that imply status. A CEO or President possesses, earned or not, a particular amount of authority in specific contexts. Leadership, in any body, grants power, and that power impacts the space in which it resides. We must, as leaders and fellow humans, be cognizant of the dynamics, points of view, and life experiences present in the spaces we share with others.

Later that morning they divided us into different groups and we repeated the matrix exercise. This time I was with the other facilitator. We were in another room and we were given the rules together as a group. It was a team effort and the experience - benefiting from all we’d learned the previous day - was a full 180. Not only did we solve the puzzle (no life and death consequences this time), we had minutes to spare!

It was healing. In the circle chat after I was able to tell the group about my experience. Some of them had been with me, their lives lost, and some of them were shocked by the differences of our set up versus theirs, which had also been group-directed. When I mentioned the dynamic of gender, I saw the women in the room nod their heads, the men listening. In that space that unfolded between us I felt heard and held.

Heard and held. From the moment we enter this human experience by way of our mother’s warm body into the icy air of our first breath, we want, we need, we desperately require to be heard and held. Without those critical connections we will not survive, and this need carries forward throughout life even if it takes on different roles, even if we learn to survive without that vital sustenance. To be heard is to be seen and acknowledged. To be held is to be safe and accepted. These are acts of love.

I felt heard and held throughout the retreat. From the stories and impressions, the feelings shared by my fellow leaders, I think they also felt heard and held. I was honored to bear witness. And I wanted to honor this honor with a gift.

At the end of the third day, as I pulled into my driveway, the last of summer’s blooms met my gaze in the haze of moonlight. Marigolds. A symbol of remembrance, of memorializing death and the transformation that follows. Their golden hues are reminiscent of the sun, symbolizing ambition, a drive to succeed, to celebrate success. All summer I’d been basking in their cheery color, harvesting their seeds at the end of each blossom’s life.

In one of our most sacred conversations, one of my peers shared the image of seeds. That symbol struck me. As I lay in bed that night, I decided this was the gift I could give. A small token of my affection, a symbol of the shared journey across this short but divinely deep sea of community, of what might bloom as a result.

I woke early, snipped flowers, and with green paper stapled together tiny seed packets just big enough for a single dried marigold, ripe with seeds. I placed a flower and seed packet at everyone’s seat in the circle, and later in the morning, as everyone discovered their gift, there were hugs and gratitudes.

The facilitator, who’d been so kind the day I was wrecked, spoke little to me over the final two days. But I was also exceedingly quiet, keeping my distance. He seemed to provide space that I was silently asking for. I know this about myself. I need space to get close. I need to move away to move forward. I need to cave and crawl inward in order to bloom and stretch toward the sun. I must be very, very quiet before I can speak and sing. A rabbit stills before it springs.

We were told early in this process: Everything you need to succeed at these exercises, we have given you.

I’ve thought so much about that early conversation around power, about how our patterns and assumptions, deeply ingrained by life and trauma, are allowed to steer our ships, often while we willingly wear a blindfold, thinking we can somehow chart the course with wildly waving limbs. I keep replaying that moment in the hallway, feeling the way my body responded then and in the present to the memory because it is so reminiscent of so many moments past. My father’s hands around my throat, his face inches from mine. The kids behind the shed. Being picked up by my hair. The deacon. The runner when I was twelve, asking me to go running with him. The teachers. The senior in a shadowy hotel room. The beautiful boy with big eyes in Alaska. My lover screaming at me across phone lines. My boss sitting close, his finger sliding across my wrist. I was terrified. I wanted belonging. I was disgusted. I was in love. In everyone one of these moments and others I made an assumption - like a blindfold I consentingly slid over my own eyes - that I had less power. I remember thinking, over and over again, This is what you have to do - this being whatever was asked of me. And I am so, so lucky. In the end, I was ok. I escaped, scarred but alive.

You might say my assumption was true. I did have less power. But there are many, many times when I had more power than I realized. And that is the point. I didn’t know. I couldn’t see it.

Now I do. Now I can.

The word transformational is in the title of the retreat, and it is the ideal description. In the days that followed, as I processed, feeling into the experience even more than thinking into it, I became aware that I have been changed on a cellular level. Many experiences change us forever, for better and worse, and we are often not privy to these shifts. Only a few times in my life do I feel I was able to witness the transformation mid-alchemy. These are those times:

My wedding ceremony, when a magical hush befell the afternoon as our chosen family gathered beneath the great pine.
Dancing and singing in the rain with Taylor and 70,000 souls at the “rainiest rain show that ever rain showed.”
Kripalu’s Transformational Leadership Retreat.

There is something these life-shifting experiences share. Connection. Being heard and held. I remember saying my vows surrounded by friends and a few close family. We felt so loved. I remember being communally drenched in the straight down storm, a drop in a sea of warm bodies collectively raising our hands, voices, and hearts to meet the power of the woman on stage who’d gathered us, a real-life goddess, a sorceress, an artist bridging generations with poetry celebrating the profoundly human female experience. And I remember what it felt like to sit in that room at Kripalu on day one, and how I was someone new and different at the end of day four. My soul had been invited to step forward into the center of a space spinning across 84 ethereal fingertips. No thumbs!

Day 4

We were given another chance with the tentpole. In two groups, side by side in the center of the circle, practicing everything we’d learned and - most importantly - tuning into one another, we breathed together, we sensed how to be and what was needed, and we lowered the pole to the floor. It sounds so easy, I know, but it took synchronized heart, mind, and body to succeed. Our fingers on the floor felt like winning the lottery.

So connected were we at the very end that we achieved the final team exercise in one go in only a few minutes. It was the same exercise that opens the play Circle Mirror Transformation. There’s that word again. Transformation. And the image of a circle. A space where you may see yourself in the reflection of others.

It’s all around us, happening all the time. Magic just waiting to be witnessed. A seed to a flower. A puppy to a dog. Night to day and returning to night. Summer to fall. I was someone yesterday and I am someone else today. Hearing and holding. Being heard and held.

I hear you and I hold you.

Happy transformation, my darling friends.