Five Breaths
Compassion into action is how we build a better world.
You can read the essay below or watch the video—the content is nearly identical.
Now, in the era of racial reckoning, something we don’t hear about often enough is the importance of grief, including and especially making space for our own grief.
In the Ever Afters, after the narrator Rory loses both her mentors, there’s a moment where she says something like: having a second grief doesn’t cancel out the first. It just carves out a deeper hole.
There’s a second implied part to that, not named in the book but shown through what Rory goes through in the rest of the story: Yes, a second grief will carve a bigger hole, but that pain can be transformed into even greater compassion, which leads you automatically into action on behalf of others. And Rory demonstrates this.
Right now, we have a lot of griefs compounding inside us. We’re all grieving for the victims of the hate crime in Atlanta, GA, and for what their families are going through, for the ongoing injustice in our communities. A year into the pandemic, most of us carry some personal griefs as well.
Again, I need to remind everyone: I am not an anti-racism educator. As a white Southerner, my task is embody anti-racism by transmuting my white fragility into white reckoning.
Active grief is part of that transmutation process. Up until now, it has been private, and that’s actually what I encourage. Please do not weaponize your grief by showing it inappropriately to someone, especially someone with less racial privilege than you.
With the griefs piling up, this is a lot of feels floating around. It’s a dangerous stew, and the longer you leave it there, the more dangerous it becomes. My friend, Angela, talked in her Instagram LIVE talked about how violence, including that against Asian-Americans, comes from unresolved trauma. These perpetrators focus on something outside of them as the source of their pain, and they lash out with tragic results.
We’ve all seen this pattern elsewhere in less serious forms. It isn’t always as obvious as gun violence and murder. I’ve been talking to some shopkeepers about how cruel some of their customers have been recently, for no reason at all.
If you aren’t actively managing your own emotional pain, you are often turning other people into the problem and lashing out at them.
Grief is the process of turning your own pain into compassion. The problem is that our entire culture is afraid of grief.
In the aftermath of an atrocity, we see a lot of reposting names and facts and figures and hashtags, and raising awareness is truly vital work. However, just reposting or putting up a memorial has never sat well with me, in part because it feels like a door slammed on grief. As in, if we just put up the right social media post, we can slam the lid on our pain, and maybe outrun it. That delays the grieving process, making it way more challenging to turn it into compassion.
So, for a long time, I’ve been considering:
How can I make a communal container for our grief?
How can I acknowledge the loss in a way that helps us to feel the feelings for long enough to transform them into greater compassion?
And what came to me was: 5 Breaths.
This is the process to participate if you feel so inclined:
First, we collect the griefs in our hearts, and we let ourselves really feel it.
For example, we hold the victims and their families in our hearts. Right now, at the writing of this post, it’s the victims of Asian-American hate crime who were killed last Tuesday, March 16, 2021 in Atlanta.
If you have personal grief, you collect that too. For me, it’ll just name some current examples weighing on my heart:
My college friend, Kim. passed away from complications of COVID at the beginning of the New York pandemic last April. I’ve already said that she’s top of mind for me now, because I’ve just survived the disease that killed her. She was also a first-generation Cambodian-American writer, the daughter of refugees from the Khmer Rouge, so I grieve all the books she won’t get to write as well as the person she was.
My sister-in-law Chikako, her father passed away in Han Nan late last month. Because of the pandemic, she hadn’t seen him in over a year—he lived in Hong Kong, where Chikako grew up. His memorial service, which I attended virtually, was last Friday, so that’s pretty fresh.
I grieve for all of my living Asian-American loved ones—for what they’ve survived and for what they’re currently experiencing.
And I’ve got a relative whose last rites were read to them Sunday. I grieve that too.
These are mine, my griefs. You’ll list your own to yourself. So you know, I’m being super honest about my feelings here, because that’s the most effective way I know to demonstrate what we’re doing. I just want to remind all of you that you don’t need to do anything for me when I have things I’m upset about. I can absolutely handle it. I’m just demonstrating what’s true for me right now so that you know, even if similar stuff is true for you right now, you can still handle what you’re going through. You can still expand your capacity to hold this pain.
So, you collect all these griefs in your heart, the grief for the victims and for your personal ones, and you really really feel them for five slow breaths. That’s usually less than a minute.
This sounds super easy, but it’s not. I kept trying to practice this week, and I kept chickening out on Breath #3. Instead I kept finding something to distract me from feeling my feels.
When you breathe, even just five breaths, emotions will come up. That’s okay.
You may feel deep rage—that’s absolutely fine. It’s just one flavor of grief.
You may feel like you’re going to cry. You may actually cry. (I might actually cry.) That’s also okay. It’s only five breaths. You can survive any emotion for five breaths, and besides, as Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés says, Tears are cleansing.
Now, when I record a video, you can do it with me, or you can do it on your own, knowing that wherever I am, I’m cheering you on—and so is everyone else who participates.
But I encourage you to really practice this—maybe you’ll even do it more than once, just to feel and transform more of your grief. Or maybe you find something else that gives you space to process grief.
Because as a culture, we may be afraid of grief, but we need the compassion that comes when you process it.
Compassion-into-action is how we build a better world.