grief: When grief for the world arises, am I willing to experience it not as a personal burden, but as evidence of my belonging to a larger body that feels through me?
There are moments when grief arises without asking permission … not only as something we feel … but as something that moves through us.
Not only personal grief, but grief for the world itself — for what is breaking … disappearing … hardening … or being lost faster than we can name.
Often, we meet grief by turning inward: we ask what is wrong with us? … how to manage it? … how to move past it? … or how to carry it alone without becoming overwhelmed? … but …
There is another possibility: that grief is a sign of belonging; not a private burden … its evidence that we are still connected to a larger body … that feels through us.
In this way, grief is not the opposite of love or engagement. It is openness unfolding.
The invitation here is simple and demanding: to stay present where truth is allowed to appear … and to notice what becomes possible when we do not carry it alone.
What follows is an account of a moment when grief, anger, fear, and hope were given a shared space … held … spoken … and witnessed.
Nothing is explained … Nothing is fixed … What is offered is presence.
The First Truth Mandala: Grief as Connection?
The East Germans found it hard to relax, tense and tighter than the West Germans who had been exposed to New Age thinking in the West. What did open them up was a Council of All Beings, where they could talk more freely in the voice of another life form.
It so happened that partway through the intensive, the night skies lit up and resounded with fireworks to celebrate the first anniversary of the reunification of East and West Germany. The next morning, I had prepared carefully and was eager to get started. However, as I walked into the room, I found everyone in a clamor, talking loudly at each other and too upset to proceed in our customary way. The official celebrations of reunification had triggered painful feelings and resentments. I saw pretty quickly that we all needed to find a way to deal with feelings of bitterness and disappointment without turning on one another. For that we needed some kind of ritual.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw someone walk in with an unusual object—a large tuft of grass growing out of a cement block. Instantly I heard myself say, “Objects for the feelings … wahrheit mandala … a truth mandala.” I announced to the group that we would be doing a Truth Mandala, speaking the formal name as if it were something venerable that had existed prior to that very moment.
I had everyone sit in a small circle several people thick, enclosing a round, open space. “We will make thick walls like the walls of a containment vessel of a nuclear reactor to hold the sacred space, and we will make this space sacred by truth-telling. Here we will enter a new dimension, made sacred by truth-telling, assisted by objects we will place in this circle.” In the quadrants formed by two intersecting invisible lines, I placed a stone for fear, a pile of dead leaves for grief, a stick for anger, and the grass for hope. I explained that we will support one another as we enter one at a time, take an object, and let it speak through us to express our thoughts and feelings.
In that moment, Mummy’s teachings were there for me. I knew our feelings were strong yet impermanent, and as they are openly expressed, we have less need to hang on to them. Rapidly I invented guidelines. “Only enter the mandala if you want to. Keep it brief. Speak for yourself only. To show you are listening, you can murmur in refrain after each person has spoken. Ich höre dich, ich bin mit dir [I hear you, I am with you].”
After chanting the seed syllable AH, representing all that has not yet been spoken, we opened our Truth Mandala. As it was new for each of us, I expected there would be quite a spell before things got under way, but with hardly a pause there they were, rising and stepping into the circle to take up an object. One veteran facilitator of the Work grabbed the chance to speak, eager to release his anger: “I have been working for reunification my whole damn life … and now that it has happened, it looks like the triumph of capitalism. Where does a socialist like me go? I feel I don’t belong in this country anymore.”
I remember the words of an East German woman, born under the Soviet regime. She had spoken in the Council of All Beings as a dolphin in a tank of water, with people watching her and no place to escape: “I have been organizing for years, risking my life in hopes of reunification, to tear down the curtain … but I certainly didn’t want my village to become a golf course.”
~ Joanna Macy
This multi-part series is exploring A Wild Love for the World: Joanna Macy and the Work of Our Time, edited by Stephanie Kaza. The book gathers reflections, stories, and practices that trace Macy’s lifelong engagement with collective grief, ecological rupture, and the quiet sources of resilience that arise when suffering is met together rather than borne alone. Again and again, it invites a shift—from private endurance toward shared presence—where grief, fear, anger, and hope become doorways into belonging and renewed relationship with the living world.
This post – Part 2 – is excerpted from the chapter, The First Truth Mandala recounts the moment the Truth Mandala took shape—a simple ritual in which grief, anger, fear, and hope were given a shared space, held not to be resolved, but to be spoken and witnessed … a moment of truth-telling in which connection quietly reappears.
… Part 1 – excerpted from Afterword – reflected on grief as a sign of belonging rather than a private burden.
Read together, the two parts trace a movement—from recognizing our shared vulnerability to sensing how it can be held, collectively and with care.
This post is part of our ongoing Shambhala Publications series, featuring selected excerpts from new and classic titles published by Shambhala Publications.
All italicized text here is adapted from A Wild Love for the World: Joanna Macy and the Work of Our Time by Joanna Macy, Stephanie Kaza (Editor), © 2020 by Stephanie Kaza. Reprinted in arrangement with the publisher Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO.
You can purchase the book at Shambhala Publications or Amazon.
Images (edited & Logo added): 1 & Featured) Image (AI-generated): OpenAI / ChatGPT, 2) A Wild Love for the World: Joanna Macy and the Work of Our Time by Joanna Macy, Stephanie Kaza (Editor) cover image from Shambhala, 3) Shambhala Publications logo. 2) & 3) generously provided by Shambhala Publications with permission to be used on our website and other digital assets.
