Stories of Transformation through Contemplative Practice:
Judith Thompson of Children of War

The story that I often tell is a story of one evening where we were doing group support work in a number of different ways, small groups and large groups, so that the stories were being told and the process of healing was happening. In the evenings we would often focus on one particular regional area or conflict area and give some more straightforward sociopolitical information. What is Apartheid? How did it occur? What are its historic roots? We might show a movie or something like that and then the people from that region of the world would get up and tell their personal stories...

On this particular evening we were telling the story of Cambodia. The Cambodian youth got up to share their story but really they just began to weep. This was maybe four days into the program and a very safe community had formed, a very open community and so when they began to weep everybody began weeping. There were 75 or so people in the room from all these different parts of the world and I truly felt that the process that evolved was really a transpersonal process. I would view it as a holographic experience, meaning the whole was present in the parts and the parts were present in the whole and we were really allowing the suffering of the entire world to come through.

I know that sounds a bit of a hyperbole but that's, I think, how we felt, and given who we were and what was happening it was not too outrageous to speculate that we had aligned with a much greater field of suffering compared to just a personal suffering of individuals.

We were all in a circle and what happened was eventually one or two people stood up, and then other people, and then suddenly one African-American girl from South Central LA started to sing a spiritual. Someone else started singing a freedom song and then the South Africans who brought a very particular flow of energy that was quite extraordinary began singing their freedom songs and then they began to do their freedom dances. Then suddenly they broke off and there was a sort of snake dance outside the building and around the grounds, then people came back in and there we were in this big room. Then someone turned on some music and we just started dancing.

It was a party. And there was never a point in time where the process was at all manipulated. It was an organic healing, sacred experience of really allowing the depth of suffering to be felt and discharged and from that an extraordinary experience of unity because in the end you could look anyone in that room in the face and there was an absolute presentness and disarmament and complete, authentic alignment to their true self... It really happened because we allowed ourselves to be with our suffering.

So my core theme that matters to me, that I speak of, that I write about, that I'm continuing this research is how suffering is transformed through presence and through the ability and willingness and courage to be present with it... In my opinion, part of what holds suffering in place is isolation and the reinforcement of the delusion and illusion of separation.

So when we make a connection across hearts, across identities and beingness and presences in the moment of suffering that immediately offers the antidote for suffering to occur. Not only that, but it actually opens up the possibility of joy so one can really move from suffering to joy through the willingness of being present. I don't want to make it sound overly romantic or Pollyanna-ish; it's not like suddenly the people who are really oppressed and are suffering are not going to suffer anymore.

But what we can learn from these moments or from these experiences is the value, the potency, the transformative possibility of engagement. This is what I call "ecstatic activism and the alchemy of engagement."