The Guide
How to Use This Map
This exploration has the potential to awaken and release both conscious and unconscious experiences held in our bodies, offering us opportunities to move towards personal and collective liberation. This is not a process we can complete in one sitting. And this work is not meant to be done alone. This is life-long healing work that asks for gentle, grounded, caring attention and requires from us a commitment to ourselves and to one another.
Individuals may choose to bring this tool into their personal therapy or healing sessions, work with it in couples or relationship counseling, bring it as an offering to community circles or new moon gatherings, explore with their chavrutah (study partnership), or dive in on their own.
Organizations, coalitions, congregations, and other community groups might use this tool during in-depth trainings on dismantling oppression, during a strategic planning process, as an evaluation tool after a campaign or action, to inform an upcoming hiring process, or as a catalyst for gathering in small intimate pods with the intention of shifting organizational culture.
Regardless of how we choose to use this tool, it is important that we take care of ourselves and one another as we do.
Below are some trauma-informed suggestions to guide your exploration. Note: This section accounts for some needs related to learning styles, trauma, and ability, but does not account for the myriad of needs present for members of our communities. Facilitators are encouraged to let participants know what to expect during trainings or gatherings and to support participants to consider their access needs.
Preparing Yourself
Consider the physical, emotional, energetic and spiritual support that you might need — before, during, and after — in order to take care of yourself as you hold space for others.
Gather information regarding the previous contact participants have had with material related to healing trauma — their own and that of the collective.
Consider ways you might weave emotional and energetic support into your time together and what supplies/opportunities you might make available for participants to turn to if they find themselves activated by the material. Some examples are:
Breathing exercises or other somatic activities that calm the physical body
Writing materials to reflect on arising emotions or thoughts
Song as a way to reset the room
A place to lay down, to move the body, or to be quiet
Water and snacks
Ritual items for energetic support such as a bowl of water to wash one’s hands, a candle to light, or stones to hold for grounding.
Opening
Invite participants to take a moment to set a personal kavannah -an intention- around the quality of attention they’d like to cultivate towards themselves and one another in exploring this content.
Offer a simple body focused grounding or breathing exercise that participants can practice together and then return to on their own as they move through the material.
Encourage group agreements as a way of inviting the group to be intentional in how they hold themselves and one another.
Note: Many of us have been socially encouraged to shame and blame ourselves and our People for the patterns we carry. Encourage participants to notice these learned tendencies and invite in a spirit of curiosity.
Begin to build a shared understanding of internalized oppression, collective patterning, and/or ancestral trauma with definitions and discussion.
Note that NOT everything on the map will be resonant for everyone. Offer recognition regarding the complexities of multiple, intersecting identities in relation to the content expressed on the map. Encourage participants to explore in the directions they are most drawn, digging in where the learning and healing feel most potent.
Sharing the Map
Addressing these patterns can be inspiring, enlivening, exciting, and relieving. It can also be overwhelming and challenging to engage with this material and difficult to lead others through it while remaining grounded. When offering this tool in a training or in community, invoke a space that weaves gentle compassion with spaciousness and clear boundaries. Below are a few suggestions for creating such a space.
Encourage participants to consider how they would feel most supported in diving into this material. Offer options, but keep them simple.
Work in pairs or triads. Explain that trauma patterns cause many of us to isolate. Awareness of these patterns is the first step towards liberating ourselves and our communities from them. Although it might feel challenging, encourage participants to consider diving in together.
Work alone. Offer optional periodic check-ins by a facilitator, or a friend, if participants are exploring on their own.
Separate space. Find space away from the group if a participant wants to emote and doesn’t feel comfortable doing so in the big group, or if quiet/separate spaces are required for a group member to hear, to focus, or to process information.
Form a group with the facilitator. It might be required for some participants to be directly facilitated in order to deeply engage with the work.
Encourage participants to begin in the center of the map. Then, move through the map briefly before choosing where to land. Choose one section to spend time on, creating the opportunity to dive deep.
Time frame. Let participants know the amount of time designated for exploring the map. This will help those who fear becoming emotionally flooded by the content to pace themselves. Offer clear instructions — audibly and visually — regarding how much time is allotted. You may also wish to designate specific amounts of time for each member of the group to speak (such as 3-5 minutes) so that everyone has the same opportunity to share and be witnessed.
Gratitude. We can learn so much from listening to one another engage with this material. Encourage people to offer gratitude to one another for their presence, their attention, and for their willingness to do this work.
Clear instructions. Write up, hand out, and state aloud instructions for this time even if the instructions are very simple. Clear instructions can offer comforting boundaries. And having auditory and visual cues help to meet peoples’ various learning styles.
Facilitators stay in the room. Participants will be relying on the energetic container you offer. Be present, allowing participants to feel tended to. Make yourself available for questions. When inviting people to return to the large group, consider doing so with calm and patience.
Encourage participants to use their tools for self care without judgement. These might include immersing in conversation, writing in a journal, checking out, going on a walk, connecting one-on-one, having a snack, drinking water, drinking caffeine, interspersing song with discussion, crying, crafting, breathing deeply.
Break. If possible, offer breaks during or after this exploration to allow for emotional resets. Let participants know, before handing out the map, when they can expect a break. Encourage participants to check-in with themselves to make sure they get what they need during breaks, including encouragement to stay hydrated.
Entry Points: Let these questions serve to guide your exploration
Where have you seen these patterns play out in your families and communities? With your partners, friends, chosen family?
How have you observed/felt/witnessed these patterns in yourself?
How have you seen these patterns play out in movement spaces and workplaces? With your comrades and co-workers?
How do you respond when you see these patterns playing out in others?
How do you respond to yourself when you notice yourself embodying these patterns?
How would you approach others, or yourself, differently if you were in a practice of relating to these behaviors as evidence of personal and ancestral trauma?
How would you most appreciate and easily receive someone intervening if they notice these patterns manifesting through you, causing misalignment between your actions with your intentions?
How might incorporating the framework put forth in the map impact your most intimate relationships? Your perception and treatment of yourself? Your perception and treatment of Ashkenazi Jews? Your relationships with Jews of all different identities?
How do you feel these patterns show up differently based on your other identities?
For example: As a cis-woman, the internalized messages I received as a Jew about about being “too much” felt very gendered. It wasn’t that I was necessarily too much as a Jew but, rather, too much as a Jewish woman.
Why might it be transformative to recognize these patterns within the culture of your organization, community, congregation, coalition? What might change if you did?
In political organizing, what strategies can you employ to support one another when you notice these patterns getting in the way of authentic connection and supported risk? What does it look like to work against the patterns rather than against one another?
What support might be needed for integrating this framing into your organization, community, congregation, coalition?
For example: Ongoing personal exploration of this content with a friend/ colleague or building relationships with another organization who is integrating this content as they move towards organizational transformation
What can we do to recognize and honor the collective ancestral experiences that lead us to embody the ancestral patterns we carry? How might we honor our own personal histories, as well as our collective and ancestral histories, while also striving to live beyond the limitations they pose?
Closing
When we delve into the collective trauma of our legacies and personal experiences, it can be challenging to feel connected to the desirability and resiliency of our family, our ancestry and our own self. Thus, it can be helpful, and quite powerful, to remind participants that (1) the patterns illuminated in this map are not all of who we are or all who our ancestors were and, (2) these patterns are not just evidence of trauma, but evidence of personal and collective survival and resilience. You might do this by inviting participants to:
Share encouraging narratives including current moments of connection from this gathering or recollections of mundane moments/delightful idiosyncrasies/ potent narratives that illustrate positive attributes and gifts of beloved family and ancestors including humor, audacity, creativity, compassion, care, and every-day wisdom.
Engage in a small ritual such as a casting-off ritual or a ritualized washing of one another’s hands, naming aloud or silently thoughts or behaviors that participants are ready to release. You may follow this with an opportunity to bless one another, to illuminate positive existing qualities, or to call in personal and collective kavannot, intentions, for connection and healing.
Sing together.
Share commitments for personal and/or collective next steps in bringing this awareness forward. In addition, you might invite participants to consider one or two supports (people, activities, spiritual practices) they will draw upon in manifesting their commitments.
Envision a plan for next steps. Organizations, communities or congregations focused on social justice organizing may wish to create action plans for employing this tool.