Truth Mandala Ritual
A 2-hour respectful ritual to honour our pain and love for our world through a simple, powerful community practice.
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Based on Joanna Macy’s, The Work That Reconnects, The Truth Mandala is a community ritual for honouring our pain​ and love for our world. This ritual provides a simple, respectful, whole group structure for owning and honouring our felt experiences. We gather with the herd and land to open our hearts in support of each other.
“Acknowledging and honoring our pain for the world, is the most distinctive feature of The Work That Reconnects and the most important too. To learn to unblock these feelings is a tremendous experience of liberation. When we are not afraid of these painful feelings, then nothing can stop us.”
Many of us are afraid to look at the feelings of pain we have for this unprecedented time. Our feelings include grief and sorrow, fear of what will happen to our near and dear, anger and outrage over the actions and motives that have brought this to pass, guilt over our complicity with destructive forces, futility, overwhelm - there are so many emotional nuances. These feelings come to us, sometimes at odd moments, in various combinations and intensity.
In response, we often do what we’ve been conditioned to do by our culture - block them, maybe because they feel so huge, maybe because we feel like we’ll sink if we acknowledge them. We make them personal, about us, suppress, lash out. We ofte struggle to know how to relate to them.
The emptiness many of us feel is deeply rooted in our separation from life - separation that has been conditioned through centuries and centuries of colonization that still today teaches us we are dominant over nature, we can take whatever we want without consequence, that other beings are inferior, lacking in intelligence, that successful people are strong individuals, that if we only learn to be independent and self-confident in who we are, we’ll “win” at life. On and on the story goes, the most destructive and damaging story of our time.
When we begin to knit ourselves back into the fabric of nature, of community, and place, we find our compassion for the world because our pain and our love are one coin - they’re twins. They spring from our interconnectedness with all of life.
But facing this pain is not something we need to do alone. Perhaps something we cannot do alone. It’s something we can learn to do together, honoring each other, honoring these big feelings, not fixing them, or sentimentalisation, but rather giving them a space to be witnessed and acknowledged.
The paradox is that when we do this together, pressure releases from our bodies, we feel seen and heard, and our interconnection with life grows and becomes stronger. Rather than being our undoing, it’s a deep source of nourishment and fuel for these times.
The Truth Mandala has been facilitated around the world by thousands of people, in a wide variety of situations both online and in-person. It’s a simple ritual with a few simple rules: no one is fixing anyone, we sit in circle together, we acknowledge and remind each other we are not alone, each person has an option to share, there is guidance for what and how long to share. It’s for everyone who is willing to follow the process. It’s beautiful and rich and often surprises people.
In our view it’s two hours of your life that will restore your faith in humanity and life and feed your brave heart the hearty meal it’s longing for.