Welcome
Out beyond ideas of wrong doing and right doing
there is a field.I’ll meet you there.
What is this place?
A Shelter
An online home of resources grown and gathered to nurture our capacities to mature, enliven and compassionately relate to the worlds we inhabit. It is an offer of shelter to those of us with weary, lonely, broken and suffering hearts. We live in times of deep grief, loss and unfulfilled longings. Many of us are in the midst of life experiences of chaos, collapse and breakdown. Shelter here for a moment and take time and space to tend to your heart.
A Field Guide
We are experiencing complex and intersecting crises across all domains of life. All of us are impacted by psychological, emotional, biological, relational, cultural and environmental dis-ease and distress in one way or another. Many of us have inherited legacies from ancestors which have and continue to generate harm to humans and more than human kin.
We need practices within and without therapy rooms that are capable of responding to immediate symptoms of distress, impacting the broader contexts that give rise to suffering and transforming status-quo approaches. This is an offering of ideas, questions and art that hopes to contribute in a small way to such practices. Lets consider how we can appreciate the complexities we live with and navigate blurred realms of personal and political, brain and body, individual and collective.
This guide doesn’t presume to know where we might be going, but it hopes there may be something helpful here for the path we make by walking.
A Companion
There are many experiences we have in life which attempt to convince us of our separation from the intricate web of life we exist within. The suffering that is generated from this belief is profound. This space offers fragments of my incomplete and often muddled up thinking-sensing-feeling to invite you into new ways of relating and connecting with ourselves and the worlds we inhabit. I don’t know who might find this kind of offering helpful and anyone who is intrigued is welcome. I am imagining that those who know what it is to live with a heart capable of breaking open and opening to love might find something that resonates here.
The name Entangled Field/s Notes emerges from a commitment to thinking, practicing and writing from within the complexity of living systems.
Field/s holds multiple meanings.
Entangled signals an ontological commitment. Following Donna Haraway, Karen Barad and others, entanglement is not a metaphor for connection. It names the ways that beings, bodies, ideas, and environments are shaping, influencing, combining and co-constituting one another. This word articulates how inseparable we are from all that we are in relation with.
These notes are dispatches from an unfolding inquiry. They are provisional. I’m not providing settled conclusions but instead tracing some of my practice in motion.
Heart Work
My heart’s work is to deeply understand and sensitively respond to suffering, adversity and harm. In this attempt, I’ve worked as a community educator in school settings with young people conscientizing1 gendered violence contexts, in foster and kinship care contexts, with adolescents and early adults who have been made homeless, with those living in homes where intimate familial terrorism happens everyday and currently as a therapist with children, adults and communities impacted by physical, emotional, spiritual, psychological, sexual, inter-generational and colonial harms2.
Early in my practice I was fortunate to be apprenticed in Narrative Practices emerging from the creative efforts of The Dulwich Centre. While I have made many explorations into a range of contexts since then, Narrative Practice has remained a steadying presence for me across time. I have especially found myself return again and again to David Denboroughs question,
“How can we respond to stories of social suffering in ways that not only alleviate individual sorrow, but also enable and sustain local social action to address the broader injustices, violence and abuses in our varying contexts?” (Denborough, 2012)
This question has been one which has helped me to orient my attention and my resources as I work to grow my practice of care. This public writing practice is one response to this question.
“Responsible action does not mean one individual resolving the problems of others. It is, rather, participation in a communal work, laying the groundwork for the creative response of people in the present and in the future. Responsible action means changing what can be altered in the present even though a problem is not completely resolved. Responsible action provides partial resolutions and the inspiration and conditions for further partial resolution by others”
— Sharon Welch
My writing here flows from my hearts desire to make a contribution to tending the conditions needed to be able to sense, perceive, relate and respond to the troubling times we’re in.
This is a way of attempting to share the insights I’ve grown and gathered through my multi-disciplinary work, in a way that protects privacy, yet honors our sufferings, beauty and wisdom.
It is a way of metabolising and contributing more broadly what I learn from listening deeply to those who know the multiplicitous ways harm is germinated and disruptively fruits.
It is a way of practicing non-compliance to dogmatic and dominating psychological discourses which powerfully shape our sufferings, while simultaneously claiming to be our solutions.
It is a way of allowing my intimate, local and daily practices of care to connect with others more widely.
It is a way of cultivating responsive and response-able care practices in collapsing and hypocrisis contexts.
I invite you into this field if you share these aches, pains and longings for a more compassionate world.
Phillipa Joy
“There are no new ideas - only new ways of making them felt” Audre Lorde
Photo by Malens
NOTES:
Australia, where I live, is a colony of the British Empire established on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander lands, whose sovereignty was never ceded.
Indigenous communities globally have been offering invitations and calling those of us with other ancestral root systems into relational care perspectives for a long time. So many of these invitations have been silenced, ignored and misheard. I hope my work helps orient us towards listening capacities we need to understand these invitations more fully.
I am not currently using the terminology ‘decolonising’ to describe my work, as I believe a decolonising process requires far more than I offer here. I feel this term is better reserved for those who are doing important work to dismantle colonial structures. My work operates to support the conditions we need to grow other ways of living.
