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image: We Are Warriors, IBT
Making sanctuary
Sanctuary begins with attention.
I believe the quality of attention we receive shapes the quality of relationship we are able to build with ourselves.
Attention does not change us.
It creates the conditions in which change becomes possible.
In a culture organised around urgency, certainty and performance, this kind of attention is quietly countercultural.
It asks nothing of you except your presence.
It does not hurry.
It does not persuade.
It does not demand that you become someone else.
It simply stays long enough for something true to begin to emerge.
There is room here for grief.
For uncertainty.
For joy.
For relief.
For the parts of you that have had nowhere to go.
For the quiet experiences that rarely find enough space in everyday life.
Sanctuary is not the absence of difficulty.
It is the presence of enough safety, attention and time for life to begin moving again in its own way.
"There is some strange intimacy between grief and aliveness, some sacred exchange between what seems unbearable and what is
most exquisitely alive."
Francis Weller
My understanding of sanctuary has been shaped by the work of Francis Weller, Joanna Macy, Báyò Akómoláfé and Nancy Kline, alongside Jungian psychology, Polyvagal-informed practice and years of movement and embodied enquiry.
In a culture organised around urgency, sanctuary is a quiet act of allegiance to another way of being.
"Urgent times, call for quiet; for rest and respite.
Instead of ramping up, we must surrender,and wait to witness the transformative potential of stillness."
Báyò Akómoláfé
Sanctuary is not somewhere we escape the world.
It is where we learn how to return to it differently, and to meet it.
Attention is an act of allegiance.
To life.
To relationship.
To what is quietly asking to emerge.
