On Saying The Quiet Part Out Loud by Bina Patel

Stubborn to a fault

I am a middle child, a birth order fact that means autonomy and being heard are extremely important to me. Sometimes I am described with favourable personality traits such as “determined” or “persistent” other times I am simply called stubborn and obstinate. As a child I would mutiny silently and disappear into the crevices of my mind, as an adult my anger seeps into my bones and my limbs, drowning my sense of equilibrium until I give voice to how I feel.

Despite this desire for autonomy, ever since I was a child, I’ve believed that if I can find the right book, the right information, I can find a way out of whatever predicament I’m in. [Which is why I’ve always lived near libraries. At times of desperation, I know that respite is only a bookshelf away.]

Lately however, it is less information but more personal transformation that I seek. The books that help me most are ones that help me show up more resourced, particularly when I’m under pressure and are more likely to default to the least spacious version of myself. I want to discuss and deepen my understanding of what I’m reading in community with others.

For the past several months for example, I’ve been reading Say The Quiet Part Out Loud by strategist, facilitator and speaker Bina Patel. Despite my stubbornness, there are mentors and dear friends in my life whose words of advice I take seriously, and who, when they offer medicine, I take it. The people at The Circle on Philanthropy are part of that group and when The Circle organized a book club series in February 2024 I eagerly attended the online sessions. Today, I’m part of the Vancouver stop of the book tour.

This book is a guide through how to show up in challenging environments with choice, agency, power and purpose. Throughout its pages, this book calls readers to move with purpose because purpose makes intentional action more possible. Purpose can clarify what is and isn’t our work, who is and isn’t our people and can be an “antidote to overwhelm and fear”¹ because “when we put focus first, speaking the truth feels powerful instead of causing anxiety or paralysis.”²

This teaching reminds me of one of my favourite somatic practices called “centre, grab, face.” In this practice, you centre, and a partner stands at your side and says something that is a particular “grab” for you. Perhaps for example, a “grab” for you are calls to move at the pace of urgency culture, to say yes to more requests than you would like. To do this practice, you and your partner first both centre, and then your partner would grab your arm. You would take a moment to feel that pressure and centre within it before turning and facing it. Your role in the practice is to allow your soma, or self to feel what that pressure is like, to feel the shape you take in response (perhaps you want to fight or flee) and then center within that pressure before facing your partner directly. It is a helpful practice to help teach yourself what it is like to move within a pressure-filled environment and choose new responses.

Forgetting to breathe under pressure makes me more likely to panic and forget my commitments. I am not alone, and through guided practices and space for reflection this book is a reminder that breath enlivens us and that which we care about. (Breathing seems simple, but only in the last month through 1-1 instruction have I learned that I’ve been breathing shallowly for years, and that breathing more deeply, from the belly and into the chest and back out through the chest and belly is an entirely different experience. I still feel like a beginner when it comes to breathwork, but I’m keen to learn more.)

Purpose is powerful because it helps us make choices in alignment with the things that we care about. One of the most interesting ideas of this book for me was the idea of strategic compliance: or strategizing “not to comply, but to stay.”³ In the book club session with Kris Archie on February 22nd 2024, this idea was further explored with Kris noting that leaving a sector, burning out, becoming too unwell to keep going means a loss of one’s knowledge, insight, wisdom in the sector one works in. Strategic compliance then Kris explained, means figuring out what one needs to do to keep going long enough to make a difference while still staying in alignment with one’s values. This of course does not mean staying is always the right answer but it does mean that when staying is important, assessing risk and then making choices based on your values and commitments is an act of agency. From that choice, it is more possible to make more choices about how to stay well despite one’s external environment.

In the next book club session on February 29 2024 with Meseret Taye of the Law Foundation of BC, Meseret shared that to stay grounded and in her purpose she engages daily in healing and resiliency practices of meditation and prayer that have been passed down to her through generations. Meseret spoke about cultural traditions and the ways she nurtures her body, soul and emotions as vital to stay in purpose, because “this work is taxing and you need an outlet to keep going.” We all have cultural and ancestral wisdom that can support our work, and Bina calls the process of returning to this heritage as unencumbering: “having space to express and nourish one’s self-determined identity, language and intergenerational life vision in ways that are healing and joyful, with access to all the resources needed to bring that vision to life, and in a way that is met with love.”⁴

Hearing from these women has been eye-opening because over the past couple of years I’ve been practicing staying rather than leaving. This tendency shows up somatically; this week my physiotherapist showed me how I am more likely to lean forward than back, and we explored what it would look to live from a more centred and grounded stance. Relationally, this shows up as having great difficulty in holding my words in, in leaving rather than staying regardless of cost, in having difficulty in choosing softer strategies. Even when the conversation will be damaging, or at the very least will not lead to good outcomes, more often than not I implode, my words flying out of me like fireworks. Holding my words scorches the insides of my cheeks, causes my hair to fall out, my limbs to turn fiery, my stomach to turn liquid and ache. This misalignment between values and actions often takes me out of my commitments and purpose, and Bina’s description resonates:

“To be of service, we must resist the urge to shrink, to let unchecked rage eat us up and turn us to ash.”⁵

Instead of ash, I want to embody the epitaph of this book in which Bina writes: “My labor is my joyful protest.”⁶ in which I have stamina for labour aimed at changing systems and the world over the long term. For me, saying the quiet part out loud often means leaning into the parts of myself that are more patient and more amenable to offering grace. At other times, saying the quiet part out loud for me means literally that: pushing past anxiety to focus on my purpose and say the thing that needs to be said. Either way, purpose is the guide.

To do this work, I am learning to support my inner changemaker through neuro-regulation, breathwork, and somatic practices, all of which help in building skills to give myself a space and moment to choose the thing that this in most alignment with my purpose. To choose a strategy rather than only being led by raw, unfiltered emotions. I started attending a group this week about chronic illness and one of the things we spoke about in this first session was engaging our autonomic nervous systems and trying to calm the amygdala which is responsible for fear centres in the brain and responses such as flight or fight. The more developed our fear centres are, the more activation we experience. One of the activities we learned about was called “expressive writing.” Suppressing or fighting your thoughts our health practitioner explained, can be exhausting, but expressing those thoughts can “cause relational problems or make you feel worse.” She offered an exercise for us to do once but ideally twice a day in which we set a timer for 20 minutes and write completely unfiltered and uncensored. Once we are done the idea is to rip up the pages and throw them away.

Utimately, this book guides us to presence and healing as key for our change work. At the book club, Bina shared with us that “presence is a journey” and that “one way to understand healing is to see it as a sense of spaciousness beyond the sharp edges of hurt, trauma and pain.”⁷ That spaciousness is made possible “when we intentionally put labour into our own and collective healing”.⁸ Healing is slow and not linear, but this book offers valuable first steps.

Till next time,

Shagufta

1. p.56

2. p.57

3. p.41

4. p.68

5. p.27

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7. p.90

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