Transformation through Joy, Ease & Imagination | Global Connections Call Notes 4.3.2024

Very few people in the world remind us of the importance of engaging art, creativity, and joy as foundational for Peacebuilding. As an award-winning writer, speaker, and artist, Ari Honarvar uses her own story as a young girl in revolutionary Iran to inspire her art with the focus on transforming relationships, finding joy, and uplifting the human spirit.

As the founder of Rumi with a View, Ari is dedicated to building bridges between the arts, social justice, and well-being. As the Iranian Musical Ambassador of Peace, Ari frequently dances with refugees and facilitates “Resilience through Joy” workshops on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. As the author of the critically acclaimed novel  A Girl Called Rumi and the bestselling interactive oracle deck of translated Rumi poems called Rumi’s Gift, Ari’s works have been featured in dozens of publications including the New York Times and The Guardian.

Ari joined us April 3, 2024 for our monthly Global Connections Call. To view the full 60 minute call recording, please click here. The following includes excerpts from our conversation.

Our Conversation:

Our time began with experiences of the senses. Breath, movement, scent, and poetry invited us into exploration of peace practice. As Ari reminds us in quoting the words of the 13th century Persian poet Rumi, even in the most challenging of times, even when the poison rains from the sky, I am sweetness, you are sweetness, we are sweetness.

To watch Ari’s peace exercises, please click here. Skip forward to minute 5:20 to begin the exercise. 

Hollister: I know a little bit about your early life in Iran and as an unaccompanied minor, as a young refugee in the U.S. Can you share how your journey has shaped how you see the world?

Ari (19:25): The backdrop to my childhood was war, oppression, and women's rights being systematically stripped away. I was born in the majestic city of Shiraz, Iran, the city of poets and wine, but at the age of six everything changed. I couldn’t play with my friend, simply because he was a boy, because there was a gender apartheid now after the Islamists took over the government. While this was happening, Iraq started attacking Iran, so we were being attacked from both the outside and from within. There was a war on joy. We couldn't sing or dance, any of the normal activities that helped us deal with stress and the effects of trauma. 

When I was seven years old, I remember watching the anti-aircraft missiles shoot up into the air because the bombs were coming from Iraq. I remember being super afraid even though the landscape was gorgeous. There were these beautiful red marks like the most magnificent Fourth of July fireworks all over the sky. But underneath that awe, there was this terror. I thought someone was going to die, whether it was me, or my sister, or my best friend. Yet in this moment of terror, a passerby neighbor would shout the old Rumi poem, 

“Even if from the sky poison befalls all; I am still sweetness, wrapped in sweetness, wrapped in sweetness, wrapped in sweetness.”

Even in the most horrific of situations, I became aware of an inner garden within myself. The word “paradise” comes from Pardis, which in Farsi means “a protected garden”. That’s where I was able to go to center myself in that horrible moment, to my paradise. This set the stage for my journey when I came to the US. Without my parents it was really difficult, but I had my dance and poetry. I danced with refugees and this helped me as a newcomer a lot, dancing together in a community. 

Hollister: As a refugee yourself, share with us how your passion for art, dance, and music has inspired your work with refugees?

Ari (23:00): Dancing helped me so much as a refugee, so I wanted to give that back to other refugees. However, during the Muslim ban, there weren’t any newcomers coming from the Middle East, so I focused on the migrant crisis that was brewing at the US-Mexico border. During the migrant child separation, I got to talk to families whose children were taken away. I thought if I can do that for people in the U.S., I can certainly bring my program to the shelters in Mexico where asylum seekers are. Last weekend I was with a university researcher dancing with 300 refugees in Tijuana, Mexico which was so powerful and beautiful.

Hollister: Could you take us more into those kinds of practices of resilience and joy that you use as transformational practice?

Ari (25:25): Resilience is the dance between reconstruction and deconstruction. The resilient person is in a constant state of transformation. So transformation is a mysterious combo of resistance, letting go, and adaptability. We're transforming all the time, whether we're doing it consciously or unconsciously. The metaphor of our inner garden is really powerful because I think of our nervous system as a garden. Even our neural structures look like trees, they're like tree branches. Even the word dendrites, our neural cell structures that take information from one cell to the other, within the Greek etymology means “treelike”. 

Whatever you do, whatever flower or weed you keep watering, whatever action you keep repeating, those neural structures get more strengthened. If we wake up in the morning and go on our social media and just scroll everyday, that is going to impact our neural structures. However, if we get up and shower or do some mental or physical hygiene or exercise, those neurons get strengthened. I'm all about “watering our plants” when we pause for a moment and check in on what’s happening inside ourselves, seeing what plants need attention. Sprinkling in those practices is going to strengthen those neural structures, so you're going to be more grounded, more resilient.

Ari (31:20): You can't deescalate a situation if you haven’t deescalated yourself, everything is an internal practice. You go to a peace march today and everyone is angry and shouting, which is totally understandable, but are we connecting to a piece within ourselves too at some point? Or are we just going to keep escalating ourselves and each other and destabilizing our own nervous system and that of each others’ as well. While those agitations are so contagious, our peace, our solidarity, and our stability is also so contagious.

I see this with the children all the time. They're sitting in the corner sometimes shivering from the trauma that they've experienced, even in the heat of July they have blankets around them. Yet when they see all the adults or their parents, who have been so stressed and that have so much weight on their shoulders, dancing and laughing and connecting with each other, then you see the children thaw out. The children and parents' joy keeps getting more amplified together. 

Hollister: I know a little about your work across the border in Tijuana where the need is greatest. You present opportunities that invite migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border into your “Resilience Through Joy” workshops, a kind of moving meditation and exploration of what it means to regulate adults and children’s nervous systems. Can you tell us more about these? 

Ari (34:05): It's so similar to what I experienced as a girl in Iran, when the Morality Police policing our bodies as women and not being able to express themselves…At the border, the asylum seekers’ bodies are being policed, their freedom of movement is taken away from them. [What I try to do] is have that sense of agency returned to them in that moment. Whether free will is an illusion or agency is an illusion as some people say, it really doesn't matter. It doesn't matter to our nervous system. If we feel like it is our choice, that’s all that matters. When we can move our bodies, it is our choice. We're doing this, we're doing this out of our own volition! 

Hollister: I love that you connect joy and resilience, could you expand on that?

Ari (35:55): Joy is our birthright, it is so accessible to us, it increases our capacity for challenges. However, the negativity bias is so overpowering for us. We're constantly shifting our attention to what's wrong, what's wrong, what's wrong, in the world and within ourselves. [The negativity bias] is an evolutionary imperative that came about because bad things happened to our ancestors, whether it was a poisonous plant or a predator. Rick Hansen, a neuropsychologist I interviewed noted rather than the negativity bias being a feature, it has become a bug of humanity because we don't have those kinds of issues going on for most of us in our daily lives. Most of the time we can bring our attention back to what's right and to go around the negativity bias. 

Ari then led us in a grounding exercise (37:30): focused on touch to help us lean into savoring the moment and focusing on joy to increase our capacity to handle challenges. 

Discovery Time:

Community Member: I find what keeps a lot of joy out of my daily life is the barrage of negative media. I’m wondering whether you've faced anything like that and how you handle it?

Ari (48:50): I think this is just unprecedented for human evolution, for the human nervous system to be barraged with so much information and with much of it being negative, and since October it has become more ramped up more than ever. I have also had to struggle with that myself because one of my colleagues was killed in Gaza, another Musical Ambassador of Peace. So personally I was so affected by this and then in the meantime I have another colleague in Gaza. Every day I have to make sure that she's still alive, so I don't have the luxury of shutting off for myself because I am one of the people who checks in with her daily.

There is a thing called “compassion fatigue”, where we just become so exhausted and helpless, and we just don't have anything to give. My practices of joy keep me thriving. I have been able to just dance with this sense of overwhelm and bring wellness into my life. The point is not to turn off my compassion, but really nourish my soul. I give it as much priority as I can, because if I'm incapacitated then that's not helping anyone. You have to take care of your activist body to be able to care for others. That is your duty to yourself and others. If you're watching someone drown and you're not able to reach them, you are not going to hold your breath in solidarity, that's ridiculous! So finding ways to get to them and becoming more creative takes a lot of metabolic resources, so we have to give some time to that. It does help you to shut out the media for a while. Do not feel guilty for taking care of yourself. But you know hopefully when you have more capacity you can get back in and do whatever you need to do if that's part of your activism.

Community Member: While serving these communities in need, have you explored anything new in your personality?

Ari (54:30): I think it has been the power of imagination. This absolutely saved me in Iran because when I was so policed as a kid, I went into this landscape of the inner imagination. Through books, through poetry, and just through my own kind of sense of imagination, this is what saved me. That's why I wrote my book, A Girl Called Rumi, because when I grew up in Iran, death by missiles or persecution were lurking around every corner. Therefore, I tapped into the power of my imagination to survive, and still do. 

When the asylum seekers go to these horrible detention centers that are cold, where they get tortured, where they are hungry, where they don't get sanitary supplies, how do they deal with that when their bodies are so uncomfortable? One thing I practice is to keep bringing their attention to what's right here. Maybe nothing is right in this cell, in this prison, [but] we have our imaginations and the world of story and memory. I'm prepping the asylum seekers for that, to remember their childhood memories, remembering how we danced together and we laughed. We just keep coming back to these things, telling stories to one another.  We're constantly making sense of the world through stories and meanings. This is automatic. We cannot be humans without our stories. Stories transform the banality and horrors of the world into like the enchanted garden of story.

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