The world is on fire.
How about yours?
Luis of Holistic Life Navigation posted an invitation to his Instagram stories last week:
“Please look out your windows right now. Is your world on fire?
Mine is not, yet so many people I speak to are telling me it is.
For some people, it is. For many others, it’s not.
I find it more respectful for people actually suffering to orient to my truth and live from that place.”
This was set among a photo of his green, lush, Upstate NY backyard. On the next slide:
“No fires here. Just this beautiful piano and cacti.
I honor my privilege of safety and it brings me the capacity to support those who doesn’t have one.
See how it feels to attune to *your* reality instead of getting consumed with someone else’s.
Empathy is good for a taste, but not when you can no longer distinguish what’s yours or theirs.”
He encouraged folks to send him what their world looked like right now. It was a refreshing respite from the shaming, blaming, and horrific images I’d come across just moments before, despite my ongoing muting attempts on my personal feed. I captured a video of the late afternoon sunlight dappling my bedroom floor as the breeze gently touched the leaves. I sent it to him with the caption “Current POV: dripping in grief and gratitude. And absolutely accepting the resourcing from the trees, sunlight, and breeze.” He pointed out the importance of the grief AND gratitude: that just because one was safe, doesn’t mean one has to be happy. And also, my world has been on fire. My internal world. Both are true: it’s gorgeous out. The beginning of a lush, New England summer. And, most of the darkest days of my life, including when I was a little girl, were smack dab in the middle of summer. 15 hours of daylight creates a lot of shadow. Currently, I’m moving though so much grief and conditioning, and being suffocated by my own compensatory strategies and well worn paths of toxic, confused relating. Thresholds of repatterning, consciousness, and development are profoundly unpleasant in the moment. But hey, what’s a few years of discomfort?
Get in, darling, we’re going to get liberated.
The next day, Lee Harris began talking about handling conflict energy in his June Energy Update. Harris says: “Have you been particularly hard on yourself? In the last few months? Have you been feeling particularly dark— about life, about your life, about things going on in your life? This is when you know that the conflict energy of the world is overtaking you, is overpowering you. And so be mindful if you're someone who hasn't really been able to explain to yourself why you've been so hard on yourself or attacking yourself or perhaps you've had a recurrence of old self judgmental tendencies in the last six months or so.” We are being pumped conflict energy 24/7. There are horrific acts of genocide happening and everyone involved has a smartphone, it’s an election year in the US, etc. Conflict, division, blame, hate, and fear are coming at us from every angle, all the time. We are pitted against each other in so many ways, fighting ‘til death in the name of being right, leaving behind the reality of a diverse world. Harris points out that many are internalizing the energy of conflict, experiencing this energy now as a conflict with self. Some folks project all of this anger and fire right back out, and some folks bring it into the personal self. Neither is recommended. Conflict energy is very seductive and therefore very distracting, and something that we can shake off or release.
A client recently asked me if their obsessive attention to a horrific conflict on the other side of the planet was getting in the way of their own liberation… yes my friends, yes it is. There is no collective liberation without personal liberation first. It isn’t selfish, it’s the order of operations. For collective liberation to occur, it must be seeded within the individual.
My late 20s coincided with the Trump Administration. I was 26 in 2016. The perfect storm of coming into more agency with myself and a raging sociopolitical uprising. I was running away from myself as fast as I could, and while alcohol and weed were doing a bang up job— I needed something harder. Enter activism. All of the parts of myself I couldn’t swallow, I projected back out. Why take a long, hard look at myself when I could hate Trump! Better yet, Trump supporters— there were so many of them! I was fueled by a self righteousness that was simply a mask for my own shadow, unhappiness, and unconscious trauma. When I funneled my energy into activism, I felt better about myself. Look at me, a savior! Cue virtue signaling (constant posting on social media of all of my efforts) and shaming and guilting everyone around me who wasn’t as engaged as I was. Does this sound familiar?
Activism is insatiable. I was always able to completely empty myself out in service to The Cause. Never having enough left for myself. It just takes, and takes, and takes, and takes. It’s not spacious. It’s never enough. The target is always moving. It requires unsustainable levels of output. It’s like a cancer. If activism were a human person we were talking about, it’s likely folks would advise they be avoided at all costs.
This mass movement, just like all others before it, creates it’s own mass psychosis. It’s very easy to get swept up into this, and then we begin to act in seemingly possessed ways, taking us all further and further away from our True Nature. Seeing images of murdered children (and adults, and animals, and plants for that matter…) is incredibly disturbing. So shocking it’s an almost default response to share it. This is by design: propaganda elicits compassion and empathy at high volumes so that energy can be turned into increased velocity for the propaganda itself to continue to be spread. It’s so shocking to our systems that it’s often difficult to process and alchemize it, so we simply project it back out. Pass it on. Tag, you’re it. Now, our own stuff is involved: our own lack of capacity to sit with the horrors of the world as they live within ourselves has been highlighted, and we’ve now become a vector for these energies to continue to circulate.
These egregores operate way beyond what is often perceptible at the physical level, ultimately on a mission to divide and conquer. This can get sticky as often those getting swept up in the energies don’t have any concept of the scope of consequences that stem from their actions. It can be compelling to blame our current times in global, late-stage capitalism that it’s “no longer” 1+1=2. Wanting it to be a reductive us/them, victim/perpetrator, or black/white outlook. This is very human-centric. From an animist perspective, it’s never that simple: there is always complex relationality at play with the seen and unseen, and humans and other-than-humans. For example, millions of folks (myself included) exerted a lot of energy getting involved to support and elect the current US Presidential administration, certain beyond a doubt it was going to be “better” —or at least different— than the previous, while wholly not comprehending the level of Zionism, and many other “ism”s, that we were actually opening the door to. Here we are seemingly endless months into a US-government-supported murder fest with Democratic leadership signing blank checks with bloody hands.
I grew up in metro-Detroit in the 1990s and early 2000s. The Detroit suburbs are home to the largest Muslim population in the United States. As a white person, it wasn’t uncommon to be in the minority. 9/11 happened and overnight my neighbors, teachers, and friends became “the enemy.” It never made sense to my 11-year-old mind: how the actions of a few could change the whole. My exposure to “too-complicated-so-only-discussed-in-reductionist-ways” politics happened at such a young age, I’ve never not questioned the motivations of the narratives in the news, though I rarely understood how to untangle the information for myself. The issues are way deeper. Bernhard Guenther points out how most of us consume and interact with these narratives is “like fighting shadows on the wall.”
So much has been coming up for me around the massive desensitization that is happening. Gore all day “over there, on the other side of the world.” What happens when that is here? Oh, dismembered bodies? Bombing hospitals? Starvation? Boring. I’ve been tapping though it on Instagram for almost a year. I have a spreadsheet to tend to before this meeting. Without too much emphasis on a time I have zero direct experience of, it feels akin to being able to tune into the Vietnam War primetime and the synchronous unfurling violence of the Civil Rights Movement.
So what now?
The urgent invitation is to turn toward personal, inner work. Psycho-spiritual work. Work that is tied to the small self. Our individual core woundings. Polishing the mirror. By whatever name. How to bring forward more peace in the world? More safety? More love? To find peace, safety, and love seeded within ourselves. If, upon seeking to find it inside ourselves, we find obstructions, then the invitation is to seek support to address those obstructions. There are literal maps for this process. (Adult development, Integral Theory, transpersonal psychology, etc.) It isn’t some moral failure that one has personal work to tend to. This is part and parcel of the human experience. Coming into form creates separation, and thus a ~trauma~, and that’s just birth. Day one, and we are already at a deficit. So few folks have worked though their personal work that we now simply wage wars on each other, at every level from interpersonal to global.
Inner work is an absolutely brutal undertaking. For starters, the amount of energy required is not something the current, default cultural system is set up to support or encourage. It’s profoundly uncomfortable. It clears the way for everything: more pain, more spaciousness, more grief, more joy. This is where we go back to underscoring that personal work, personal liberation, is not selfish, it’s the first step toward any collective shift. Individuals shifting into awareness of the forces who work though us and others for their own agendas is what loosens the grips of those forces. When we slide too far to extremism (on whatever side) we are creating opportunities for the other side to exist.
It’s not rare or uncommon to face shadows, however it’s typically only in one direction: out. Evil is out there. Those people are evil. Those ideas are shadowy and incomplete. Just to say: it’s possible, if not uncomfortable and humbling, to face ones own capacity for evil. Daniel Foor says “We have an apothecary of poison in our heart.” There’s a sense of familiarity. Oh yeah, I know this. No need to be seduced or hypnotized by it. Here’s what I know I need to balance it out. The work begins once we can sit with the darkness inside of ourselves that we have denied, possibly for our whole lives thus far. I always come back to the caterpillar: face and body, all form, dissolved into mush in the middle of the transformation. Probably not a great time to tell them not to worry, soon they’ll have wings. It is though this work, this facing of ourselves, our own personal shadows, that the shift can begin. There will be moments (seconds, months, years) of immense resistance and distraction. There is deep humility required to pull back our projections and hold paradox within. Like the paradox of not identifying with one side or the other… which is not the same thing as being neutral.
Eventually the grip loosens, you cut cords, or whatever language you want to use. Activism (and identity politics), especially performative, social media-based activism becomes uninteresting. I imagine that’s not a neutral sentence for some to read. That’s great. Follow that non-neutral sensation or feeling right back into your own body. What’s it trying to tell you? Alchemizing the tension of opposites is what creates the space for more of your essence to come though. For True Nature to flow. It’s an invitation to wake up from the death spirals, from the entrancing shadows on the walls. To see how flimsy and superficial choosing one side is. Sure, you can get a cheap dopamine hit from “doing something”, sure you can not have enough energy to feel yourself, which can, in effect, “feel good.” To fully understand that virtue signaling feeds the ego, which feeds these other forces, it never creates positive change. As John Mayer asks “Is there anyone who / Ever remembers changing their mind from / The paint on a sign?”
These are not original-to-me ideas. These are not new-to-this-decade phenomena. I say all of this from a place of we don’t have to agree on everything, but with the prayer that if we do find some common ground, it’s in care for each other. The invitation here is to handle approaching this with a lot of care and attention. To see it a different way.
Some resources:
Ancestral Lineage Healing is a beautiful onramp to personal work. As we work though our lineages, we are always (yes, always) met with a mix of victim/perpetuator that is asking to be liberated, integrated, more deeply understood, and as a catalyst for expanding our compassion. Be in touch, it’s one of my deepest honors to steward folks though that.
Darananda has a free healing (guided meditation) for The Warring Mentality. “This very deep and potent healing guides us through clearing the warring mentality (at the root of duality). This is a deep-seated program that operates through the body, mind, and collective unconscious. We are invited to trace back the origins of this program, and clear any memories related to war and hate that continue to hold charge. We work to clear this program to move forward with the evolution of consciousness and heal the collective.”
Ancestral Medicine is offering a short 4-part course call Possession, Addiction, and Belonging: On the Perils of Intimacy and Identity. “In this short course, participants will learn to recognize and to more consciously navigate possession states in themselves and others. The approach will be free from shame and will include exploration of potentially helpful possession states like channeling collective rage, grieving as the Earth, and potent merging with Source. We’ll consider the need to skillfully navigate possession states not only in extreme and harmful examples like genocide, hazardous nationalism, or ethnic cleansing but also in interpersonal conflicts and spiritual development.” You can also join the waitlist to get access to another 4-part course called Relating with Evil and Malice.