From Control to Emergent Intuition OR Initiation Me to We OR Pause Aversion
The global pause, the days the world stood still, the extent of our interconnectedness, undeniable. The time of pandemic, isolation, giving birth to a shared cry, an outrage, a protest and a holy call – for justice, dignity, life.
Invoking the pause. Stopping the engine of incessant growth, going, doing, striving. Long enough for many of us to take a real honest look at ourselves, patterns, assumptions, individual and collective practices and structures. This time out of time, where the whole world has been given an opportunity for a reset. There is suffering and sacrifice and loss. And space enough for a choice. We have been on the rat wheel for so long, doing the things to stay afloat in a sea of oppression and capitalism. Some of us have been lucky enough to pursue what we love, and even to make a living, with such endeavors. Mostly as a result of unearned white privilege. In my life, that is certainly the case. I was given the gift of education, and the blessing of family support in other ways as well. I grew up in beautiful Santa Barbara. I come from a lineage that is oriented towards service and generosity. My dad is a psychiatrist and has always worked to alleviate suffering and to bridge the patient/doctor hierarchy gap. My mom worked many years as an attorney in land use and development in our local government, with an eye for fairness, equity and the common good.
Victor Frankl, Austrian neurologist and psychologist who spent years in a holocaust concentration death camp, and wrote the well-known, Man and the Meaning of Life, has a simple and provocative saying: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
What if we look at the current situation with the pandemic, and the consequent changes in our systems, and routines, as this space. We don’t need much, just a moment, to pause, take some deep breaths, reconnect with our selves. So many, if not most of us, have been imprinted with trauma, a fight, fight freeze response, that has us often reacting to situations, as threats to our very survival. Whether or not the threat is real or perceived, the body reacts in the same way. This self-protective conditioned instinct was a viable strategy at one point in our lives, and if we are out of imminent danger now in the present moment, it is a hold over response in our psycho-bio-immunological systems. We cannot simultaneously be in a fear shut down defensive response and an open, collaborative, creative response. It is one or the other.
So this time of pause, essentially allows us, at least some of us, more of a chance to remember our power to choose. To step out of reaction. It is a choice point. There are many possible paths ahead, including the one we have been on as a species, headed toward destruction and annihilation of our precious world including our human relatives, particularly people of color. It is an opportunity to reflect deeply and see what kind of world we want to choose and create. We have the power, we are made of this earth. Our cells carry and contain billions of years of intelligence and creativity. We have never lived on this earth connected to our true inheritance.
Years ago, in a workshop with educator and activist Joanna Macy, I called a group break-out meeting for folks interested in Exploring a Beautiful Future. One of the participants asked me to clarify why I choose the word beautiful, out of all the potential descriptive words available. I had not given it a lot of thought at the time, it just felt right I said. There is something about our relationship to beauty, as an essential part of what it means to be human, as an essential aspect of this existence. We live within a beautiful natural living earth embedded within a beautiful natural living universe, or multiverse. We can enrich the overwhelming, exquisite beauty of this planet earth, with our own. We have the gift and capacity to make beauty. Martin Prechtel, writer, rogue wild orator of praise, teacher, modern shaman, speaks about humans as the beings who with an opposable thumb, and an ability to recognize the gift of this life, the generosity of this earth, the beauty of the cosmos, are made to make beauty to give back to the other world, the holy, the mystery. We can never completely repay the debt of how much life has given us, but we can dedicate our lives to feed what gives us life, with beauty. The debt is actually not meant to be repaid. There is a holy humility in that. A humility that has been forgotten in the modern world. We can never repay it, we are never done, and therefore, not off the hook, complete as separate entities. We are always tied in mutuality. With humans that think we are the masters, who can control everything - get to the moon, create incredible technology, hold back the tides. The President of the USA was quoted earlier this year as saying the power invested in the president is “total control” The powers that be, in the fires that have moved through much of our forests, the floods and droughts covering our planet, and communities, teach us otherwise.
And now this. This tiny virus, with the power to bring our systems to a halt. A HALT. Makes me think of the acronym used in recovery. When you are in a reactive stance, take a moment to self reflect to see if you are Hungry, Angry, Lonely, or Tired. If so, you have the power to make a change and meet some of those needs. We need awareness first, so that we can see the situation clearly. Then we have the power to act, rather than react. Many of us are hungry, angry, lonely and tired. The system is designed this way, so that the majority are run to the ground to serve and elevate the few, who continue to accrue monetary wealth. This is a game gone awry. King of the mountain. A game that serves the I and the ego.
With trauma, it is very difficult to perceive both self and other. We tend to either over focus on the external as a locus of control and safety, care taking others, worrying about what they think of us, making sure they are appeased so as not to rock the boat, or we are self absorbed – either in shame, not knowing our own worth, or in grandiose thinking about our status and self interest. The vulnerability required to both feel into our self and another as well as the place in between requires a presence that most of us have not learned, or more accurately, we have not un-learned enough of our mind set to be able to rest in this place of presence as our natural state. Presence is at the heart of our power and interconnectedness. We have limited our distractions now. Habitual patterns of relating to self and other are likely making themselves revealed, amplified in the simplicity of being at home. If we have a home, that is.
So beauty, opens our heart. Softens something. Connects us to our humanity.
What are we going to choose as our collective future? What are we going to metaphorically center. Have at the center of our community circle, in our commons? The welfare of our children? The health of our water? Of our oceans and forests? Our health? The field of ecopsychology looks at the relationship between an indivuduals health and the health of the whole ecosystem of which we are a part, understanding that our health depends upon the health of the whole. Right now, the health of the whole, has been sorely neglected and outright exploited.
So we can continue on the path we have been on. Getting for the few, corporations at the center, progress and technology at the center, with earth, animals, people of color, women, LGBTQ, at the margins. Or begin to recognize what has been lost as a result, grieve this, and then reorient to a new path. We have to believe we have the power to choose. We have to know this to be true. We have to remember in our bones that we come from this earth, are this earth. We do not have to know how this can happen. We can’t know how. We do not have to know the way, we only have to choose moment by moment the possibility of something that opens us to more beauty, connectedness, love, and care. There are solutions out there, there are those who have been re-imagining the world, and engaging prototypes of communities, technologies, etc that include the well being of the whole. There are indigenous peoples who have the traditional ecological knowledge to support this new path. Who do we have to become to choose a beautiful future? Martin puts it this way, If the modern world is to start maintaining things, it will have to redefine itself. A new culture will have to develop, in which neither humans and their inventions nor God is at the center of the universe. What should be at the center is a hollow place, an empty place where both God and humans can sing and weep together.
This seems a good place to start. In the space in between, that hollow empty place, the liminal, betwixt and between. And not to fill it with stuff, with attempts at self soothing, with food that makes us sick rather than nourishes our bodies. We have grown so accustomed in this modern civilization to accept extremely poor substitutions for our real needs. Many of us do not even recognize our needs. However, I believe that in our DNA in our bones we know what we long for, what we came here for, what we are capable of, and this gap between what we know is possible, and what our lives look and feel like, causes tremendous pain and suffering. I will write a few of what a mentor, Francis Weller, calls primariy satisfactions – attuned human contact and presence, meaningful work and contributions to the whole, connection with nature, meaning and purpose, beauty, arts, connection to a larger story, connection to the sacred, a so called spiritual life – relationship to the invisible world, intimacy, sharing good food. Secondary satisfactions are the poor subsitutes – addictions, shopping, technology, zoom calls, etc. A time to take our own pause, knowing that when we do this and choose love, as a response, as a psycho-bio-immuno response, we affect the whole, we are reorienting toward relationship. We are present within the web of our lives. Humility – knowing our place. Divinity –knowing our place. Beauty – knowing who we are, what makes us and what we have the capacity to create.
As Martha Postlewaite wrote in her poem The Clearing…
“Do not try to save the whole world
or do anything grandiose.
Instead, create
a clearing
in the dense forest
of your life
and wait there
patiently,
until the song
that is your life
falls into your own cupped hands
and you recognize and greet it.
Only then will you know
how to give yourself
to this world
so worth of rescue.”