First, Happy New Year!
Second, let’s get down to business - who’s taking the crazy pills?
I’m guessing that of those of you reading this, about 5% of you are blissed out, spiritually bypassing this blip in history, 45% of you are committing to practices that have you managing stress in as healthy ways as you can, 45% of you feel like you’re on some kind of a downward spiral and are looking for someone or something to save you, and 5% of you have gone bat-shit crazy.
It reminds me of the first mushroom trip I had in college. I walked into my friend’s house when the sun was out thinking I knew exactly what was up in life, ate mushrooms mixed with Cracker Jacks, and left the house hours and a lifetime later having discovered everything I thought I knew was no longer relevant, nor was it true. I had a new blueprint for what was possible because my mind had been stretched in totally new ways.
What if we all need to get stretched?
It’s happening anyway – we’re seeing the dark sides of organizations, groups and individuals that prior to smart phones and social media, stayed in the dark. We’re organizing and rallying behind values like never before, and we’re being faced with what feels like impossible situations which has the potential to throw us into survival mode in the blink of an eye.
What if we choose to see these times as a necessary step in our evolution?
That would require us to keep questioning our reality and what we think is true. Because not doing this creates division and dualistic thinking. You and me. Us and them. Right and wrong. Separation. It’s both silencing conversations and literally blowing them up without much in the middle.
Each one of us is experiencing our life as “reality”. Yet there is no single reality. There are as many realities as there are living beings.
If we seek to understand other humans – because face it, unless you live in a cave (which could almost be argued for this past year with quarantine), you have to deal with other humans. And we humans operate from emotional places. We operate from unresolved trauma (as evidenced by most of the shit show you see out in the manufactured world of media). We operate from desires, from longings and from scarcity and abundance.
In short, we operate from our humanity – in its most glorious and enlightened forms as well as its most base and primal forms. We aren’t just a yummy chocolate shake – we’re also the brain freeze that comes from slurping it up too fast.
What’s behind reality is our humanity and how we’re wired – what we come in with, and what gets cultivated over our life experiences. Nature + nurture.
It’s rare that we’re not operating from our nervous system’s fight/flight/freeze response on some level which means the majority of us are walking around like bobble heads poised to punch, run or dissociate, or more mild versions - be defensive, vigilant or check out. Up the ante with social injustice, a heated election and patriots storming the Capitol and it’s hard to stay out of the limbic system.
So where does that leave us?
Up Schitt’s Creek?
Well, sometimes.
But we can do better than that.
When you know better, you do better, right? Innocent until proven knowledgeable. Naïve until experienced.
So, let’s do better. What does better look like?
1) Give up the need to be right. Assuming there is a ‘right’ way means there has to be a ‘wrong’ way. Us and them. Smart, dumb. Polarized. Get familiar with how it feels in your body when that need to be right surfaces. It will have a specific feel to it. Mine feels like a hardness in my core and leaning forward. I use words like never, always and it feels like I’m speaking tunnel vision.
2) Question your reality on a daily basis at minimum. Reality is not as it seems, it’s as YOU are and the lens you peer out from. Challenge your mind to look beyond the labels it has put on things and people (safe/unsafe, good/bad, rich/poor). The mind/nervous system does this to assess threat level in a super efficient way. Once things get labeled though, there’s no more curiosity and that equals a closed mind. Ask yourself – is what I know absolutely, 100% true?
3) Know when to draw the line to create safety for yourself and those you are responsible for and/or love. This includes a safe physical as well as mental/emotional space. Move your body to move your energy instead of taking it out on others. Take a break from the media IV drip. Be informed, not inundated. Spend time in nature. Choose to talk about things that matter to you. Be the cause of someone else’s smile.
Let’s keep stretching to create a new blueprint that includes conscious humans awake to creating a reality we actually want to play in. This is essential to our evolution. Like what the bass is to funk. I invite you to reach out if you need help creating that reality for yourself.
Let’s put more funk in the trunk!