I often say to my clients that there’s a difference between mouse view and kahu or hawk’s view. Mouse is often in the middle of a flurry, all the things seem big, potentially threatening and much must be done by mouse, scurrying to and fro to get a sense that threats can be understood at least if not managed.
 
Hawk’s view is one from a distance. Hawk’s view supports us to see over the whole picture, and in doing so find the part we need to home in on; the part that will best serve us and our needs.
 
I was thinking about the distress in Aotearoa New Zealand this morning as I woke up; about my friends whose choices around vaccination are not ones I made. As unvaccinated people they stand to lose jobs, access to gyms, cinemas etc. Their children will face restrictions too, social gatherings will be limited. The grief is huge. So is the anger. So is the sense that they are being controlled and discriminated against. It’s been a rocky path to walk and I don’t think I have done a great job always of loving the person and not loving the choice.
 
If you have read my blog, and thank you if you have, I have been stumbling over what the fuck is happening to us for a long time now… Why is this situation causing so much division. What makes this pandemic a political football that seems to be caught and played very differently from say the polio epidemic and treatment? Why do people, and I read this on a local facebook page where people share lemons and look for lost pets, call themselves “conscientious objectors” a very inappropriate war reference, in my opinion, if they are unvaccinated.
 
So instead of stumbling and scurrying as I find myself doing when I step close to the sense of threat I read in my system at this whole shitstorm, I asked for Kahu’s wisdom.
 
I began to see the way that imported American individualism has taken centre stage in pakeha (white) culture.
 
Te Ao Māori or the Māori world view has whanau or family in the centre.  The concepts of whanaungatanga (relationship and connection) Kotahitanga (unity and working together) Manaakitanga (extending love and compassion to others) all uphold the values of community and this is in stark contrast to individualism.
 
My Grandad fought proudly for the 40 hour working week to make life fair on hardworking people. The Treaty Negotiations and attempts at reparation have been going on since the late 1980’s. My mother worked in Family Planning when the changes to the Contraception Sterilisation and Abortion act were enacted. The Gay Rights movement in the 80’s and same sex marriage in 2005  is the most recent sea change in our legislative landscape that have impacted all NZ citizens.
 
But covid has come along and the necessarily hasty changes required to face the threat of the pandemic have set many people up to feel like the Government are creating change that doesn’t represent them at a speed they don’t trust in ways that are incursions on their rights.
 
The changes required to meet the pandemic are needed on, from Kahu’s view, all the levels.
 
We are asked to take on personal change – lock down, vaccinations, restricted access etc being obvious ones.  Maybe we were anti-vaccination before and we are facing this novel virus as a new threat. Maybe our vaccination status didn’t mean much in our work before and now we can’t work. Maybe we had an identity as an alternative person into natural health. All of this is called into the arena and has pressure put on it to change.
 
Politically we are asked to change. A semi socialist country is suddenly being asked to swallow urgent changes that seem rushed through. Our freedom is being restricted. The right to gather and protest is being restricted. The leadership seem to be making decisions on our behalf that don’t make sense to us, and when they talk about it something doesn’t feel right.
 
Collectively we are asked to change. We are called to consider what we are doing with our neighbours in mind. We are being asked to believe big pharma and Government sources we aren’t used to listening to… are they trustworthy??? We are being asked to stay away from each other. To engage in a socially distanced masked up world.  We are feeling worried we will suffer and we want to buy the toilet paper before someone else does. We are being asked to get vaccinated with this thing that seems to have come out of nowhere with no testing and trust it? And if we don’t we won’t be able to participate in the flow of life??
 
Out of these changes arise two broad responses. One, I will take one for the team. This is a shite situation and we have to do things to navigate this. It’s scary to think of the world in disarray and to trust big corporate and international interests but I am listening to the experts.
 
Or the second response which is; This doesn’t feel right. I don’t trust it. Something is up here. Don’t push this on me. Let me look at alternative sources of information. This is my decision. And here is a lot of information that feels right to me, that means I have grounds not to trust Government. I refuse. .  If we are Māori or Pasifika we have the added distress of being treated poorly, for generations by Government and government agencies. Our healthcare, education and housing stats are shite. We get a bum deal.
 
There’s a bit of Kahu and a bit of mouse in both these two camps, which are coming more and more like palisaded pa sites.
 
One pattern seems to emerge, unless we can hold the lens of the collective we will most likely land in the second camp.
 
Added to that unless we are used to engaging politically in life, seeing how politics is inherent in every decision we make, we might see these interventions as incursions.
 
And because of a period of relative social stability, we are unlikely to have had lived experience of being involved in big social change.
 
If we don’t consider the collective, we might believe that all information is equal and that what’s important is how the information makes me feel. We might read something that’s had lots of views and think that makes it an important source. We might not look up and see who our bedfellows are.
 
Unless we know our history we won’t understand the huge losses suffered by Māori in the last pandemic, the Spanish flu. We won’t understand how polio ravaged New Zealanders and how willingly people took their children for their “sips”.
 
If our experience doesn’t include the collective, the view of history, the engagement with the political this huge change is likely to land in a disturbing and distressing way. We are I imagine much more likely to find some information that matches our disturbance and distress and say “ This is wrong! I knew it!”
 
Then what?
 
 
Well from my view it’s the unsexy, mundane, exhausting work of sifting and sorting. It’s the poppy seeds from the dirt work or looking closely at what is really there. It’s understanding the patterns from Kahu’s view, the view that always includes the collective. It’s understanding our own patterns and traumas and crucially it’s thinking of the way our individual choices count for something in the lives of others. This shit is not easy and there’s been tears on all sides of this situation.
 
The way we come into mouse view is to look at what we are responsible for in our own lives and how that impacts the collective. It’s a both/and we are being called into.
 
We have to consider everyone when we make the decision that is right for us. We are nothing if we are a nation that doesn’t act to protect the vulnerable. We are nothing if we don’t recognise the privilege inherent in being able to say “I will be alright, I deserve a holiday!” when travelling to Tairawhiti or Te Tai Tokearau despite the wishes of iwi leaders.
 
We have to be the pivot point and bear and friction of this time. The forces of the Pandemic are grinding against our longing to be free and the more we imagine we can reach back in time to the pre-pandemic way we perceived freedom, the longer the friction will burn.
 
We can use our individuality to show up as the pivot through which change begins. We can use our own being to be the place that change and care for the collective, for each other and for our neighbours begins.
 
For me, that’s what Love looks like that.

an image of a web of light i found on pinterest without attribution. If you know who made this please tell me so i can credit them.

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We are hardwired to belong. As these hairless, clawless creatures we have developed all kinds of ways to protect ourselves; some generative, some destructive. Our most powerful development is not something uncommon to other animals; we herd together, we find safety in healthy connection.
 
To feel connected with another person who has our back, on whom we can rely, is a deep need hardwired into us from our earliest days. We could not survive without this connection as infants and children. We are both wired and socialised to need it.
 
What does belonging look like? The team from the podcast This Jungian Life describe it like this;
 
“Horses herd, birds flock, whales pod, and people tribe. The need to belong is as intrinsic to human nature as the need for food, touch, clothing, and shelter. We belong to families, communities, ideas, and ideals…”
 
 
When we belong we understand that we are accepted and we share certain beliefs, behaviours and values. We might share a place where we live, we might share a religion, we might share an ideological viewpoint or a favourite football team. Sharing something is intrinsic to the sense of belonging.
 
When we belong we are a part of something.

We understand ourselves, define ourselves in many ways, through belonging.
 
Belonging gives us comfort and reassurance. Belonging, being able to feel held by the community, takes us out of survival mode; suspicion, alert and sense of danger, and into rest, created, and enjoy mode. No wonder belonging is such an important feature of our lives.
 
At the moment, in my community, there is an accelerating a rent in the fabric of belonging.
 
The shift in identity – covid denier/anti vaccination versus covid aware/pro-vaccination has created a break in the sense of community. The potent and alarming rise in feeling tone has meant boundaries around civil discussion are eroded. People are sensing threat everywhere and there is discordance amongst once close knit communities.
 
What does this have to do with belonging. Well firstly, the sense of community has fractured. There is no longer a sense of belonging to a community in an area.  The sense of belonging rests in your “faction” – pro or anti. This means many people have more in common with people who live thousands of miles away than they have with their next door neighbour or even their family members.
 
Belonging, based as it is on sharing, seems to be bolstered by sharing information that digs you further into your views, ridicules those who don’t think like you and encourages the lobbing of disrespect and ridicule over the dividing line, which is quickly becoming a chasm.
 
The fears that are driving these rifts are potent. The fear of losing autonomy, the fear of getting sick, the fear of collapse of our healthcare system, the fear of putting something foreign into our systems, the fear of being told what to do.
 
The more we identify with our faction or the community of shared belief, that is holding us in a sense of safety in this time of our fear and confusion, the less we are able to listen to each other., especially those with opposing views.
 
In the alarm caused by all these things, we are polarised further from each other, further from the very shared human experience of fear, further from being able to reach and support each other. 
 
This is fertile fields for a deeper kind of harm-making and destabilisation that can be tended to if we are able to relinquish the mirage that we are enemies. If we step out of mouse view with all the conflicting sources and into hawk view. Hawk can soar overhead and look down on us trying to make our way in a world with a new-to-us threat. If we stop seeing ourselves as victorious by embedding in our self-righteousness and find the humble place of one scared human reaching out to another and make connection there, we might have a chance.
 
There are some who would say there is no virus, who promote the idea that this is a diabolical plot against free thinking humans and that those of us who have had the vaccination are sheep.  Although this rises compassion in me for the darkness of their vision and the high alarm state they must be living in to project that out onto the world, I think the vitriol that world view requires must be causing great harm. I would rather build community around our very human fear for our wellbeing, our fears for our family and freedom, which are things we share. I would rather build belonging to the humane and the compassionate than accelerate the rupture.
 
Is our belonging to these groups of "them and us" actually serving our wellbeing or is it bolstering our fear? Is the belonging that matters to you making you more humane or less?  Is it showing engagement in the experience of disadvantaged people, who are demonstrably most at risk from covid or is it every man for himself? Is it supporting you to make mistakes without flaming everything down in its path?  Is it serving values of community, kindness, generosity, mutuality, respect and connection or is it fostering distrust, conflict and anger?

Crucially, Is it aligned with the sort of sharing, the basis of community and belonging, that makes us more humane or not?
 
Reaching out is hard, especially to people who dismiss, shame and belittle. Reaching back is hard too when it requires us to deconstruct that which we thought would keep us safe. We have to be willing to look at what is alive in us and those we are rafting up with. We have to look hard, sometimes underneath the surface to see if this is the kind of human family we want to belong to or not?
 
To be willing to stay with your own discomfort at what you see there, to wrestle honestly with your own soul matters right now. I hope you will belong to a community of compassion and kindness. We need you.

This podcast  excerpt inspired this post - i'd love to hear what you think.

fragment from a soulmap journaling page

What if you love someone and hate their choices?

What if what brought you together is less of a feature in your relationship and the things they are now choosing bother, or worse, alarm you?

What if you are finding yourself having to gather and steel yourself before engaging, find yourself trying to prepare strategies for getting out of harm's way, finding little excuses to avoid or limit your contact.

What is this like for you?

My guess is that there is a muddy mix of alarm, grief, frustration, avoidance, anger and bewilderment.  

It's what i am seeing in clients and in my own life as this world around us swirls and reacts to the mighty changes Covid19 has initiated.

The muddy place of misalignment is somewhere we are navigating more often in this very polarised world and something we who wish to continue to engage in and build community, we who wish to maintain our humaneness in the face of so much dissention, need to get skilled in.

There is a strong element of shadow that rises when we are confronted with people who disagree with us, and an even stronger presence of shadow when we feel threatened by the other, including others that we love.

"How could they do that? How could they pervert things to take this stand? How could they put themselves at risk?"

These questions are applicable on both sides of the growing covid divide.

It's important that we answer them and i am going to suggest we use two views: 1. The conscious response and 2. the shadow response.

The conscious response is about tending to our values and what's important to us about the friendship. It's about weighing up the risk of contact, noting both our own capacity to steer away from the controversial and the hard and their capacity to do the same. It's about deciding on what we need in order to feel like we can stay in good shape, in order that we can flourish and shaping the relationship to do that. Making boundaries on what will fly for you and what will not is important. Personally i have had to say "no more" to a dear friend who sends conspiracy type videos. She may or may not be offended. It's been quiet between us since then. We can still connect on the things that bring us joy and that connected us. The boundaries are around things that disconnect us. I love her and i don't love what she's consuming.

If i had not checked in with my values and had tried instead to focus on smoothing it over, wanting to not upset her etc i would have ended up letting things into the relationship that would have harmed it. I would have been avoidant and resentful.

This is where the shadow lense is important. 

I know part of my shadow is the people pleasing, codependent part. Although i have some consciousness about this, the roots are deep and when i am stressed it is likely to leap out and take the steering wheel.

Part of my shadow is the immense rage i feel at the harm being done to wellbeing and communities by disinformation.  I need to keep that in check, inadvertently pouring it out onto people i love when i have too much contact with it, even when that contact is in the name of connection, tolerance and niceness.

I have to keep an eye open for shadow, because by its very nature it's hidden and unseen. i have to watch for the big waves of feeling out of proportion to the situation, a sure calling card of shadow and i have to hold myself with care, patience and respect.

So the boundaries i make are both internal, with myself, and external with the relationships and the wider community.

These boundaries ensure my energy isn't leaking out into relationships that feel wonky to me.  

These boundaries make sure that i have the capacity and energy to navigate change and be responsive to new information and not find myself becoming more concrete and more defended.

These boundaries make sure i am not engaging in the relational poison of contempt in order that my facade of niceness is maintained.

This, to me is how i can enact my boundaries, how i continue to build clean connection and how my humanity remains intact. 

How are you finding this?

image of 3 books on a bookcase, the middle one is called Handbook of dangerous Materials.

One of the most dangerous things in human relationship is projection.

Projection is when we take the unconscious content we are unable to own, see or engage with from our own psyche and project them outward onto another.  This can be the projection of character traits, behaviours, attitudes, prejudices etc.

These projections can both be negative in content; "Women are all terrible drivers" from men who have aggressive and dangerous driving habits, or positive shadow "what an amazing woman, she is so kind and courageous." from those who are struggling to own their power.

It's part of what makes me so determined to continue on with the work i do; engaging people with their unconscious patterns, supporting them to be revealed in ways that are constructive and nurturing.  

Because this shit has got to stop. It's causing so much harm in the world right now. The high emotional tone, the willingness to condemn another to harm because of perceived superiority of position and immune systems... Projection is rife. Projection of all kinds causes harm, it stops us seeing what's really there - we don't see the real person or situation, we just see the projections we overlay on top of what's really there. Not only does it obscure our view but it stops us doing something constructive about it.

Even positive projection can be a problem.

Why is positive shadow so difficult to bear? Isn't it nice for people to think you are "all that and then some"?

Well, no.

To carry the weight of a projection skews our psyche. We're not able to turn up authentically. When we try to wriggle out from under projection, when our egos and Self are strong enough to navigate out from under the weight, the person projecting, when in the presence of a broken projection or a retrieved truth, often feels shocked, let down, angry.

I have carried positive projection. A local woman saw me; wild grey hair, creative and projected all kinds of perfection onto me. I was supposed to be some wise woman living close to the earth, perhaps with blackbirds doing my bidding. Anyone who knows me will know what a powerful and magnetising vision that is... i have often longed for the same thing BUT I was, at the time, a harried woman in the midst of a collapsing marriage with a daughter who was losing connection with her own strength and struggling. I was tired and lonely and distressed. I could not carry that projection. I actually didn't want, or have room for that and when i turned up fallible and hurt in real life she felt angry and let down. I didn't let her down, i didn't (well maybe in my imagination for a few moments,) collude or encourage the projection but man, did i still experience the fall off the pedestal. 

To climb off gracefully is an art that for some might, well be full time. Our current prime minister was internationally lauded early in her career and now she is the victim of death threats and hate speech. It seems when she began to have to enact stringent (and bloody successful) measures to navigate covid, she went from being a wonderful person to being a communist and a tyrant.

Projections closer to home need our attention. We need to see where we are seeing the enemy within as our partner, our neighbour or some shadowy figure in the background treating us all like puppets.

Projections without the consciousness to work them, become weapons.  

I believe we all need to be sheathing our weapons, withdrawing our projections as hard and fast as we can right now because we need each other to be visible, clear and true.

What  are you doing to withdraw your projections? What have you experienced?

He's legit. i checked his Bio here 

,
"Looks like New Zealanders are walking up to this take over by these authoritarians, totalitarians, autocrats, fascists, dictators and cuddly Communists.


Looks like we will need While Hat military intervention with the support of the public, the citizens and We the People to bring back sanity, order, justice and freedom."

These are quotes from a post this week by an acquaintance, someone who works in the field of life coaching. Someone who purports to be about wholeness in physical, emotional, mental and spiritual bodies.

A person who on one hand posts about meditation and light, and on the next post is full of this kind of vitriol. 

I want to mark my soul deep alarm at the cruelty and viciousness in thinking like this. Thinking that is getting stirred in people by the disinformation that is pouring into the hearts and minds all around us. This disinformation is shaping swathes of people, often disaffected, often it seems not knowledgeable about things like public health, virology, immunology. These people are turning up all over the internet, and the streets, with a sense that they have seen through the lies surrounding them and they and people like them, are the one source of truth.

It seems like a form of psychological complex capture that, beyond a psychological frame is like the rabid fervour of an evangelist or crusader.

I see it like the captured and cruel dismissal of everything that is loving and compassionate about Christ's words that marauds through the right wing thinking in our society. I see this White Hat military vision this person has, as akin to the Christian zealots slaughtering their way to the holy land. 

This thinking, this "we are special, we are the chosen, we know and you who do not are tainted and we get to punish you for your ignorance." is so viciously alive in my community.

I have tried, in my commitment to soul and compassion, in my understanding about the marks trauma leaves on a soul (and, OK, a martyr complex); the need to be special, the need to matter, the need to feel safe in an unsafe situation tried to stay in, what i have been naming the messy middle.  The ground where uncertainty lies. The space in the middle where we can wrestle with the beliefs and bring facts, counter cherry picking, call out the inaccuracies and in that space, i am finding my flame for goodness blown out by the roar of malice and, well hate, that emits from these spaces.

These people will claim "opinions" that differ to me, when they are in fact looking at twisted and cherry picked information. When that is being addressed they will often claim their right to an opinion. They will retreat into name calling and disrespect.

These are not just a few people who are out on the edge but it seems a growing number of people who are being reached by this disinformation and who are left feeling destabilised, unsafe and in getting to blame the government and nefarious nebulous outsiders with harm, they enact the infidel killing fervour or the zealots. 

I have been trying to stay in the conversation, in part because the life of soul matters to me. I have been trying to call back into engagement with each other, with facts to no avail. I have been trying to appeal to the humanity in these people by talking about the people i love who would be at severe risk from covid but i was literally told to stop wasting my time and if i loved my friend i would teach her about how to have a healthier immune system. The malice is distressing.

Hell i am trying to advocate for people i don't like who might be at risk because this "i care more about my perception of freedom and the ideology i am swept up in than i do about another vulnerable human" is an affront to our humanity.

Jung talked about psychic contagion and the rising of Wotan as an archetype after the second world war. I wonder what he would say today? The Destroyer archetype? The Death Mother?

Whatever it is that is capturing people, contagion or no, it means us harm. 

Just like the virus, it doesn't need us to believe in it. It is active and it is alive.

And i sit here soul-sore, heart worn, alarmed and furious.

How about you?

I am reading a lot of comments from people who are using "you are living in fear" as a way of shaming and demeaning others.

To me that sounds like a dicey prospect. 
​
We have developed fear as a powerful and appropriate tool to help us avoid threat. It's wired into our nervous systems so deeply that we can react to threat with fear and take evasive action without even thinking. 

It's innate. It's hardwired, It's essential.

Somehow our macho culture, the patriarchy, white supremacy, has shaped us to shame ourselves around fear. We have honoured and mythologised the fearless warrior for so long that we don't have stories that reflect the reality of courage.

Somehow we are deluding ourselves that fearlessness is the mark of bravery.

Nelson Mandela, a truly brave human, had this to say.
​

If we were best served, as many of these people seem to suggest,  by taking the path of "fearlessness" we might be heading towards an evolutionary cul de sac.

These comments are coming from people who also believe the virus is a big beat up, that the democratically elected leaders of our country who have kept the death rate from covid19 stunningly low are communists who are all wanting to take over our lives, that the vaccine is killing us and that if we all just ate more healthily we would get through this. They are the people who say the death rate is less than two percent and that they would like to take their chances. These are the people that they are not living in fear.

They point to my mask wearing, vaccine taking self as a portrait of fear.

I disagree. 

I call projection. I think that their response to think they can outsmart a novel virus (this is a novel virus and our immune systems don't have the forewarning) with nutrition, or vilify and blame the Government for tried and true if hard to endure public health measures is an expression of fear. Fear of things being out of their control. Fear of a loss of quality of life. Fear of a threat so immense and unseen that they are overwhelmed and instead of fearing the virus, they are fearing something they can see, something that represents difference and change. And in some circles, sometimes that is me.

I think we are right to fear a virus that has a death rate of 2% in the population, has proven long term health challenges and is continuing to mutate through communities with low vaccination rates. I think my alarm at the presence of this in the world is an appropriate response. 

I don't want to get sick. I don't want my community to get sick. I care about the many people who are likely to be badly impacted by this virus and fearlessness and bravado is not going to save them. 

Does that mean i live in fear?

No it means i take the situation, i see the risk to my own health, my family's health and the health of my community and in my alarm at this new presence I am moved to take action. This action means i have changed my previously anti-vaccination stance. This action means i wash my hands when i have been out, i used to relish the chance to give my immune system something to do. This action means i wear a mask, i buckle down in lockdown. I am not living in fear when i make changes like this. I am doing what i am designed to do; assess risk and act accordingly.

When i do this for not only myself but my community i think the likelihood of my evolutionary success is a lot higher than what it would be if i was in "fearlessness" or as i have been calling it in my head "fearlessmess".

It's time we looked at fear as an ally and learned to navigate it with care.

Oh honey i know.

i know it would be good, in the maelstrom of information and misinformation, to be able to turn towards your internal guidance system and know, just know down into your bones, what to do, who to listen, what to think, what course to take.

I can feel my body soften at the idea that i could have a failsafe method of sifting the poppy-seeds from the dirt, hardwired in. I long for that kind of ease.

But i know that tuning my ears to the voice of my heart and instincts, my breath and deep listening as i was encouraged to do by a well known "influencer" today, might not be the panacea i am longing for.

We are designed to be a self righting organism. To manage harm with care we need to be able to make quicker-than-consciousness decisions. We have instincts preloaded to ensure we don't have to reinvent the coping strategies our ancestors developed. Flight or fight response is a great example of this; we immediately size up a threat - if we can run from it we take off before we know it, if we feel we can take it out we are likely to fight. We don't sit and make a pro-con list, we just (and yes i think Nike knows it's coopting our wired nervous systems) DO IT.

But that's assuming mostly our healthy settings are intact. That's assuming we come through life without things we learn and have to respond to getting overlaid over our healthy settings.

"Psychologically, Jung speculated that the instincts derived from the psychoid unconscious , that layer of the psych where biology and spirit might touch. I am of a considered same mind, and would like to go further to venture that the creative instinct in particular is as much the lyrical language of the Self as is the symbology of dreams.

..... The idea of instinct can be valued positively as an inner something that when blended with forethought and consciousness guides humans to integral behaviour. A woman is born with all instinct intact.....

Through wildlife studies of various species of captive animals, it was found that no matter how lovingly their zoo plazas are constructed, no matter how much their human keepers love them as indeed they do, the creatures often become unable to breed, their appetites for food and rest become skewed, their vital behaviours dwindle to lethargy, sullenness or untoward aggressiveness....." Dr Clarissa Pinkola Estés; Women Who Run With The Wolves.


When we grow up we all receive injuries to instinct. When we grow up female in Western culture we are taught to be "nice". Nice, in my opinion is one of the worst weapons to be used against instinct. 

Nice stops us being honest. It stops us speaking up. It stops us reacting. It stops us protecting ourselves. It makes us say yes when we want to say no. It makes us be polite when we are being harmed. It makes us turn against ourselves in ways that shrivel our soul.

When we grow up in these pretty cages we are, by definition, instinct injured. 

Many of us are unable to act on an instinct long silenced. We are unable to hear our hearts, so long have they been unheard. 

Many of us have had so many overlays one on the other on the other about not doing what will serve us. 

If in these days of heightened distress and misinformation, of deserved fear about a pandemic and climate catastrophe, we think the answer lies in our heart we might be making a mistake.

Is it wrong then to listen to my heart? To trust myself?

No no of course your heart is wise and your Self is a loving force.

What i am saying is that instead of hearing your heart you might instead be hearing the static of the overlay. The buzz of trauma.

Has the system been consistently untrustworthy. Has authority let you down, harmed you? I think many of us would say yes to that. 

Are you living in an age where people are vulnerable to scams and greed seems to be destroying the planet unchecked?

Of course the answer is yes. Does this hurt our hearts? Yes! Does this leave a scar? Yes.

Does this mean when we listen to our hearts and we hear the alarm and the fright and longing to flee into the safety of our own protective response and think it's our hearts telling us what to do? That we can trust that distress and follow where it leads us?

I think no.

I think that the distress is real. The alarm is real. The mistrust is real. I think that we need to be able to hold that and look at how much this has been a trauma response, a rush to flight programmed from long ago mistrust of authority, hurt from the system.

I think we have to look at how we feel alarm and assume something nefarious has to be at the root of it.  

I think we have to look at the way we find a theory that, in its far reaching evilness seems to justify and match our alarm (NATO, COMMUNISM, BILL GATES,) and say that this is trusting our instinct.  Is it instead matching our untended distress, our trauma response? 

Are we saying others are sheep and mindless and responding to fear pumped out by Government and media, because we need to feel safe in our systems, our psyches and our bodies, at a time where our usual coping strategies for managing our dysregulation and trauma are not working any more?

Are we all, and i am one, believe me, walking talking reactive beings who are thrust into a time of threat without the healing necessary to help us discern the voice of our instinct from the voice of our instinct injury, the voice of our heart from the voice of our scars, the voice of the land and spirit from our own projected distress?

I would love to say there's a simple answer to all of this, but from where i sit, all we can do, the best we can do, the best we can hope for is that all of us do our trauma work. That we share the privileges necessary to do the work to clear a path to instinct and find a way to respond to these crises, and to each other, from a clear heart and not from the hurt and distress turning up in so many places.

If you feel yourself overwhelmed here is some free stuff to help.

 
This is not a post about disinformation. This is not a post about the way information is consciously targeted at fear and dissension. If you are interested in that work I can highly recommend the Conspirituality podcast.
 
I want to talk about how the slant of information shapes our thinking and how people co-opt that to cushion themselves from what’s happening.
 
Patriarchy and the media.
 
Ok before you switch off hear me out… traditional media is fast paced big business. It relies on attracting “consumers” and has come to be, in many cases like fast food information; shallow, lacking in deep nourishment and harmful to us in the long run. It’s reflective of our culture; very production oriented, valuing hierarchical processes and narrow measures of success, a force for dominance over, versus engaging collaboratively.
 
Media focuses on very masculine lead pursuits, by that I mean archetypally masculine; production, outer world action, measurable, hierarchical type processes. We have business news, reporting on the stock exchange and currency markets (I know the word FTSE for God’s sake, I have no idea what it means but it has come at me so many times my brain has kept it as an oddity…) which takes up a whole section on the national news and things like health and education are lucky to get any airtime unless it’s to criticise some failing in their overloaded systems.
 
We have developed systems that favour the quantifiable, the logical, the scientific and thank heavens for that because that part of human thinking matters hugely and has made immense contributions to human life.  But to imagine that numbers and facts are all there is neglects a large part of what it is to be human.
 
We are thinking creatures. We are creatures with a big frontal cortex that helps us plan, strategize, prioritise and create new solutions.  We are also feeling creatures. We are creatures with trauma who have had to create coping strategies that are not always good bets long term. We are creatures who learn not only from facts and figures but have been much more shaped by story. We are creatures who can create, learn, love, destroy, heal, grow, change, be a bridge between the world and play. We contain multitudes.  How do we know that?...
 
Story.
 
Story is the way we learned to instruct; “I ate the red berry. I was sick. Don’t eat the red berry.” To comfort; “Yes this stage of childbirth hurt me too- I suffered in my time and I am here to help you as I was helped. To mend; “When my mother hurt me I felt so very sad. I don’t want you to be hurt like that.” With story, we reach into the life of another and notice our suffering reflected, feel ourselves open to the possibilities of what may be available from their experience and try on how it might fit for us. With story we learn, change, soften and grow.
 
Jungian psychology works on the premise that myths help us to understand what it is to be human; the universality of them instructs someone in the veld of Africa in the same way it instruct me in suburban Aotearoa; it goes to the heart of what it means to be human.
 
Story, whether it be the archetypal power of a myth or the retelling of what happened at work over the dishes, story is a deep connector of humans, to each other and to life.
 
SO WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH THE BUSINESS REPORT?

Well I think the weighting of our media on business, production, economics, dominance etc. shapes us to see those as the most valuable facets of the world. When we soak in a bath of this kind of thinking, we come to value quantitative over qualitative, it seems like a natural thing. Numbers count. Thoughts and feelings don’t.
 

How does this impact us around Covid19?
 
I have seen many people retreat to numbers in order to contend with the challenge we face as a species. Today I read someone saying something ageist, fatist and ableist. (it’s in the bottom of the page if you want to look but consider this a trigger warning.) They talked about "30k cases and 2% death."
 
They recounted these numbers like they were cans of baked beans. Like this was some new stock issue that had gone down on the FTSE (no idea if I did that right but you get the picture). But they are not beans or stocks. They are People. People with lives and families, fears and loves, gifts and failings are getting sick. It’s a lottery that’s stacked against you if you have disabilities, have pre-existing conditions like asthma. It’s a very, very human experience being explained away, defended against by the distancing power of numbers.
 
If I make you into a number I don’t have to face you. If I make you into a number it’s easier to pass by the discomfort of seeing you suffer. If I make you into a number I can keep it theoretical and not have to accommodate the immensity and natural fear of a pandemic.
 
How do I know this is happening?
 
I see people shaming others for “living in fear”. If the threat of a pandemic doesn’t give you the willies I would say there’s something wrong with your neurobiology. We are supposed to react with fear to a threat, and use that fear to take action, come up with solutions to mitigating the threat.
 
These statistics don’t hold the truth of the suffering underneath and all around them. The distress of dealing with a potentially life threatening illness. The isolation. The time away from loved ones. The sheer physical cost of dealing with a powerful virus, one that has been proven to have unpredictable and often long lasting effects. Perhaps, having to be in hospital. The stress and distress of the hospital staff. The exhaustion they are facing. The threat to their own lives, their families’ lives with continued engagement at work with a population who are in no small part, cavalier about what they are facing. For all the people who make up that two percent, there are grief stricken families, broken communities, scarred workplaces. The ripples are immense.
 
This doesn’t count the proportion of people who have long tail covid. Three of my friends in the US are still dealing with quite debilitating symptoms a year on. Yes, they are lucky they didn’t die and their lives have been altered to become much more difficult.
 
When we leave people to only exist on the plane of broad brush statistics we excuse ourselves from the distressing truth of what covid19 actually does.
 
I am hearing people say “The Spanish flu killed more. This will just be another virus, we’ll adapt.” It’s offered up like a trump card. Like a call to get over hysteria. As if we were playing some team building game that was theoretical, that could technically be true, but we are talking about humans. Does it justify a whole lot of people dying because humans have been here before and will be again? Does it justify the levels of suffering and trauma inflicted on people?
 
Sadly, it seems, that unless we know someone well, someone we care about, whose story we are intimate with, these statistics are actually a bolster and protection to some people. They seem to become a  barricade about odds and how invulnerable we still are. It’s the bravado that these numbers seem to inspire that perhaps would start to unravel in the face of another human telling the story of their suffering. 
 
It’s my hope that we who hide behind numbers and othering, like the “it’s only old people” that I believe would crack in the face of my friend’s story about 12 months of inflammatory problems, brain fog affecting her work, pain, breathing issues etc.
 
Stories hold us in our discomfort alongside another human. Someone with families and fears, work and communities, hopes and dreams just like us. Stories help us stay with each other, even when it’s hard. That’s where we are meant to be in times of crisis, with each other. Not hiding behind piles of seemingly reassuring numbers. Those numbers are cold when they are the face of your best friend’s suffering. Stories keep us on the side of humans. And that matters.
 
 
SO WHAT’S POSSIBLE.
 
“When women speak, the story of human history changes.” Elizabeth Lesser.
 
Does this quote mean only women get the mic now? No. It means that all people willing to talk about and value story, connection, meaning, feeling need airspace, need to be placed in positions of influence.  These voices and stories are not the ones we currently see in a vacuous stream on social media. Not the “look at my shiny life” stories. These polished-surface stories are the ones that are keep us on the treadmill and contribute to hierarchy.
 
We need the real stories. The truth of the feelings and challenges people navigate. The impact on their lives of their conditions and experiences.
 
It’s my hope that if we began, and continued to understand the experience of others through this new illness* that we would re-humanise our response. We wouldn’t be so ready to say it’s just 2% because we would see the faces of those 2%. They would have names. They would have families. They would have gifts and contributions and connections. They would leave legacies and challenges. They would become part of us that we would have to engage with and care about. They would matter.
 
To use statistics to describe and quantify is one thing, but to use them to distance ourselves from the harm that is being done minute by minute in our communities is something we can consciously change.
 
Human Stories soften. Human Stories connect. Human Stories mend and heal. Always have done. Always will.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
“30k new cases and only 2% death. Don’t know how many are elderly, obese or have other conditions.”
 

 
If we look at the world that is coalescing since the impact of Covid 19 and the it’s-already-too-late of the Climate Catastrophe, we are having to sit with some very uncomfortable facts.
 
The world is not the same. The choices and cushions we had have changed.
 
Our capacity to fly around the world when we have the means and the inclination has fallen away. Our capacity to use technologies and go through summers without bushfires, or winters without floods seems to be a thing of the past. The world has changed.
 
The concurrent change in people’s choice making doesn’t seem to have changed however. 
 
People seem to want to make the same choices while finding themselves in a different world.
 
The changes in the world around us have to factor into the way we live, the choices we make, the way we move in the world. People seem to want to claim freedom and their rights while not considering what impacts this has, as they could for a couple of generations. The fact that we have to consider what our choices do to the people around matters in a whole new way.
 
As I wrote before, I was anti-vaccination in the old world. I had thought and read long and hard and considered, on balance, that not vaccinating was the right decision for me.
 
Now, that decision is upended. The world has changed. The risk my unvaccinated self poses to others means that I can’t make a choice based on what works best for me without realising it impacts my community. I am making a new choice because the parameters are different.
 
I have been watching the way many seem to be holding onto the idea, any way they can, that life is the same, that the world is more controllable than it is.
 
Uncertainty is a deeply difficult thing for humans to manage. We have to feel some sense of certainty to feel safe and often we reach for that through trying to control things.
 
Some seem to find a sense of control through the belief that they have been party to secret information that blows the lid off the hoax. (What makes a mind available to believe that there is power diabolical enough to engineer a hoax where 4.3 million people die to prove a point?) Some seem to just want to carry on as normal and convince themselves it’s their right to do what they have always done (my bach my rights!). And some rally deliberately giving rise to super-spreader events, to protest about tyranny from the comfort of their white middle class lives.
 
The way people seem to be incapable of taking on board the understanding that things are different now, whether you like it or not, is alarming. We are being required to take a new stand, to make a change in the parameters of our choices and decision making. But not all people are capable of doing that.
 
When people show up unwilling to change perspectives or take on the situation at hand they often also ask to have their opinions respected.
 
I have a problem with this. Firstly, as someone way wiser than me pointed out, choice is choosing chicken chips to salt and vinegar, not I choose not to believe in this pandemic.
 
Secondly, whether you protect me from your potential infectivity or not, matters to me. It’s taking my choice to be safe and healthy away from me if you don’t wear a mask. It puts me at risk. That’s not you exercising a right, that’s you valuing your stand over my wellbeing. If I have disabilities or immunity issues or am at risk because of other health conditions, your actions, put me at risk.
 
Now let me backtrack. Is big pharma a beneficent fount of goodness? No. Are all the decisions the Government make wonderful and in line with what I hope for? No. Is the medical system all it could be? The education system? The housing system? The welfare system? NopeNoNope.  Does this make me mistrust everything they say and make them the bad guys who have sinister motives at every turn? Also no.
 
Part of developing an adult competency is the capacity to not split. Splitting as a psychological principle is where someone, in order to build certainty, wants things to be all good. Or if there are some flaws, they then “split” and that object/person/structure etc, becomes all bad.
 
There seems to be little tolerance for or resilience to the messy middle, which unfortunately, is where most of human life sits. The flawed messy middle, where we have to roll around with hard  stuff, make decisions that aren’t always a HELL YES. We are often confronting confusion, complexity, dissonance, nuance and having to come through a good deal of discernment before we find a place we are mostly comfortable with.
 
When we are able to do this, look into what is the best choice from a range of tricksy ones,  we are required to hold the tension of the opposites, this is where the new way comes from. Not from flinging from bad to good and back again but from being both flawed and wonderful and finding a new way to engage, to grow from that place.
 
Climate change has overtaken us, in part because of splitting. There was a reluctance to bear the weight of the change, the friction of what was called for so the original scientists were poo-hooed, some sceptic was always trotted out to refute the claims and time was wasted. Some parts of our communities made the climate scientists, who were ringing alarm bells out to be fools. They put them in the bad end of the split and so we were held in place dithering while , well, Rome burned.
 
Over the last few weeks, I have been noticing a call to “respect my choice.” when they are not making a choice based on untruth. A call was put to me to be kind to a man who reportedly yelled and spat at the supermarket when he was told to put on a mask. In pointing out how his choice, frustratingly, I believe made because he was filled with the same kind of disinformation, put me and others I care about at risk, I was told to be compassionate. His freedom to not wear a mask could well have put others in the same queue with immunity issues at serious risk. I could have been standing in that queue unwittingly having been infectious from a recent trip to Auckland. I could have made him sick. How is that freedom?
 
There are calls in my community to just be more compassionate, be kinder, let the choices they make stand.
 
And this is where Randi Buckley’s wisdom comes in. Randi is the developer and teacher of the radically beautiful Healthy Boundaries for Kind People work. Do her workshops (or one with me using her work!) you won’t regret it. One of things she teaches about is Idiot compassion. This is a Buddhist term that describes a glossing over of hard things in order to be nice and avoid conflict and to act as if being compassionate, when in avoiding the hard conversation, you are not serving compassion at all. Compassion is served when hard things are confronted with care.  Letting harm continue in the name of compassion is not compassionate; hence idiot compassion.
 
My experience is that in letting people continue talking about ‘respect my choice’ and ‘tyranny’ and ‘freedom’ and ‘hoaxes’ without challenging them I am not serving compassion. Compassion has to stretch wider than discomfort. It’s got to hold the impact of choices on others. It’s got to hold the wellbeing of the community, it’s got to hold our planets survival in our view.
 
Let’s not be idiots in the name of compassion.
 
 
If you are in Aotearoa NZ and have concerns about your wellbeing please go to this website for a range of community resources.
 

We are in a shitstorm and no one knows 100% what is going to happen.
 
We are in a shitstorm of a mess on a global scale. I imagine it feels like a world war without a classic enemy.
 
We sit in the middle of this shitstorm with evidence of results-of-war-like  devastation and destruction all around us., in the mess and tragedy that is covid19*, in the mess and  tragedy that is the fires in Greece, Bulgaria, US, Canada and Turkey, flooding in Sudan, North Korea and Iran , humanitarian crises in Yemen and Tigre, the Rohingya refugee crisis, the Climate Catastrophe that has been glaringly obvious and now starkly stated.
 
It’s a shit ton of hard, right here, right now. It’s healthy that we are scared right now. It’s right that our systems are in deep distress that we are on the lip, or already part way down the bowl of irrevocable change.
 
Each of us live in an animal body that is responding in a physiologically sound way to this shitstorm, this unavoidable change; it’s reading the threat all around us and is preparing us to do something about it.
 
Classically, humans get hunkered down in the face of overwhelming hard and wrong. We take our fear and we polarise. We become right and the others, wrong. We become good and the others, bad.  The stronger the fear the more polarisation and the less room there is for discernment and the grace required to reach each other.
 
Yesterday I was told I lacked compassion and intelligence, that I had been brainwashed because I disagreed that having a vaccination card meant I was living in a place that is becoming a totalitarian state. There is a distinct lack of grace and nuance there. My disagreement was grounds for making me not only wrong, but bad and defective. The righteousness and high emotional tone, the emboldened inhumane response that was in that brief and in my experience, typical exchange, is likely when shadow is present.
 
Shadow is the unknown, hidden and often, but not always, negative parts of ourselves. Shadow is the parts of us that we are unable to consciously own and therefore hide from conscious view. These parts, although hidden, are alive in our psyche and work through us in sneaky ways, looking for attention.  They are, when they erupt, often accompanied by strong feelings, undifferentiated blobs of tangled thinking and confusion. It’s very much a wtf presence. In that presence we need to find a reason for this wtf?ness often leads the shadow engulfed person to want to find someone to blame.
 
It might look like this. I am scared. There is so much going on that is unsettling and it feels like a big fucking mess and I can’t face these fears because I risk overwhelm. I need to find a source for my fear because I think feeling scared is somehow wrong or weak and I think acting from fear is a failing. I look to find something that matches the big scared/unsettled feelings I have. It’s got to be someone or something “out there”. And so we look for an enemy, a bad guy to take responsibility.
 
We look to match the intense (and remember highly valid) feelings we have and so we need a BIG bad guy, a big pharma or a big government or even better still a big international cabal of shady figures that reaches everywhere, that and only that, matches the intensity we are feeling. Just because the feeling that everything is wrong is matched by stories about cabals, and communist plots and and... and doesn’t make any of those stories true, it makes us scared and at risk of manipulation. It makes us want to protect ourselves and damn everyone else, which in a culture that prides individualism and names community values as communist is a pretty easy reach. It makes us scared and we take a grain of truth and build a whole sandcastle out of it. For example, Bill Gates plan to microchip us all via vaccines. Yes, his funding was, at one stage going towards seeing if there could be a way of tracking vaccine records but not personal information. It was in the research phase and has not been actioned but man the idea that one of the richest men in the world who controls computers could one day have information to track me inserted into me and I wouldn’t know … well that’s bloody scary. If I read that information from someone important (like an ex advisor to the then president…who sounds plausible….I might feel like my fears, my uncertainty was now justified and I would perhaps look for more proof.
 
So let’s pause for a bit.
 
I have been a nurse. I no longer practice. I didn’t like a lot of what I saw in the medical system and big pharma. I didn’t like vaccinations while I felt there was some leeway in my choice. I have a healthy side eye for everything I encounter. Expecting something to be all good is something I reluctantly grew out of some time ago. It hurts to see corporate greed and self interest in the world. Sitting with the discomfort of the ambivalence, the good and bad in just about everything is tough.
 
But it’s not lying. 
 
All that to say I mistrust big pharma, I question a lot, A LOT about medical systems but I can bear the nuance that mostly there is reason to engage in the efforts that are being made to keep me safe. Why do I believe that? Because the capacity to bear the truth that we are in a terrible situation matters. The need to find a bad guy to explain, an enemy to fight in this catastrophe, is not nuanced and well, responsible enough, to make the slim chances we have left matter.
 
We have to develop a capacity to tend to our shadow. To come alongside our own fear and our automatic responses to fear and learn to navigate them with less blame and projection and more nuance. The drive to polarise to good and bad to right and wrong takes us out of community and connection, things that soothe and settle our nervous systems and responses, and into enmity and mistrust, things that activate our nervous systems and make us more likely to be reactive and act from a primitive defensiveness.
 
What if then, the enemy was both outside us; the harm of global warming and the very real (yes I know people who are suffering because of corona virus) harm of Covid19, and within us; our lack of capacity to tolerate our discomfort and fear.
 
What if we developed the capacity to meet discomfort with nuance and a thought for both ourselves and our values and also our community. What if it was time to stop blaming everyone else for the shitstorm and picked each other up and got to work cleaning it up?
 
 
 
(*and if you think the virus is a hoax then it’s likely you won’t like what I write from here on in but I’d love it if you could tolerate the discomfort of reading the information on shadow because it might be useful, even if to explain why what I am writing makes you angry.)