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.)

This blog was inspired by Michael Meade's Podcast; Living Myth, Episode 237 Standing in the Water of Life. 22 July 2021. Here's a quote from the podcast. 

This stopped me in my tracks, as deep truths are want to do.

This whole shitshow within western culture, the slide towards toxic individualism, the final eruption into general white consciousness of racism and the harm we are culpable for, the arrival of Covid19 and the subsequent avalanche of mistrust, misinformation and fear mongering that is every.where, all of this is like the coming of a kind of destruction.

The alarm i felt in my whole being (i have written about that here ) continues to be a very real response to what i consider a force for harm in the world. 

The dismantling and destabilising of information that literally saves lives is deeply alarming. That those who believe no one can be trusted and those who profess kindness are actually deeply dangerous is an Alice in Wonderland phenomenon that is taking a pair of nail scissors to the fabric of our communities. I see friends accusing friends of being stupid, gullible, sheeples. I see people saying you can't take away my freedom at the same time as being totally oblivious to, at best, or uncaring about at worst,  others suffering long term impacts of covid, if not mourning a loved one.

There is a lot i could ponder about around the psychology of fear, needing to feel special, fear of being abandoned and lack of capacity for change but what i want to focus on is the capacity for uncertainty.

Uncertainty is a bloody horrible place for humans to find themselves in. In western culture there is only scorn for those who are caught in uncertainty. We respect someone who can make clear decisions, hell, i have even created an ecourse about it, stimulated partly by my dismay at my own uncertainty at that point in time.

When we don't know we feel weak. We feel vulnerable. It gets to the most tender parts of us of us. We have nowhere to hide if the unknown is around.

Humans try to guard themselves against uncertainty in all kinds of ways; we buy protection, we bank on the dominant ones who purport to be certain. But of course, life has other ideas.

As Meade named it in this great podcast (and i am paraphrasing here) life cycles through the following stages; we are in the known, there is a falling away of what is known, a separation from what was, uncertainty and then new form arises. This is the cycle of life, of the seed, the animal body, our hair, our ideas... all of what we know has to go through this gate, this messy scary gate, of uncertainty.

Meade's quote above stopped me in my tracks because i think apocalypse is what arises when we are most uncertain, most challenged and most likely, most tightly gripping onto that which is falling away, refusing to allow the new, wanting to make our lives great again.

I looked up the etemology of Apocalypse and this is what it says: apo = un and kaluptein = cover (the last part changing in the Greek to the word kalupsis) The force behind the word is to uncover.

If, as it seems we humans are back in this deeply polarised place where we are rigidly holding onto our rightness and their wrongness, where we are able to call our friends stupid and imagine they are being duped while we alone know the truth and that there is heinous calumny everywhere we look, are we perhaps creating the conditions for apocalypse?

What if this destruction happening all around us is uncovering something, revealing something?

Personally i would rather not have to get to total destruction to uncover what wants to arise. What new thing needs to be born. What new way we could perhaps learn to tend to our own shadow and injuries so that we don't project them out onto the world and cause harm in the crusade of destroying that which is ours to own and mend?

That is the old way and by God are some people clinging to that like it is going to save them. Humans have done that back into history and i would hope that the new that wants to arise is to put an end to that

​i don't know that we are going to get a chance to find out.

Earlier this year i turned 56. The photo on the left is when i was 16. The photo on the right is 40 years later is on my 56th birthday - in one of my favourite places in the world; Kauri Mountain Beach.

56 sounds old. I can remember hearing those kind of numbers as a child and being kind of horrified at that many years stacked up inside, and as it turns out, outside me. When i was 16 i couldn't comprehend what 56 year old me would be like - i was too busy trying to be good and pretty and biddable. i was Vassalisa before she went into the forest.

I know... Some people never make it here at all.  Some lovely and deserving and wonderful people won't make it here. And so the imperative to make some use of life, to tend to a sense of purpose gets sharper each turn around the sun. 

But one of the things that sticks out in my memory from those times when i listened to adults reflecting on age was the idea of letting go.

No, not the diaphanous spiritual idea of just letting it go. Or even the more hard won and solid recovery idea of letting go and letting God. Nope. This letting go was, by the tone of the voices, something shameful and an act of letting the side down. "Oh she (rarely he btw) let herself go."

What was this letting go?

Was it the kind of letting go that brought relief to my little childhood heart - "Yes I'll let you go to the shop with the neighbours?" No it wasn't an allowing .

Was it that she finally let herself go on holiday or somewhere she always wanted to be? No, didn't seem to be a destination.

Was it the letting go of the reins and letting the horse go where it wanted. Well that was closer.

But what was the shameful part of that? Was it about controlling the direction or destination and if so what was the thing they were trying to control or avoid?

It seemed that the letting go was the kind that happened to houses if they were filthy and gardens if you didn't use lots of weedkiller and petrol.

It seemed the letting go was about rack and ruin. About disintegration. About failure.

And what was this failure? it seemed it was the failure to be young. The failure to pursue youth and youthfulness. To put effort into appearing younger than you were or slimmer than you were or richer than you were. The way this thinking keeps us on a hamster wheel of buying things to stave off age is clear. The way this thinking keeps you ashamed of yourself is also pretty clear - living into your own body as a source of shame never fails to distress me.

But as i aged It seemed to me that letting yourself go meant being who you actually were.

The crime of being your age, of being your weight, of living to your means seemed to be one that special vitriol was levelled at. I know little jane tucked that in her psyche for future reference. And now, i think i am living that future.

I have let myself go. Into my own weight, into my own skin; as saggy and wrinkly as it is. Into my own changing shape and hair colour and capacity.

i have had to wrestle with my thoughts and prejudices as i did so. I have a pang each time people who haven't seen me for years don't recognise me because of the changes time has created but do i regret it?

No. I don't.

I feel like, by letting go of the battle with ageing, i am freed up to pay attention to other things; to sleep on my front as i love to do (a woman i know who did end up in her elder years with impeccable skin refused to sleep anywhere other than her back for fear of wrinkles. - the pay off just doesn't make sense and i often think of her when i am snuggled in with my face all squashed into a pillow, luxuriating in the softness.)

Do big trees regret changing into their adult form? Do wolves mind getting grizzled grey muzzles? I don't think so. 

Maybe the letting go is about letting ourselves go towards the realms that modern culture is so damn scared of; ageing and dying? Maybe that's why we are encouraged to spend so much to stay young; to convince the tribe not to leave us behind on the next migration?

I don't know. I have had too much tenderness around age and dying to discount it as something to fear. And besides I can go where i want to now that i am a grown woman with means. I get to let myself go on adventures if i want. And the adventure of age seems important.

So l let myself go. Into my Baba Yaga self. Into wildness, into freedom, into self compassion, into the relief of being able to put down my weapons in that particular war against myself and just be real.
 

One of the best things i have ever done is Randi Buckley's Healthy Boundaries for Kind People course. Stellar, Life Changing stuff. I even trained as a facilitator (and would be happy to share her wisdom with you if you like - just shoot me a message)

But sales pitch and Randi fangirling aside, part of what i learned was about inner boundaries.  The boundaries i have with myself that support me to live a life that feels better to inhabit. The boundaries that support the change i am aiming for. The boundaries that remind me "not that way anymore, this way now."

These are some of the hardest boundaries to hold because they turn me towards the coping strategies that have saved me. Ok, so some of those coping strategies come with their own shit-ton of problems but they were the best i could do at the time. They were the patterns i learned to try and keep myself safe, win connection, figure shit out in this wonky world.

One of those patterns is people pleasing. I was an a grade, well trained footsoldier in the army of nice. I tried my best to ensure that everyone thought i was nice, that everything i did was nice and that the nicest thing about me was that i was nice. 

Notice a theme?

This pattern had me swallow my truth, behave very inauthentically and subsequently very unnice things happened. My anger leaked out in passive aggressive ways. I couldn't trust myself so i self sabotaged, i didn't back myself and i felt, as a direct result, lonely, confused, hurt and disgusted with myself.

I also felt ripped off. I mean, here i was trying, as if my life depended on it, to be nice and people walked all over me. i was a screen for projection (unsurprisingly because i was absent from the picture and was just a facade of niceness). I was able to be an object of scorn because i wasn't treating myself with any respect. I was failing to turn up in ways that mattered to the outside world so i wasn't considered valuable. I was sacrificing myself left and right because that's the deal right? If i sacrifice, you will like me - isn't that the deal? 

I would spend hours re-running interactions, imagining triumphant speeches, people seeing the error of their ways when they were mean. To no avail. It was familiar - i knew how to do it, it was a well worn deep groove of a pathway i didn't even have to think about. If i was doing it, at least i was doing something, and that somehow had to count as nice, even though it hurt and it was fruitless. Right??

I can see, through the Somatic Experiencing lense, that this was me trying to build connection, the very necessary-to-human-mammals part of the sense of safety. "If you like me, i belong, if i belong i am safe with you" is the best way to sum it up. It was my attempt at building that safety, that connection. 

Trouble is it wasn't working and in undoing the pattern of trying to make people like me, i had to suspend myself outside the old ways until something new was strong enough for me to rely on.

I don't remember a particular time when i realised i couldn't keep being nice, perhaps a watershed moment was when i decided to stop doing things that made me resentful. Seemed innocuous, but man, did it turn things on their arse...

I won't lie, it wasn't always pretty. I made a lot of mistakes - clumsy and not deliberately mean, i didn't always get the new way of turning up right. I had to, as i changed shape, step out of situations i could no longer fit. It was tough.

But one of the hardest patterns to break has been the midnight ruminations. The running 200 different how to fix this scenarios while in the shower. Losing 20 minutes of walking the dog to, well as my photo says, fondling the shit. Some of the shit was mine but very often the shit was the stuff i was facing was the way i had been treated.

The more i cleaned up my end of the relationship, the more vehement the projection, the snideness and judgement, the more rapid the triangulation. I spent hours running through it like a crime scene detective combing for clues about how i could do it better. 

And the truth is i was often just fondling their shit.

My hands got covered in kaka. No one but me and the people i loved could smell the stink. I ended up sitting in it and alas not in a "it all becomes compost" kind of a way. 

So my instruction, my boundary with myself is "stop fondling their shit." and you know, it's coming up roses. 

 


In typical fashion I am writing from the world view of a cis white woman. I am speaking to white folk, to look at ways we collude with white supremacy. I would like to cover some wide territory, to spark curiosity to support wonder. This is, as always, not exhaustive and full of cracks but if I wait for perfect I collude with harm so with that caveat, let’s begin.

in the natural world everything dies. A seed dies in order for the plant to grow, the plant dies in order for the soil to be nourished. Even the seemingly solid mountain is slowly eroding into a non-mountain state. In their own time all living things are somewhere on the life death life cycle. 

You could say anywhere on that cycle, that there is a will for life or a will for death. Is the tree in a process of dying or a process of living? What is it working towards? Most likely it depends on where you are placed at the time.

The will to live can be seen as the incredible raft of functions that the tree, for example, has to correct any harm being done to it. The sap rises and becomes gum to seal off an injury. The roots communicate harm to other plants to help them prepare. The tree knows to still it’s growth in the winter to preserve it from harm in the cold. This is what the will to live looks like – a self-righting impulse to continue on, to thrive.

Humans too have this force within them, this self-righting impulse to mitigate harm, to navigate threat.

The polyvagal theory is an observation of this in action. When we experience threat our systems automatically respond in ways that are designed to get us out of trouble.  We see a bull running at us and our sympathetic nervous system doesn’t give us time to think, it gives us the blast of adrenalin to run, leap over the fence and escape. The will to live. 

The will to live is not just about surviving, it’s about making the conditions for thriving and our incredible self-righting organism of our bodies support that too. We are not designed to just move around escaping threat, but we are also encoded with the self-righting mechanism to come, like many other herd animals,  to bring us to rest. Interestingly enough rest is not just about to being safe from the bull but also being with others with whom we are safe.  So, no physical threat and connected = safety.

With this embedded equation the will to live and thrive, how do we explain people who are not coming to rest, like people who are experiencing anxiety. We can say that in anxiety our sympathetic drive doesn’t turn off. We feel like they are living in “AAAARRR BULL COMING” mode all the time. We can’t come to rest. 

As a result a lot of things suffer; sleep, concentration, digestion, relationships, self-image etc. etc. When we don’t rest, we don’t thrive. 



Is this a mal-adaption? Is this just a personal issue? Should we just get over it and be sensible and see there’s no bull and get on with it?

Well. No. 

What about the dark cousin of anxiety, depression. Where is the will to live in that? Is that the will to die switched on? Is it the natural systemic response to overwhelming threat?

I would say inside depression is the will to live being confused or contorted somehow. I would say that the system gets overwhelmed by intractable challenge and, under resourced, goes into a shutdown state, aka depression. Depression, like all human experiences can be on a continuum and sometimes the darkness is so overwhelming it becomes the will to die. i think it’s a natural response to overwhelming threat to freeze – emotionally, socially, physically – it can turn up in many ways. 

Would it be great if these people who are living in a state of exhaustion and distress could just switch it off? Well hell yes.  But I think unless we look at the will to live, at the natural process that we come encoded with, we will continue to blame the individual, treat with cruel, disrespectful linear treatments and set them up for more distress.

I think we need to look at anxiety and it’s cousin depression, as natural responses to overwhelming threat.

What if we are able to look at anxiety and depression which is turning up in epidemic proportions in teenagers, and see what this pattern might be expressing or attempting to mitigate. 

What if instead of using mouse’s view - what is wrong with this person, what chemical imbalance are they exhibiting, what thought are they being captured by etc etc, we took the hawks view of the systemic issues our teens are facing and began to see what effect they might be having.

It’s  a modern western cultural norm to blame the individual for pathology and to seek perfection. Those are two  of the features of white supremacy. Ok let’s name them all to get them on the table.

Firstly I want to name this article to thank the author for their rich insights and to name the lineage of this part of my thinking From Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture by Tema Okun, dRworks.(1)


• Perfectionism, 
• sense of urgency, 
• defensiveness, 
• quantity over quality, 
• worship of the written word, 
• only one right way, 
• paternalism, 
• either or thinking,  
• power hoarding, 
• fear of open conflict, 
• individualism, 
• progress is bigger, more,  
• objectivity, 
• right to comfort

if we see ourselves, our children, as being embedded in a culture with these paradigms and oppressions as part of the air we breathe, is it unreasonable to think these are threats that the will to live and the drive to thrive are impeded by? 

If we are constantly required to engage in a world that would have us be perfect, for example what does that do?  Let’s look at a young woman. She is supposed to be pleasing and beautiful. She is supposed to be successful, but not too successful, thin, accomplished, academic and sporty, smiley and engaging. I can feel the way these impossibly narrow criteria for approval set young women to walk on a knife edge.

Each week I meet with young women who are sliced by this knife edge, profoundly harmed by this cage of acceptability .They blame themselves for their failing to meet this inhumane ideal. They see their “failure’ as evidence of their unworthiness. Each week I try gently to say “fuck that shit” “this is not your fault” “you are not wrong to be buckling under this pressure”

But often they just think I am trying to be kind to them. I think they sometime see me as naïve or simple because as far as they can see I am just a whisper against the roar all around them.

They understand the world telling them that they are wrong and not that the world is wrong.

What if they are not wrong? What if their response to this world is healthy and adaptative? What if their system perceiving the threats all around them is working just as it should?  What if it’s a will to live screaming at them “get out, GET out, GET OUT!!!”?

What IF all the anxiety that is flooding the nervous systems of so many people is in part a response to the inhumane threat posed by white supremacy?. 

Of course, if you are in a Black body or a brown body, you have a disability, are not cis, or adhering to the gender binary, or you are old, these things are a real physical threat.  As a white person we are automatically privileged by this system. Imagine being this harmed and being privileged at the same time.

Make no mistake this system is one of deep harm making where very, very few are advantaged and it has us stepping over each other to get out of harm’s way. The criterion for thriving in this system are in being able to be the top of the pile and to get there we climb over the “imperfect”, the slow and gentle, the collective, the powerless…

What if this rise in anxiety and the smashing down of depression are our system saying fuck this shit. What if this will to flourish is saying we are at peak toxicity and we are not going to survive, let alone thrive?

My grandad was a coalminer so I lean into his legacy when I ask, what if all these heartbroken young people are the canaries singing “enough” while they can? What if with each cut they make they bleed out a little of the harm they are holding? What if with each negative thought they are hearing the whispers of the system we all participate in?

What if the treatments that tell them to work harder, think themselves lucky, be mindful are just corralling them closer to that which is hurting them?

Now of course, not all treatments and not all therapists and not all paradigms…. But  until we can be assured that we can help each other see how our oppression guarantees us harm we will be suffering from our own collusion and I don’t think we can afford to do that anymore.

IF you are willing to leap you might want to wonder about this with me too. What if, seeing we humans are, in our true state and origin, a part of the natural world. We have become so “superior” in western culture that the idea of humans as natural seems risible. But if you are willing to leap with me – what if we are seeing the rise in anxiety and depression because we are part of the natural world? What if the suffering of the natural world (at the hand of humans and mostly white humans) is calling us into a deeper sense of alarm?

What if this is again, a healthy response to a planet that is suffering and that we are irreducibly linked to? What if these young people’s systems are reading the distress of the planet and are able to take on their responsibility where many of the older generations have failed? What if they are living expressions of “we can’t do this anymore”?

I believe that if we see these young people, well, all of us with anxiety and depression, as purely pathological we collude with the paradigm of perfectionism, with either or thinking, with reluctance to confront what is really there. 

What if we can see our collective responsibility, we can honour the will to life being expressed by people with anxiety and depression? 

What if we could use this as a chance to listen to the grief, to stay with the discomfort and learn what’s really there?

What if we could listen, to each other and to our collective and we could disconnect both as individuals and as communities, from this toxic paradigm and start to reclaim our humanity? 

What if our systems could finally read each other as safe, because we are no longer treating ourselves like production machines?

What do you think?

What if we could honour our will to live outside of what this toxic system tells us is the only right way?

What if we could become safe with each other again?


https://www.showingupforracialjustice.org/white-supremacy-culture-characteristics.html