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

 
Caveat before we begin. This is not exhaustive and doesn’t look at every facet of how Modern Western Culture causes harm. It’s not my intention to gather all those threads. This is just the lens I am looking through today because i am a fallible woman who is learning to use her voice and not the oracle at delphi.
 
Modern Western Culture (MWC) is a collection of forces that unconsciously shape our social landscape. MWC has a central theme that tough and hard is good. We see that in the honouring of the warrior archetype, the ruthless businessman, the go get ‘em entrepreneur.
 
The be the best, winner takes all, no prizes for second, go hard or go home mentality is the air we breathe.
 
If we try to navigate life  in MWC without a critical eye, we can think the world is a pretty hard place. We learn quickly that neediness and vulnerability are considered weak and undesirable, that rest and disability and failing are not. an. option. We should just Do It ®. In relationships, news media, social media and current popular political movements we are encouraged to go hard regardless of suffering, regardless of the impact on others (aka the weak) and the planet.
 
To be human is to fail, it’s always going to mean stumbling and falling. It’s always going to be messy, painful, embarrassing, but this MWC thinking has us repelled by our own softness. It teaches us to be disgusted with our wobbliness as we learn, our own hurt and emotional response to the inevitable tender and difficult aspects of life.  .
 
We are always going to need things aka be needy and if we are growing and learning we will always make mistakes. When we believe that these very human responses to life are things to hide and be ashamed of we begin to make maladaptations.  In these mal-adaptations we attempt to shut down our neediness and instead try for invulnerability. We shut down to our failures and stop trying. We learn, for fuck’s sake, to think we have done well if we don’t cry at a funeral.
 
In a world where it’s not so much who we are, rather what we make that matters, we begin to jettison our innate humanness.  We value how we appear and what we produce over our truth and experience. We become the ones who say what we do rather than who we are. We are repelled by the very things that encourage us to belong; things like story-telling, vulnerability, connectedness and nurturance.
 
 
Nurturance.
 
The world nurture has its root in the word meaning to suckle or to nourish. A nurturing relationship then, is one in which we are nourished and where we are safe to bring our innocence and child-like tenderness.
 
In the view of the polyvagal theory regulating our system and coming into a sense of safety requires two things;
1. we need to make sure we are not under threat – there’s no sabre toothed tiger in the room and
2. We are able to connect and cooperate with trustworthy others.  This connection is predicated on the need for nurturance, we have to be safe to be vulnerable and to receive nourishment.
 
Despite it being the central quality for a sense of safety which is the bedrock of development and coping for all humans MWC would have us dispise nurturance.
 
In a dog eat dog world there is little place for nurturance.  
 
One of the biggest signals of value in MWC is where the money is. When you look at roles that are by nature engaged with nurturance you see the truth; parenting, childcare, teaching, nursing, death-work, all of these nurturing roles are low paid work. They don’t have value in MWC.
 
The impact of devaluing nurturance
How does this lack of value of nurturance impact us. Does it show up in our undervaluing of self-knowledge, the so called navel gazing of self-reflection? Does it show up in how self-care is considered a mani-pedi and a haircut or buying a bigger car? Does it show up in our vicious inner critic who has no limits on how cruel it can be if we stumble or fail? Does it show up in our rigidity, lack of rest and addiction to busyness? Are we lead to believe we are like a machine and drive ourselves into suffering while neglecting the signs along the way?
 
How does it show up in our relationship? Does it show up in our desire to give someone who is crying a tissue and a platitude, to hurry them into happy? The shiny impenetrable glaze of “think positive” and “look on the bright-side” that’s offered to people who are suffering? Does the nervous system, get what it needs? Is that need over-ridden so many times that we begin to feel we are intrinsically wrong? What does that do to a nervous system? To our wellbeing? To our ability to connect with others?
 
What does the social devaluing of nurturance do to the family system. Does it teach us to value pushing ahead and the striving into the outer world rather than the resting with and tending of nurturance. Does it have us stay busy in our outer lives rather than taking time to be with each other. Does it have us turn away from the vulnerabilities of ageing? Does it make people who are just mothers or just fathers or just guardians shrink or become invisible? Does it mean that the broken relationship to nurturance in a family system becomes a burden? Are children taking on the thinking that despite the neurobiological imperative, the fact they are missing nurturance means they are bad/faulty/not enough or too much? Does that mean we go into life trying to disguise our neediness and faultiness and doing so by not listening to ourselves and perpetuating the cycle?
 
What if on a global scale neediness is discouraged and shamed? Does it misshape neediness and the call to interconnectedness into entitlement?  Does the denial of our own natural neediness twist into greed. Does it turn up in the behaviour of the “weak” being exploited by the “strong”? In the powerful taking what they want and damn the consequences?
 
 
 
What if we repatriate neediness?
 
Chris Zydel an expressive arts therapist in San Francisco and general glorious human encourages her students to be

“needy greedy and proud of it.”
 
This invitation opens the door to self-acknowledgment. As that long-shut door creaks open, often what rushes in is hunger, grief and confusion. How long have we been waiting for someone to tell us it’s ok to want and to need? How do we learn to understand that which we have taken such pains to deny?
 
This invitation is the beginning of a quiet revolution. It’s in this nurturance that we start to uncouple from important parts of the harm-making of modern western culture.
 
It’s in the living into the acknowledgment of this woundedness that we begin to come into clarity; clarity about what we long for, clarity about what works and doesn’t work for us, clarity about what is true.
 
It’s in this state of clarity that we can begin to resource ourselves and fill our cups with what works, without having to grab everything, we learn what is enough.
 
It’s in this well nurtured, replete state that we begin to understand ourselves, that we begin to humanise. We learn to listen to our bodies, we learn to rest, we learn when to leap and when to wait. We learn about who is with us and who is harmful to us, who to trust and who to turn away from. We build healthier connections and respectfully see ourselves as part of the ecosystems of our lives. We learn to connect to meaning and our sense of purpose and live into that in a respectful way.
 
It’s within the gentle holding of nurturance that we learn to respect. When we see ourselves as worthy of respect, through the nurturing eyes of another, we come into a new relationship with enoughness. When we respect ourselves we learn to behave in honourable ways;  we learn to respect ourselves, our limits, of others, of the system around us.  We come into an interconnected and respectful relationship that acknowledges if we cause harm to ourselves, we cause harm to the interconnected system we are a part of.
 
It’s in this right relationship with nurturance and respect that we undo the imperatives of dominance and control that MWC is predicated on. It’s in this right relationship that we can begin to find solutions to the challenges of this broken paradigm. It’s in the arms of nurturance and respect that we become free to be human.

So fuck harden up. let's go soft. let's nourish and nurture. let's create a rebellion of tenderness. 

Are you in?

I want to talk about human Threat response and covid19.
The other day, I listened in dismay to a supermarket worker talk about the hideous behaviour of some people in the shop. The day before, I was waiting in a patient and well distanced line at the pharmacy, when a white man came into the queue and pushed in and started swearing and generally being belligerent.
I felt scared. I felt sorrow for the workers and others who are doing the best they can in really difficult and scary conditions and did not deserve that treatment. And I felt aghast for my fellow pharmacy queuers who felt intimidated and upset.
And now I am feeling for the angry people. That's not some spiritual bypassy nonsense. That's after a lot of reflection on my distress and leaning into the principles of Somatic Experiencing and the Polyvagal theory.
I will attempt my simple understanding of the way it works... here goes...
Our nervous systems have developed to respond to a threat in several ways. These all happen unconsciously.
Firstly, we try to think/negotiate/create our way out of it (this is the ventral/front or "newest" part of our brain).
If that doesn't work, or we have not had good experience using this, we go to the next level (the sympathetic nervous system or more ancient part of our brain.) This part of us is ready to respond to the sabre-toothed tiger. It's the fight and flight part of the brain. If you think you can take the threat on, you will fight and if you think you can outrun it, you will flight (or run).
If that doesn't work, or again, you have lived through experiences that have taught you that you don't have a lot of skill with threat, or, in the moment you are overwhelmed, you use the most ancient part of your brain the dorsal/hind-brain at the back of your skull. This is where you freeze or go into shut down.
I hope you are still with me.
Back to the shouty man in the queue. People are scared. This virus thing is out of our lived experience. (I could go off on a tangent about the lost art of story and how if we had kept alive the stories of the Spanish flu we might have navigated this differently but, I digress.)
We have been raised to think we can be the masters of the planet. We have learned to take what we want, when we want it, in the way that suits us. We don't have experience of our own puny place in the real scheme of things except for bushfires and tsunami and earthquake and something in our psyche convinces us that was a one off and we move on with the relentless entitlement that seems endemic in our culture.
At the moment, we are faced with this unfamiliar threat. It’s a threat that we can't see, it's minute and yet powerful, that is taking people out despite their status, power or wealth; aka all the things we have been taught to believe, matter.
We are all having to do things we don't want to do, live a way we don't want to live. We are having to curtail, cut off, submit. We don't like it. It's a threat. And that threat makes us respond. Remember this is not conscious.
Some of us are to the threat responding from our ventral system. We are connecting, being creative and community minded, building new ways to stay safe and strong. This doesn't mean we are not scared or feel the loss. We just respond by learning, connecting and being thoughtful and creative. To respond like this we have had to have lived pretty safe, well supported lives, be well resourced, have done some inner work to resolve trauma etc.
Some of us are responding from the “sympathetic” part of our systems. We are wanting to run and we can't. In Aotearoa NZ right now, because lockdown for a month, this means just that, no hanging with whanau, sauntering and jaunts to the beach or the bach or the fishing trip.
We are reacting from the fight part of the sympathetic response. In many cases this is a well-worn path honed by finding relief in intimidation and aggression; if you roar loud enough most things will run away.
Sometimes the fight response is heightened as a result of our own trauma and learned behaviour. And, right now, many people who otherwise wouldn’t, are acting from this fight response through stress and complete overwhelm.
We reach this place of being driven anger in an attempt to get the threat out of our faces.
These are the people who are angry in the supermarket and in the pharmacy queue. They are also the usually mild mannered person who snapped at us, the mother with her kids on lockdown losing her cool, the father crying in the car before he comes inside.
Does it excuse anger and intimidation? No.
But knowing there are people out there who are likely to be on a short fuse is important.
How do we manage this? We are wise to pay acute attention to our own feelings, not deny or avoid. We can try to be self aware, self reflective. We can try to build safe connection that will allow us to talk things out. This will often help us move into the frontal part of our brain, bring it back on line.
We can run or do exercise to release some of the pent-up fight/flight response we are all feeling. We can shout into a pillow. We can rip up paper (not toilet paper coz that's gold apparently - an attempt at humour). We can dig the garden. Movement will help us mitigate that flight/fight response. All things we can feasibly do in lockdown.
We have a responsibility for taking care of ourselves. That means navigating things with care. Trying to pay attention to how we are feeling. Asking for help. Taking breaks. Talking to people. Being kind to ourselves. Noticing something that is growing, like a pot-plant, or changing, like clouds.
None of which is encouraged by modern western culture (as you will know if you have been following my work for any time at all!) #smashthepatriarchy.
There will be many people who are unable to do this moderating or mitigating. Who are angry and lashing out. If you are one of those people or stuck in quarantine with one of those people, please contact agencies listed below for support. You deserve to be safe.
As for the third response from the dorsal part of our brain? That's shut-down. That's when we can't think, or feel. When we curl up. And sweet human, we need you with your heart light on to make a way in the darkness. If you find yourself in shutdown, please rest. Please ask for help. Please be gentle and please return. Many people use alcohol and substances to maintain this state and it's going to be harder to isolate and continue with this, again if you can please get help.
Not everyone has the resources to cope during this time. Not everyone can just get through. Not everyone has the capacity.
So, dear one. When we tend to ourselves kindly and with understanding and generosity we are more likely to be able to navigate our way back to the ventral part of our brain, think cogently, understand, learn, be creative and connect with others.
When we drive ourselves beyond our capacity we are less able to hold that place of thought and conscious decision making. We respond to threat in ways we are not proud of. And some of us are doing the best we can and it's not enough for us to cope.
So, what am I trying to encourage you to do? If you have the resources; be kind to yourself. If you don't please ask for help.