Stilling the pendulum of insanity
Getting intentional about healing ourselves is still the most effective way to make a collective difference. 07.09.24
“[W]e live in a culture that has no capacity for the conversations that have to happen around fear … and if you have a leader who leverages that fear, who gives you people to blame for it and then promises to deliver you from your pain and your fear by hurting the people you blame … that person will always win. If [your fear is] burrowed, metastasized — then it can be leveraged.
Now, you hold fear in front of you, and you say, ‘We’re fearful. We’re in so much uncertainty. There’s so much change at such a rapid rate’ — if you hold fear in front of you, it doesn’t dictate your behavior. But I think, because we’ve lost our capacity [to face] pain and discomfort, we have transformed that pain into hatred and blame. It’s so much easier for people to cause pain than it is for them to feel their own pain.” — Brené Brown
Watching the UK and France barely pull back from continuing their game of footsie with fascism is simultaneously inspiring and deeply unsettling.
Everywhere I look, I get this feeling that we are collectively so close to not being insane, but we can’t quite seem to break up with insanity for good. Or we lurch from one form of it to another, stranded children hanging onto a gigantic pendulum, seeking comfort in the claimed authority of extremes.
The delusion that we could finally feel better if only we could just control and crush all the people we don’t personally approve of is so enduring and so temping.
We can’t seem to accept that it’s never, ever worked.
I know it seems impossible, but every single wound, fear-based belief, blame, or resentment that we can heal in ourselves actually does contribute to more life-giving choices and outcomes for everyone — not just in politics, but in everything.
This isn’t some woo-woo magic; it has everything to do with the nervous system and an anchored wisdom that is rooted in wholeness. It works because when we deal honestly and compassionately with the places in us that crave constant soothing, it clears a space in our hearts and minds for healthier, wiser options. We experience both the clarity and the desire to go way upstream (in Desmond Tutu’s analogy) and deal with issues at their source rather than just whacking away at symptoms downstream.
We keep falling into the trap of seeing particular authoritarian leaders (or wishful authoritarians) as the cause rather than the manifestation of our collective internal and external unwellness.
If you really start to pay attention, you will notice this consistently: people who are at peace are simply not drawn to authoritarianism of any kind — political, ideological, religious — because it makes no sense. You don’t need unquestioning loyalty if your focus is on being a humble public servant first and foremost, and you’d never be drawn to someone who expects it. (The very notion of, say, demanding a televised military tribunal for subjects deemed insufficiently loyal would be utterly absurd.)
The power of real, deep-down, collective healing is not that we defeat and annihilate our perceived “enemies”; it’s that they become completely irrelevant. There’s nothing to be at constant war with, because their nonstop personal grievances, revenge fantasies, seeking to gain power by dividing people, whatever — there’s no pull. The total delusion of Us vs. Them ceases to land.
Bad actors exist in this world, no question—I understand that, and I understand that we can’t just wish or pray them away. I’m not looking at war zones and besieged innocent peoples and suggesting they just think differently about violence and death.
I’m talking about all the things the human heart can do before we ever get to that place, about what we here in relatively privileged places can do to reduce the chances of creating conditions that are favorable to power imbalance and violence in the first place. We here in the US are lucky: yes, the authoritarians are banging on the door, but we still have a moment to decide if we’re going to open it.
Right now in the US, we’re the ones who are giving bad actors platform and power. Our dis-ease is what makes them monsters rather than impotent lunatics shouting on a street corner. If we aren’t attached to their promises of control and certainty (always broken), and we don’t need them to make us feel secure and adequate, then the level of danger they pose all but evaporates. We can love them genuinely, offer them compassion in their illness, be present should they choose their own recovery — but no part of us will ever see them as anything other than a deeply wounded child who can’t ultimately give us what we need to be content. The thought of elevating them to a position of unquestioned power would be both totally unappealing and also kind of…laughable (we forget that there was a time when this actually was the reaction).
When we’re free and we’re healed, we don’t fall for the lie that other struggling people are to blame for our unhappiness. That notion actually becomes repellant. We start asking way better questions. We feel drawn to other spiritually healthy leaders. We want to work towards the end of everyone (yes, even people we don’t understand or don’t agree with on everything) having access to restoration and flourishing, because that makes the most sense for a sane society.
We don’t have to stay stuck in frantic cortisol-jacked survival mode, constantly trying to “win” by punishing the scapegoats du jour. The great news is that we don’t have to change anyone else, which is impossible anyway.
Even better news is that it doesn’t even have to be everyone. Some will always choose sleep and self-soothing. That’s just the way of things. But healing and elevating consciousness is, thankfully, not just a 1:1 effect — it’s compounded and exponential. Research has found that a threshold as low as 3.5% of people (!) committed to nonviolent, positive transformation have never failed to bring about change.
It takes a relatively small percentage of people who are willing to risk trying a more excellent way to break these pendulum cycles of insanity.
It’s okay and smart to start small — that is, with ourselves. I know, I know: we’re constantly told that’s not enough, that we have to obsessively commit ourselves to changing everyone else first, by force if necessary, fueled by rage and righteous indignation — because that’s what fear-based paradigms feed on. Why do you think Empire loves relentless chaos and noise and confusion? It keeps us spinning.
This is why seeking out the real healing of real Silence is so revolutionary: because in these moments of intentional quiet with ourselves, there’s a still, small voice that keeps telling us the truth: we’re meant for mutual flourishing, abundance, connection, and life, life, life.
