Tools for the Awakening

by LaUra Schmidt & Aimee Lewis Reau, Good Grief Network Cofounders

Dear Waking One,

The world is burning, literally and metaphorically. The soles of our feet feel the flames. Heat seeps into our lungs and smoke makes our eyes water. Do you feel it? Do you question how we’ll ever be able to fix this juggernaut we have set in motion? Are you afraid? Do you feel paralyzed to act?

We are experiencing disruption and rearrangement to all of our major systems. We are drastically altering the biosphere from which we evolved. We are killing off entire species, ourselves, and each other at alarming rates. Those who have done the least to cause these crises are, and will be, impacted the most.

Pause.

Let that sink in.

Don’t avert your gaze. Stay with it. Stay with us.

We need you to feel the weight of these actions. Where do you feel it in your body?

Burnout and despair come easy to anyone who closely looks at our plethora of problems. Whether it’s climate change, our decaying democracy, the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, increased xenophobia, systemic racism, and mass violence. These seemingly intractable issues confront us from all angles. The problems are vast and prevalent, causing many to call our current situation a wicked predicament. There is not one solution that will get us out of this mess. The path forward will not be easy. And we cannot give up. How do we prevent being bowled over by our emotions and the urgency of change required?

Good Grief Network creates and disperses tools to help sustain individuals on this difficult and brave journey of being a change-maker amidst such overwhelming destruction. We have constructed a 10-step program designed to build personal resilience and empowerment for those of us aware of, and overwhelmed by, the state of the world. It provides networking opportunities to share resources and strategies for healing and co-creating a life-centered society.

Community is tragedy’s remedy. You don’t have to do this alone. In fact, you cannot do it alone. The Network provides tools to help you create a supportive community to engage the systemic transformation required. But first, each of us must become aware of, and begin mending, our disconnection from ourselves, others, and the more-than-human world. We can do this by working the Steps, which results in an acute awareness and exploration of self, leading to bridging the gaps in our lives, and reconnecting. This is the start of co-creating a meaningful, joy-filled life-centric existence for us all.

The following are steps each of us can take, right now. Practice them. Keep them as tools that help illuminate the path forward. Come back to them when despair overwhelms.

Step 1: Accept The Severity of Predicament. It is in this step where we aim to understand the problematic ways in which the dominant culture operates on this planet. When we catch glimpses of the problems and their severity, don’t look away. We must invite the grief to move through our whole animal body. The planet and our species need us to be awake and aware right now.

We’ve lost our way. Consumerism, pervasive violence, systemic racism, the climate crisis, water and food shortages, mass-produced propaganda, uneven distribution of wealth, the sixth mass extinction and skyrocketing rates of depression all point to the errors of our ways. The COVID-19 pandemic reveals the fragility of our current systems and ways of being.

A delicate balance exists between false optimism and overwhelming pessimism. Reality exists between these two polarities. We aim to live within these two extremes.

Regardless of which collective problem most paralyzes us, remember that balance is a practice. We wobble. We fall. We get up and get to work again. Like any practice, balance gets easier the more we do it.

Now is the time to rise to the challenge. Let’s envision new ways of existing, together. First, we accept the severity of the predicament. After accurately discerning where we are, we can focus on the path to arrive where we want to be.

Step 2: Be With Uncertainty. The dominant culture is rigid. Most of us are conditioned to make little, or no, room for uncertainty. We want guarantees, plans, and perfection. We desire to feel secure and think certainty means security. Yet, control is an illusion. We can calculate the odds of every risk, but there is always some amount of uncertainty that exists. We minimize risks by making smart choices and planning, but there will always be external forces beyond our control. We live on a dynamic planet and our perceptions are limited. There is more to existence than we can take in. Can we give up our need to control the outcomes of our actions? The more we convince ourselves of a certain outcome, the less resilient we are. Can you take risks and chances and find meaning in our daily lives knowing that our existence is unpredictable?

Practicing flexibility moves us out of a fight/flight/freeze/fold response when we experience the unexpected. This allows us to respond from a place of patience and compassion. We must befriend uncertainty to exist in this time and place, and to preserve our sanity.

Step 3: Honor My Mortality And The Mortality Of All. Death is a natural and normal part of every life cycle. You will die, as all living things do. Nothing is free from death — not pets, not that person you’re certain you can’t live without, not even the sun. Death is natural. Yet, the high rate in which we humans are killing off other species feels nearly impossible to take in. We’re extinguishing other species so quickly that we’ve entered the Sixth Mass Extinction event on Earth. Humankind has become the first species to control the course of evolution.

How do we remain present knowing death is inevitable and avoid becoming obsessed by it or dwelling in the dark? We are alive for such a short time. Heart attacks, accidents, and illness hurl curve balls at the ones we love and us. Nothing is guaranteed. Death and life are interrelated. One cannot exist without the other. Once we accept the inevitability of death, we can be more alive in the present moment.

The work of this time asks us to be brave and courageous. Eventually, death comes for us all. So, how do we cultivate the most meaningful journey while we’re here? Let’s live while we’re alive because how we die matters and we die how we live.

Step 4: Do Inner Work. Our personal wounds and traumas add weight to the heavy emotions we feel on a collective level. We can deny, repress, or run from our personal struggles until they crush us. Or, we can explore them with curiosity and courage, recognizing that feelings are both mental and physical experiences that shape, but do not define us. In doing so, we choose to use this extra baggage and its weight for strength-training a little at a time, rather than collapsing underneath it. Our grief, anger, or fear then become tools for connection instead of roadblocks to plough through or avoid.

Until we can experience and process the full range of our emotions, we cannot truly face the systemic predicament. Our culture has deemed some of our feelings acceptable and others taboo. Many of us have received messages that it is inappropriate to share honestly and openly about our heavy or painful feelings. There is a tendency to “think” our emotions instead of being willing to “feel” them. Feelings are lenses that color our perception of the world. We invite you to feel your whole range of feelings. Try each lens on without judgment. What is it about each perspective that helps create a richer, fuller life?

All emotions are transient and recurrent. For example, we don’t “face our despair,” and then never have to think about it again. When the despair comes back, we greet it as an old friend and sit with it. We can ask, “What does this feeling have to teach me?”

It’s critical to learn methods for processing our feelings, because each of us wakes up and falls asleep in our own mind. Community offers solace and support, but If we can’t work through our own feelings, the help of a community is limited. We must each commit to a full life experience and build community from that place.

Step 5: Develop Awareness of Biases And Perception. We think we are rational creatures, but we are not. We construct our reality based on the information collected and processed by our instincts, cognitive biases, senses, complex thinking, and the stories we tell ourselves. This combination is limiting. We can’t know what we don’t know. If we never learn how our brain overcompensates for our limitations, we are held captive by the illusion that we are rational. As we begin to notice all of the ways our brains take shortcuts, we can begin to see reality as it is, not as we want it to be.

Each moment can seem overwhelming as our attention and reactions are demanded from the sensationalized daily news, our personal relationships, and the weight of our collective problems. This overwhelm can keep us tethered to our survival responses and stuck in our reactions. We can help our minds become calmer and steadier. Personal practices like meditation, mindfulness, reconnecting with our body, and embodied gratitude can train our brains to respond to stimuli in non-reactive ways. By observing our thoughts instead of identifying as them, we remove ourselves from the daily hype that leaves us reaching for the next addictive fix to cover up the intensity of the times we’re living in.

Personal practices can help us observe our limitations in perception. And, we will still falter because we are human. When we make a mistake, instead of chastising ourselves, we can see these slips as invitations for empathy and humility that deepen our connections.

Step 6: Practice Gratitude, Witness Beauty & Create Connections. Gratitude, beauty, and connection are resilience strategies available to us at all times. When we practice gratitude, notice beauty, or increase connectivity with ourselves, others, and the more-than-human world, we become present with what is still here. These practices help us overcome feelings of scarcity and lack and are tools for meaning-making.

Making meaning is not optional; we need it to survive. In Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, he uses examples from his time imprisoned in a concentration camp to remind us that creating meaning and finding beauty are matters of perspective. They are available to us if we make the decision to pursue them. Terry Tempest Williams writes that, “Finding beauty in a broken world is creating beauty in the world we find.” The act of consciously experiencing beauty allows us to be transformed by it and in return we transform the world around us.

Desperation, hopelessness, and threats to our safety make it seem that meaning isn’t available, but as long as there is life, it exists. When we encounter such darkness, we must recall concrete instances of beauty, connection, or embodied gratitude from past experiences to help us move through it. Frankl reminds us that “Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how’.”

What are the why’s that sustain you through dark times?

Step 7: Take Breaks And Rest. Taking breaks has been portrayed as an individual luxury afforded to us only if we have earned it. Rest is a human right. And it’s one that’s not recognized by the dominant Western culture that has profited from disproportionately denying rest to marginalized communities.

Each of us has personal limitations that we must respect. Because we have committed to doing inner work, we have cultivated enough self-awareness to know when we need to take a step back for a moment and regroup. If we continue trying to push through, we become saturated, leading to emotional, physical, and spiritual dysregulation. This state makes us unable to receive new information and insight. We become easily irritable, frenetic, and risk burn out. Responding from a place of agitation or burnout prevents us from participating in the meaningful work asking to be brought forward by each of us. Bayo Akomolafe often says, “the times are urgent; let us slow down.”

The collective traumas in the world are exhausting and being in a place of awareness and vulnerability requires precious energy. Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith suggests that everyone needs seven different types of rest: physical, mental, sensory, creative, emotional, social, and spiritual. We must cultivate space and time in our lives to engage with the different forms of rest, understanding that we can’t do it alone. To truly take breaks, we must rely on our community to hold us when it is our time to slow down. And when we are recharged, we reciprocate this generosity to our community.

Are you willing to slow down and take a break? The work will be there when you return.

Step 8: Grieve the Harm I Have Done. We need to talk about privilege and how our individual and collective decisions are impacted by how much of it we do or do not have. A few examples of privilege include having indoor plumbing, being born with white skin, having access to a car or public transportation, and identifying as the sex you were assigned at birth. The system of privileging permits our economic and social systems to continue prioritizing profit over people and our planet. Looking at our privilege and undoing cultural conditioning is hard work, and the corporate and political elite like us to believe that we must be perfect before we can hold them accountable for their grievous wrongdoings.

This step is your invitation to begin exploring ways you have been complicit in perpetuating systems that thrive at the expense — and lives — of others. We did not grow up in vacuums. Our opinions and beliefs have been shaped by messages we received along the way. The systems are alive in each of us, and by participating in them we let them live. With this understanding, we can avoid falling prey to the guilt and self-criticism that strips us of our personal agency and allows these predatory systems to prevail. We can do this while also learning to forgive ourselves and others for being unwitting products of these rigged systems. Now is a time to be compassionate and fierce while we reclaim our own agency and tear down any walls that disconnect us, repurposing their scraps to build bridges.

Step 9: Show Up. Now that we have done some healing through self-reflection and building self-awareness, we need to turn our focus toward our personal agency, and discerning where our energy is best placed.

The work of this time will eat us alive if we let it. So we must cultivate and honor our personal boundaries to protect our energy.

It’s important to discern why we’re showing up. Each situation is an opportunity to explore whether we ought to lean into the discomfort and show up or if our attention is best placed elsewhere. Are we showing up to prove something to someone else? Or, are we pushing through discomfort and vulnerability to cultivate courage and growth?

Life exists in the moments we show up authentically. To avoid uncomfortable experiences out of fear is to miss opportunities for growth and courage. So, we must be discerning in our bravery and take chances. We have an opportunity to be fully alive in times of great disorder.

We show up for ourselves first, so that we can better show up for our communities.

Step 10: Reinvest In Meaningful Efforts. The final step is to use the openness, wisdom, energy, and resilience that we’ve cultivated through the other steps to inform our every action. As we reconnect to ourselves, others, and the more-than-human world, we make decisions based on compassion and insight instead of egocentric motivations. Instead of thoughtless and selfish actions, we reinvest ourselves with an understanding of the consequences to the larger world. This new type of effort must come from our inner stillness and from our Love for each other, the more-than-human world, and ourselves. Our actions become relational, moving us toward increased growth and healing. Unless we’ve undergone an intensive process that forces us to seek truth from within ourselves, instead of having “truth” pushed on us, any action with regard to our collective problems will perpetuate the same social and economic systems that are failing us.

Now is the time for each of us to discover opportunities to practice courage. Our next moves must be made from a place of inner calm and outward reverence. These actions can be informed by the intersection of where our skills meet our passions and experience. A truly just and life-centered world can only exist once we are awake, resilient, and re-connected.

So now, Waking One, you have some tools to help reinvigorate your efforts in helping to co-create a truly just and harmonious future for all of Earth’s beings. As the world grows more chaotic by the day, it’s important to build and maintain an arsenal of strategies focused on personal resilience and empowerment.

We suggest working through these steps in community. Move through your difficult emotions and past trauma, challenge the social constructions pushed upon you, and wholeheartedly reconnect with life. When you complete the steps, run through them again with the new insight you possess. And then keep them as tools for your toolbox. Help awaken others and encourage them to reconnect and envision new ways of existing.

Take this leap. You are not alone. We are here with you. Gather support from your community. Create spaces to move through the heavy and painful feelings so that we’re not bogged down by them. Let’s process, dream, and grow together.

We need you now. There is no more time to waste.

Onward With Love,

LaUra Schmidt & Aimee Lewis Reau, Good Grief Network Founders