These are not times of peace.
These are times when veils are being lifted on governance, power, inequality and colonisation. It’s a time when many extremely difficult truths are being told and a time for many of us, when business as usual makes even less sense than it did before. It might even have become intolerable or impossible for us.
For 2 months now, we been able to watch a war on innocent civilians live on our screens from the comfort of our homes. What does this mean for our bodies, souls and our individual and collective health? It puts a whole new meaning to the quote, “its no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society”.
In continually witnessing mass ecocide and now war, many of us are now experiencing collective vicarious or secondary trauma. This is very important to hold in our awareness in terms of how we show up to look after ourselves every day. As someone who knows the territory of healing through pain and darkness well, I also see that this moment is an important collective opportunity for immense humanitarian, spiritual and ecological transformation.
For a true transformation to occur, we all need to go to our edges regularly.
Have you allowed yourself to go to the edge?
And what do we do possibly do these such strong thoughts, feelings or sensations in our bodies once we get there?
Instead of trying to ignore them, fight them, get rid of them or fix them, I think we have to see them as messengers, as teachers and even as our most sacred helpers. We have to allow them to move through us and have their way with us.
Whether it be a feeling, sensation, pain or dis-ease, this thing that has arrived wants us to know something – some truth we have forgotten. Such things come to move and push us towards our truth. If we can give these messengers a compassionate space to be seen, to be heard, to be and breathe in their fullness and to express their message to us – we have a chance to hear what it is we need to hear.
Making friends and welcoming the discomfort and dis-ease in us with open arms is a vital step in our individual process towards right action and healing. It then helps us to show up to the collective action and healing so desperately needed right now from a truer place where we can be of greater service to life.
Know that we are in a collective unravelling.
The good news is that once things become unravelled, they can be easily rewoven.
One thing I know for sure is that it isn’t our role right now to try to fix or collapse in worry.
Each of us now has the job of picking up one of those unravelled threads – the one that is calling out to only us and we need to start re-weaving.
Only you can know what your thread is. Listening to the messages of our discomfort and our dis-ease will help us to find it.
It is that niggle you’ve had for years to start something. It might be that secret longing you’ve been ignoring. It might be committing to finally making the time to heal that thing that happened to you. It might be the first steps of organising your sacred activism.
We must now each of us choose our thread and start weaving our part of the new story we all need.
Written from day 29 of my menstrual cycle when I am slowing into inner winter but with a fierce truth telling fire blazing through my being.
Calling for a ceasefire for the mothers, fathers and children of Gaza.
Calling for decolonisation and climate justice for all.
Calling for ecocide law for the children of all species.