What to Do When the World is Too Much
Breathe in for all of us and breathe out for all of us. Use what seems like poison as medicine. - Pema Chödrön
When the world is too much and you feel helpless, what can you do?
It’s a shitstorm out there. I’m not going to try to offer a way to make sense of what’s happening in the world. I can’t tell you how to understand it, who to listen to, or what relief orgs need money most. What I can offer is an embodied perspective on how to stay grounded and feel more empowered in the midst of events that are beyond your control.
Attention
First, recognize that your attention is the most valuable resource you have, bar none. Media knows this, corporations know this, governments know this, and they are all skilled at capturing your attention and directing it where they want it to go to serve their own ends. Be very conscious about where your attention is going. This is the difference between falling into a doom-spiral versus staying informed enough but also putting your focused attention in healthy directions.
Internal V External Reference
There is nothing more radical or important to be doing right now than to practice being more internally referenced. Most of us are taught to calibrate to things happening outside of us - other people’s desires, agendas, feelings, and even collective experiences. Attuning to your own body, heart, and soul, again and again, creates a pattern of discernment where your own experience becomes the reference point. Because we all have access to Truth-with-a-capital-T within our own being, and the only way to tap into that is to peer into our own deep well and learn to listen with the ear of the body & soul.
Resource & Regulate
When your nervous system is activated in a fear-anxiety state, your higher thinking brain shuts off. This is natural and good because higher thinking takes a lot of energy, and if you need to run from a tiger, you need every ounce of resource available for survival. But if there’s no real tiger, you actually don’t want your primal survival brain to be in charge.
When your higher thinking is offline, your ability to see the big picture, connect dots, make complex decisions, be creative, or think of novel solutions is impaired. And those are pretty fcking important things to be able to access to benefit yourself, the people around you, and indeed the world. If you need help with this, click here to access the Embodied Safety Toolkit (free guide & meditation).
Resource & Regulate pt.2
Not only does a regulated nervous system give you access to more complex thinking & decision making, it also becomes like a gift, a balm, that you offer to the world through your body. Doing this for yourself first creates inner resourcing that has a profound effect on the people around you, and ripples out to the collective.
We are all pinging off each other’s bodies and nervous systems, co-regulating with each other, and if you can remain grounded and regulated, your body occurs as a salve of safety and resourcing to other people. This is particularly important if you have or work with children, as they depend on adults to stay regulated, they can’t do it reliably for themselves.
I hope this is as empowering to you as it is to me! If you can’t do anything about events in the world, you CAN work to be resourced and take care of your own nervous system as an offering of healing to everyone in your sphere. Imagine the magnitude this can have if you are able to shift even one person’s experience and they go on to create a different chain of events than they might otherwise have. Go download our Embodied Safety Toolkit (free guide & meditation) if you need help with this.
Tonglen
Tonglen is a Buddhist practice I learned about a year ago which has helped me immensely to ride the intensity of our present times with more ease and grace. It also dovetails really nicely with embodiment practice because it is about the alchemy of feeling & transmuting through the body - exactly the processes I teach and work with for myself and clients!
Tonglen means “taking and giving.” It’s a meditative practice of taking on the suffering and karmas of others, and being willing to transmute it within your body into peace and happiness which you emanate back out to them.
Lama Zopa Rinpoche says: “Taking on the suffering of others and giving your happiness to others is the quickest way to abandon the oceans of samsaric suffering and the quickest way to free the numberless hell beings, hungry ghosts, animals, and humans and bring them to full enlightenment.”
If you feel fear and anxiety, you open your awareness to feel it not as YOUR fear and anxiety, but as THE fear and anxiety. You become aware of the countless beings feeling fear and anxiety right this very minute, all around the world. And you feel a big, compassionate YES to feeling this fear and anxiety ON BEHALF of all of them so that their suffering may be reduced. YES, I will feel this for all of us. YES, I will allow more of this into my body. YES, I will feel it all the way down, so that others may suffer less from it. By being willing to let it in and allowing it to be fully felt, all the way to the heart of it, you dissolve and transmute it through your body. Then you allow your bright blue open sky heart of compassion for these beings to generate feelings of loving kindness, coolness, and peace, and visualize this pouring out of you into their suffering hearts, replacing their pain.
Even if you don’t believe this is “doing anything” for other people, it has a profoundly alchemizing effect in your own body, giving a clarifying effect to the pain you feel (your own or others’), and making you more available to compassion, and more able to be there for others, even in what seem like impossible situations.
We have to create the change we wish to see in the world in our own bodies first before we can begin to see it unfolding in the collective. When you feel helpless, look to what you are animating in your own lived experience. What do you want to bring more alive through the way you are being and moving through the world? What do you want to hold in your body as an offering to those around you? If you do these practices, your entire perception will begin to shift and everything will become more clear.
