No one can know the depths of another person’s heart or another person’s mind, but it is possible to connect deeply enough to have a sense of the depths of another being if they want to be known. The inner life is sometimes so secret that it is the only safety a person has, but the truth is that other people can be safe too. If one dares to be real, others dare to be real too. And then one deep heart finds another deep heart and then there is the possibility for real love to blossom. And then there is also the possibility to know the depths of another being and to reveal your own.
Old ideas wear out like old clothes. Try on some new fresh ideas today, especially about the self. Cast aside that which no longer fits a changing you and try on something new and different. You’ll look and feel great in your new attitudes, your new thoughts, your new look. Your proposal to dare to be different and more alive is in tune with the new you that you have been working so hard on for so long. Let today be the day that you dare to be different. Welcome to the new you! Welcome to the world!
Since time immemorial humans have looked to the sky for a greater power to nourish and keep them safe. In earliest times the rising sun was worshipped as the power that protected life through light and warmth. Later, sun worship morphed onto worship of gods and a God in the heavens who could be prayed to and who would personally intervene to offer safety to mortals. Eventually, that mana, or divine energy, came down to earth and rubbed off on kings and queens who provided safety and bounty to their subjects. In our modern world that divine mana is still projected onto our elected leaders, to whom, from a very deep layer of the psyche, we look to for stability and safety.
Currently, the leader of America and the world presents as a case of hysteria common to patients in Freud’s psychotherapy practice in Vienna in the late 19th century. Freud’s remarkable discovery was that hysteria, marked by bizarre moods and impulsivity, was actually an emotional instability generated by a highly repressed instinctual nature at the root of the human being, in what he called “the unconscious.”
The latter stage of the Victorian Era in which Freud lived was so dominated by the ascent of the mind and reason that the instinctual, irrational nature of the human psyche was both devalued and repressed. That repressed nature rebelled by seizing possession of the personality in the form of hysterical symptoms. The cure, Freud was able to discover, required a reconciliation of the rational mind with its irrational nature.
The fact that the highest ranking official in the world today, imbued with the projected divine mana of the masses, displays an hysterical character rocks the boat of world and individual security and also challenges us all to reckon with the bipolar nature of our species. It is our task too to forge a reconciliation between our rational mental plane and our irrational emotional and instinctive nature, which lies at the root of our humanness.
Last week I shared in my blog that I limit my exposure to the news to one minute per day. I do this to regulate the influx of hysterical energy from without into my being, but also to regulate my own intense hysterical reaction to it from within. To find safety we must be able to regulate our own emotional reactivity within. For each individual this limitation may be different. Jan, for instance, finds that she can expose herself to one hour of the news per day.
Outwardly, protest movements have sprung up in an attempt to provide a container or boundaries for the hysterical energy at the center of the government. These are necessary, but I would caution that groups organize from a sober, regulated place, as hysterical reactivity to hysteria only serves to escalate it and works against the goal of stabilization. To rage against the unreasonable only makes one vulnerable to inviting rage into the center of one’s own personality, an obvious defeat of the self.
On an individual level we are all confronted with the fear of disaster, natural or manufactured, erupting at any moment. The individual can no longer look to the leader for solace, certainly not a hysterical leader! One must calm the storm from within.
The simple act of deep breathing can have a calming effect on the stormy areas of the body from which our deepest emotions emanate. First and foremost is the perineum, that area between the genitals and the anus, the very root of the human body. When we don’t feel safe that region clenches. To place the awareness there, at our physical root, and gently breathe into it while releasing its tensions can bring deep calm to the self. The air we breathe comes from the sky, from the heavens; it is mana from the divine. When we bring the breath into our body and join it in deep communion with our root we join spirit and nature in peaceful safety within.
Although we can easily criticize and make fun of our hysterical leader, whose behavior really does threaten world safety, we might also accept that we, in our time, are being challenged to individually make peace with the true needs of nature, both within ourselves and outside in the world, just as it was the challenge in Freud’s time. We too are faced with bringing the forces of reason and the forces of irrational nature back into calm balance.
This is the opus of our time, as is evident from the events that present daily on the world stage, and yes, there is extreme urgency. But the first task is to be able to regulate and commune with the forces of nature within the self, the neglect and repression of which reflect in a president who suffers from hysteria.
Find safety within… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
Behind the hysteria is nature itself demanding attention and a new relationship. And this is the task that we are all challenged to take up now, to become leaders ourselves by reconciling with the deepest natures within the self. Bringing balance and safety within will bring the same without. Try it within and see how the world follows suit.
This calming breath to the perineum is but one small beginning to safety. Many more will follow. But it’s always good to begin at the root of things!
Hold peace in your heart, calmness in your mind, balance in your body, for what you hold onto within your physical self reverberates without. Keep your vibration at a low frequency, your central nervous system relaxed, and let your own power of love soothe you, for though the world without may oppose your notion of what is right and good you can still live and act and be all that is right and good within yourself and your own world. And that may be enough for now. Change, it begins and ends within you!
When it is time to change pay attention to nature. Nature is what it is in the moment. It rains or it doesn’t. The sun shines or it is cloudy. The wind blows or it is calm. The creatures of nature accept what is and react to it as it happens, one day, one moment, one natural event at a time; without worry they go with the flow. Humans on the other hand rarely notice nature except when it affects them badly or beautifully. Otherwise, to them, nature just exists out there.
But humans are far more affected by nature than they know and to get into synch with it, with what is, would save them a lot of heartache. Nature is, within and without, the true barometer of all that is. Pay attention to it, get in the flow of it, neither too much not too little of anything, just be in the moment. Pay attention, the signs of progress and change will come to guide you, one day and one step at a time, taking you where it says it is time to go. Nature knows.
