Sometimes it feels like the bottom has fallen out.
It could be the doctor saying, “This doesn’t look good.” Or a financial reversal, or getting betrayed by someone close to you. A storm or wildfire might have devastated your home. A mass shooting could have occurred in your school or town. Terrorists might have committed atrocities on your people. Some government may be bombing your children.
Sometimes it’s a political event. For example, recently less than 50% of American voters have reelected Donald Trump. Many are celebrating his victory. And many are not, including the majority who did not choose him. People can accept the result of an election while being deeply concerned about its consequences.
Whatever the source, it’s normal to feel shocked, frozen, frightened, outraged, sad, and other emotions. We don’t need to compete for who most deserves to feel upset or aggrieved. For you, if it feels like the bottom has fallen out, it has.
What then?
In studies on trauma and resilience as well as in the lessons of people dealing with disasters far beyond my own, we keep finding four fundamental strengths that make a big difference. They help us feel better and function better, for our own sake and that of others. And over time, these inner strengths make us even more able to improve the outer world.
Take Heart
For starters, be kind to yourself. Get on your own side. Not against others, but for yourself.
Try to get a sense of your good intentions, your efforts, your own fundamental goodness, the deep sweet nature in your core. Believe it when you find it.
Have compassion for yourself. Let yourself feel what you’re feeling, slow down, and take your time.
Protect your heart. As the Buddha taught long ago: all kinds of painful thoughts and feelings can pass through awareness, but we don’t have to let them invade the mind and remain. Pull your attention away from toxic influences. For example, bullies want you thinking and talking about them whether you like them or not. Bad enough that they’re strutting on the playground – or in the halls of power – so don’t make it worse by letting them into your head.
Also of course, try to keep your heart open, love your friends and family, and love our big beautiful precious world. In all its forms, and from mild to intense, love heals us and feeds us whether it is flowing in or out. There are often limitations on the love we can receive, but there are none on what we can give.
With others who are draining or upsetting, you can have compassion for them while stepping back or standing up for yourself. Look for examples that speak to you of people who are fiercely committed to the good without letting hatred poison their heart. Thich Nhat Hanh – the great teacher and peace activist – has been a model for me, and I love the description of him as a combination cloud, butterfly . . . and bulldozer.
We are all wounded. Perhaps people have let you down or directly attacked you. Everyone makes mistakes and is burdened with regrets and remorse. Everyone has losses, such as doors closing, loved ones dying, or dashed hopes for a better future. We can be honest about our wounds . . . . and feel them along with love. Carry your wounds into love. Then they soften and are more bearable, and we open out into a field of love.
See Clearly
In 1986, Harry Frankfurter’s academic paper began with: One of the salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. And it’s only gotten worse in the years since as the BS has been weaponized politically.
So try to recognize lies – and liars. And look for basic factual information from Wikipedia, university websites, and credible news organizations that correct their errors. Sure, check out information outside the mainstream – and then see for yourself what stands the test of time.
Recognize facts that are relevant to you. Close at hand, how are people doing who you care about? How are you doing, really? Your health? Finances? Well-being?
Further afield, are actual harms heading your way? There’s a lot of sound and fury in the political arena to rev up the true believers . . . which does not become actions that affect people in concrete ways.
Still, as Maya Angelou has said, when people show you who they are, believe them – the first time. I and many others have underestimated the movement toward authoritarianism in America, and overestimated the guardrails against that. Let’s not make those mistakes any longer. It’s a plain fact, not alarmism, that America is already several steps down the well-worn path historically toward tyranny.
We don’t know their timing and shape, but we can see that storms are coming.
Do What You Can
Nkosi Johnson was born with HIV in 1989 and died soon at age 12. He became an advocate for those with AIDS, and once said essentially:
Do all that you can with what you’ve been given, in the place where you are, with the time that you have.
The more uncertain and potentially threatening the wider world, the more important it is to invest in yourself and the circle around you. What feeds you? What protects you? What makes you happy? Boring but true: we get back what we put in . . . to what we eat, to exercise, and to meditation and other inner practices.
We also get back what we put into our relationships. I remember seeing a YouTube clip of a big grim former Special Forces expert on survival who was asked, “Under the worst conditions, what’s the most important thing to have?” He replied: “Friends.”
Talk with people. And listen. Know your neighbors, find common ground. Consider important relationships and what could be repaired or deepened in them.
Out in the world, get involved locally in organizations that are strengthening the fabric of your society, no matter what’s happening in the capital. And at larger scales, pick the causes you care about, and support them. The petitions you sign or dollars you send may make no discernible difference for the world, but they will definitely make a difference for you.
In many areas, there has been great progress in the past 10-100-1000 years. Nonetheless, major centers of wealth and power continue to drive our planet over the cliff of climate change, mass famines and species extinctions, and rising militarization and authoritarianism.
We need to face this fact.
The root causes of these looming catastrophes have received many excellent diagnoses, prescriptions, and exhortations. But all too little action. For example, we can’t assume that lifting individual consciousness – certainly good in its own right – will lead to the collective action necessary to change systemic sources of suffering. Thousands of years of teachings about compassion and justice have not led to societies founded on those principles. There’s too much complacency and too much self-congratulation as we help each other feel better . . . on the deck of the Titanic racing toward the iceberg.
If we are to deal with the root causes of our looming catastrophes, we must face the humbling fact that just doing more of the same will not change them. We need to think and feel and love and act at deeper levels.
As Gabor Mate has said: Suppose you have a petri dish in which a type of beneficial bacteria is thriving. If you transplanted some of them to another petri dish and saw them barely surviving, you wouldn’t blame the bacteria. You would look to the culture medium in the dish.
So first of all, we must address our toxic culture, which is driving us apart rather than pulling us together, and erasing the vision and sense of the common good. We need to rehumanize, to reclaim our true nature as a highly cooperative species living in harmony with its world.
We evolved in small bands organized around what scholars call caring and sharing – essentially, compassion and justice. Large inequalities of wealth and power were impossible in hunter-gatherer bands of 40-50 people spending their lives together.
Yet for the past several thousand years, wealth and power have become increasingly concentrated in the hands of the few at the cost of the many. And for the past several hundred years, we’ve been increasingly living in unsustainable ways, literally burning up our planet and excreting our waste into the sky.
Because we are used to it, we take these developments for granted. But they are actually and toxically inhuman. As Mamphela Ramphele – board chair of the Global Compassion Coalition – puts it: We need to become indigenous again. Which means expanding our vision and sense of “us” to include all of humanity and the web of life as a whole.
Second, we need to reestablish compassion and justice at the foundation of all societies. The greatest opportunities for accomplishing this involve forming many new groups, networks, and alliances – coalitions – in the space between individual action and central government policies, and then claiming the power we do have to accomplish real things.
Groups pursuing wealth and power compete at the “street” level but pool their resources at the political level to shape laws and policies. For example, in America the oil and gas industry has spent $2 billion over the past fifteen years to quash climate crisis legislation – and they’ve gotten what they’ve paid for. On the other hand, with some notable exceptions, prosocial nonprofits are friendly with each other but rarely pool their resources at a scale that is big enough to make a dent in the root, systemic causes of suffering.
Yes, let’s keep the pressure on national governments, while remembering that only 6% of the world lives in a high functioning democracy. Meanwhile, local governments are typically more focused on practical improvements in the common good. And there are plenty of other opportunities for motivated coalitions to weave more threads in the fabric of civil society, for their own sake and as a bulwark against tyranny.
Many scholars, activists, and policy-makers are already thinking and speaking out and joining with others at this deeper, necessary level of:
Rehumanizing
Forming effective coalitions
The Global Compassion Coalition is among them, and we are eager to join with you, and we welcome your help!
Find Peace
Throughout history, most people have lived under tough conditions while still finding their ways to be happy. If they could do it, we can, too.
It helps to know that most things are beyond your control. Try to accept this fact, and uncertainty, and not always knowing.
What brings you to peace? Neurologically, it helps to raise your gaze, look out a window, take a bird’s-eye view. Take some breaths, with the exhalations longer than the inhalations. Tune into the internal sensations of breathing, which will help to quiet inner chatter.
Look around and see so many things that are unaffected by the political ups and downs: trees reaching for the sky, birds flying, friends cooking dinner, good music, laughter, love flowing. Turn toward whatever are reliable sources of well-being and comfort and wisdom for you: perhaps the simple taste of a banana, the hug of a friend, the eager look in your dog’s eyes, the vastness of the night sky, the onward developments of science, the perennial insights of the great teachers, or the simple rainbow beauty of an oil sheen in a puddle.
In your mind, there is always the peaceful stability of awareness itself. To paraphrase Pema Chodron, you are the sky and everything else is just the weather.
And even deeper is a fundamental stillness in your ground of being. Slow down, be gentle with yourself, and you can find this quiet between and beneath all the busy thoughts and feelings and desires. This innate peacefulness, infused with love, is our true home, a reliable refuge and source of strength under all conditions, including sometimes an unreliable and scary world.
There is also peace in knowing that your own practice and efforts will help many others besides yourself. Rippling out into the world, touching many lives, known and unknown, seen and unseen – including me, and many others I care about.
From my heart, thank you.
Rick Hanson is the Founder and CEO of the Global Compassion Coalition