The World Is Crying

Two mass shootings, one targeting college students at my daughter’s alma mater, another in Australia targeting families celebrating their festival of lights, and the murder of an iconic Hollywood couple potentially by their own son. All in one weekend.

The world is in pain. 

I am aware that any singular theory trying to answer the question, “how did we get here?”, would be inadequate to capture the complexity of factors involved, and I do not have a broad enough understanding to propose one.  However, I want to offer one lens through which to consider what we can personally do to help our world heal. 

I think we have lost connection with who we can be. 

Émile Durkheim, a 19th century macro-sociologist, described human beings as homo-duplex - living on to levels. First, the banal or ordinary level, living as an instinctual biological organism driven by survival, desire, and fear. Second, the extraordinary, the part of us being led by something greater than ourselves.

I think we are forgetting the part of us that can be extraordinary.

Each of us is capable of good or bad things. Thinking in terms of good and bad can be reductionistic, so let me offer an alternate.

Each of us has parts of ourselves that react from fear, self-protection, and old conditioning. Many of these protective ways of being developed early in our lives, when we were vulnerable, dependent children. Initially helpful, these survival reactions can become less adaptive in our adult lives. 

For example, over-pleasing or taking care of emotionally erratic parents maybe adaptive when we are young children dependent on the adults in our home for our literal survival. However, people-pleasing often becomes less adaptive in adulthood, when we need to set boundaries, have difficult conversations, or navigate challenging relationships.

In adulthood we need to be able to harness the part of us that comes from wisdom, heart, calmness, and clarity.  Our wise essential self.  This self is intentional not reactive, and is pulled by love, not driven by fear. It has access to our deeper knowing and a broadened perspective. It is less self-focused and more other-inclusive.  It is empathic, creative, innovative, curious, and connected. 

These two parts of self, our protective fear-based self and our wise essential self, don’t just exist in theory; they reside in different parts of our brain.  Without going too much into neuroanatomy, our fear-based self relates to activity in the “older” survival brain (the fight-flight-freeze center which includes the brainstem, our limbic system, specifically the amygdala, and parts of the left brain) while our wise-essential self predominantly emerges from areas of our right brain.  This left/right comparison oversimplifies the brain’s full complexity, but it makes the point that these different parts of self are neuroanatomically distinct.

Here is the thing.  Both are always available to us. We can react to life with fear, narrowed self-focus and protection, or we can be more.  We all have the capacity to be guided instead by empathy, love, clarity, vision, courage and kindness, all expressions of our essential self. 

The invitation here is not about eliminating our protective parts, they served us well once and can still be a partner in our lives alerting us to pay attention to potential risk.  However, the offer is to strengthen our capacity to lead more often from our wiser self.

How?

Notice, pause, and redirect. 

The part of us that gets strengthened is the part we most frequently express, the part we most practice, the one we feed. 

Notice.  Practice awareness; become conscious of when fear is in the driver’s seat. A good indication of this would be any negative reaction we have aimed at ourselves, others, or circumstances.  Examples include feelings of judgement, blame, criticism, frustration, anger, worry, self-doubt, shame, etc.   

Pause.  Maybe it’s three deep breaths, focusing on the sensation of the air moving through your nostrils and filling your belly, and out again.  Maybe it is a mindful moment, becoming very present by attending to details of things you can see, hear, touch, or taste.  This softens the grip of our fear-based brain, interrupting our autopilot responses, and allows us to access our essential self. 

Redirect.  Ask yourself: In this situation, who do I want to be? Invite your wiser self to be in command.

What would it be like if we all practiced living and making decisions from a place of deepened access to our own light and inner knowing?

In 1943, American psychologist Abraham Maslow introduced his hierarchy of needs, a framework for understanding human motivation. In the model, Maslow posited that at a base level we are all driven by a need for survival starting with meeting our physiological needs (like food & sleep), and once those needs are met we evolve to a need for safety (which includes money & resources) all the way to the final level of self-actualization (to reach and express our full potential).  However, what most of us don’t know is later in life, Maslow himself questioned whether this was the final stage, and turned his attention towards what he called transcendence. 

Transcendence is an elevated state of being.  It is a state of oneness where we transcend ourselves, and “I” becomes “we”.  It is an experience that can leave us feeling transformed, alive, and connected to something beyond the self.  Maslow considered it to be the highest level of striving in human life. 

When “I” becomes “we”, we meet ourselves in the extraordinary. 

So, my invitation to us all is to ask ourselves, “Who do I want to be?”  And maybe, if we met ourselves in the extraordinary, the world would not be crying.