Have You Wondered What’s Living You?
Ever wondered what’s that subtle sense of dis-ease underneath the fullness of your days? A sense of disconnect at times? Perhaps even emptiness, or a gnawing longing for something unnamed? During the pandemic, for many it was languishing, a sense of stagnation and aimlessness. But was that just the last two years of a relentless pandemic, or did the pandemic bring to the fore something that has been long brewing?
Do you battle anxiety about the uncertainty of our times? We keep hearing that the vast changes we are living are also a time of unsuspected opportunity, yet we wonder how that applies to us. Is it therapy that we need to figure out how we relate to these times?
I’d say, after three decades of practice as a psychotherapist, that while therapy can be helpful, it is no longer sufficient to help us figure out the way forward. To define our suffering in strictly individual mental health terms is to do an injustice to the reality we are living. Our condition is as individual, as it is also social and systemic; it is as much about mental health as it is about the hunger of the neglected soul becoming impossible to silence. We are longing for more than the next fix, the next prescription for “living your best life”.
What we need is a way to redefine our relationship to life, to ourselves and to each other, so that we can navigate rapid global change and restructuring in an intelligent and conscious way. Our social world is changing so profoundly that the world views that helped us negotiate life as we knew it no longer hold. We find ourselves trapped in oppositions that we defend, in order to have some turf to stand on; but privately, we struggle with neurotic thinking and try to find escape in anxious consumerism and endless busyness.
It is less and less possible to pretend that we have nothing to do with the millions of displaced people roaming Europe and the world, looking for a way to strike new roots someplace. It is less and less possible to ignore the climate and global health emergency and their planetary domino effect. It has become evident that what used to be sufficient to create a good life — good education and a solid profession — are no longer enough. Why? Because traditional social structures and centers of authority are eroding rapidly, and values no longer hold. No matter how much we try to keep going, as though in a daze, trying to maintain normalcy of life, earning a living, raising families, distracting ourselves with our smart devices and a thriving entertainment industry, we know deep down that we have left home as we know it and our present ways cannot see us through to a new destination.
The first step is to wake up and realize what is living us. We are in the midst of an unprecedented global transition to an interdependent planet, where every relationship reflects on every other, and the impact reaches every one of us, whether we recognize it or not. The Butterfly effect. In this new reality, we need to learn how interdependence works and why fighting it out with each other does not. We need to develop the skills to make informed and thoughtful choices that bring inner coherence and peace. We need to grasp the universal principles that govern coherent and effective choices and allow for thriving. We need to learn how to reorganize our lives with greater integrity and how to weave our intergenerational and cultural past into an emergent planetary reality, preserving continuity and meaning as we redefine purpose in an interdependent world.
In coming blogs, we’ll explore a path forward, beyond our outdated current maps, as I explore it my recent book, Global Unitive Healing: Integral Skills for Personal and Collective Transformation.
