The last two months have been particularly rough in America. The longstanding issues that America wrestles with have repeatedly risen to the surface in huge fomenting waves of drama, division, rhetoric and ugliness. We’ve witnessed ongoing gun violence, difficult Supreme Court rulings, the January 6th hearings and the implications to democracy, corruption, corporate greed, police brutality, houselessness, voter rights, women’s rights —and that’s just off the top of my head!
I’m an American, but I no longer live in America. I live in Portugal, and I love it. Living abroad means that I’m not in the hotbed of emotions generated by the relentless pace of the ongoing, devolving American story. I get a little reprieve from it all, and it’s helped me enormously. How? It’s helped me step back, take a look at my emotional reactivity, to see clearly how my emotional resilience gets hijacked if I’m not attending to my energetic self-care. Then, I calm the reactivity and cultivate emotional resilience.
Emotional Reactivity Derails
Don’t get me wrong, when things hit the fan, it doesn’t mean I don’t want to lash out, to burn things to the ground (not literally), to strike back and rage. I definitely have those feelings — I’m human, a woman, a mother, a grandmother, an environmentalist. For me, none of what’s happening right now feels good, right or progressive. None of what’s happening validates or supports what I believe in, my values or morals.
I’ve done a lot of work to evolve my story. You probably have, too. Yet, reactivity is not triggered solely by what resonates with your life story. Truth is, there’s a vast sea of trauma that we surf in our collective unconscious. When situations get heated up, we’re like a geyser erupting through all of us.
We can channel anger into action, but if we rage and lash out, if we fight back instead of rise up through coherent, aligned, conscious response, then we’re bringing the energy of the problem into our efforts for a solution. That doesn’t help at all.
Then, what can we do? We can take actions that support what we believe in, the change we want to see in the world. Each of us has accountability for taking action on things that we see as untenable, out of relation to what is possible, what benefits and blesses the whole. Whatever your primary cause, show up, and do what you can with what you have where you are, to paraphrase Teddy Roosevelt.
Emotional Resilience Heals
Beyond that, though, there’s our responsibility to show up energetically, without the reactivity, without the traumatized, triggered, fight, flee or freeze stress reaction. How do we cultivate emotional resilience? Energy clearing can make an enormous difference.
Emotional Resilience Workshop
Want to learn more? I’ve got a live, online, two-hour workshop coming up July 27: Emotional Resilience: What to do when the sh*t hits the fan.
In our time together you’ll learn and apply 3 practices for clearing reactivity and cultivating resilience. It’s a game changer to have tools that work at the source, the root of the reactivity issue. You can’t will the trauma away, you can cultivate resilience. You need it, your community needs it, America needs it, the world needs it.
Please join me. Resilience rocks — and we have some coherent rocking to do — to stand up and do what’s right, not just in America, for our collective consciousness and this beautiful Earth.
Image: Street Art, Aveiro, Portugal
