December Audio Meditation

I am living with cats for the first time in 24 years. There are three of them, all related, and less than a year old.  What I’m aware of constantly these days is how much more often I find myself smiling.  I’m kind of a “smiley” person to begin with, so it’s not new territory to me but—even with that familiarity—I’m surprised by how much moreof the time I seem to find myself smiling.

This got me to thinking about the research that’s been done around smiling.  Read More “726th Week: Smiling as A Resource”

One of the things the Internet has given us is more access to connecting and communicating with one another.  This is all to the good when the communication promotes the well-being of everyone.  It becomes a problem when it allows people to feed their fears.  We see this phenomenon around the world in those groups that seek to oppress or eliminate other groups of people who may be different from them or in some way represent a threat.

As a trauma specialist, this got me to thinking about how important it is to be conscious of our fears and to cultivate ways to become even more conscious of, meet, and process this powerful emotion.  So much of what creates division and conflict among human beings—be they in a one-on-one relationship, a family, a community, a country—is the presence of underlying, and often unrecognized or disowned, fear.

For this week’s practice, I’d like to offer a practice that can be helpful in recognizing and dealing with the presence of fear.  Fear isn’t an emotion we can eliminate because it’s an important survival response that we need throughout life.  It’s essential that fear can motivate us to jump out of the way of a bus we hadn’t seen, or remind us not to walk down a dark alley alone in the middle of the night.  The problem is that we are often afraid of things that aren’t threatening and, when we act on these kinds of fears, we often generate even more trauma in ourselves and others.

There is no question that we live in stressful times and that the challenges facing humanity and the planet are of global proportions.  Those of us who pay attention to science reports and environmental conditions understand the dangers we have helped to generate around environmental degradation.  Those of us who pay attention to social sciences and to social movements understand that humanity is currently going through a powerful time of polarization between people who are deeply afraid of, and feel threatened by, certain “others” and people who are comfortable experiencing connection to all members of their global family.  

Collectively, we are in a time of intense activation, from a trauma perspective, and one of the key antidotes to this kind of activation is finding out how to re-center, re-ground, and re-stabilize ourselves.  When our brain is triggered into a threat response, we perceive through that lens and it can be very challenging to re-center and settle ourselves down.  Fortunately, there is help available, as many people currently share ways to help ourselves find that place inside us that is always steady, even when we feel quite unstable.