Here, on our primary election day in California*, I am moved to be very open and hopefully clear about an element of the collective shadow - the unconscious or subconscious desire for destruction - that I feel is affecting many of us.
I will also offer a potential solution for those of us who don’t wish to be unconsciously or overly destructive.
The best way I can explain this phenomena is like this:
We, collectively, have been in a hard time, for a long time.
Individually, most of us are over our ideal allostatic load.
For years now, we have been, individually and collectively, on ‘high alert’ much of the time. This creates a sustained state of tension.
When an individual, or a collective, is in a state of sustained tension over a long period of time, with no respite in sight, the desire to destroy everything emerges - as a possible solution to the on-going, pervasive tension.
Which is why today, again, I want to remind us of unnatural vs. natural stress cycles.
Stress is a natural part of life. And, in and of itself, stress is not the main problem.
The long-term tension, sustained, over time and with no end in sight is the problem.
A natural stress cycle goes like this:
stress
tension
release
rest
An unnatural stress cycle (and the one the vast majority of us have been cast into) goes like this:
stress
tension
stress
tension
stress
tension
and so on.
What makes the second cycle so unnatural is that there is no release and rest portion.
It is just brick upon brick of stress on top of tension. There is no relief. And, we really need that relief in order not to end up wanting to unconsciously destroy things.
A helpful analogy here might be something like this:
A person is in allostatic overload, but for such a long time it feels “normal”. This person is maintaining and taking care of things in their daily life pretty well, all things considered.
Then, one morning, the sink starts to leak.
The person, looks at the water dripping from the tap, even though the sink is turned off, and (because of the pressure of all the stress/tension bricks piled up inside them) the dripping faucet pushes them over the edge and they decide they’ve “had it with this house” and decide to just burn the whole house down.
This person just wanted (needed) the dripping faucet to stop, and under the weight of all the bricks, a decent idea seemed like burning down the house as that would certainly stop the dripping faucet.
This overly destructive option creates more work and cost and stress than if they could separate the faucet issue from all the rest of the stress/tension bricks and just call a plumber.
We cannot create space around any issue - large or small - when we have a brick build-up within us.
Fortunately, it is not that hard to invoke the release/rest part of the cycle.
It is a dark moon until the new moon at 1am Sunday (L.A. time). I’ve taught about dark moons a lot - I find a lot of value in this part of the lunar cycle; essentially, this is the part of the lunar cycle designed for rest and release. That fact alone, begins to explain why I call the dark moon the most counter-cultural part of the lunar cycle.
Important to also note - because we live within an over-culture that always wants the individual to be hard on themselves, sometimes this gets translated in mystical internet spaces as - “let go of everything! surrender it all! and if you can’t, you’ll be sorry!” - which is obviously a message that feels a lot like more stress and tension, than an invitation to gently, organically, release some bricks and then indulge in a period of rest.
That message (well-meaning, I’m sure) of dark moons meaning “you better let go!” might overly activate that destruction impulse and for instance, inspire us to "clear out our closet” by throwing ALL our clothes away.
Dark moons are when “the tide is out” and we see all the shells and scraps of kelp strewn across the beaches of our awareness.
Yes, it is a good time to rest and release.
But, due to the more dour, somber tone of dark moons, we may not have an accurate view of whether to give away all our clothes or just that one weird shirt.
This is the aspect of all dark moons that I want to highlight for us that can keep us from destroying too much - thinking that because we don’t like this one shirt, we need to get rid of every shirt we ever bought.
So, what is the solution?
The solution appears when we address the parts of the natural stress cycle that might be getting left out as we struggle to handle our allostatic load.
The release part of the cycle is exactly what it sounds like - we’ve got to release and get the stuck energy (tension) moving again.
There are lots of ways to release tension, here are a few to get your imagination going…
1. guided meditation (135 to choose from)
2. physical activity – dancing, singing, chanting are especially effective
3. make something (creativity)
4. laugh or cry
5. share touch or space with someone you love (pets and trees count!)
6. deep breathing
7. time with natural beings (this doesn’t need to be Nature with a capital N, it can be a moment of presence with the sky or weeds poking up through a city sidewalk)
And, after you release… then you endeavor to enjoy a resting state as the natural cycle continues.
Guided meditation is also indicated for the rest part of the natural cycle, just like it works so well in the release portion.
When we actively release and rest, even for a minute or two at a time, it dissolves some of the built up bricks of stress and tension and when, inevitably, stressors occur again, we can deal with them singularly without the heaviness of all the bricks we’d allowed to build up inside us before.
We make ourselves more antifragile ** the more we release those tension bricks of stuck energy.
WHICH IS EXACTLY WHAT WE’LL BE DOING, IN THIS ROOM, THIS FRIDAY AT ROAM.
Each week of the ROAM pop-up has a different theme. I picked these themes very intentionally in accordance with the zeitgeist, astrological weather and the overall transformative journey of all 13 Fridays.***
This week the theme is Oceans + Landscapes.
On Friday, March 8, I am bringing our most elevated, beautiful, processes of:
connecting to the metaphor of OCEAN in order to flowingly release, move energy along and feel oceanic - with room for EVERYTHING
connecting to the metaphor of LANDSCAPES invoking first a sense of where WE ARE and then opening ourselves to enlightened visions of where we WANT TO GO
You can see we are really doing our dark moon protocols without the heavy handedness of “surrender, or else!” Rather than running away from what we don’t want (or burning it to the ground), we are using the release and rest part of the cycle to create space for what we do wish to experience.
I find this re-framing very beautiful, life-affirming and effective.
I hope you do too.
We all have our own ways of doing these things - my wish for you is that you find your best ways to access those important release and rest parts of the cycle so that we never burn the whole house down instead of just fixing the sink.
Until next time,
Jess
*if you are interested, my pick for president is Marianne Williamson and I stand by the vast majority of her proposed policies. For the down-ballot I picked as many women of color as possible.
** I. HOW TO LOVE THE WIND
Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire.
Likewise with randomness, uncertainty, chaos: you want to use them, not hide from them. You want to be the fire and wish for the wind. This summarizes this author’s nonmeek attitude to randomness and uncertainty.
We don’t want to just survive uncertainty, to just about make it. We want to survive uncertainty and, in addition – like a certain class of aggressive Roman Stoics – have the last word. The mission is how to domesticate, even dominate, even conquer, the unseen, the opaque, the inexplicable.
How?
II. THE ANTIFRAGILE
Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it antifragile.
Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better. This property is behind everything that has changed with time: evolution, culture, ideas, revolutions, political systems, technological innovation, cultural and economic success, corporate survival, good recipes (say chicken soup or steak tartare with a drop of cognac), the rise of cities, cultures, legal systems, equatorial forests, bacterial resistance… even our own existence as a species on this planet. And antifragility determines the boundary between what is living and organic (or complex), say, the human body, and what is inert, say, a physical object like the stapler on your desk.
The antifragile loves randomness and uncertainty, which also means – crucially – a love of errors, a certain class of errors. Antifragility has a singular property of allowing us to deal with the unknown, to do things without understanding them – and do them well. Let me be more aggressive, we are largely better at doing than we are at thinking, thanks to antifragility. I’d rather be dumb and antifragile that extremely smart and fragile, any time.”
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile
“I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world. I may not complete this last one but I give myself to it.
I circle around God, around the primordial tower. I’ve been circling for thousands of years and I still don’t know: am I a falcon, a storm, or a great song?”
- Rainer Maria Rilke
Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes
more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,
what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.
In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.
And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.
- Rainer Maria Rilke
"I am learning to see. I don't know why it is, but everything enters me more deeply and doesn't stop where it once used to. I have an interior that I never knew of. Everything passes into it now. I don't know what happens there."
- Rainer Maria Rilke
“I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
…
Often a star was waiting for you to notice it. A wave rolled toward you out of the distant path, or as you walked under an open window, a violin yielded itself to your hearing. All this was mission.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke
“You mustn’t be frightened if a sadness rises in front of you, larger than you have ever seen; if an anxiety like light and cloud-shadows, moves over your hands and over everything you do. You must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall.”
- Rainer Maria Rilke
THE HEART'S NEW CAPITAL
Strong, compassionate souls reach
the plateau of the heart’s new capital.
Tears enhance their eyesight through the dark.
They're not afraid to suffer. They learn to give back
heaviness to the churning weight of the Earth,
its mountains and seas.
—adaptation of a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke
***If you’ve read down this far - thank you, I love you! I also will ask, if you know anyone who will be in L.A. that would like to come on Fridays, please tell them about it. Or if you know anyone who knows anyone. At this point any time I post on Insta about Friday Nights, the app doesn’t show that post to many people. This is a real word of mouth situation - we are going back to the tried and true “marketing” technique of recommending to friends. Also - if you are far away and want to follow along, this Friday, March 8th will be a combination of portions of the Ocean, You Are Here and Meadow meditations. You can get any one of these for $5 or have access to the complete library of 135 meditations for $11/month. xoxo Jess
"It is a strange and wonderful fact to be here, walking around in a body, to have a whole world within you and a world at your fingertips outside you. It is an immense privilege, and it is incredible that humans manage to forget the miracle of being here. Rilke said, 'Being here is so much,' and it is uncanny how social reality can deaden and numb us so that the mystical wonder of our lives goes totally unnoticed. We are here. We are wildly and dangerously free.”
- John O’Donohue
This is one I found so helpful during one of the darkest points of my life, I would watch the leaves on the trees as fall began and think, “look they’re waving at you, you aren’t alone”
7- “time with natural beings (this doesn’t need to be Nature with a capital N, it can be a moment of presence with the sky or weeds poking up through a city sidewalk)”
On my breaks at work there was a dead tree on the side of the building, but one pinecone held on for YEARS, no exaggeration. Silly maybe, but I thought, “you get em lil pinecone! Still hanging in there, through so much weather that should have broken it off.