Topics:
- Coming to my senses
- The evolutionary purpose of grief
- Emotional combustion: tapping into the energy and creativity of emotions
- Emotions, resilience, and climate justice
- Building emotional resilience in the face of an accelerating climate crisis
Coming to my senses
In November 2014, after a decade of struggling with vascular dementia, my beloved dad died. My mom, brother, and I were fortunate to be present with him in his final moments, and his passing was a deep teaching for me in so many ways.
As is often the case, the days immediately following his death are a blur. As the eldest child, there were all the arrangements that needed to be made, my mom to care for and bring back with me to the United States from the Philippines, and myriad other family matters.
If I’m honest, I could also say that the next few years were a blur as well.
At that time, I was also the executive director of a small international nonprofit. Anyone who has worked in a nonprofit knows what November and December are like…I came home from saying goodbye to my dad, and was plunged into fundraising and end-of-the-year activities.
So I worked. And worked. And worked. I felt I had no choice, because others were counting on me. I truly believed I didn’t have time to feel my grief. If I stopped working to feel it, I might fall apart and (gasp) become unproductive.
Get. Shit. Done.
Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
Two years later, I ended my tenure as executive director and began a sabbatical. It was only during this respite, when I did the 52 Hike Challenge (52 hikes in a year!), that I started to snap out of the trance of grief and stress that I had been in since my dad’s death.
Out in the wilderness of the Pacific Northwest, in the bosom of the temperate rainforests of the North Cascades and Olympic Mountains, my senses began to open up again. As a woman hiking alone, my senses had to be particularly present and sharp. I’d come home from being in the wilderness and notice how vivid everything was — the colors, the smells, all the beauty I had not looked up to see for so long. Only then did I realize how much my unacknowledged grief, stress, anxiety had dulled my senses, narrowed my vision, and blinded me to possibility and creativity.
The evolutionary purpose of grief
As a scientist who has studied, among other things, the social psychology of emotions and resilience, one thing is clear: every human emotion plays an evolutionarily adaptive function, or else it wouldn’t exist in us now.
What is the function of our grief?
In the ever-changing, dynamic, interdependent natural system that comprises all phenomena on Earth and in the broader universe, our grief is inevitable and necessary. It is the nature of whatever arises to cease. Therefore, loss is not optional, and neither is grief.
As the natural activity of forest fires demonstrates, to let things die completely, clears the way for new cycles of growth, bursting open the seeds that would not open any other way, allowing the sprouts of the great sequoias, jack pine, and lodgepole pine (and other pyrophytic trees) to take root. As the second law of thermodynamics points out, energy doesn’t disappear; it merely changes form.
Like a scorched forest, grief cleanses our vision, pulls back the veil of habitual ways of understanding. Grief asks us to see with fresh eyes and an open heart, to step out of the failed logic that has brought us to this point. Grief bids us break through to creative possibilities we could not have previously conceived.
But it’s up to us to answer that call, to let the natural cycle of grief play itself out in us.
Those of us now experiencing the accelerating demise of the awe-inspiring web of life on our planet, we who feel the urgency of the ticking clock, are compelled to take action, to craft solutions, to formulate policy. To get shit done. Because there’s no time to waste.
Tapping into the energy and creativity of grief and other emotions
As the mom of a toddler, here is one of the most important realizations I’ve had in the face of the climate crisis: Not only is grieving necessary; it holds a secret boon for those willing to sit with it. By grieving, I untangle the knots of sadness, anger, stress, and confusion. And in a feat of emotional combustion, the energy at their core is released.
By grieving, or by genuinely experiencing with care and awareness any emotion that arises , I discover a fresh source of sustainable, renewable energy I didn’t even know I had. That WE have.
When we experience our emotions’ raw energy, as distinct from the labels and stories we superimpose, the energy at their core is fundamentally positive, creative, and full of sparks.
Moreover, our grief can clear the way for growth and resilience. With a tip of the hat to Albert Einstein, we cannot solve the crisis we’re facing with the same logic that got us here: doing, doing, doing, without ever stepping off the hamster wheel.
So am I saying we should just cry it all out? Well, not exactly.
Emotions, Resilience, and Climate Justice
There is a lot of talk about resilience in the face of climate change. But how can we come together as activists, as communities, as nations, as humans in the broader democracy of species, without tending our reserves of emotional resilience?
There is a growing recognition that, in order to strengthen our abilities to shift the dominant culture and “be the change we seek,” we must first heal the trauma in our social justice movements. Oppression, inequality, and colonization are written in our bodies and minds, and that is where they must be healed. “Soma” is not defined solely by the boundaries of our fleshy mortal coil. Seen through the eyes of radical interdependence, the soma is made up of all the inhabitants of the earth, from our microbiomes all the way up to our vast natural systems including climate.
How do we begin to undo these old patterns of extraction, exploitation, and domination of our minds, other beings, and the earth and create openings for a regenerative culture?
Building emotional resilience in the face of a climate crisis
Over the last few years, I have begun meeting with local climate change activists in my community, most of them young people ––inheritors of our collective inaction.
We have been coming together to acknowledge and transform the difficult mind states that arise when we look clearly at the crisis we are facing: not only grief, but anxiety, fear, rage, denial, paralysis, depression, powerlessness and its cynical cousin, indifference. What do we do with these states of mind? Can we feel all of it and still take whatever action we can and must?
We have been working with the three-step Emotional Rescue Method, an approach that uses mindfulness to build resilience. In this context, resilience is defined as the ability to bounce back from adverse circumstances. With practice, not only can we bounce back to our original shape after difficulties, but we can also grow our emotional skills and expand our overall sense of well-being.
The latest findings in psychology, neuroscience, and biology point to why the three steps of the Emotional Rescue Method work so well.
The 3 Steps of the Emotional Rescue Method
Step 1, Mindful Gap
In countless studies, mindfulness has been shown to reduce stress and help transform negative habits. By creating the space between stimulus and response, practicing Mindful Gap opens new possibilities for responding to change with conscious intention rather than with unconscious reactivity.
Step 2, Clear Seeing
Once you create a Mindful Gap, there is a much greater possibility of seeing challenging situations with fresh eyes of creativity, rather than through the foggy lens of stress and reactive habits. The clarity of vision, Clear Seeing –– supports what is known in the emotions research as “cognitive reappraisal,” and leads to more effective decision-making, even amidst uncertainty.
Step 3, Letting Go
On the basis of the previous two steps, the body can complete its natural cycle of releasing stressful energy. As trauma research has demonstrated, when the stress cycle is frozen, there are countless negative impacts on physical and mental health. However, when stressful emotional energy is released physically and emotionally, the body’s innate resilience allows one to bounce back and even grow from adversity.
According to Dr. Rusty Low, climate scientist and educator at NASA, who recently participated in one of our Emotional Rescue courses,
“People should realize that we are worth investing in . . . especially those of us who are activists, who are engaged in trying to make the world a better place. We feel like we have to put all of our time and energy into that. When you put time and energy into yourself, you’re really not taking away from the other larger goals you have.
In my own experience, it makes me a little more effective: maybe a little bit better communicator, maybe more intuitive when I’m talking to other people, listening a little bit deeper –– all those techniques we practice in the Emotional Rescue [Method], It’s another toolkit we can use as we try to change the world.
But we are part of that system, so we need to do a little bit of work just recognizing that most people, like me, can definitely benefit from a little investment in ourselves. I felt it was an incredibly good use of time, and I still think about it every single day . . . at least once or twice a day, I just do it.”
Dr. Rusty Low, climate scientist and educator at NASA
We cannot come together and do what must be done in the coming time without acknowledging and tending to the grief, anxiety, and rage we feel at the violence towards each other and our Earth. Doing so does not paralyze us or slow us down. Rather, it will empower, energize, and strengthen us. It will help us to step out of this story of extraction, exploitation, dehumanization, and disrespect for life in all its varieties, and midwife us into a new regenerative story and culture, one where all species have safety, belonging, and dignity.
To restore life, we must feel it. Doing so will cleanse the lens of our insight, so that we can stop repeating the patterns of the past, and look with eyes of creative wisdom to see what we must do.
“Keeping Quiet” by Pablo Neruda
Now we will count to twelve
And we will all keep still
For once on the face of the earth,
Let’s not speak in any language;
Let’s stop for second,
And not move our arms so much.
It would be an exotic moment
Without rush, without engines;
We would all be together
In a sudden strangeness.
Fishermen in the cold sea
Would not harm whales
And the man gathering salt
Would not look at his hurt hands.
Those who prepare green wars,
Wars with gas, wars with fire,
Victories with no survivors,
Would put on clean clothes
And walk about with their brothers
In the shade, doing nothing.
What I want should not be confused
With total inactivity.
Life is what it is about…
If we were not so single-minded
About keeping our lives moving,
And for once could do nothing,
Perhaps a huge silence
Might interrupt this sadness
Of never understanding ourselves
And of threatening ourselves with
Death.
Now I’ll count up to twelve
And you keep quiet and I will go.
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