Unrelenting natural disasters like the current West Coast wildfires and smoke outs are terrifying. Those of you who don’t live here might not understand how terrifying it feels to not be able to breathe in your front yard. This morning, I got online to see if there’s some place I can escape to, someplace my family and I can breathe. The closest place I can find with a good AQI is Sedona. That’s terrifying. 10% of the population of Oregon has evacuated according to the New York Times this morning because the AQI is 400-500+ in most of the state. Yet only the privileged can evacuate. What about all the people who can’t afford to leave their jobs or their homes and go stay in a hotel somewhere? What about the people who are high risk for COVID and are scared to leave home, even if home means you can’t breathe? What about the animals?
If we are “woke,” we should be engaging in the very practical action steps put forth in the hopeful book, The Future We Choose, by Paris Climate Agreement negotiator Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac. If we are woke, we should be rallying together to make a cooperative effort to get this pandemic under control, even if it means sacrificing in the short term some of the personal freedoms we’ve come to feel entitled to. If we are woke, we need radical policy change in almost all of our systems—health care, education, politics, economics, the justice system—which have spiraled into apocalyptic levels of corruption and are causing moral injury for those who still work within these systems they feel helpless to change.
I get that it’s hard to feel the feels that come with back to back disasters. It’s hard for me too. But we need to increase our resilience and tolerance for feeling fear, bewilderment, shame, guilt, helplessness, powerlessness, worthlessness, disorientation, and other painful emotions so we can be “response-able”—able to respond, as Thomas Hubl defines it—in this apocalyptic time. The only way we can do that is by treating our traumas with therapies that actually work. (I’m a fan of Internal Family Systems-IFS—personally.)
But dear ones, if we want to actually wake up, we must stop believing we’re woke and feel the pain that comes with humility, facing our personal and collective shadows, wrestling with painful emotions, and taking firm action to make amends and reverse course. Nobody is coming to save us from the disasters we’ve created with our own greed, denialism, plundering of nature, entitlement, dehumanizing behavior of people of color, land theft of the indigenous people, genocides, and other atrocities us and our ancestors have willingly participated in.
To read more of Lissa Rankin, MD. article, please click here.
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