Lighting and Healing Shadowed Wounds

As we encounter painful or fearful experiences in life, we tend to retract and close ourselves off from them, avoiding or shielding ourselves from as much of the hurt or anxiety as possible. It is natural to avoid or protect ourselves from unpleasantness, but continuing to do so after we’ve already been injured does us a great disservice. Doing so is like covering over a poisoned wound with a bandaid and expecting it to heal without using medicine. Those wounds we ignore or suppress and forget about stay lodged in the subconscious part of our memory-body or psyche, where they continue to fester, quietly influencing our beliefs, moods, and behavior, blocking or disrupting normal functioning, and causing parts of our minds to be stunted, underdeveloped, or dis-integrated.

These suppressed elements of our psyche become a part of our “shadow-self” (personal sub-/un-conscious) and can greatly encourage addiction, physical ailments, mental illness, and habitual or unconscious behavior that is harmful or that at least distracts us from achieving our full potential. We can only heal those tender wounds when we allow them to come to the surface in a safe environment, to be felt and honored in the light of conscious awareness, without judgement, but rather with a gentle dignity, courage, kindness, compassion and a genuine effort to understand. Often we will need the assistance of a compassionate healer or at least the support of an empathetic listener; we are courageous to ask for that help and should not hesitate to seek it out.

If our adolescent human species is to survive at all and proceed on with a conscious evolution, we must be willing to bravely face our individual and collective “shadows”, to shine the light of awareness and compassionate understanding on them, and succeed together in actively healing the wounds that our greed, anger, delusions, pride, narrow-mindedness, and ignor-ance have caused one another. Listening with a sincere aspiration to understand those whom have not felt heard and have been neglected by society is just the first step, but one we’ve largely yet to take. Our collective karma has been one of passing on pain and suffering from generation to generation and person to person, allowing it to grow larger and larger, to systemically dangerous levels, because the majority of us have thus far refused to face our own fear and woundedness and take personal and collective responsibility for our own minds and actions, so as to break the cycle or causal chain of passing on the pain and suffering and instead transmute it into fertilizer for our growth and maturation.

On the Existential Threat of Selective Censorship

(A loving reminder and warning I offer out of heartfelt concern and genuine compassion for you all.)

The society we have known thus far is unraveling and failing for many reasons, but let me try to briefly identify one particularly fundamental cause based on the behavior I have noticed people actively engaging in lately: namely, disconnecting from others who challenge us to grow and learn and be invested in one another. People have generally forgotten or were denied the gift of knowing how to truly listen to each other with genuine presence and emotional investment. Many have forgotten how to respect others by giving them their full, open-minded attention and appreciation, denying the dignity and invalidating the existence of the other person. We do this quite commonly while failing to recognize that such treatment is a major source of our own suffering, loneliness, and despair when the tables are turned.

When there is a society-wide culture that promotes a disrespect for and avoidance of different points of view, that society is inevitably doomed, because society is a system and all healthy systems require healthy feedback loops. We all need to be heard and have our concerns acknowledged and our fears validated, or we start to go a little crazy inside because suffering must be transformed for it to not consume and corrupt us. Although transforming our suffering requires personal courage and personal effort, we all need our pain to be acknowledged and validated along the way, and we need others to help guide us through the difficulty. Through truly listening to one another, we can see that all misbehavior stems from ignorance or a place of deep suffering. When we recognize this, we lose our instinct to be fearful and mistrustful of others by default.

The potential destruction of civilized society will, ultimately, be a result of this behavior of willful avoidance generating a huge buildup of anger, resentment, fear, and despair in us all. Why deny others the kind of attention and appreciation you want others to pay you, and that you need in order to be sane and happy? Being truly emotionally invested and involved in the wellbeing of others, as well as in their hopes and doubts, dreams and nightmares, staves off disaster for us all.

– With Love, Respect, & Gratitude for You All

Why Compassionate Understanding is the Only Sensible Approach

A human mind is like a seed, from the time of conception. If you plant that seed of consciousness in harsh soil, the seed will either shrivel up and expire, manage to sprout but remain meager and wounded from constant attack from predators, or will manage to grow quite strongly but be riddled with thorns to repel and injure anything that tries to touch it. With a soil ripe with the conditions for fear, such is the outcome for a human mind. But suppose that seed is settled into fertile soil, it will surely grow and blossom despite the occasional deluge of a rain storm. With a soil ripe with the conditions of love, the human mind is invigorated with enough purpose and meaning to grow into something that will benefit other life, like bloomed flowers that benefit bees and other creatures (despite an occasional deluge of pain and difficulty).

What one should recognize is that this is not just a simple analogy. The same fundamental essence (some call "life-force," some call "Mu," some call "spirit," etc.) is behind the growth of a human mind as is behind the growth of a plant. This basic and singular essence of existence is consciousness-waveform-energy. The more coherent that energy-matrix is, the more influence it exercises over how energy flows within its surrounding environment.

So, a human being has significant influence to apply to their environment and, given the intention (choice) to, can provide a flower in their yard with just the right conditions for energy flow (in the forms of sunlight, water, nutrients) that result in it achieving its maximum blossoming potential. Likewise, if a human mind is provided the light of love, the water of freedom, and the nutrients of knowledge and wisdom, they will become the next Einstein, the next Buddha, the next Martin Luther King Jr., the next Gandhi, the next Steve Jobs, or the next Mother Teresa.

This is why it is senseless and unproductive to punish a person's future self for the behavior of the past. Their behavior was overwhelmingly influenced by the conditions that were prevailing at the time of the behavior – proximate causes such as poverty, isolation, neglect, abuse, addiction, mental illness, and miseducation. However, given the necessary social and environmental conditions are then provided that person, they will surely thrive and blossom as the best human being they can be.

Stigma Free

Today, let us face the epidemic of mental illness together, with some clarity.  In countless ways, some subtle, some not so, our society actively engages in the dehumanization of people who do not operate within a “normal” (i.e. socially convenient) range of behavior.  While we’ve increasingly buried our heads in our phones and TV screens over the past couple decades, our country has slowly gone to hell around us — primarily because we have neglected to attend to one another’s suffering and isolation.  Worse than that, we’ve managed to allow the development of a for-profit trade in the mass-incarceration of human beings, a majority of whom have an untreated medical condition (addictions, mental illnesses, and neurological impairments), at the hands of a morally-bankrupt “justice” system that denies all but a few “due process” and “equal protection of the law,” much less genuine avenues for tangible rehabilitative support.

We’ve allowed the justice system to ensnare hundreds of thousands of mentally ill people, whom have not had a genuine capacity to advocate for themselves or press their incompetent public defenders to do a better job.  In an era of the “rocket docket” assembly line of defendants being processed like cattle and public defenders literally only having a few minutes to review each case, we cannot afford to ignore the festering problem of inadequate "behavioral health” care for the tens of millions of people who are one “bad day” away from being trapped within the blackhole of the prison-industrial complex.  Put bluntly, we cannot ignore, any longer, the fact that our jails and prisons have become convenient (money-making) garbage piles for “unproductive citizens.”  Yet, every one of us knows someone actively suffering from a mental malady, someone we care about — whether suffering on the surface, or in silence, they are all around us.  So how do we begin to solve the problem?

We begin by facing reality as a culture, admitting to ourselves that when a person suffers from a serious mental illness or impairment, the impact that that has on their behavior is inherently beyond their ability to self-regulate.  We begin by recognizing people’s behavior is constrained and distorted by environmental conditions (such as poverty, abuse, and neglect) and brain neurobiology (also beyond their control).  We begin by appreciating the fact that we are, as a society, directly responsible for all the social conditions currently prevailing to permit the psychological abuse and neglect of millions of children and vulnerable adults, and directly responsible all the more for the furtherance of those injuries through a cultural stigmatization of the people who suffer the effects of that abuse and neglect.  The onus for change rests with the society, not those abused and abandoned by it.  The lens through which we’ve been perceiving the problem has been the fundamental condition providing for the problem's perpetuation and growth.  Thus, we most readily begin, truly, by dissolving the chains of stigma imposed on ourselves and our bruised and broken brothers and sisters.

In order to effect this, the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) started the #StigmaFree campaign to foster greater understanding and compassion in our approach to the largely ignored problem of mental illness and addiction in this country.  I encourage you to take the pledge.  I also strongly encourage you to consider helping support NAMI [www.nami.org], especially since they are actively engaged in such work as the Crisis Intervention Training (CIT) [http://www.nami.org/cit] for law enforcement (emphasizing de-escalation of situations involving a person suffering from a mental health problem).  Direct participation of community members in their local NAMI and CIT programs is sorely needed, but please at least spread the word.

It’s never too late to make a difference, to save future lives through the noble teachings and compassion of today.