it’s been a heavy week…
This week has been a hard one. The school year is off to a violent start. The air feels heavy with fear and contention.
In my practice, I hold space for people who sit on both sides of the aisle. But no matter where they land politically, every single one of them is afraid.
Afraid for their kids. Afraid for the children in their lives. Afraid for what the future looks like.
I’ll be honest: I don’t have the answers. My usual supportive response of “accepting our current reality” feels impossible right now. Maybe even restrictive. What I do know is that we first need to feel what needs to be felt—terror, anxiety, anger, frustration, confusion. If we don’t, those emotions collect inside and turn us into emotional landmines.
Unfelt emotions don’t create change. They keep us stuck, frozen in fear, hidden behind anger, judgment, resentment, depression, or whatever your default emotional state might be. And I think we can all agree that right now, the energy of our world feels very stuck.
Here’s the thing: fear stops flow. When we’re in fight, flight, or freeze, blood flow is cut off from the prefrontal cortex-the part of our brain in charge of clarity, decision-making, and vision. So the very moments when we most need clear choices… are the moments when fear hijacks them.
Yes, real trauma is happening. People are being targeted, hurt, and judged. That is absolutely true. And yet many of us are also sitting in the relative safety of our homes, just hoping we can make it through another day without someone we love being harmed.
Which brings me back to what I wrote in a Facebook post yesterday: as long as we don’t take care of our own pain, heal our trauma, and learn to love ourselves enough to accept those who think differently, we will keep spinning in circles, even with gun laws.
I don’t know the big answers. But I do know this: tending to our mental health, doing our inner work, and learning to love ourselves may be the most radical, world-changing thing we can do right now.
I came across this poem from John Roedel on Facebook yesterday that spoke to me and helped me synthesize what I was feeling. You may have seen it. I think it has gone viral, but just in case, here it is:
I can’t make the world be peaceful
I can’t prevent children from having to hide behind desks
I can’t deflect a sniper’s bullet from turning a wife into a widow
I can’t convince the news to stop turning war into a video game
I can’t silence the sound of bombs tearing neighborhoods apart
I can’t stall tanks from roaring down roads
I can’t turn a guided missile into a bouquet of flowers
I can’t make a murderer have an ounce of empathy
I can’t convince politicians to quit playing truth or dare
I can’t stave off a schoolyard being reduced to ash and rubble
I can’t do any of that
the only thing I can do is love the next person I encounter without any conditions or strings
to love my neighbor so fearlessly that it starts a ripple that stretches from one horizon to the next
I can’t force peace on the world
but I can become a force of peace in the world
because
sometimes all it takes is a single lit candle in the darkness
to start a movement
oh, Spirit,
let me be a candle of comfort in this world
let me burn with peace
-john roedel
