Culture change happens through us

Big, warm hugs to you.

The message I share in my video and the transcript below feels so alive for me right now. Like it wants to be shouted from a mountaintop!

It’s one of opportunity and direction. Contextualizing all that’s activated for us as a society right now, and giving it purpose and direction for how to be worked with.

I’d love to know what you think. Please write, or send it to me psychically ;)

Love, Liz

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We are conduits for this time of culture change

The collective consciousness shifts that are taking place for society, they manifest through us.

Everything that we're feeling right now, all of the pushing and the pulling, the tension, the heaviness, the uncertainty, the questions—they’re here in service of those shifts.

Our collective consciousness is in flux

Like I said in my last two posts, when it comes to emotions and these things that we're feeling after a big current event like the election, I most often hear:

“Process what you feel so we can get the f*ck back to work.”

“There's no time. Lock in. We got sh*t to do.”

I feel that, I get that. But there's more to this inner stirring than just something that needs to be managed or taken out back behind the barn and taken care of.

If we think of the collective consciousness sociologically—right now, I'm sourcing from Emile Durkheim's definition of it—it's where our sense of self as society lives. It's our shared values, our shared morals, our shared worldview.

And in this day and age full of political disintegration and breakdown, and parts of our system really pushing up against its own edges, all those things are in flux.

What I’m feeling right now is tied to that

What we know about emotions, what we know about feelings from healing-centered sciences and psychology and neuroscience is that our emotions reveal things to us.

They reveal us to ourselves. They reveal to us what's important. They reveal insights and guidance about what we need and how to go about doing it.

So in this way, this stirring, this grappling, this heaviness that we feel in our bodies these days are here in service to reveal things to us, collectively.

So that's why for me, I am in a big process of just creating space for it all. Creating space for it because there's value in doing so, and not as a means to an end.

It's not processing my heartache so I don't accidentally bring that into the work. Although of course there is value in doing that.

But because I see myself as a conduit for the shifts that are going on for us as a collective.

I can use what I feel to be of service to these shifts

This process of breakdown that we're going through as a society, as well as the process of emergence, the newness that is emerging and rising up from the ashes throughout it all is happening in us.

Yes, it is its own social phenomena that lives outside of us as individuals… And each of us are tendrils and parts of the collective body. So we are constantly co-creating the collective body through the way that we live.

Through the way that we embody values, through the ways that we intentionally and unintentionally—but in the case of change makers intentionally shape the cultural waters that we swim in through the way that we go about our life.

We are co creating these shifts.

I let myself be surprised by what comes through

For me, I really step into this work with a lot of humility and a lot of not knowingness.

I'm not stepping into this process to arrive at a specific place—a specific set of policy actions, or a certain idea of even what culture changes are needed. Although, of course, I have different visions and ideas.

I'm really entering into this work with a lot of spaciousness to be surprised. Allowing whatever is meant to come through right now, what is meant to emerge for us as a society, for us as a culture, and then for me as an individual and the unique role that I'm meant to play within it all to do so.

This is the invitation I see so clearly

I think this is really the invitation and the opportunity that we have right now at a time when it feels like so much is outside of our control. And yet we are feeling and sensing and seeing so much.

We do have an opportunity and an invitation to work with all that we are seeing and feeling and sensing constructively. Not letting it overrun us or run us down. Not letting it excuse bad behavior. Grounding into certain principles of what right and wrong are. And also giving ourselves a lot of grace.

Being in the practice of working with this constructively, taking what we know about how emotions work, the things that support them best, both from psychology and healing centered sciences, and also from wisdom traditions and spiritual lineages, and really allowing that which is alive for us to shape us.

That's the invitation that I'm holding within myself right now. And that I want to just shout from the mountaintops. So here I am on a digital hill, a small little digital hill trying my best to speak this into existence because it's guidance that I'm receiving really strongly right now and it feels like it wants to be known and out in the world more.

Let me know what you think.