Where do I land? You guessed it: Collective healing
Our age of awareness gives us something new. Collective healing helps us actualize it.
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This is the final piece in my series, Making sense of things: Navigating tensions of progress and collapse to arrive at collective healing. Check out part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4 to catch up
Weaving threads together
So, what do I make of all of this? Why is the world in so much pain? What does it say about the state of things?
It is clear to me that the world is pain because things are changing in big ways. It almost feels like a waste of ink (or pixels?) to type that out because this change feels so self-evident. We are on the precipice of something new as a society. Or many new things, rather. The world’s pain is the stretching, cracking, and breaking that comes with this newness. Both the breakdown of that which we are hospicing because it no longer serves us (culturally, systemically); as well as the break-throughs that come with giving birth to that which seeks to emerge; the things that we are all pioneers and guinea pigs of.
The world’s pain is our own personal lived experiences with this change and the way it shows up in our individual lives. It is our own moral grappling and existential reckoning with what is happening, as Bendell points out. Whether it is climate change or political corruption or human rights abuses or government incompetence or unbridled corporate power or war or gas prices. The stress, fear, anger, and overwhelm so many of us feel is us coming into direct contact with the changes in the world.
And the world’s pain is also a social phenomenon, as sociologists note. It is something that is happening across the system as a whole, outside of our individual experiences, therefore it is a sign of change in and of itself. Change in social order, change in cultural norms, change in technology, change in business practices and policy approaches. The cultural tide is turning as society evolves. The pain we feel from the world is her hitting up against her evolutionary growth edges.
The world’s pain also indicates that there are things that need to change. Luckily my sense-making journey has taught me that change is possible (thank you, Max Roser). Collectively we have made great strides in addressing big, seemingly insurmountable problems throughout history and in the not-so-distant past. We have done it before so we can do it again.
And, simultaneously, my journey has taught me that change is inevitable and is going to happen whether I like it or not (thank you, Turhcin). Impersonal social forces that have been in the making for centuries are unfolding and producing the challenges we face. Social and political change has a rhythm to it and we are, indeed, in a disintegrative phase within its dance. Like the Wheel of Fortune in the Tarot, these ebbs and flows are outside of our control. In so many ways, we are merely along for the ride.
Collective healing’s role within it all
As I zoom-out from my sense-making journey I see the world’s pain being here for a reason and signaling to us that we have an opportunity to heal, and ultimately, transform. We just need the right tools to do so.
The system we are part of, and its economic development, has produced certain things that people agree, across the board, are for the better, as well as things that are no longer of service. The thing that sticks out to me the most, though, in terms of what our economic system has produced, is our growing awareness of ourselves.
Yes, our ability to be aware of ourselves as a system—the good, the bad, and the ugly—is at an all time high and strikes me as a shining vector of newness that can be leveraged. Our awareness is born from our economic development—the age of Information and Communication Technology; increasing education levels; advancements in research; more leisure time relative to past points in history. It is a product of what we have built. And in some ways it is asking us to reassess how we go about developing further.
We have reached a milestone in our economic development that is ushering in changes to our collective consciousness: changes to our cultural and political values, our shared moral universes and, therefore, our perceptions and experiences of the world around us. The world’s pain—the feelings of stress, urgency, overwhelm, anger and despair— is a sign of this shift in collective consciousness, and is an integral part of a larger evolutionary process.
We have never been this self-aware as a system. The world’s pain is a normal byproduct of this. But in order to leverage our growing self-awareness and channel it into pro-social, generative change, we need tools that helps us process what we are waking up to in order to integrate the newfound gifts and guidance into how we operate. Which is where collective healing comes in.
If we agree that our awareness is a new access point, then figuring out how to work with this newfound awareness—and all of the stress, distress and confusion that comes with it—is paramount. Learning how to work with an expanded view of the world, of history, of each other, of what’s happening in our local communities, of what’s happening within each of us. Learning how to hold all of that in constructive ways that don’t lead to collapse (psychic, energetic, social).
We need tools that help us to stabilize the new forms of consciousness due to our age of awareness that are emerging amongst us within society. The type of collective healing work I’m advocating for here helps with this. It is about providing ourselves and our communities with support to work with the normal emotional energy that we all feel during these times of change. To see ourselves as conduits of the system we are co-creating together, and empower ourselves as change makers, helpers and healers to use our own personal lived experiences as entry points to support the larger transformational process we are in as a collective.
Collective healing practices help us work with the energy that has been and continues to be awakened within us due to the age of technology and consciousness shifts we live in, both for the system we are part of and for our own sanity. The prevalence of the world’s pain is a product of our collective awakening, and, in my humble opinion, is here for a reason—to be a catalyst for our greater evolution. We just need to support ourselves to be in relationship with it.
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