From the climate crisis to racial violence to COVID and the pandemic – the scale and urgency of it all can be overwhelming. Our nervous systems can feel like they are in hyper-drive, each piece of news building on the anxiety and stress we’re experiencing.
How do we calm our overwhelmed bodies so that we can respond effectively – and compassionately – to the crises we face?
How can we create meaning amongst the uncertainty and anxiety?
The answer – at least in part – lies in our body.
It’s pretty natural that we try to escape the body when we’re stressed or feeling anxious – it’s not exactly a comfortable place to be (think butterflies, digestive trouble, back pain, muscle tension, headaches – to name a few).
And so we do something to check out – we pick up a drink or a snack, we dive into work, we distract ourselves with Instagram or dive back to the safety of our mind (if you’re anything like me you’ve probably spent some time trying to ‘think’ your way to being less stressed).
Rarely though, do we find the safety we’re looking for through escaping the body.
You see, when we’re feeling anxious about the world or stressed we’re seeking refuge, we’re seeking comfort, we’re seeking safety.
Safety isn’t found in our mind, but in our body.
If this resonates with you, you can join one of our regular workshops on Embodiment for Eco-Anxiety. It will cover some simple body-based practices* to help us explore our relationship to these times in our body, and to bring a sense of safety to our overwhelmed nervous systems.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve been devastated by the news this week. Watching the scenes in Afghanistan has been heartbreaking, and I’ve had feeling of grief, anger & powerlessness wash over me.
It can be hard to know what to do with news so far away, so seemingly out of our control.
But we can let the enormity of our feelings freeze us into inaction, or we can use our rage & our grief to catalyse our head, heart & hands into action.
If you’re wondering what this might look like this week, the below are some options.
Head: Learn about Afghanistan – it’s history, culture, people, landscape. Its history is long & complex but if you’re reading this you likely come from a country that has played a role in that history for at least the last two decades (and for the US, UK, Russia and others, much longer). If you’re needing a little more hope over this time, read the Kabul Peace House by Mark Isaacs.
Heart: Our anger stands as a gatekeeper to our love. Let us feel it, & let us use its spark, but may we allow love to guide our actions. This week, use your spiritual practice in offer of those who are suffering. Whether through prayer or loving-kindness meditation, offer your compassion each day to those that are suffering, your wish that they be free from suffering, and your prayer that peace be embodied.
Hands: Call your local representative – ask that they increase the amount of Afghan refugees being accepted, that they offer protection to any temporary Afghan visa holders, and that they support the visas of family who may still be in the country. Get involved with local refugee organisations in your area – you can volunteer or be part of a campaign to influence policy. Donate to organisations that are doing work on the ground like Ascend Athletics, BRAC, Mahboba’s Promise or others.
How can you use your head, heart & hands in service? What would you add to this?
Our world is all about results. Did we hit our targets? Did we achieve our KPI’s? How strong were our campaign metrics? Did the action succeed or fail?
Our measurements of success and our motivation become enmeshed with the goal or end product, with something that is never actually here and always somewhere in the past or future.
Regenerative work is about the process as much as the results.
It’s about the quality of our relationships.
It’s about the experiences we are having right here, right now, as much as our desired future.
As Kazu Haga beautifully writes, the spirit of which we engage in the work of transformation will be reflected in the change we create (if you haven’t read his book, you can find it here).
We benefit from understanding that the way we engage with our work, the energy we bring, is also the work.
I’m gonna say this again for those in the back – being positive does not mean ignoring injustice.
There’s an idea in the spiritual/new age world that we shouldn’t follow the news or stay up-to-date with ‘negative’ (read: unjust) things happening, because to do so gives them more energy and it’s not what we want to create. You know – love and light.
This is the ultimate in ‘spiritual bypassing’ though. To deny somebody else’s lived experience because it makes you uncomfortable and isn’t what you want to create isn’t being positive – it’s the result of privilege and perpetuating oppression & the status quo.
Being positive may mean that we have cultivated a faith inside ourselves of a more beautiful world, one that we cannot see yet with our eyes. It may mean that we seek out good news, because the world as it exists does not feed it to us.
Being positive means while we are aware of the injustice of the world, we cultivate a mindset and practice that allows us to consciously respond to it, rather than react to it.
Being positive means we have allowed ourselves to practice a conscious and active hope.
But being positive never means ignoring reality, and it never means ignoring injustice.
Changemaking is a long game. Whether we’re working through a social enterprise or business, or we’re an on-the-ground activist or community organiser, it can be hard to stay motivated when change seemingly doesn’t come. We give our hearts and souls to a particular outcome, and when the results are slow to see, we easily become demoralised.
As changemakers, one of the quickest ways we burnout is by confusing our goal and motivation. A goal is a clear outcome we want to achieve – maybe it’s a policy change; net-zero emissions by 2030, or the end of corporate political donations. Maybe it’s more of a culture change, with stronger representation of queer and BIPOC people in media, or communities that feel like they belong to one another. Maybe the goal is for your social enterprise to deepen its impact and create new opportunities. Whatever it may be – the goal has a clear outcome.
Motivation is what gets us to do the work. It’s the feeling we have that tells us this is what we need to do, and why.
Often though, we confuse the goal and the motivation. We do the work assuming that the reason we are doing it is the goal we seek – and when there are setbacks or our work takes longer than planned we begin to burnout.
At this point it’s easy to become that little bit more jaded or angry. Feelings of tiredness and apathy are common. We might continue to do the work, but the spark we had before is gone. The work feels heavier. Our hearts are heavier.
Understanding our deeper motivations can help us to move through this. We cultivate our resiliency in part by building solid foundations within ourselves that call us to the work.
To understand your motivations, think back to when you were first inspired to create a change in the world. What did you feel called by? What feelings arose in you? Take a few moments to really feel back in time, and write down what comes up. Was it an extrinsic motivation, arising from something outside of you? Was there any internal, or intrinsic, calling that brought you to the work?
And importantly, is that motivation still working for you today?
Our motivations change as we change, and most of us have multiple motivations within us, we just need to know which to tap into. Below are some strong, renewable motivations, and tuning in to the ones that drive us can help us to stay the course.
Service Service is about connection to something larger than ourselves. Maybe it’s to God or whatever you believe to be divine. Maybe it’s to humanity. Maybe it’s the love letter to what you feel we humans could be. Service is less about the destination and more about the journey. It’s an attitude we can embody in all of our actions and interactions. How can I serve? How can I serve? How can I serve? This question has such different energy and intention to one of How do I fix this?, and it’s not reliant on external change to exist.
Pain-transformed. Pain-transformed becomes compassion. It is the foundation of empathy, of deep listening, of holding space. If our pain has been given the space and healing needed to transform, we can use it as our motivation to change the world – to not have others experience what we did, to offer compassion to those who are suffering. Pain-transformed is also what allows us to begin exploring transformative justice and other forms of accountability. Pain that hasn’t yet healed though is not a sustainable form of motivation; if it’s still running the show and driving our reactions, it isn’t transformed enough to drive the work of change.
Vision. We all have a vision of a more beautiful world. What would yours look like? Can your vision be your inspiration? Can your vision sustain you with enough hope to keep going, even when it feels that we are a million miles away from it? Can your vision adapt and evolve to co-create with people around you? Can you ground the feeling of this vision in your body, even before you see it with your eyes? Vision motivation needs regular watering, a feeling of being alive in your heart and body in order to continue to do its work.
Love: Often we hear people say they are doing the work for their children. What they really mean, is they are doing the work because of love. Love for our children, love for our shared humanity, is a strong and sustainable motivation. Our desire for those around us and those after us to live in a more just and beautiful world, as well as to honour those who came before us.
The Arisings: a more nuanced approach to motivation, subject to change at a whim. The arisings are those little voices that whisper to us, that tell us we need to do something even when we don’t understand why. It’s our intuition, our gut sense, our connection to something deep within us. Choosing to regularly check-in and listen to the arisings can be a helpful source of motivation, an intrinsic connection that tells us if we are on the right path, even when we can’t see it. The difficulty here is in honouring them when they change, and knowing how to listen.
Values: When I talk about values in this context, I’m also referring to our sense of what is ‘moral’. Moral obligation is subjective to people, but it means there is something in our values that says this is important. That we must do this because it is just or right. This is a more sustainable form of motivation because the desire and foundation of it is within us. Even though our hearts may ache at how long change takes, we know that our conscience demands we continue.
Belonging: Belonging is a powerful motivator. We all crave some form of belonging, no matter how rebellious and independent we may be. True belonging is a space we can be radically ourselves, yet also be part of something larger than ourselves. Belonging helps give us purpose, solidarity and meaning. We show up, because others show up for us. We rise, because others are rising with us. We do the work, because what we co-create together is more magical than what we can do alone. Tending to the community is form of love in action, and when we’re feeling hopeless, it can help to remember to water the seeds that are in front of us.
When our goals seem impossibly far away, come back to what is true for you right now. Go within to find your deepest source of motivation. Ask it what it needs to be activated, listen to it, follow it. “Let us be the ones who plant, even on the days that feel like the end of days” – Omid Safi.
A note on fear: fear can be a useful motivator, in the short term. Fear activates our fight/flight/freeze response, and sometimes these ‘primal’ responses can be of great benefit. It can encourage us to say yes to opportunities we might miss out on, or our fear for the future may fuel a call to action within us. However, stress and fear have detrimental long term effects. Our bodies are not designed to have stress responses permanently activated without some sort of consequence, whether that be physical, mental, emotional or spiritual. Fear can however be a transformative emotion if use it well. Can we feel it in its fullest experience, and watch it transform into freedom? Watch it transform into power? Watch it transform into spaciousness?
A further note on mobilisation: the motivating tools we use to mobilise others may be different from what sustains us in the long term, though I believe in a healthy-change-ecosystem our reliance cannot be solely on tools of fear or ‘othering’ to build a movement.
Most of us know what we are against. We’re against racism, against inequality, against fossil fuels, against war, against the alt-right, against trans-and-homophobia. We’re against corporate political donations, we’re against capitalism, we’re against xenophobia, we’re against violence, we’re against the Murdoch media bias, we’re against big oil, we’re against foreign intervention, we’re against offshore asylum centres.
The list of things we are against in changemaking circles is endless – and rightly so. We’re working to change what currently exists, and that means being aware of the problem and its causes. It’s easy to center our work around this because reality is seemingly centered around this.
But I want to also ask a different question: What are we in service to? What would a world without ‘the problem’ look like? I’m talking a radically different world… can you imagine what that experience would feel like?
When you picture a world with the solutions to the issues you care about, what do you feel right now in your body? Relief? Lightness? Tension? Can you even imagine it?
What does this world sound like? Look like? What would your life look like in that world? What role would you play with the freedom to do so?
This imagination exercise isn’t just for fun, it’s for clarity.
Because, here’s the thing – it’s not enough to be against something. We need to know what we’re for at the same time.
We need to build as we resist.
We need to heal as we end harm.
We need to liberate as we fight.
If we remain solely focused on what we are against, we miss the opportunity of embodying the change we seek. Our work is not just for the future – it’s for now. If we want others to feel joy or freedom, we must allow ourselves to experience them too.
Knowing our vision – our how, our why, our calling – means knowing where to serve.
Knowing what we’re for allows us to articulate new stories and ideas to those who cannot see them yet.
Knowing what we’re for is the bedrock of hope and inspiration.
So let me know what you are for, comment below, or drop me an email, I’d love to hear.
Feeling anxious about the world? Yeah, me too.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve been devastated by the news this week. Watching the scenes in Afghanistan has been heartbreaking, and I’ve had feeling of grief, anger & powerlessness wash over me.
