Crazy stuff has happened in the last several years, and more is happening every day. Many people are feeling like nothing makes sense any more and it feels like we are living in strange times.
I recently spoke again for the Medical Doctors for COVID Ethics International to address where we are now and where we can go from here.
Where are we now?
I had DALL-E generate an image to depict the current state of things. I wanted to show the giant elephant in the room—what we aren’t talking about publicly as a society.
Of course, we are talking about it in many little bubbles and communities, however as a whole we haven’t been able to have a public conversation about what happened due to the ongoing gaslighting and denial.
The phrase is “an elephant in the room” but the Ai didn’t seem to understand that it’s singular and instead kept drawing multiple elephants. I realized it was actually pretty smart. That elephant indeed has grown so massive that it’s now spawning multiple other elephants.
You’ll notice some people are paying attention to what’s happening, while the rest are self-absorbed. They’re focused on food, drink, status, selfies, cellphones, lust, gluttony, wrath, pride, greed, sloth, envy and all the other distractions while the social rot spreads and things start collapsing under the weight of the elephant(s).
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, a world-renowned trauma expert says that what causes the post-trauma is not having someone there for you, not being able to talk about what happened. Of course, he was speaking about trauma in general, and he and I probably disagree about what’s happening in the world.
When we can’t talk about it, the self-healing mechanism is blocked. This happens in individuals, families and society.
All the clients I’ve worked with one-on-one over the years have had some version of generational trauma in their family system. The forms of trauma varied, but the common denominator was that none of them could talk about it with anyone in the family system when it happened.
Daddy gets blacked out drunk and beats mommy. The child hides terrified in his/her room hearing this go on all night. The next morning daddy goes to work and the child tries to talk to mommy about what happened. Mommy says, “Nothing happened.”
Uncle Johnny molests the child and no one is there to protect him/her. The child tells mommy and/or daddy in the language a child can express that something wrong happened. The child is told, “It’s just your imagination.”
Mommy Godzilla goes on a rampage of wrath, terrifying the child into silence and compliance. Daddy gets home from a work trip and mommy is acting like a saint. The deeply confused child tries to explain what happened to daddy but he doesn’t believe him/her, “That didn’t happen.”
We need to be able to verify reality together as humans. AND it’s very important not to get stuck in the talking and storytelling stage.
Talking doesn’t heal the trauma, but we first have to talk about it before we can start healing.
So here we are, rounding the corner toward 2025 and society still isn’t able to talk about what happened since 2020.
We’ve all had existentially-shattering experiences during the recent years, causing layers of existential crises. These have impacted every area of human life.
Now we have a choice: We can either give up and give into the trap, falling into despair and defense, OR we can lean into the existential calling of a lifetime and level up. Only one of those options leads to empowerment, liberation and healing.
We are now in a strange limbo state that I wrote about almost a year ago.
This transitional state or place is referred to as liminal spaces. We are being called to adapt to a changing world as we are walking through these liminal spaces as individuals and society. Of course things feel unsettling or surreal.
When you’re the only one in your social circle who is noticing this, while everyone else is acting like it’s 2019 and nothing happened, you can start to doubt yourself from this crazy-making.
That’s when it’s a good time to remind yourself of Krishnamurti’s famous quote.
However, even for those of us who are aware of what happened, the challenge now is that when the past is unresolved, there is no real future.
Without doing the inner work, everything is merely a repetition of the past trying to resolve itself in cycles of insanity… doing the same thing, reacting in the same way, and hoping for different results.
We can either create a new future or continue in the insanity of the repetition compulsion, repeating the same old painful stories—feeling powerless over the outcome and being reactive victims controlled by outside forces.
Resolving the past means we can feel it, digest it, process it and integrate the learning.
First we have to be able to feel, thawing out layer by layer, the ugly feelings that were frozen in the nervous system and buried in the subconscious so we could keep surviving and doing life. This is scary for many people because they’re afraid to get stuck in the feelings. You can feel it without getting stuck, if you’re willing to digest it.
Next we digest it. In the digestion process, first the stomach starts breaking things down. Then the small intestine separates, filtering out the nutrients that will be used to form new materials like cells, blood, organs and all the systems of the body. Those nutrients are very important.
Likewise in the trauma healing process, we can extract the gifts of wisdom, strength, learning and resilience. We don’t have to hold on to the waste—all the stuff we want to release that no longer serves us. Some of it is easier and faster to let go. Some of the grief could become constipated depending on inner blockages we may have that cause us to hold on to it.
We continue processing what we can. During that process, the nutrients start creating new life and the waste continues to be released. We are integrating the learning, layer by layer and releasing the emotional residue layer by layer.
This is the transmutation of the past into gold. It also becomes the resilience that we pass on to the next generation.
When the past is resolved, there's space for the new consciousness to enter. Clearing the emotional residue creates space for the new—new ideas, new insights, new responses, new solutions.
We don't have to know all the answers and solutions yet.
First we create the space for the new to emerge.
We are at a turning point in human history right now. Each of us who is alive during these times has a massive responsibility.
Our ancestors lived through many traumas and they survived. Because they survived, we are here now. Much of the trauma was not resolved and became the burden we inherited. We also inherited the resilience of our ancestors—the gifts of their strength and wisdom that they transmuted from their own challenges.
In the past, there have been wars, economic depressions, food insecurity, natural disasters, plandemics and other tragedies. What’s unique about our time is that all of the above and more, including the technological dimension, are converging now into a polycrisis or metacrisis. Those of us who are alive now were born for these times.
We will either pass on the legacy of the unresolved, undigested trauma. Or we will pass forward a legacy of resilience. Truth be told, it will be a mix of both, but it can either be trauma-heavy or resilience-light.
This is our choice as individuals and the sum of our individual choices becomes the collective human path.
If we do not step up in big ways now and in the coming months and years, the future of humanity will not be bright because we will have passed forward the burden.
While we are aware of some of the damage caused to the youngest generation during the COVID measures, such as reduced IQ and increased mental illness, we have no idea yet the extent of the repercussions of that never-done-before social experiment when their key developmental years were interrupted and stunted. Those being born now are already coming into the inheritance of what was not resolved.
We could focus on healing the kids, but I would suggest that first the parents heal themselves.
What I’ve seen working with clients is that as soon as the client makes a shift, that change is instantly mirrored in the kids who are under 7-8 years old. The parents are surprised they didn’t even have to explain anything to the kids.
This is because the kids were tuned into one frequency through the parent, then they automatically shifted to the new frequency as the parent shifted.
It usually takes longer with older kids because they have more layers of trauma and defense mechanisms, but it’s wild to also see the subtle shifts occurring in the adult kids as the parents make their own shifts.
It’s much easier for the kids when the parents heal first. Blessed are the kids whose parents are taking on the responsibility of doing their inner healing work, and brighter is their future because of it.
So here we are at this pivotal opportunity to step up as individuals, whether we have kids or not.
Self-healing contributes to collective healing. Each of us impacts the whole of humanity. The more of us who are doing this inner work, the faster humanity can heal.
But that’s not the choice that most people are making right now.
Most are stuck under layers of defense, denial or cognitive dissonance.
Even among those who are awake and aware of what’s been happening, most are still focused externally, reacting to people, events and disempowering narratives.
This is the same trend I saw over the years of doing YouTube videos on narcissistic abuse recovery. Eventually I got disheartened because I realized that 90% of people watching videos like that didn’t actually want to heal. They just wanted to focus on the narcissists and psychopaths, using the knowledge mostly to soothe their egos and distract themselves from healing their own issues. They often confused a state of defensiveness with empowerment. There was a time in my life when I was stuck there too.
At first, that information can be life-saving. But then a person needs to put the awareness into action to change their life, otherwise they’ll stay stuck in self-sabotage loops and wonder why they’re not getting much better.
Likewise, focusing entirely on the abusers and tyrants of our world, and what they’re doing, is a coping mechanism and a way of avoiding the inner work.
In a similar way, focusing on trying to wake other people up is also a way of avoiding doing the inner work. It looks strikingly like the coping mechanism of codependency.
Focusing externally can get you stuck, cause you to lose yourself, your focus, and the vision of your dreams. The surprising thing is that you can also end up enabling the status quo by participating in the social dysfunction and disconnection. In this case, society is just a bigger picture, yet much like a dysfunctional relationship or family system where these same dynamics occur.
What happens if you insist on trying to wake people up?
They'll resist you. People wake up when they’re ready, on their Divine timeline.
Keep in mind, if you force or emotionally coerce people to wake up:
You're taking away the other person's agency and infantilizing them
It's a battle of egos
You're in a power struggle
It's defense mechanism vs. defense mechanism
You're not building a connection
Our human nervous system is binary. We either have the defense system activated (fight, flight, freeze and fawn) or the attachment system (our “safe and social” connection as mammals) activated. It’s never both at the same time. When you’re arguing and fighting, you’re not really connecting.
Awakening is not the same as healing the trauma.
Most people get stuck at the early stage of awakening. I’ve been there too. But the awakening is just the start of the healing process.
It’s the same with spiritual healing. The awakening is the sexy part, and that's what everyone wants to talk about. But it's not the same as doing the inner work of the healing. You can know a lot of things but you’re rendering that information useless if you do nothing about it.
So how do we grow from these experiences?
The first thing is the perspective shift. Admittedly, I was stuck in a negative paradigm as well for the first few years of the 2020s. But now I see things differently.
I’m not sure who originally said that quote. The internet says Tony Robbins or Byron Katie. I’ve heard a lot of people say it this year and I think it’s one of the most important perspective shifts to get re-oriented in any moment.
When something is happening to us, we are in a victim state of consciousness. When it’s happening for us, we are in an empowered state of consciousness. The same thing is happening in both circumstances. The only difference here is the perspective.
Perspective is a choice. It’s one of the most vital choices we can make during these times if we want to heal, grow and leave a better legacy for future generations.
No doubt, we are under tremendous evolutionary pressure. The choice to emerge and evolve from this story is ours.
What we most need to develop is resilience.
Resilience is about adapting and bouncing back from tragedy, trauma, threats, significant stress, loss and adversity. It means embodying greater wellbeing so we can share our gifts with the world. It’s a process, not a fixed state or destination.
Resilience is one of the most important qualities and skills to master in the 2020s.
Resilience is not the same as surviving.
Surviving means you're alive but still in it—caught in the defensiveness, self-pity, dread, grief, anger, doom and other heavy emotions. It means you’re stuck in, or frequently triggered into, states of fight, flight, freeze and fawn.
Weighed down by the suffering of mere survival, you don't see a way out and life becomes unbearable. That also means what you’re sharing with others is not uplifting, empowering or inspiring. You could get stuck in complaining, fighting, self-pitying or storytelling mode, which is incredibly draining on the people who choose to be around you.
If you stay in the suffering, you’ll pass that legacy forward to the next generations.
Resilience is about feeling, digesting, processing and integrating the learning to pass that gift forward.
As you do the healing work, you’re making it easier for others to tune into your codes of resilience and heal themselves.
It’s always more challenging to be the innovators and early adopters of any technology, including the inner human evolution. It’s also a calling, and the choice is yours to step up or not.
Watch the full presentation for a deeper exploration of where we are and where we can go from here.
Restoring Your Light