American Trauma: A Psychospiritual Preamble
I’ve been quiet the last couple of years. Absolutely silent at times. Some might remember that, before late 2019, I had a prolific amount of videos, blogs, essays, and all sorts of communication streams across multiple platforms. I was a consistent, daily content creator and boots on the ground weaver of love and laughter. It started winding down, at first, at the beginning of 2020 and eventually came to a halt for quite sometime later that summer.
Many things catalyzed this dramatic shift. Now, every fiber of my being knows it’s time to start letting my fingers dance on the keyboard again. Many things are catalyzing this shift, as well. While this time has been painful, inside and out, returning to the written word is the most fundamental part of my healing.
This is the moment in my timeline that I reintroduce myself in a way that even some of my closest friends may not be expecting. Of course, no one is obligated to read my words and empathize, agree, or respond to any calls to action I put out. However, to find peace with each other, we need to be honest with ourselves and each other while ensuring our words don’t invoke unnecessary pain or foreseeable harm. Something many of our journalists, paparazzi, and media at large seems to have forgotten about too long ago.
I am also imperfect, and I will likely fuck up along the way, but I will do my best to cite reliable sources, as well as remain open to valid criticisms and respectful counterarguments. Your voices are vital in this process. The vast majority of what I wish to speak on courageously is the traumatic impact ‘The United States of America’ has on every single one of the people living within it, in various outcomes.
I plan on writing from the wholeness of my body, mind, and spirit. To authentically communicate without compartmentalizing or censoring for any particular audience, or to avoid the inevitable disagreement someone will have with my words. I plan to be unapologetically real. I want to be true to the passion within me that is aching to discuss our shared reality and all the taboo things, including its impacts on the mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical aspects of us as individuals and as a society.
I want to let my emotions speak for themselves with a voice that has permission to get obscenely profane, righteously angry, overtly emotional, obstinately irreverent, nihilistically snarky, as well as profoundly compassionate and passionately loving. I need to address the doubts I suddenly have to see world peace in my lifetime, which is a massive shift in my perspectives. I want to share how I can still see it as a long-term possibility and what it’s going to take to actualize it, individually and collectively, assuming we make it through the bottleneck we’re in.
You see, the past three years have resulted in a profoundly unpredictable and chaotic transformation on a global scale. A tidal wave of reality slammed into all of our existential frameworks, showing us everything all at once. Revelation after revelation started an unexpected awakening while simultaneously driving wedges and chasms in everything from personal relationships to supply chains. Perceptions and beliefs, choices and commitments, lifestyles and habits — healthy and unhealthy — required a new examination. I was not spared.
Every notion I held about what the world was and how it worked was penetrated in ways that destroyed the understandings I once had of life as I knew it, inside and out. Everything was moving faster than I could reasonably process it, leaving me standing frozen in the eye of a tornado tearing through the fabric of global societies in an absurd number of ways. For several years I had ‘prophetically’ spoken of the centrifugal force that would take over the world and how I had already seen it starting. Yet, even in the visions that inspired those words, I could not have predicted what it would become.
I was seeing the blatant assaults on consciousness attempting to push us all further away from the fundamentals of who and what we are. Not just as individuals, but as a species, as a global family, and as a part of interdependent eco-systems interconnected through a vast and highly diverse web of experiences and perspectives. Observing it all and doing so outside of any setting I was familiar with became so painful that I have returned to therapy again. I was witnessing American dreams turn into nightmares.
Nonetheless, I still have hope and faith in many things and a lot of people. I believe that all of that chaos can lead to a regenerative movement that activates more people to do the right thing. To collaborate in creating systems that make the old ones obsolete, as Buckminster Fuller spoke on so wisely. Ones that work for all life on Earth. Ones that break the hypnotic state of programming so many individuals are lost in to begin unleashing all the untapped consciousness available in our planet’s population.
After all, we are just in the early phases of looking at other species through the lens of having their own societies, languages, governance, trade systems, and more. We are learning how to detect forms of communication in other forms of life, such as plants and fungi. We have no idea what environmental breakthroughs we might never have imagined or thought of will come out of all of it! What can we learn from the mycelial network or the dolphins that our researchers have not discovered yet, but is vital in stopping the mass extinction that has already begun?
Every day, breakthroughs are happening in science and technology, and we are connecting with each other in deeper ways across great distances. Every leader in the world will eventually be under pressure to adopt the most successful foreign policies and systems from each other. Every day, more and more people can share their voices and experiences to help people align in activism and outreach. Every day, more humans realize they are not as well guarded against devastation and suffering as they thought they were. The system is broken and hurting us all in some way. Yet, many of us, possibly most of us, already know there are better ways and want better.
I also believe that each of us has the power to be the hand of ‘God’ and the answer to other people’s prayers. It doesn’t take a lot. Sometimes, it’s the generosity of a meaningful compliment, a moment of assistance, or even the smallest token of financial support to someone struggling that can change an entire life. Currently, we have no way of measuring the butterfly effect of our actions. Still, I’m sure we can all agree that the actions that demonstrate any amount of kindness and love are better than those that are cruel, selfish, heartless, or otherwise disconnected from the human spirit.
Finally, since all of the major religions and the spiritual paths of almost every culture include messages of love and generosity as a personal responsibility, shouldn’t we listen? If something is echoed in every holy text and demonstrated by nature, why would we ignore that? Imagine if every leader, influencer, educator, and generally, each person that holds power in their hands proactively embraced the ideals of interconnectedness, unity, and equity. Not just in their words but their actions, policies, integrity, and every one of their interactions. The shift in our world would be profound!
And with that, I will close this out by thanking each of you that read this far and asking you to subscribe and give me a clap. I’ll be posting here as frequently as I can within the boundaries of other obligations. I hope to be a beneficial voice that inspires you, even if some of what I say is painful at times. We cannot accurately assess a problem without diving in to get all the way down to the parts hidden in the darkness. Once we do, however, we can address it in whole, rather than whacking at the outgrowths of the problem. No disease is cured using palliative treatments for symptoms, whether depression, cancer, or homelessness. Still, I know we can heal these things together and empower ourselves and others to reclaim our gifts.
And, we will.
If you liked this article, please don’t forget to give it a ‘clap’, and I’m always grateful for financial gestures of gratitude for my writing. ❤️
