My fear of nuclear war became a portal to the animate Earth

I woke up this morning to Trump’s tweet about destroying an entire civilization. Subtle-not-so-subtle nuclear threats, just splayed across the internet the way my dog used to splay shamelessly across the bed. Except a lot less cute.

I groaned. “Are you fucking kidding me.”

I remembered the time, the same month of 2018, eight years ago now, when he had a standoff with Russia via Syria. I woke up to the reality that the threat of nuclear war did not end with the end of the Cold War, like so many of us believed.

It was still here, and it started to haunt me.

I’d jolt awake in the middle of the night, hearing phantom explosions while I slept, my body flooding with terror before I came out of the hypnogogic confusion.

The bombing of the Russian base in Syria, despite threats from Putin of serious retaliation, kicked off a cascade of emotional, physiological releases in my body that ultimately changed my direct perception of reality in a way that was permanent.

If your body started to open a doorway like this today, know that listening to it can be a powerful opportunity for clarity and reconnection. It does require patiently building capacity and often getting support from others, but it was a liberatory process that changed my life forever. As messy as this story is, I wish everyone could experience this kind of transformation of perception.

As reality continues to show us the true faces of our leaders, we’re going to have more moments like this, and if we commit to building the capacity to listen to our bodies completely, we can turn insanity into gold.

The opening of a portal

That day I was in a group chat with several wise female friends, one of whom is a respected independent journalist and political commentator, and she was keeping us informed as to what was unfolding.

I found myself half numb, dissociating in terror. I reached out to a friend in the group as we started to disband: “Hey, can you sit with me for a moment? I’m not okay.”

We ended up on speakerphone, and my core and thighs began trembling uncontrollably. A ball of tension and heat started accumulating in the base of my skull before shooting down my spine like a ball of lightning. About halfway down the driveway, I stopped my car to lean out and dry heave.

I spent the rest of the week in a kind of horrified stupor. A question emerged in my mind that carried terrible implications that were trickling into my consciousness:

How did we let them get so much power?

I remember driving to a local meditation center to do some volunteer work, and the grayness of the overcast sky mirrored the cruel, callous, apathetic nature of the universe I was now in. There was no love woven through anything. It was nothing but cold, dead chaos.

As we worked together to build this strawbale building, a quiet voice whispered, telling me to just keep my attention on the color and texture of the clay, the shape and brittleness of the straw. I still remember the clay and that straw with exquisite detail to this day.

By the time I got on the phone with Fiona to help me with this, I was a hysterical, slobbering mess. I barely got a word out before I began sobbing in panic about these psychopaths, how we have given them the power to destroy everything, how insane they were, that we had let the unthinkable happen.

In that moment, an image came to me. I saw a massive red mushroom cloud blooming over a landscape, people scattered on the ground covered in blood, voices screaming. And then, over this image, emerged the smirking face of the psychopath looking directly at me.

I bellowed in horror, “I cannot look at this! I cannot look at this!” And as I turned to look away, a voice as loud as any embodied voice spoke over my left shoulder,

“That’s how it gets its power.”

My eyes snapped open. I felt like I had been in a haunted house and someone had just flipped on all the blinding overhead florescent lights. I slowly turned back to look at this arrogant and contemptuous smirking face.

I looked right at it, and then this miraculous transformation happened.

The face faded away, and suddenly I was aware of the land all around me. It was alive, conscious, sentient. It was animate.

Yes, the trees, the animals, all the plants were animate, but also the rolling hills, the cliff faces, mountains and rivers and the Earth. The Earth herself was alive. She was awake.

It was an experience I realized I had always been having, but had somehow buried all the way back in my subconscious, such that I knew it was there but couldn’t perceive it directly. Now it had moved to the forefront of my attention. I don’t have words for the feeling I felt coming from her, but it was something very much like unconditional love.

Even as I experienced this profound moment, I grappled with whether this is real, or if I’m crazy. Then the local mountains, the Tetons, came into view.

I felt myself in front of them, small and fragile in contrast to their humongous, enduring, and ancient presence. It was like they were speaking, but without words.

“What are they saying?” Fiona asked.

“It’s hard to put into words, but it’s like, ‘you’re big like us.”

My conscious mind - at this point convinced I’ve taken a one-way train to permanent insanity - squawked, “What?! What are they talking about? Look at how small I am!”

Their illustrious nature filled the silence with a kind of knowing I couldn’t contend with, even though it felt like a nonsensical statement at the time.

But over the years I have come to find they are right. My true self extends far beyond the limits of my individual skin. I am, in my truest form, big like them.

Reflections years later

At the time this happened, I was still getting trained in the somatic inquiry method I still use with clients. But from a trained somatic therapy perspective, this whole thing looks like a blazing somatic shitshow. Window of tolerance, titration, pendulation, gently building capacity? None of it was happening here, clearly. I was breaking all the established rules.

It’s helpful to know that I had been engaging in various forms of somatic practices - some very simple - for 16 years, and I had been able to work efficiently and with significant capacity for about four years, when this happened. I intuitively knew how to let my body do its thing, even when it was very uncomfortable.

And I’m so glad I did. I was not retraumatized here. While I did have other sessions around nuclear war in the coming months, I never experienced anything like that kind of debilitating preoccupation with the topic again. It no longer diminished my ability to be present to and enjoy life. Today, while definitely activating (which is appropriate), was a day I was able to tolerate and return to relaxation quickly when I learned of the de-escalation.

And I never stopped perceiving the world through this animate lens after that. It felt like I had come home to something that had always been there, but had been obscured by the embedded perma-terror of empire, an empire led by psychopaths, over hundreds of years. I felt a kind of love and belonging that has only gotten stronger since.

I remember coming across the statement in The Emerald podcast that said, “Animism is normative consciousness.” And realized that’s what it was: I had returned to a layer of consciousness that was the normative consciousness for the vast majority of my ancestors.

And I eventually came to understand the true nature of these people to whom we have given so much power:

They are also made of earth, born of the land, just like each of us. They are not inherently special. They have the tremendous power they do because they have taken it through brutality and violence. It is not rightfully theirs. And we have to remember: without the power of the systems they command - systems comprised of humans “just following orders” - they have no more power than any one of us.

But our inability to look at them in the face, to develop the capacity to look directly at what they are doing and accept the natural response of NO inside each of us, that is what continues to give them so much power to do as they please at the expense of all life.

We’ve all been there in our personal lives too: our refusal to look at something honestly and squarely is what ends up leading to so much destruction.

The real power is always in radical honesty and the ability to fully acknowledge and stay present to reality as it is, such that we can then follow with appropriate action. That is just as true collectively as it personally.

But in order to do this, we have to develop the capacity in our bodies to withstand the discomfort with what we’re looking at. The story above is a story in which my body took over and there was little choice for my conscious mind but to go along with the unraveling. But for years before this, I practiced increasing my capacity, having no idea I’d be thrust through a portal so powerful it would change my perception of the Earth, the land, and all life here, forever.

Our bodies, in all their discomfort and mysterious ways, always reveal the portal we need to take to emerge with newfound power and clarity.