The Collective Doorway

I’ve helped people for many years move through the portals that their bodies and, particularly, their emotions offer them. What emerges on the other side of fully feeling these emotions can truly feel like walking into another world.

Yet many people shy away from treating the emotions they feel around collective issues with the same curiosity, intention, and tending that they normally would with an emotion related to their personal lives.

We think they are a completely different beast and so should be treated as such. “Why bother?” is not an uncommon sentiment when it comes to the grief, rage, and despair we might feel in response to what we see happening in our world.

The late, brilliant Joanna Macy made it her life’s work to speak to that answer and I couldn’t agree more with her statement “that the pain that comes up is just a gateway into which you go into a communion with the living world that is fearless. And the pain for our world and the love for it are but two sides of the same coin.”

I’ve experienced that communion many times. I walked through that very gateway she names, and the power, the fearlessness, the love is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced in any aspect of my personal life.

Those experiences provided me the courage to explore personal areas of pain and fear in my life that I would have never been motivated to otherwise, simply because I felt that communion, that ancient responsibility, and I knew that my integration, my deep embodiment, my shameless authenticity, was the greatest gift I could offer.

But, for many of us, the idea of truly letting ourselves fully feel this level of emotional intensity is completely overwhelming. We see no solution to these problems, at least not one that we can individually provide in that moment, and therefore we see no end to that emotional experience. We believe, however unconsciously, that if our mind can see no way to resolve the pain, then there is little reason to touch it.

In that resistance, we find the unconscious tendrils of empire that tell us that the body, with all its pain and discomfort, is a problem to be managed, an issue to be fixed. If it can’t be, this conditioning says, then best to mostly avoid it. “Focus on yourself” is a mantra repeated often by many healers of all kinds and it is a kind of avoidance of reality as a way to avoid the uncontrollable emotions it seems to bring with it.

Breaking through

Anyone who has grieved a profound loss and completely surrendered to that grief knows how powerful a portal that emotion can be. It is powerful not despite the fact that it has no solution, but precisely because it has no solution. It can open doorways into a kind of transcendent love and connection that breaches the limits of time and space. It can reveal the mystery behind all things. It can uncover aspects of reality we would have never encountered had we not stayed with the pain that has no answer.

So if we know that all emotions, when fully felt, can be a kind of portal into another experience of reality, and that emotions with no answer can be especially powerful portals, what happens when we surrender to our feelings around the unveiling and unraveling of our world? What happens when we meet the grief, the rage, the terror of how our unraveling world will bear down not just on us, but on everyone and every place we love, every being we’ve ever known? What happens when we surrender to an emotion that big?

What that surrendering does is this: it breaks down an isolated, small sense of self that is both fundamental to our collective dilemma, and has been running from these feelings the entire time. Fully feeling an emotion like this reveals the fearless communion Joanna named and that I’ve experienced, and it is that fearlessness that breaks us out of the constraining social norms of empire.

We become free enough to respond to this profound moment appropriately. We are no longer domesticated by elites, complacent in the siphoning of our life force to fuel their sociopathic agendas. We become feral in the best way possible. We come alive again.

To become feral in this way is to reconnect with the source of creativity that drives the evolution of life on this planet. It is to reconnect with millions of years of ancient intelligence that is far more expansive than the confining mental conditioning that leaves us feeling lifeless and powerless. We begin to rise to meet the collective moment we are in with clarity and a power rooted directly in the Earth, herself.

And we start to experience something so characteristic of wild animals: we are shameless.

The body as teacher

Developing this capacity to feel things like this does take time, but a lot less time than we might think. And here’s the thing: I don’t think we have a choice anyway.

I sense many of us feel confounded by how to respond to this moment in human history. Problems of this magnitude paralyze us. We have no idea how to move. In an effort to get out of the discomfort, we may lean on our addictions, or try ever harder to avoid what we’re seeing.

But as many of us have learned from working with our emotions in our personal lives, the opportunity is in leaning into the discomfort, learning to create space around it and even play with it, not to turn away from it. That principle is just as true now, in these circumstances, with these emotions, as ever.

And walking through this portal is what will initiate the dismantling of the very empire that got us here by dismantling it at the foundational level: in our own body-minds. It will resolve the inner delusion once and for all: the mind is not the teacher, it is not the master - the true teacher is the ancient intelligence and wisdom of the body.

I’ve laughed with loved ones over the years that know this path on a personal level about this phenomenon of “the perfect setup.” It’s the way life seems to organize exactly the right set of circumstances so that I have to face the very difficult emotion, the pattern, the story I was refusing to face.

I look at the world we’re in right now, as horrifying as it is, and I chuckle inside sometimes. As the circumstances become increasingly intense, when it seems like there is nothing we can do, it’s often because we’re trying to skip the first step: we need to feel. When we fully feel, we shed the delusions that keep us from accessing the capacity and creativity to act with confidence, clarity, and skill. And when we acknowledge that life is often setting us up to feel what we’ve been refusing to feel, we could see it as collaborating with us for our liberation. Then I find it easier to walk through that doorway.