Navigating collapse with calm clarity
Grounding as the foundation of leadership
The idea of collapse sounded romantic when it was an airbrushed figment of our imagination, didn’t it? The old world ending. A new one beginning. A revolution. A renaissance. Ah right. Cool. That seems like something we should want.
But it feels very different now, living inside of it, as we scramble to find even a small square of solid ground to stand on. It has become frighteningly obvious that we can’t rely on anything anymore.
It turns out Chicken Little was not being dramatic. It’s true. The sky is falling. The structures that held our reality together… well, that careful architecture built a house of cards. And the cards are coming down — not one by one, but suddenly, violently, and all at once.
What the f#€% do we do now?
If anyone claims to have a neat and tidy answer to that question, they are bold-faced lying to you. Or maybe hallucinating certainty as an inflammation response to a fear virus. Or likely, both.
We are trench deep in the wild unknown. And the lines we’ve drawn in the sand are starting to harden into stone.
From the choice point that we’ve always stood in, two spirals emerge — which are now quickening in turns: Either you’re choosing to retreat, contract, shrink, obey, isolate, in a futile attempt to build a bunker of safety for yourself as your world grows smaller and smaller. Or, you’re choosing to embrace initiation after initiation, as you grow your capacity and explore new territory that lies far beyond the borders of any known map.
Fear or love. Doubt or hope. Safety or growth. Compliance or creation.
This is a choice we’ve had to make many times before, knowingly or not. And it’s a choice we will continue to make as long as we’re here, like it or not.
Only now… Our movements are amplified and accelerated by technology — creating momentum that makes it harder to reverse out. And our actions have a supersized impact on shared reality, because we’re much more interconnected energetically than ever before.
We’re going where no (hu)man has gone before. The velocity of change. The intensity of energy. It’s highly exciting. And equally terrifying.
Our human nervous systems feel archaic in an electrical grid, where signals get sent to the edges of the universe in milliseconds. Yet we’re still working out how to partner with machine intelligence, so we don’t end ourselves trying to compete with it — for resources or for results.
All this while the human mind-body system continues to see massive increases in capacity. We can hold and move quantities of energy now that would have disintegrated earlier humans. What’s also growing in quantum leaps is the depth of presence needed to ground this energy.
Chronic exhaustion seems like the new normal now. I think this is probably because our energetic capacity is growing so fast, ahead of the containment that’s needed for us to rebalance.
If that gap widens enough, it can cause us to short circuit. Too much electricity. Not enough grounding. If we’re receiving lots of high voltage energy that has nowhere to flow through, nowhere to land — this is literally going to fry us. How do we ground to keep from burning out?
What’s grounding is doing things that make us human. Everything that’s not about us processing information or producing output. Breathing deeply. Eating slowly. Smelling flowers. Making love. Creating art. It’s enjoying the stuff that having a body gives you the privilege of experiencing.
The sad thing is that for many humans (myself included), our primary relationship is now with the device in our hands. We spend more time interacting with this thing than anything else.
We are locked into an arranged marriage with a glowing screen — one that divorced us from physical reality, while we barely noticed it happening. Now we find ourselves: practically dependent, emotionally attached, psychologically addicted, neurotically hinged.
This little rectangle removes all sense of time, as the LED light signals to our brain that it’s perpetually high noon. It also removes all sense of space, as images transport us to everywhere and nowhere — as we swipe between continents faster than we can walk to the next room.
Stripped of our sense of time, and stripped of our sense of space, it’s no wonder we feel dislocated and disoriented. We can’t tell who we are, or where we are, or which end of this box should be facing up.
We’re the frogs in boiling water that got cooked one degree at a time. It’s not easy to get out of the pot now. I would say that it’s pretty much impossible to do it alone. Right now we need to reach out to each other more than ever, to remember what being human is all about. To celebrate life. To feel joy. To be grateful for the experience we’re having in all its flavors.
Before we can lead anyone, before we can build anything, we need to first set free our energy and reclaim sovereignty. It starts with grounding. Regulating and resourcing ourselves through community, through genuine connection. From there, clarity about direction will come through naturally.
Tomorrow on the Spring Equinox, I will announce the opening of a brand new, live group container — the first of this kind that I have offered in five years. It’s called PAR-TIC-I-PA-TION. Stay tuned.
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