The world, from my chair, is a room full of people who are all doing their best with the hands they’ve been dealt.
Some days, that hand is a royal flush of privilege and luck. Other days, it’s a busted straight flush of trauma, loss, and systems that were never designed to hold them. Sitting across from hundreds of humans, listening to their stories, their fears, their quiet triumphs I do my best to anchor myself in the safe harbor of loving presence and the belief that The world is not broken. It’s breaking open. And so are we.
If you turned on the news lately—or simply glanced at your phone— it can seem like the world is a dumpster fire : literally and morally. Wars rage. Systems and people are motivated and perverted by pain, greed, discrimination, domination and control. The planet suffers as a result of human ‘use’ and ‘abuse’. Loneliness is at an all-time high, even as we’re more “connected” than ever. We are a species in pain.
I am soothed by the idea that pain is not the absence of healing. It’s the invitation to it…That, as Rumi said, “the wound is the place where the light enters you”.
Every tear, every rage, every moment of despair is a part of the human experience longing and asking to be seen. The world’s suffering isn’t proof that we’re doomed. It’s proof that we’re alive. That we care. That we haven’t given up yet
We’re All Just Walking Each Other Home
One of my favorite things about being a therapist is getting to witness the sacred ordinary of human connection. We are not meant to do this alone.
The current worldview tries to convince us that independence is strength. That needing help is weakness. That vulnerability is dangerous. But we are wired for connection. Our nervous systems calm in the presence of safe others. Our hearts heal when we’re seen. Our souls remember who we are when we’re with each other. And the remembrance and active living of our interconnection will overtime reinstore harmony in our societies and interspecies connections and force out the dominant paradigm of a world that abuses its people, its vulnerable, its environment for ‘individual’ success and ‘fulfillment’.
We are all, every single one of us, both the wound and the medicine. The world is a mirror. And what it reflects back isn’t just our pain—it’s our nature: LOVE.
So when you look out at the chaos, the injustice, the heartbreak, and think, “What can I possibly do?” Remember this: By healing yourself, you heal the world. By loving yourself, you love the world. By loving the world, you love yourself. By healing in community you provide change from the roots up to larger social systems that injure us and the planet. By showing up, messy and imperfect and still trying, you give the rest of us permission to do the same.
The world needs you. Not a better version of you. Not when you’re fixed. Not when you’re perfect. Not when you’ve finally got it all together.You. With your scars and your laughter and your quiet, stubborn hope, your pain and your beauty. All are welcome, all belong, and all can find their way home to a heart that is inseparable from the blue and green beating heart of the world we are part of.