I have recently come to realize that our political views, whether we are Democrat, Republican, Liberal, Libertarian, Green, Progressive, Conservative, Tory, Labor… you name it…. our political views are largely shaped by our fears.
Economic insecurity.
Higher health care costs.
Higher taxes.
Deportation.
Religious extremism.
Terrorism.
Job loss.
Civil unrest.
Unjust arrest.
Racial profiling.
Police harassment.
Government overreach.
Corporate greed.
Loss of power.
Loss of freedom.
Loss of reproductive rights.
Loss of marriage rights.
Being marginalized because of gender, race, sexual orientation, or religion.
Sharia law.
Polluted land, air, water.
Species extinction.
People who look, talk and think differently than we do.
Nuclear waste.
Nuclear war.
Global destruction through climate change.
Choose your poison. And I mean that literally.
Our fears poison our minds, our psyches. And they poison our relationships.
We argue, not because we don’t like each other, but because our fears don’t match. If I am relatively economically secure, but worried about the environment, I might take lightly your fears of job loss to immigrants. You then assume that I either don’t listen to you or don’t care. At the same time, you have stumbled across sources that tell you that man-made climate change is a hoax, so you tell me to calm down about my doomsday fears of rising sea levels, species loss, wild weather fluctuations, and climate refugees.
To make matters worse, we all live in a giant echo chamber called the Internet, where each of us can find ample evidence to support our views. We choose friends who surround us with agreement. And we choose our media to do the same.
Thus, we get angry with each other. We hurl insults at each other. Stupid. Blind. Arrogant. Uncaring. Nothing makes us angrier than to have our fears, our belief systems, the things we know absolutely to be true, to be questioned, discounted, sneered at. As an old acquaintance once told me, “When I am panicking and no one around me is doing the same, I figure they just don’t understand the gravity of the situation.”
Our fears divide us. And they divide us at a time when — if there is any truth behind our fears — we really need each other to pull together and find solutions.
But fears do more than that, because they form their own kind of echo chamber, their own feedback loop. They start with a thought. The thought plants a seed of fear. The fear festers. We search out answers “out there” somewhere, in the world of knowledge, but all we find is more confusion, which piles more thought on top of thought, more fear on top of fear, in and endless cycle.
And thoughts are powerful things. Thoughts create. Thoughts fueled by strong emotions create even faster.
Have you ever heard the phrase, “What you resist persists?” Have you ever wondered about the logic of that? If I resist it, why can’t I just abolish it?
But it’s true. And the reason it works the way it does is that resistance is concentrated Thought, fueled by strong emotion. It is telling the Universe: this is important. And what is important finds a way of showing up in our lives, one way or another.
The rise of Donald Trump is a perfect example. Love him or hate him, his rise to power was fueled as much by the fear of him on the political left as it was by the hopes of the economically downtrodden on the political right.
He started out as a joke candidate. At the beginning of the primary process, no one on either side took him seriously. Until they started to. Until his outlandish behavior and rhetoric attracted massive media attention. It was like driving past an accident on the highway. You can’t help but slow down and look, give it your attention, both horrified and fascinated by the carnage. My friends and community and media sources, all largely politically left-wing, couldn’t help but talk about him. Whenever I could, in conversation with my friends, I tried to steer the conversation away, back to something neutral, not because I was afraid that he, like Voldemort, would hear me utter his name, but because I knew that by discussing him, worrying about him, fearing him, we were giving him energy. And some of that “energy” was tangible: nearly $2 billion in free media coverage, by some estimates.
But if our fears are so divisive and so powerful, why do we indulge them as much as we do? Well, they are a fundamental part of our evolution as a species. They come from the amygdala, also called the “lizard brain”: the part of our brains that was there when we first crawled out of the primordial ooze. The lizard brain serves us. It is the source of our fight-or-flight response. In the face of real danger, it gets us the hell out of there.
But the amygdala has limited usefulness. For one thing, it blocks creative thought. Have you ever been in a really frightening situation, facing either a real or vividly imagined threat? What happens to your field of view? What happens to your ability to think?
A couple of years ago, I thought my family was being threatened. It turns out I was wrong; we were just the victims of a teenaged hoax phone call made to sound threatening. But at the time, I didn’t know that, and the effect was surreal. My mind, which normally thinks quite clearly, thank-you-very-much, could not process what to do. I lost all peripheral vision as my focus literally narrowed to see only what was directly in front of me. And all I could think was to run. Call the police, then go somewhere safe: a hotel, a friend’s house. Somewhere else. Get the hell out of there. Thank goodness that the police officer who showed up had a cool head. In his calm presence, we were able to figure out who the jokester was and confront him. Then I felt my field of vision opening up again, my mind clearing up.
My point is that when we try to act from a place of fear, our actions have limited effectiveness. We can run, or we can fight, but we can’t do much about the real source of the problem. We can’t find real solutions.
To do that, we have to use our higher brain functioning. Our creative thought. Our calm, cool heads.
So what do we do? How do we do that? How do we “turn down the noise in our minds” (thanks, Carly Simon!)? In the face of what we know are real dangers, how do we stop thinking about them?
There are loads of techniques out there to do just that. The practice of mindfulness meditation, for example, exists primarily for that purpose.
Might I also suggest something that many of us, especially those of us brought up in a Judeo-Christian tradition, are more familiar with?
I suggest we pray.
Now, before you get up and leave this blog, thinking I’m off my rocker, hear me out. Whether you believe that there is a Higher Power pulling the strings to make our lives in this world better (or worse) or not, prayer serves a purpose. It has been shown, scientifically, to help heal people. Is that because of a Higher Power? Maybe, but it doesn’t have to be, because thoughts, by themselves, are powerful things.
Thoughts create. And when your thoughts are focused on dark, dangerous possibilities, that is what you create. When your thoughts are focused on positive, hopeful outcomes, that is what you create.
Prayer — and by “prayer” I mean the right kind of prayer, which I’ll get to in a second — whatever other power it may or may not have, does one thing quite well: it takes our minds off of our fears, off of our hopelessness and powerlessness over a situation, and focuses us instead on a the possibility of a positive outcome. It allows us to believe that there is a solution out there, whether we know specifically what that solution is or not. It turns our thoughts around. It takes us out of our amygdalae and puts us into our higher brains, where creative solutions exist.
So what is the “right kind of prayer?”
When I had a tumor in my spine four years ago, I had a really special doctor. She is an osteopath, and she is the one who suggested I get the MRI and the one who cared enough to advise me on where I go to get the tumor removed.
But she did more than that. She taught me how to pray.
That’s a bit of a bizarre thing to say coming from the granddaughter of a minister, don’t you think? But it’s true.
She shared with me the prayer she offered before my surgery. And I recognized the power in her prayer because it had two key characteristics that are also the recommended elements in every technique I’ve ever read about Reality Creation (and I’ve read a lot). Her prayer was:
1) positive; and
2) specific.
This was her prayer: “I want you to know that I lit a candle for you at church today. I asked God to keep you and your husband and son in the palm of His hand this week. I asked that he steady the hand of your surgeon on the day of your operation. I asked that your recovery be described in terms of ‘miraculous’ and ‘beyond expectation.’ I asked that your pain may be suspended as you wait for the surgical cure, as you have suffered more than enough already. I am grateful for confident, competent surgical coverage.”
Everything she prayed for came to pass. My husband and son were well supported. My pain, which had been considerable, lessened considerably as I awaited surgery. The surgery, though long, was entirely successful. And my recovery was rapid. After a mere two weeks, my back became, and remains, stronger than it was for years, maybe decades.
Positive and specific. That is “the right way to pray.” Or, if you hate the word “prayer” call it something else. Call it Positive Intention. The technique is the same. And it is just as powerful.
First, focus your attention on what you want, not on what you don’t want. Not, “Please, God, don’t let all these no-good immigrants steal my job,” but, “Please, God, help me to be economically secure, to keep this job or find a better one.” Not, “Please, God, keep us from destroying the planet,” but “Please, God, help us to find creative solutions for getting and keeping the climate healthy.”
Then be as specific as you can be about what you want:
Help me to easily afford to pay my taxes, whatever they are.
Allow me to live where I choose to live.
Calm the minds and hearts of the downtrodden across the world.
Steady the hands and minds of law enforcement.
Keep our government lean, efficient and effective.
Allow corporations to be profitable and also rooted in their moral center.
Provide me the freedom to choose what to do with my own body.
Give me the freedom to openly love whomever I love.
Etc.
As you pray (or Positively Intend) notice what happens to your physiology. Feel yourself open up, breathe, relax.
Then, from that state, notice what happens next. How do you feel about reaching out to your friends, family, and community, even those with whom you may have disagreed in the past? How inspired do you feel? What real solutions occur to you in the middle of the night? How energized are you to pursue those solutions?
If you want more inspiration still, that is, if you want the Disney version of how powerful our thoughts are, go watch the movie Tomorrowland, if you haven’t already. (And if you have already seen it, go watch it again!) Feed the right wolf, Dear Ones.
Godspeed. And do let me know, if you feel like sharing, what your (specific, positive) prayers are. I am interested to know.