Taking care in troubling times
Welcome to Triggerville! It’s the new virtual neighborhood we all live in. The inhabitants live on a slow drip of adrenaline and cortisol (the “flight or fight” hormones) and as a result are prone to hair trigger reactions to “asshole” drivers, rants on Facebook and insomnia.
Triggerville residents live in a state of readiness to pounce on anything that may resemble or be an actual threat. But mostly the threats arise from an overactive imagination.
Living in Triggerville causes even the nicest of people to become nasty and emboldened to say and do things they would never had said before moving to Triggerville.
I find myself in this neighborhood more than I like. Just like being behind a car yesterday with an offensive political bumper sticker that pissed me off. And then I felt frustrated and ashamed that I allowed it to piss me off.
Triggerville sucks us in. And the more time we spend watching/reading the news or scrolling on Facebook, they more we are ensnared.
My teacher, Richard Rohr, OFM, offered this sage advice in a recent email on navigating through these challenging times. Here’s some of what he said:
If you will allow, I recommend for your spiritual practice for the next four months that you impose a moratorium on exactly how much news you are subject to—hopefully not more than an hour a day of television, social media, internet news, magazine and newspaper commentary, and/or political discussions. It will only tear you apart and pull you into the dualistic world of opinion and counter-opinion, not Divine Truth, which is always found in a bigger place.
Instead, I suggest that you use this time for some form of public service, volunteerism, mystical reading from the masters, prayer—or, preferably, all of the above.
Friends, we ARE going to get through these difficulties. We may not be able to effect change in the upper echelons of powers as quickly as we would like, but we CAN choose to not add to the nastiness and vitriol.
Our Higher Selves must prevail.
