Beyond New Years Day 2012: So Stuck In Survival Mode
Itʼs not Two Thousand and Twelve. Itʼs Twenty Twelve. For better or worse we are no longer moored to the semantic safety of a ʻnewʼ millenium. Having attained critical velocity, we have escaped the gravitational pull of a thousand years. Beyond New Years Day 2012, time itself has telescoped through a tipping point in the technology of computerization. Life comes at us in a vortex of faster and more furious nanoseconds, which brings me to my New Yearʼs resolution. Get quiet, still and centered. Breathe deeply. Weʼre all ready to crawl out of our years in collective purgatory. It is time to move towards the light of a more refined energy. Yes, I know, America feels increasingly like a third world country when one in four of our children now grow up in poverty. Then thereʼs the post holiday blahs, seasonal affective disorder, and a million other ʻrealitiesʼ and/or distractions which all are mediated by groupthink, the social noise that spews forth from all our screens, devices and institutions.
Enjoy even a few minutes of quiet. Notice that we have all been so stuck in survival mode that we are fixated in our anxieties. There is a correlation between anxiety and performance. A little anxiety enhances performance. With more stress, performance then deteriorates. Ratchet up anxiety even more, and our evolutionary limbic brain kicks into the flight or fight mode. As this stress becomes ever more chronic we can easily become trapped in the circuitry of our subcortical brain. Prolonged severe stress
eventually erodes our sense of self which may begin to feel absent, lost or broken. This is post-traumatic stress disorder marked by dissociation from many of our most important feelings. We know that now more than ever, we need to act decisively with courage, creativity and clarity. Yet we feel numb, paralyzed by our fears. How can we stop feeling so stuck? We become more alive when we reclaim the time and space to feel our fears outside of survival mode. Fearʼs alchemy is transformed by light. Despite the anxieties of our collective despair, we can successfully struggle towards an insight and wisdom that knows that our identity is so much greater than the sum of our fears.