Courage to Change

Humanity suffered a huge trauma from the pandemic. 

Young people (at least in America) are not emotionally equipped to cope or heal from this trauma.

In the summer of 2020 we saw riots across the US.  Opiate overdose deaths increased 41%.  A year later, a family member became suicidal, requiring intensive mental health treatment. 

When a person gets upset (angry, jealous, judgmental – insert emotion) the prefrontal cortex is flooded with adrenaline and cortisol.  When that happens, cognitive ability shuts down.  These stress hormones hijack our nervous system and we get stuck in a state of fight or flight.   

I know this. And yet there are times when my emotion gets so big that I can’t even recognize that I’m in full-on flight or fight mode.  I’m having an out-of-body experience.  Yelling and sniping things I don’t mean.  And I’m a grown-up, with years of emotional and spiritual practice under my belt. 

There are Boomers and X’ers who are unaware of the physiological response to stress.  And our kids, the Millenials, and GenZ? Most have no idea. 

This is why social activism surged during the pandemic. A generation of people were told that if they don’t like the world they’re living in they can change it. What they weren’t told was that the only thing a person can change is him or herself. 

A lot of what we’re seeing in our society today, whether it’s cancel-culture or gender fluidity, is a result of individuals trying to change the people around them instead of focusing on what is within.  When it doesn’t work then the individual breaks.  We have a generation of broken people. These broken people are fighting “them.” I wish they could see that there is no “them” there is only us. 

Consider the words of Gandhi:

“We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.”

~ Mahatma Gandhi