WHAT HAPPENS OUTSIDE, HAPPENS INSIDE -- WHAT HAPPENS INSIDE, HAPPENS OUTSIDE
01.02.25 | By Andrea Fajardo
This year I have felt more intensely the chaos and tension in the polarities, through different personal and world contexts. Hopelessness, anger, fear, helplessness and pain have been part of the emotions that have touched my shore and this has moved me to make contact with parts of myself that I did not yet know. My intention is not to enunciate a political vision or name what is right or wrong, I want to bring curiosity to how external events impact us and what we are choosing to do with that impact, to open the door to observe the network that is constantly being weaved between internal and external realities.
I don't know if this resonates with you, but when I see the news exposing images of war, I tend to feel overwhelmed and sometimes I don't feel anything. When I see people who are in places of power, exercising it from imbalance, oppression, marginalization and fear, I feel anger, pain and hopelessness. And when I witness how nature strongly seeks to send us powerful messages, I feel anguish, shame and sorrow. These are experiences that I dare say, touch all of us, in one way or another. What I have noticed both in my work with my clients and in my social contexts, is that I recurrently find a tendency to connect with one of these two positions (I want to clarify that they are not the only ones, in order to keep the message concise, I have chosen the ones that from my shore are most prevalent): insensitivity (I don't feel anything, this is not with me, conflicts or natural disasters are happening in another country, this does not touch me) or helplessness with hopelessness (this is bigger than me, there is nothing I can do individually to change this).
If you identify with insensitivity, I hear you. Not feeling is one of the most powerful strategies to protect ourselves from what can be perceived as unsustainable for our body and our heart. Being born and growing up in a country where the armed conflict, the daily violence in the streets and at homes are part of the daily news, for a long time was very overwhelming and exhausting for me. I felt distant from that reality and like a small percentage of people in my home country, my place of privilege gave me the option to look at the chaos from above, so as not to let myself be touched. "This is not with me, I live in the city, this does not happen to me, it happens to others..." Until I left Colombia and the distance gave me the possibility of realizing that the position that both I and many others had chosen was to desensitize ourselves to the terror and deep pain that comes with living in a territory that has been in conflict for centuries. Desensitizing is an individual and collective strategy.
If you identify with helplessness and hopelessness, I hear you too. Seeing people leading from fear and whose policies favor separation and hatred ("this is acceptable, this is not, you are acceptable, you are not") moves me so much, that I have felt small, isolated, angry and without resources. What can I do in the face of a world power, or a group of people who have millions and millions of dollars in their account? Faced with these questions, on many occasions I have chosen to do nothing, including avoiding feeling the emotions that appear in me when I connect with these events.
Recently, I brought this to supervision, with the aim to find resources and a broader look to accompany. He asked me some questions that stayed with me and I want to share them with you: what do these leaders evoke in you?, what is your impulse?, do you have any protests or do you feel paralyzed?, what are the images you have of power? I began to give space to those questions, which not only connected me with how I have usually connected with the authority figures in my life, but in what way I am connecting with my own creative power and what is in the way to connect with it, with my own resources.
This is deep, complex, and has more layers than I can name now. When we approach what happens in the collective from our individuality, it can be deeply overwhelming, we are not the collective, but we are part of it. We are born connected to someone and this for me is without a doubt the most explicit and beautiful metaphor of how we are connected to each other.
For now, I would like to invite you to reflect through these questions: If you are one of those who do not feel anything or have the firm belief that the chaos of the world has nothing to do with you, what do you think would happen if you dared to let yourself be touched? If you instead feel paralyzed, helpless, and/or hopeless, what do you imagine you would do if you could connect with your gifts and power? Finally, how willing are we to put aside judgments and observe in ourselves the shadows or darkness that we see outside? Can you imagine if the people around you started to reflect on these questions and share them with the people they know, what would be the effect?
I don't have all the answers or all the truth, what I do firmly believe in is that each of us co-create the reality we live outside and that is intrinsically related to our inner reality. So, in what way are you/we contributing to the external reality that accompanies us?