THE BREAD & THE CIRCUS
In this essay, Misti shares some basics on psychological warfare and how to steady your mind and heart to keep going and believing in better days.
There’s a reason your head is swimming, you’re more anxious and nauseated and feeling a deep desire to space out and just pull the covers over your head.
It’s called “Cognitive Bottleneck.”
With the amount of rapid fire change/disruption that is occurring around us, you simply cannot process it effectively. No one can and that is the point. This technique is used intentionally. But did you know it is a well known psychological weapon often called shock doctrine? The term "shock doctrine" was coined by Naomi Klein, a Canadian author and activist, in her 2007 book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.
It is used to strategically and systemically change only a few major things under a mountain of other major/minor (renaming an ocean, stuff like that) and also changing things that you will never even know were changed. Meanwhile making some very important changes with little to no resistance due to the fact everyone’s… head is swimming, you’re more anxious and nauseated and feeling a deep desire to space out and just pull the covers over your head. Get it?
Let’s zoom out even further. The media (social included) is a very important part of this intentional war on your psyche. Played into the hands of every person who can read and write in the world. We are all participating in this war. But some are unknowingly doing so. Some think they are winning, while others feel lost, and many, in fact, are underground preparing for the worst of it.
My work for 20 plus years has been guiding folks who are repairing their own broken belief systems and liberating themselves from their self-made prisons. In this changed time of today, I see that much of this work is now spilling over into the areas of broken cultural, economic, political, and educational systems - whole SYSTEMS of people needing a breakthrough. Systems which will ultimately break free BUT can it be done with little or lessened collateral damages?
I believe it can.
As a start, I’m going to share with you what I’ve learned in these last few weeks as a way to steady myself and my family in the face of cognitive overload. I hope it helps and I hope we continue this dialog as we move along through it. By implementing micro-changes that at the right tipping point have macro level impact. Otherwise we’re all just scattered ants who are running directionless from the flood of information - only to drown in it. So, grab a coffee and your life-vest while I dive into a new way to approach the oceans of chaos and more importantly, how take your damn power back, float and eventually rise up again.
Daily meditation/energy alignment
Let me start with the most important aspect of your resistance. Your mind. I’ll be direct here, if you are not meditating every single day for at least 15 minutes - NOTHING (literally nothing) you do to resist, help, fight, advocate or protest will be potent enough energetically to truly matter. This is a time of harnessed intentional power. Not just effort but ALIGNED effort. Those who will agree have utilized the power of mindful, intentional, and aligned actions. Those who scoff at this directive have not yet experienced this and now have a seriously world-defining choice to make. If you find yourself in the “not sure camp” then reach out to me and let’s talk more about this, given just a little of your attention, I promise to make a difference in the ways you may view mindfulness as a tool.
Choose TWO areas and take an action step.
My second piece of advice is to get focused on TWO areas you are already connected to and take one action step for each one, right now.
For me, I have three daughters and I am a woman. Therefore, reproductive rights are at the tippy top of my list. My action step was to order 6 boxes of emergency contraception that have a shelf life of 3 years, placed securely in the medicine cabinet. JUST IN CASE they or someone close to them needs it. Because needing it does not always mean you had a CHOSEN sexual encounter - no. Statistics in the US report 1 in 3 women experience some form of contact sexual violence during their lifetime. These are reported cases and do not include non-reported cases, I will leave you to math out that piece, but it’s less than 1 in 3. I have chosen to protect OUR right to choose in this actionable way.
The second area that I am passionate about supporting is the LGBTQIA community. I have both personal and community connections to every aspect of human rights in this regard. I have worked in many circles helping others finally live in their own truth and authenticity, to forgive and heal the trauma that comes from enormous hate and rejection. I have family members who are within the Pride+ circle. Now, more than any other time in history, we are making political decisions about what constitutes humanity and what does not. What constitutes love and what does not. And what constitutes marriage and what does not. These are all extremely intimate choices we make as absolute sovereign beings. Choices that are so sacred, no government can really touch them - but they try. Every effort is made to dehumanize and over-power this sovereignty. My actionable step is to help my husband Jason produce a charitable songwriter show to benefit a local support system called Wilco Iris. We intend to give them not only a stage for support but our hearts to listen and care about what they are going through right now, showing that supporting each other is the decency we all deserve.
My last suggestion is inspired by this quote:
Make a weakness a new strength, learn about something important in the world. And if you can, reconsider your role as a commercial consumer.
Learn something brand new. Keep it simple, it can be an article, a book, a podcast, whatever. But let it expand your knowledge in a way that will serve our world. No one is keeping score, but bonus points if it is something you wouldn’t consider a real strength. For me, that is math and numbers. If someone spoke about economics (beyond the basics) I would probably glaze over - but in this time of change and upheaval I know economics has a level of gravity and certainty to it that one cannot simply argue based on opinion. It’s concrete and the more we understand the less we are blinded by obedience. The reason for 99% of the worlds pain is caused by our beliefs about money, success and who has the biggest pie. This is changing over the next few years and we will begin to see a new form of currency that will birth an entirely new economical belief system. Don’t believe me. Look to the experts.
As my action step here, I started listening to a global economist and I have found it to be truly eye-opening. His name is Richard Wolff and I highly recommend his expertise both historically and predictive regarding the worlds economics outlook. I am hooked and I have Jason hooked as well. We are even listening to Richard’s videos on the way to school in the mornings so our children can speak intelligently on global economics. It’s powerful AND it has influenced my own circulation of personal economics as well. In addition to some wise investments, I have for many years I have rolled back our families dependance on big box commercialism. We primarily buy second hand in person (thrifted) and online (marketplace) whenever possible. We try to look for local alternatives to items we buy on Amazon and big stores. We also get a large part of our weekly groceries from Misfits market (a wholesaler of rejected organic items; mostly over produced items, upside down labels and ugly produce - perfectly good items that without this service would go into the trash).
These are not tactics for only saving money as much as it is about over-consumption and over-production in commerce as a whole.
What do these steps have to do with the bread & circus? A lot. The point of this essay is to help you steady your heart and mind as the foundation for making continued choices going forward. Over and over again. Regardless of political preferences or how you voted. We are all making choices each day. Personal choices. Sovereign choices. All in the face of a Big Top circus atmosphere. To understand how shock and awe tactics fool you into thinking you must surrender, give up and stop being you. But you cannot, you cannot stop evolving. We must keep going and keep choosing the next right things for us and for each other.
The next time you’re feeling wobbly, come back to these steps and willfully focus on doing as much good as you can in your sphere of the world. It matters, no matter how small and incremental. Keep going.