Your capacity to feel your most painful emotional triggers freely with a fully open, vulnerable heart (in increasingly difficult situations) is directly correlated with your capacity for compassion, courage and radical transformation of your psyche required for true change in our polarized world.

Sometimes, this will feel like standing in an elevator and facing the other direction, driven by a faith-like zeal to remain in the discomfort of your authenticity and truth while others cave into numbing out, distraction and overcompensation in effort to distance themselves from the collective pain-body.

Doubts will frequently and convincingly gnaw at your mind to follow suit with everyone else (sometimes to the brink of genuine overwhelm), but the willingness to stay with what is real with gentle, deep humility and spaciousness - to honor your limits, while remaining at your edge - will gradually integrate, heal and transmute not only your unconscious - but the collective unconscious shadow. These are the shadows that run underneath the 'just the way things are' mentality that is all too tempting to buy into.

This is not to judge this pain body in others, afterall, it lives in us. And we feel it deeply with warmth and understanding. But it is to do the necessary work of embodiment and integration on an ongoing, moment to moment basis. It is to choose to hold the torch of authenticity and love in front of us in the dark cave of collective numbing out, bullshittery and disconnection.