What a shocker year the world has had for empathy and kindness. Many, many people seem hell-bent on proving everyone else wrong and picking fights on Facebook. Seriously? This is how people want to spend their time?
In this crazy time courtesy is often mistaken for flirting, kindness is confused with weakness.
People have forgotten how to communicate. There’s a whole lot of CAPS LOCK ON going on. What’s so hard about ‘do unto others’? Everyone wants to be heard and seen but who is listening?
This year the #MeToo movement evolved and mutated numerous times and other movements like #TimesUp bloomed, but I learned this year that not everyone wants men and women to have equal opportunities. Some want women to have more, to make up for the last few thousand years of active and passive oppression. Some want women to go back to the kitchen, barefoot and with no bodily autonomy. It boggles my mind that some women want to go back to what I would call the bad ol’ days too.
And I learned this year, that there is a huge backlash brewing against social media after revelations of Facebook’s involvement in fake news and the US elections. People are destroying their psychological health with fucking social media! But just as the artists of Romanticism painted bucolic scenes from nature, heroic images from mythology and emotion in reaction to the Industrial Revolution, I think people are now craving connection and a return to nature. More and more people are buying their food mindfully, often at farmer’s markets. Demand for yoga, meditation and mindfulness instruction has boomed. People want REAL.
We MUST learn to communicate with each other. Listen to understand. Speak to be understood. We need to put down the phones and take up the eye contact. We need to sit across from each other and listen and be open to the other person CHANGING US. Before it’s too late.
I rabbit on about the evolution of consciousness and I’d dearly love to talk about this with others, to #findtheothers. If you’re keen, please read the attached article and let me know what you think!
http://www.gaiamind.org/Gebser.html
Integral Consciousness once we develop it, even get just a glimpse, we’re able to understand the reasons why we thought the way we did in the other stages.
It follows then that it becomes easier to allow people in the other stages to have their say, to see the world from another perspective without trying to convince them otherwise. Understanding where we’ve come from helps us not only on our way but makes us guides for our friends too.
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