Healing in the Age of Individualism

After decades of working with individuals to facilitate change, I understand that healing must happen at the collective level before deeply wounded individuals can sustain consciousness transformation.

That’s why most addicts relapse right out of residential. Not because the treatment program didn’t work or because the addict is weak, but because our modern world has failed our soul. Our culture does not provide us with life-sustaining survivable environments for free like the rest of nature enjoys.

We must pay to live. As if owing a debt for being born a human being.

Hmm…wonder where I’ve heard that myth before.

Wait, where am I going here? That’s right, addiction…

Addictive behavior is often equated to insanity in that it is repeating the same behavior hoping for different results time after time.

I say insanity is expecting humans to be able or even want to live in this world without some kind of crutch.

A world where admitting vulnerability, frailty, and even a differing opinion can get you institutionalized against your will. Doubly so if you are a woman.

Even if you aren’t locked up, speaking out against anything too often and too loudly will see you pathologized and zombified with medication you had to sell your house and remaining shriveled eggs to buy.

It’s hard to want to be present in a world where growth is stagnated because fear is the only motivator left.

Where life expectancies of ALL THINGS are in decline, despite technological and scientific advances that should have us all living to 150 by now.

Who’s insane here?

Patriarchy and capitalism, the two systems we rely upon for survival, are at their core against the very interest of life itself.

They are the twin towers of systemic oppression, subjugation, rape, and desecration of this planet and all of its inhabitants.

These systems have been anthropomorphized into archetypal energies themselves. I think you’d be hard-pressed to find many Americans not carrying systemic toxicity in their psychic archives.

Understanding that we’ve been blind accomplices in self-imposed death matrices can be life-shattering. That awareness itself can make one want to vomit up the truth pill and down several Ativan instead.

Here’s a thought experiment for you. Imagine the world waking up tomorrow with irrefutable proof that animals, ALL animals, have souls.

That overnight, as a collective, we agreed animals are sensitive conscious beings with emotional depths equal to and sometimes vastly greater than ours.

That the hierarchy between man and beast was no longer based in intelligence, consciousness or the idea of a “soul.”

Would that make eating veal the moral equivalent of carving up a human infant? Seems like it would. We may as well open season on Mr. and Mrs. Jones because they run slower and are easier to shoot than the doe in the brush.

As someone who knows that animals have souls, I believe their emotional and spiritual lives are just as rich and nuanced as ours. To me, a human is a mammal is a bird is a crustacean. If I can’t get myself to take its life, I’m not going to use someone else to do it just so I can eat a cheeseburger.

While this works for some, I’m not sure the mass psyche could withstand that level of cognitive dissonance. It’s just too great a change en masse to our fundamental construct of reality. Chaos would ensue.

It might plunge human consciousness right back into the dark ages when we apparently forgot everything that mattered or was real.

The thing is, it takes courage and energy to embark on a trans-generational, interdimensional, quantum healing journey. It also helps to have passion and purpose, which is often found on the other side of grief and loss.

Two things most humans struggle greatly to move through.

Most people will find it too much bother, knowing it’s easier to pop a pill or snort a line. And that’s completely understandable.

It’s exhausting enough just to keep your cool in traffic most days and we are all very, very tired. Again, remember the definition of insanity.

So we muzzle ourselves with wine and Botox and binge-everything-everything.

I doubt I will witness consciousness transformation on a global scale in my lifetime. Definitely not with our current level of collective awareness, not to mention my waning years.

BUT.

I see more sparks every day. The beginning of the inferno reflected in the eyes and words of those around me.

These are not my college and law school compatriots waxing on about all the changes they were going to make, you know, from the inside.

Not the same rubes toiling in unscrupulous structures and systems for decades only to find they didn’t change anything and their lifecycle is almost complete.

We have learned the importance of keeping good company, especially with ourselves. We understand the pain we cause each other when we say we “don’t like women.”

We no longer sacrifice our sisters for the hollow validation of the male gaze.

As the years fall away, so do the masks that kept us separate and alone in a psychotic frenzy to compete and conform.

We know that “women’s work” was always harder and really does take a village.

And we decide that there’s no longer space in our town square for a pyre.

© Kelley Murphy, 2023.

Thank you so much for reading! xo

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