I won’t be the only person who cried while watching and listening to Greta Thunberg’s impassioned speech at the UN climate summit in New York this week.
Everything she said is right. My heart surged as I watched and listened to her wisely attuned heart and voice speak to us – connect with us – with a passion and an absolute determination that we must hear.
We have all been in denial for so long now about the state we’re in as we stagger towards our global rock-bottom.
We’re practically sitting in the gutter with vomit down our fronts, still saying ‘there’s nothing wrong. I’m fine. Everything’s ok. Leave me alone’.
But Greta shouts at us. We’re not fine! Look what you’ve done to us! We don’t quite know where to start as we begin to feel shame for the damage we’ve done, but we’re finally starting to listen, hear and act as we’re propped up, groaning towards recovery.
She ‘tells it like it is’. Like the scapegoat in a dysfunctional family. She speaks the truth. She allows her feelings and emotions to be present. She expressed her anger at having to do this! She is a child who believes she should be living a different life – with choices. An education. A life. Dreams.
She was articulate. Eloquent. Heartfelt. She did not sound ‘crazy’ as the other scapegoats – men, women or children who have been quickly labelled (and written-off) in the past when they dare to speak their truth among the deny-ers.
Perhaps the profile of The Scapegoat is finally changing and evolving too? I sincerely hope so.
Greta is the earth’s gift right now. And what a presence she is making.
I felt a surge of excitement, admiration and joy at watching and hearing her speak. She is bold. Unafraid of her feelings spilling out onto the microphone for the world to hear.
Go Greta! You have been braver than I.
But we must be careful not to over-burden, idolise or just praise this child for her public-speaking ability – and her eloquence about the disastrous state we are in. She is our Perfect Messenger and Change-Maker. But we must not abandon her in her admirable leadership.
We must work with her. Love her. Support her. Learn from her and show gratitude for the gifts she brings and so boldly shares with the world to ignite change.
She was even able to express how she refuses to believe our generation is evil!
Amazingly powerful.
She is what the world needs now. And it really is love, sweet love.
This is all an absolutely necessary part of our evolution.
I truly believe this is all a necessary part of our Collective journey.
We have gotten into this mess because so many of us haven’t yet been able to tolerate our own or each others’ personal feelings or express them in the world.
Hearing Greta makes me think about my own individual journey from denial into literally ‘waking up’. And until more of us do this ‘work’ – on ourselves – and with each other, we will stay asleep, rolling out of bed each morning onto a manufactured conveyor belt of ‘life’ which bears little resemblance to what was really intended for us.
Then rolling back into bed each night and doing the whole Groundhog Day thing over and over again until we ‘die’.
Except of course, as we are all made of energy, the energy does not ‘die’. It just gets changed. And the next generation brings with it all that unresolved pain, grief and suffering – to ‘do it all again’ until we learn. Until we truly transform that energy into something new.
We have all been addicts.
Or if we stay true to the 12 Step philosophy of addiction, we always will be addicts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve-step_program
For centuries humanity has sought comfort from our inevitable pain and suffering – from our grief and losses – in all the ‘wrong’ places. We have tried to control it all – to dominate it, reject inter-dependence and take care of ourselves alone (calling it independence). We have sublimated in unhealthy ways.
These things are all reactions against actually feeling and sharing our feelings with each other. We’ve done it through unnecessary wars, harming each other, killing and fighting each other for control and power, when all the while, we haven’t noticed that our home (the earth) has been burning down around us.
It’s our repressed sorrow, anger and pain. We need to feel it all. Our collective grief and sorrow.
So, in our ‘reaction’ to all this pain, we tried to heal. To create security. To feel better. We built our own mini-empires, gathering ‘stuff’. Being ‘independent’. Looking after our own needs, often at the expense of The Collective needs. We cut ourselves off from other people’s pain – because we’re feeling better now, right? Now that we have ‘our stuff’ to protect us from ‘all that’.
It doesn’t work for us as individuals, for communities and it doesn’t work for the earth. It was just our way of coping with all the pain.
Surprise! Our pain never goes away. It’s just been covered up. It’s like good make-up spread over the weeping skin we try to hide. Eventually, it starts to seep through. It starts to look and feel bad. Until everybody else can see it too and we must take the make-up off and have a look. Face it as it is.
When we dare to look at what’s underneath the mask, we see the hidden scars, the pain, the sorrow – the mistakenly named ‘ugly’ parts of ourselves.
We must let our pain and suffering parts be here. It’s time to face it. To look at ourselves as we are. And see that we are not whole without it.
It’s only when we see our dysfunctional ways-of-living for what they truly are (our mass consumerism, our fake independence and our addictive behaviours) that we can finally face reality and allow real change to emerge.
We have stuffed ourselves silly with all the things we could ‘get’ with money, power and dominance which has created a mass illusion of health and safety.
We built empires to protect us from feeling our pain (even our own individual empires – the big house, the 6-figure-business, the flashy car – fill in your own blank here).
But all we’ve done is try to self-soothe – like babies in the cot with an absent, wayward or unavailable mother, who is busy trying to soothe her own pain.
It hasn’t worked. We must take responsibility, but we must also have compassion for ourselves and each other as we heal. Forever berating can do further harm, which we can ill afford at this time.
We need to mother ourselves and each other differently. We need to hold ourselves. Love ourselves. And love each other in new and different ways.
We need to love the earth. She has felt our unconscious rage and pain for too long now. And she no longer has the capacity to hold it.
Just like any other addict, we wanted more. More of the ‘stuff’ we thought would make us feel better. We never felt satiated. And having more and more leads to needing more and more and more.
And with that, comes a greater dumbing down. With less and less ability to feel the pain we are secretly hiding beneath.
But now the whole earth is in pain. Our earth is experiencing exactly what we experience individually when we gorge unhealthily on…(fill in your blank). Or more likely she is holding up the mirror to us all.
If we keep ignoring our pain – whether physical, mental or emotional – eventually, it catches up with us.
We fall. We have an accident. We hurt. We become ill. Dis-ease seeks us out and moves in, taking up residence in our bodies, minds and hearts.
This, I believe is the law of nature. A law we have tried to conquer. But we will not. It will always bring us sharply back into line. Into equilibrium.
This is what I believe. Why? Well, that’s probably for another article.
I find myself having too much to say!
But perhaps that, too is okay.
Thank you, https://www.facebook.com/gretathunbergsweden/ for allowing us all to speak up. To speak more of our truth. For the earth. For each other. For our future. Together.
Your Authentic Life Matters! www.slowcoachsarah.co.uk