Our Great Reset
How often do we give ourselves permission to reset our lives? If you’re like me, the idea of wiping out all of the human habits that aren’t so healthy, but often necessary to survive being, well, human, is appealing. Unfortunately, the reality of doing so is not so clear or easy.
Our human journeys often contain turmoil and dis-ease that rests beyond our control. Collapsing economies, deteriorating immune systems, dangerous political regimes, evaporating job markets, toxicity laden food systems, deregulated environmental policies, dangerous technologies unleashed on the population at scale, violence and hatred publicly celebrated and promoted to positions of power, martyrs made of promoters of hatred for profit — on and on it goes. A never ending cycle of turmoil thrown at our fragile nervous systems on a perpetual basis.
How do our bodies react to such ongoing abuse? Not well.
I was chatting with a neighbor at the dog park last night and she mentioned the perpetual state of stress she’s in and her autoimmune issues that suddenly surfaced the past year or so. We’re close to the same age. Our bodies are transitioning into our Wise Woman phase in life and doing so under one of the most dangerous times in modern history in a country hell bent on suicide to benefit the ruling class. Certain elements of our stress responses are within our grasp to control. Not eating trigger foods that stress our immune systems or avoiding toxic personal relationships that cause us to spiral are all elements of our lives we can mitigate. Embracing wisdom traditions designed to regulate the nervous system are within our control.
But ALL of the other elements I listed above, and more, are far beyond our ability to control. All we can do is mitigate our response to those situations, not change the situation itself. I saw a very disturbing slogan written on the sidewalk outside my apartment complex today as a tribute to a recent violent KOL’s death who shall go unnamed in this article. The name is irrelevant, just as the person was in my life.
What is relevant is the fact that someone, in the dead of night, decided to publicly create this tribute in a neighborhood where that type of rhetoric has no place. What is relevant is the fact that this situation is being weaponized to “eliminate” dissent, kindness and diversity by an entire class of people who choose violence and ignorance as their way of functioning in this world.
My nervous system didn’t respond to that tribute on the sidewalk. My logical mind did. My immediate thought was “we’re fucked”, there’s no solution at this point to reset a society that pays tribute to violence in the dark of night. There’s only the passing of the virus through the entire system and hoping the immune system of society can hold onto just enough of itself to create an immunity to this cancer of hate.
We need a giant reset.
Just like a wildfire, I know in my logical mind that a system this far gone has to reset itself by burning to the ground. I know in my heart that I am now going to be living through the burn, not just speculating or documenting it as I did in my days as a journalist. I now will have to do the hard work of controlling my nervous system during the burn.
And that type of work is a day to day, hour to hour, minute to minute endeavor. One must deploy self awareness to their mental and physical triggers. One must have a toolkit of practices that require nothing, no fancy studios or expensive yoga mats and no aspects of space of privilege to deploy. Just breath and somatic movement on the fly. We must embody these tools to the point that we can regulate our nervous systems in real time as conflict arises around us. Because it will, and it’s everywhere— by design.
As we all travel through this great reset, we might as well also embrace the reset of our own selves. Return to our roots as a human, embrace our communities again, restore healthy diets and tap into local food systems, limit our exposure to weaponized algorithms doing the dirty work of the oligarchs, close our screens and open our books, spend time IRL with people who nourish us and help us co-regulate, keep our heads down and do the hard work of deploying empathy and kindness with boundaries and deliberation.
We are all going through the Great Reset, whether we want to or not. My best advice, and my own personal plan, is stepping into these chaotic whirlwinds with awareness and without bypassing. Once that acceptance has truly occurred (and it takes time, so give yourself that grace) find a way to use the situation beyond your control to reset an aspect of your life you’ve been wanting to revamp but never had the opportunity or time to do so.
For example, this past summer has been a nightmare on my bank accounts and my immune system. Mystery food allergies are wreaking havoc and I don’t have the budget or health insurance (not that insurance would help because that system is so broken) to deal with it all. I also have been removed from the job market and am floating in a place of perpetual “wtf?”. So, about 45 days ago, I just ran out of fucks to give, and it was a relief. I’ve been presented with the opportunity to reset my diet, my cooking habits, strip my lifestyle down to the bare bones and get very clear and focused on what I actually want. I’ve restored my creative writing rituals I thought I lost during my stint in corporate America. I created alternative banking systems to the toxic centralized system I’d been using to convert crypto to USD and created a dual system of fiat to bitcoin flow that gives me peace of mind. I lost weight since I can’t really eat anything and returned to a completely clean and from scratch diet. I’ve slowly rebuilt a client business that I can embrace with joy that leaves time for creating art again and have a few amazing souls who are stepping into my world to work with me.
My giant reset has forced me to exit the systems of extraction with deliberation and intention. And forced me to remove the fear of a system that was designed to destroy everyone like me. A fear that I’d not really possessed until I stepped into the colonizing systems of corporate America. It will take more than late stage capitalism to destroy this Tantrika yogi.
If we all undergo our own versions of transformation as society hits the giant reset button at the end of a gun, maybe we’ll come out on the other side as a people who found what was lost long ago. And maybe in doing so, we’ll find a way to remove the deep separation that is forcing this reset and live again as a society that looks out for one another, stranger and friend alike, and who has finally addressed the trauma of empire that placed us at such a precipice.
