When Numbness Calls, Choose to Feel

My heart is hurting. A lot. The last time this happened, I was on day five of a weeklong meditation retreat. The confusion, sadness, anger, pain were frighteningly palpable within the clarity of deep practice. It feels like I’m right back there now.

My heart is hurting. I just got back from a dear friend’s place, but sleep feels far off, so much so that it was either coming here to write or the meditation cushion. Having sat a lot today, I chose here. But I’m having a hard time writing anything but the pain.

“Don’t dissociate. Feel your heart. Don’t turn away from its pain.”

Pain. Pain for so many people, myself included. Fear of the cruelty and what it will mean for the minds, bodies, and hearts of so many people I love, so many people I feel connected to.

Anger. Anger at everything that led us here, the lack of addressing the real issues that real people face, the corporatism that prioritizes profit over people, the blindness of the impact of our actions in the Middle East and in so many places across the globe.

Fear. At what this could mean, at how much more fabric of our national and global society will be torn to shreds. Of what depths of violence and war are now imminently possible. Of what it means for our climate, our future, our lives.

What lies ahead will be tragic. Amidst it all, all I know for sure is the truth of feeling and the necessity to honor it.

So often, over these past few days and months, I’ve heard the word “dissociate”. “I need to dissociate from my feelings.” “I’m so nervous I need to dissociate.” “Come to the dance and dissociate party!”

Tonight, as the results became clear at the watch party I was at, I heard a man I didn’t know say, “Well, I guess the silver lining is that I can ignore the world and focus on my self care.”

I don’t judge — fresh off another weeklong meditate retreat, I see so clearly the desire to go “inward”in a way that’s really about dissociation and distraction. To separate myself from feeling the big things like election anxiety and the vulnerability of my work. From feeling the small things, the everyday moments of boredom and body discomfort.

We are a dissociated, distracted people, and it is part of what led us here. I have no logic for this – it’s a feeling, hunch, intuition. In almost every corner of my life, I feel the way I and seemingly everyone around me is constantly avoiding, constantly not feeling our hearts.

But these hearts contain our whole lives. Dissociation always leads us to numbness. If we don’t feel our sadness, pain, and anger, we don’t feel our joys.

In the coming months and years, people will experience violence, cruelty, and harm. For so many of the people in so many corners of my life, this harm will be far away. Life will continue almost as normal. Parties, Burning Man, tech jobs, material comfort.

In so many other corners, the oppression will come, and swiftly. Jobs will be lost, medical care will be withheld, violence will be encountered and endured.

Shortly after the last time this happened in December 2016, when I was home in Milpitas, California, a Trump-stickered truck pulled up alongside me while on a run, shouted a racist epithet, and drove off. I still remember the moment right before it happened, the fear of wondering what was going to emerge from the truck — if it was just going to be words. I know – so clearly – that this small, insignificant incident is the tip of the iceberg of what my queer, trans, black, female, Arab and Muslim friends (and so, so many others) will face on a regular basis.

I have one plea amidst it all, for myself and anyone who cares to listen: don’t dissociate. Feel your heart. Don’t turn away from its pain.

If we are to build solidarity, it starts with our hearts. If we retreat into the comforts we can afford and numb ourselves to the world around us, this will get worse.

Because ultimately, this is not about the orange man. This is about our numbness, our dissociation, our blind inertia to stay within the seeming comfort of the ignorance of our bodies and hearts.

We are not feeling our lives. We are not feeling the heartbreak of climate change. Of the poverty all around us. Of the stories we read in the news about the innocent people dying all over the world and in our very country through the violence of law enforcement, the healthcare system, the economy, and so on.

How often do I walk by the person living on the street and feel nothing? Each time, I implore myself to feel, to practice more, to wake up. And yet it’s never enough, I always have more to give.

I can hear you saying it’s too much. We have been so entranced by a world that tells us we’re overwhelmed. That we need to shrink our lives, dissociate, and just try to have fun and get by. Focus on ourselves, take mental health breaks from the news, do “self care”.

Of course we must take care of ourselves — but numbness, dissociation, and distraction are not care. This is not just a lie from a capitalist, individualistic society. It’s more fundamental than that. It’s denying gravity, fooling us into thinking up is down. Caring for ourselves involves caring about each other. This is, as far as I can tell, our natural state of being, simply how we’re wired.

The countless ways we deny this basic truth are like a dam on what should be a free flowing river. From the swamps this dam creates come swamp creatures like the orange man. This insidious being is as much a creature of our own dissociation as some evil, ignorant other voting the wrong way in red states.

Don’t dissociate. You and I can make this commitment, and to be fully human right now requires nothing less than this impossible aspiration. Nothing is going to get better. Technology will drive further unemployment and inequality. More people will lose healthcare, be denied justice, live increasingly bleak lives.

The wealthy will claim more and more of our precious resources for themselves, and this will continue to bring out the most violent and cruel instincts in so many. Our fragile environment will continue to be less and less able to support human life.

In her duology (trilogy except only two books) Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, radical black feminist and science fiction fairy godmother Octavia Butler tells of the a future world in which society is increasingly organized into haves and have-nots. There are small pockets of gated communities with those who can continue to consume and live comfortable individual lives, and a violent, brutish rest of society fighting for the precious few jobs, clean water, and resources left (usually by finding ways to serve the rich and enforce their police state).

In her books, written in the late 1990s, a white nationalist president comes to power in the 2032 election literally promising to “make America great again”. In 2016, we were first 16 years ahead of schedule. Now, once again, we’re back in that place.

The changes we must make if we are not to keep going down this doomed path are radical, unimaginable, impossible in our current minds and world.

The only way out, as far as I can tell, is to start feeling, to embrace the big and little heartbreaks that are present and lie ahead. Without this, we lack the strength, courage, and, ironically, joy to come together in the ways this moment asks us to do.

I write this for me more than you, but it felt necessary to say out loud. The more we dissociate, the worse it gets. Please — above all else — use this moment as motivation to return to our hearts, not run from them.

This article was originally published on Ravi Mishra’s blog Practicing Out Loud.