QUESTION: Dear Abdi, thank you for your guidance in the last podcast episode you shared. I am always humbled by the reminder to stick with shadow work and inner inquiry.

Something I've been sitting with lately is the onslaught of emotions people my age seem to feel about the current ecological collapse. I can pinpoint several friends in my life (myself included) who feel tremendous grief when stopping to be present and connecting with the current predicament of the Earth. In some way, I find it comforting to know that we are willing to be still and feel these emotions (I also find it a bit funny how we sometimes “meditate" by just crying for an hour or two).

I wonder what tools or pointers you might have encountered in your many years of practice as a healer that may be useful as we face this issue that seems so insurmountable and can make us feel so powerless.

ANSWER: I am happy that you found the material helpful, what I talked about in that podcast episode also applies to your question.

There are so many levels to examine here. First and most obvious, the human behavior that has led to this ecological collapse is part and parcel of the greed and selfishness that arises from being disconnected internally. We feel empty when we have forgotten our internal compass. All the consumption that leads to outer destruction is directly connected to the attempt to fill this void. And like drinking salt water to quench thirst - it just leads to more thirst. So we need to address this disconnection and from that place take whatever action we feel called to.

Grief is the proper response to seeing all the not so slow-motion mayhem that is taking place on this planet. Honoring that grief is important business and sitting with it as well as feeling it is a part of the process. Being present in the moment with what is - is meditation. So of course your crying is meditation: you are being present with what is in your heart. It is freeing to not be wearing masks or making stories about reality and facing it fully instead.

At the same time, it is important to not just stop there. Powerlessness and helplessness are a part of life. Most of the ego's attempts at "mobilizing" and feeling powerful (whether it be the chase for fame, power, money, etc.) is to mask these feelings. When a certain level of internal maturity is reached, we stop identification with such external-fortifying behaviors and pay attention to the garden inside. At the end of the day, we are all moving furniture on the Titanic until we face our predicament. In my experience, we can not live life fully until we realize our impermanence.

Is your grief only about the environment or also about your own impermanence? Sit with that. We can all do our part for our Mother by becoming more conscious, consuming less, being more internally focused, and having an inner relationship. When we are connected with our inner compass, we will be guided in how best to mobilize in the healing of our planet. But what about the fact that we are here for such a brief time? The denial of our own death is the ego’s biggest motivator to stay mobilized. The gift of living in such a precarious time environmentally is that it forces us to face mortality. Do realize that our whole culture is based on the denial of this fact. From our obsession with being youthful and not aging to the fact that we dress up and apply makeup to the deceased points to this huge denial of and repulsion to the natural order.

This full-on extinction cycle is the sixth in what we understand of our natural history. Life carries on, whether our species and all the others we have destroyed with our greed are here or not. Yes, we humans can be a bunch of knuckleheads and destroy everything around us. But there is so much beauty and love amongst the pain on this plane as well. What and where is your joy? How do you reach it in your daily life? Where are you being a zombie and what can you do to change that? How would you be living differently if there was no environmental catastrophe knocking at your door?

I will leave you with a lovely story that several spiritual schools teach, but I do love the Zen version: A monk is chased by a tiger to the edge of a cliff. As the tiger approaches, the monk climbs down the edge of the cliff using a vine. As he is hanging, he notices another tiger staring at him from the bottom of the cliff waiting to devour him. As he dangles between the two tigers, two mice start gnawing at the vine. Facing certain death, he notices a wild strawberry growing out of the side of the cliff. Grabbing the vine with one hand as it starts to give way, he plucks the strawberry and puts it in his mouth. "How sweet this strawberry is.”

Do find and taste the sweetness as you dangle at the precipice of impermanence. That is the case regardless of what is unfolding in terms of our environmental catastrophe.