A Post-Election Letter of Support

Dear friends,

I am so very, very sorry. If you are anything like me, you have been experiencing waves of horror and heartbreak, grief and rage, shock, confusion and numbness, possibly even inner collapse.

The first thing I would say do you is this: take time to feel and honor the feelings that are arising in you right now. Your emotions are not only normal, they are healthy. And these emotions are arising because you love. You love and care for women and want us to be healthy and safe. You love and care for people of color, immigrants, refugees, LGBTQ+ people and want us all to be healthy and safe. And you love the natural world and all the beings who live here, and want us to do everything we can to slow down climate chaos and take better care of this beautiful planet. So honor those emotions, that love.

If you have not received training in how to feel your feelings in a healthy way — or if it has been awhile and you need a refresher — here is a quick rundown.

Let’s begin by talking about the two things not to do:

1) Don’t permanently shove, numb, or ignore your emotions. Emotions are like waves in the ocean. When a seawall is built, it prevents the waves from releasing onto the shore, and the water is extremely disturbed where it meets the wall. Unfortunately in this culture, we have virtually unlimited methods of blocking the waves, from zoning out to shows, to getting stoned, to stuffing them with food. A little distraction can actually help to give yourself a break, but too much stuffing, ignoring, or blocking prevents the waves from moving at all. Depression and anxiety result.

2) Do not feed the emotions with cycling thoughts, or telling yourself stories about how awful everything is – AKA ruminating. This would be like if someone installed an enormous wave generator at the bottom of the ocean and pointed it toward the shore. It would increase the amplitude of the waves, transforming them from a normal, manageable size, to destructive and terrifying tidal waves. Not recommended!

So what’s the sweet spot in between? Here are my two favorite strategies:

1)    Mindfulness with emotion: sense the emotion in your body with curiosity. Ask yourself, what does the emotion actually feel like physically? Keep paying attention to the physical sensations of the feelings (without adding thoughts), until the emotion moves through or transforms into another emotion. This is like surfing the waves. You cannot control them, you cannot stop them, but you can move skillfully with them.

There are many wonderful and vibrant variations on how to feel your feelings. You can put on some favorite music and dance with them. You can go to a kickboxing class and sweat with them. You can paint how they feel with art. But the essential strategy is similiar: honor the emotions with your (non-ruminating) presence and attention.

2)    Unearth the wisdom or message of the emotion. Emotions didn’t evolve because God or natural selection has an evil sense of humor and wants to see us suffer. They have a purpose. They have power. They are a form of feedback about our environment that helps us to survive! When we feel pleasant feelings, our bodies and heart are telling us: This is good! More, please, if you can! And when something feels horrible, our bodies and heart are giving us feedback: Ouch! If you can do something to stop this or course correct, please do!

Unearthing the wisdom of a challenging emotion involves asking: what am I needed that I am not getting? Or what am I needing for my loved ones, my people, my country, that I am not getting? Answers could include safety, peace, connection, support, justice, equality, freedom, autonomy, choice, self-determination, and so on. If you are new to this approach, it can help to refer to a list of human needs. Many are available for free online – google “Non-Violent Communication needs list.” Or, click here.

The fact that emotions have something to tell us about what we are needing, is also why emotions carry with them energy for action. When you really take time to feel your feelings in your physical body, and let them pass through you, and ask yourself with compassion, what am I needing?, you will often find that you are left energized and ready to act on those needs.

So, in this tumultuous time for our country, feeling your feelings is not only important for your own self-care. It is also important because your country needs you. Your energy and your action are needed now, and your feelings are the doorway in.

My deep hope is that this will become a watershed moment in our history. In 2016, we could write off Trump’s election as an outlier, an unfortunate artifact of the racist institution of the Electoral College, a weird situation where the racists who usually don’t bother to vote came out of the woodwork for the most openly misogynistic and racist presidential candidate in my lifetime. When Biden won in 2020, many breathed a collective sigh of relief and hoped that that would be the end of it. In 2024, many believed Kamala Harris would defeat Trump, and he would move out of the country, and the Republican party would turn away from fascism and rightwing hate and return to its conservative roots. But this week forced us to realize this was a pipedream. As a dear friend of mine, who is a cancer survivor, put it: Trumpism has metastasized.

So, may this moment jolt us out of our consumerist fog and force us to realize:

If we care about the future of this country, if we want America to live up to its promise and potential of true democracy rooted in equal rights and respect for all life (including nature), each one of us must make changes in how we live our lives. It may no longer be enough to work at a job. It may no longer be enough to raise kids rooted in our morals. We may need to shoehorn even just a little time out of our already busy schedules for new kinds of action.

With that in mind, I invite you to join me in entering into a space of deep reflection in the coming weeks. I encourage you not to turn away from what has happened, but to feel your feelings, square your shoulders, and turn to face it. What your gifts? What do you have to offer our vulnerable democracy and the people and natural beings who may be in Trumps’ crosshairs? In what ways have you been hiding and staying small? What people in your life can join you in these reflections? How can you support each other to envision the community and country you yearn for, and find ways to help make that vision reality?

I can tell you one of the ways I intend to get out of my comfort zone and act. For several years now, my Spirit Helpers have been putting increasing amounts of pressure on me to write. I have been in a nice, comfortable place of working one-on-one with psychotherapy and shamanic clients for over a decade, and I have experienced tremendous learning and gifts from these practices. My Spirit Helpers told me that I needed to start sharing these learnings with a broader audience.

But I didn’t want to leave that comfortable place! It is scary for me to write from the heart and about my spiritual practice, because all of my cultural training and education pushes me in the opposite direction. I have dual undergrad degrees in Neuroscience and Philosophy of Science, and Masters’ degrees in Economic and Social History, and Clinical Mental Health Counseling. My first job out of grad school was producing an independent news program. Do you know what ALL of these fields have in common? They all insist that the only valid things to write about are objective, independently verifiable facts. Do you know the things that are not objective nor independently verifiable? The inner knowing of the heart, and direct revelation from spirit. What if people would think I’m “woo-woo?”, that I’ve gone off the deep end?, I’ve often thought to myself.

But around three years ago, I finally surrendered to the spiritual guidance that has never done me wrong, and I began pushing my edges and experimenting with finding my voice. Well guess what: this election has tipped me over the edge. I am ready to explode with all the ideas that have been bottled up by my perfectionism and fear. So, in the coming days, I will be launching my writing platform on Substack. It is called The Sacred Circle, and there, I will explore the intersections between nature-based spirituality or shamanism, holistic psychotherapy, and taking effective, loving action to create a better world.

For those of you who have already signed up for my email list, you won’t have to do anything to access my Substack. You should receive notifications when I start publishing there. Once you do, if you like what you see, please invite your friends and family to subscribe. If you arrived at this writing from another source and have found it to be helpful, then I invite you to subscribe to my Substack page.

Keep the faith, friends. And if you feel moved to tell me what you are inspired to do, please share in the comments below!

With love,
Kris