Episode 14: TOOLS TO AVOID FEELING ANXIOUS, HELPLESS AND OVERWHELMED

In this episode we consider what insights we can glean from reported near-death experiences to help us avoid feeling overwhelmed, anxious, worried, helpless, hopeless and ultimately paralyzed in the face of the cascading problems besetting human society.

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Hello and welcome to Reimagining Our World, a podcast dedicated to envisioning a better world and to infusing hope that we can make the principled choices to build that world. In this episode, we consider what insights we can glean from reported near death experiences to help us avoid feeling overwhelmed, anxious, worried, helpless, hopeless, and ultimately paralyzed in the face of the cascading problems besetting human society. Happy springtime for many of you who live in parts of the world where it is truly spring and everything looks verdant and gorgeous. Springtime is traditionally a time for a cleaning house. We call it spring cleaning, for new beginnings, a time to reset our intentions, make resolutions for how we want to lead our lives going forward for the next year. In short, making time to assess what we want to keep, what we want to throw out and get rid of, what we want to replace, and what indeed we may want to modify. As we all know, this program is really about reimagining our world, and it has become clear over our time together that this really involves two distinct lines of action, if you like. One is learning how we can shift and change the way we think. And the other has to do with making shifts and changes to the way we act. These both have to go hand in hand. Indeed, one the thinking and the mindset, spawns the other, the behaviors that turn into habits that then create our reality So I've been reflecting on a particular challenge that many of us seem to be going through, particularly in the context of a pandemic, which is still ongoing for many, but in some parts of the world, we're starting to see light at the end of the tunnel. The challenge we seem to face is how can we avoid feeling overwhelmed, overwhelmed when we see the myriad societal needs that are around us and the societal challenges that we face? How do we navigate attending to our individual needs while also attending to the collective needs? Some of the things that are plaguing us, some of the thoughts that disturb us and keep many people up at night are questions like what is the economic impact going to be of the pandemic in the long term? What's going to happen with unemployment? Am I going to be employed? Is my business going to fail or succeed? How will I be able to put food on the table for my children and my family? We also worry about our children on many other fronts. What is their mental health going to look like? How has it been impacted as a result of the lockdowns and their inability to be with their peers and to go to school? How are their future employment opportunities going to be impacted now that they've fallen behind in their education? What about the increasing drug addiction and the rise in opioid addiction, the increase in the use of alcohol, the increase and the rise in suicides around the world? In domestic violence, where abuse partners at home have been trapped with their abusers and have therefore suffered even more during the pandemic than they would have otherwise. What about the impact on women's progress? Their ability to access equal rights, privileges and opportunities. Many women have had to give up their jobs to stay at home in order to homeschool their children or take care of all the needs that could not be taken care of by somebody else during the pandemic. What about the impact on minorities and the rising incidences of social injustice and the bearing of the problems of racism and bias against women and other minorities? And we haven't even gotten to the global challenges, like climate change and nuclear proliferation. We could be forgiven if we tend to get overwhelmed or find that we have a tendency in that direction. It's perfectly understandable given the circumstances. So I wanted to share with you three insights that have helped me keep my sense of sanity and that I think really allow each of us to identify the arenas in which we can take on responsibility and therefore keep manageable the universe of responsibilities that we want to undertake so that we won't succumb to a sense of overwhelm. The two questions I ask myself are, What can I do? And what am I responsible for? And these three insights come really as a result of experiences of a particular individual whose videotape I watched years ago. This lady had gone through a near death experience and as she transitioned from this life to whatever the next life was ended up coming back, because it wasn't her time apparently. She learned a few things that I want to share with you that I have found very helpful to me and we'll unpack them. The first thought is to view the world as an orchestra. Imagine that humanity is an orchestra. Each of us is an instrument with certain notes, melodies, harmonies to play as part of a universal, glorious piece of music that we're trying to produce. When we step into that imagination and imagine ourselves as part of that orchestra, several things become clear. Each of us is responsible merely for playing our own notes. We have to play them correctly and we have to make sure they're on pitch so that they mesh with what everybody else is playing. They have to be played in the right scale, right tune, the right pitch, and the quality of sound we produce also has to be the best quality possible. The analogy of a choir also works for those of you who have ever participated in group singing. You know what it's like when an individual sings even one or two notes off pitch. It's jarring and it actually interferes with the whole piece. And it ruins the effect of the entire piece of music. What does this mean in practice? What do we mean when we say that we each are like an instrument with certain notes to play, and that we have to play them correctly and well? The way I think about it is that we each have certain qualities in life. Qualities of character that we get to hone. And honing these qualities is the equivalent, basically, of playing our notes right in the context of the orchestra. The qualities that we get to hone include qualities like patience and kindness and the ability to listen to others, to be compassionate and empathetic, to trust that the universe is here to support and aid us and not out to get us. The quality of gratitude, the quality of joy, of enthusiasm, of passion, these are all qualities that are so important to who we are as individuals and the way we show up in the orchestra of life. The most important of all these qualities, however. seems to be the quality of love, particularly unconditional love. Now, the COVID 19 pandemic, despite all the mental and physical and emotional suffering it's brought, has also, I believe, brought us many gifts and blessings. And one of the gifts is the opportunity to hone these qualities. And if we were to look for the positives, we start to see examples of individuals truly rising to their potential and demonstrating how they are mining and honing these qualities. Some examples that come to mind that I just find so inspiring are the following. A group of 14 year olds in one of the northeastern states has decided to get together and help older folks who have trouble getting an appointment for a vaccine online because it's so hard to navigate and slots come and disappear so quickly. They've decided to help them sign up for vaccines. What an amazing act of service, right? Driven by a feeling of love and compassion. To date, they have signed up 600 folks who otherwise were unable to get appointments for themselves. Again, this is an act of service to individuals and by doing so they're serving the collective. Another example that happened during the pandemic was this lady who owned a luxury travel company that went out of business at the beginning of the pandemic because of all the restrictions on travel. Decided that since she had time on her hands, she would spend her days finding out who in her neighborhood needed groceries, especially, again, the elderly folks, and she made it her job to go and buy them their groceries and deliver them. As she delivered the groceries, also to make sure that they weren't feeling too lonely, to exchange a few words with them, to just really have that human to human contact. The third amazing example some of you may have seen was the story of the postman who that's what he's done for years, delivered mail. And he became the center in the life of some children, including this particular girl who was alone at home all day with her mother. She must have been about four years old. She would sit on in the living room at the window waiting for the postman, because when he delivered the post, although he couldn't come in and she couldn't go out to talk to him because of the pandemic, he would start dancing up the driveway, up the garden path, and waving to her and then dancing as he left again. It just brought such joy. They'd actually managed to film this girl and her chuckles of delight and glee. This was basically the light of in the middle of her day. It was the visit by the postman. So it really doesn't matter who we are and how humble or seemingly humble our service may seem or contribution in this world, we can each make choices whereby we share these qualities with the rest of the world. The last example that comes to mind is celebrities. I'm thinking of one in particular, I believe it was Dolly Parton, who chose to record bedtime stories for children along with song so that their exhausted parents would be able to have this amazing celebratory read a bedtime story to them and for them to get a break after a long, hard day trapped at home, having to be all things to all people in their family. Okay. That was the first insight. The second insight that I got from viewing this video is that every act that we do in this world, every action we take has ripple effect. The analogy is to throwing a stone or a pebble into a pond. You start to see ripples, right? And the ripples expand and expand. Even though visually the ripples as they go out seem like they're less impactful, yet they are actually there. And again, this insight demonstrates the relationship between us as individuals and the collective, just as the first example did, that we are individuals with individual responsibility that's entirely manageable, that of playing our own notes, but we're part of a collective endeavor. And this collective endeavor, how well we do it, how well we play this piece of music, depends on our individual endeavor. All of a sudden makes our task more manageable because we get to focus on our bit. Let's go back to the ripple effect. It reminded me of the years in which I practiced law and I remember for a while I was a litigation attorney and I often used to wonder how much a judge's home life or the experiences they had immediately prior to arriving in court for a session would impact their rulings and particularly when they were meting out sentence against an accused. Say the judge, her husband, had been mean to her at home in the morning or been passive aggressive or just been very difficult and how that might set the emotional tone for her day. Or I would imagine this judge driving in her car and being cut off in traffic by aggressive drivers. And how that would impact her sense of rage or a sense of wanting to pay back or heightening a sense of conflict and competition in life that might then influence, to some extent, the way she meted out judgments. Anyway, this is another way of thinking about our responsibility in life, just being very aware of everything we say and do, recognizing that it impacts not just ourselves, not just the individuals in our immediate vicinity, but as it affects those individuals, it affects everybody else that they meet, and those people, the people they meet. Again, these concentric circles, like the stone being thrown into the pond. The final insight I wanted to share is that the question, When all is said and done in our lives, what is it that matters the most? The insight that I gleaned from this lady's near death experience was that when all is said and done, only one thing really matters, and those are the acts of unconditional love that we have given in this world and the relationships based on unconditional love that we have forged in this lifetime. One of the things she said was that how we're all so focused on crafting resumes that tell people who we are and how amazing we are and what amazing skills we have and qualities. She said at the end of your life, in some sense you become cognizant of and aware of your own life resume. What things you did that mattered and what things you did that didn't matter so much. We all tend to focus a lot on things like getting the right education, getting the right grades, getting educational degrees, living in the right part of town, going on vacations, owning the right kind of homes or cars, or wearing the right kind of clothes and all that sort of thing, including our social status. And yet at the end of the day, this lady said that she was shocked to discover that in the years that she had lived, and I believe she was 16 years old when she suffered this accident that caused her to have the near death experience. Looking back over her 16 years, there was one act that had stood out as the most important and significant act that she had accomplished. And it was the following. She had been a counselor at a camp, a summer camp, for children with disabilities. And one particular summer, she had gone up to this little boy who was particularly isolated and shunned by the others. And out of a sense of just love and not with any agenda in mind, she had gone and asked this little boy, Is there something, can I get you any water? and had then gotten him a glass of water. That act, because it was done with purity of intention and selfless love, accounted as the most important thing she'd done. And she said, very often these other things that we focus on they're neither pluses nor minuses on our resume. They just are. They're like zeros. They don't add anything. And yet we put such inordinate focus on them. Again, part of shifting the way we think is to recognize, Oh, you know what? Life is actually a lot more manageable. I don't need to be overwhelmed by all these things going on in the world. I can just choose to determine certain acts of service that are driven by pure intention of unconditional love, and I'm going to offer those. You can be the post worker who does it while you're working and just putting a smile on your face and dancing up or down the path. It could really be anybody in any circumstance thinking of a small act of service or an act of random kindness that they do for another human being. Those were the three insights that I wanted to share with you. I hope as you reflect on them, you will find them as helpful as I have in making you feel more in control in some sense, sense that your life is manageable, that you don't have to succumb to overwhelm, and that the problems of the world are not so big that no matter what you do is futile, that you're helpless and that you're therefore paralyzed and despondent. Let's all buck up and think about what we can do at this new springtime with the wonderful new year ahead of us to change both our lives and, by changing our lives, changing the world through the ripple effects that those individual changes bring about. All righty. I will go to the comments now. Thank you. I'm glad that you enjoyed this. Again, for those of you who like this program please think about looking for a copy of the Alchemy of Peace: Six Essential Shifts and Mindsets and Habits to Achieve World Peace. I hope you'll find them inspiring. You can find it on Amazon, wherever you are in the world. If you have any questions or comments, again, please feel free to put them in the chat. And I hope that you'll feel free to continue this conversation on Facebook or YouTube during the course of the week between sessions so that we can learn from each other, we can grow, we can support and help each other, and I can learn from you as you share your insights with me and the rest of the group. There don't seem to be any other comments that I can see for now, so I will let you go and enjoy this fabulous day or evening or morning, wherever you are in the world. Take care and goodbye. That's all for this episode of Reimagining Our World. I'll see you back here next month. If you liked this episode, please help us to get the word out by rating us and subscribing to the program on your favorite podcast platform. This series is also available in video on the YouTube channel of the Center for Peace and Global Governance, CPGG.