You’ve Got This: From Overwhelm to Ease: A solo with Christine

Podcast
Written By Geneva Tolentino

SHOW NOTES | TRANSCRIPT

We're living through intense times, and it's easy to feel overwhelmed. In this solo episode, we take a tour through the landscape of human resilience, exploring how to stay present and loving during challenging times. Through breath, personal insights, and historical perspectives, this episode is a compassionate guide to understanding overwhelm, collective grief, and personal regeneration.


Tune in and remember: You are not alone. You are part of a long, beautiful lineage of humans who have faced darkness and continued to love.


In this episode, we cover:


Signs and Symptoms of Being Overwhelmed

-Collective Grief and Historical Patterns

-Thanatos and Eros: the urge to destruction and the urge to life

-The Role of Eros in Human Experience

-Three Vital Psycho-Spiritual Skills for these times

-The Quiet Rage of the Responsible

-Tending to Overwhelm in the Human Body

-The Arc of the Visionary

-Living in the Field of No Make Wrong


Helpful links:


Christine Marie Mason

+1-415-471-7010

@christinemariemason

@rosebudwoman


Founder, Rosebud Woman, Award Winning Intimate and Body Care

Host, The Rose Woman on Love and Liberation


The Nine Lives of Woman: Sensual, Sexual and Reproductive Stages from Birth to 100 Order in Print or on Kindle

Subscribe: The Museletter


Christine Mason  0:01  

Christine, hello there. It's Christine, your host for the rose woman podcast on love and liberation. I've been a very busy bee my friends. The book launched a little over three weeks ago, and I have recorded on about eight other people's shows talking endlessly about the sensual, sexual and reproductive stages of a woman's life, from birth to 100


and sometimes we emphasize the sexuality piece, and sometimes we emphasize menopause and perimenopause, or the stage of the trescence or becoming a vibrant and beautiful elder. And I'm really seeing how the book's hitting people. So I'm super grateful for everyone who's been interested in the conversation. Super grateful for your reviews on the book. It was many years in the making, and I'm super, I don't know, just like loving how it's being received. So if you haven't gotten a copy yet, Amazon. Christine Marie Mason or rosewoman.com. I'd love for you to check it out and let me know what you think.


That being said, I've also led a couple of retreat days and been teaching every day. Launched a couple of new products for radiant farms, running production for rosebud. And I'm on the farm in Hawaii now, and I landed and just went gaga over everything that's in bloom. And I'm reminded over and over of the incredible life force that surrounds us all the time, even when we're not aware of it. You know, in the Hindu traditions and classical Tantra traditions. The first chant of the day is the Gayatri om buva Swaha, which is basically Bhumi Dev, the goddess of Earth. You know, you're waking up every day, and the first thing you do is just say, thank you Earth. Thank you atmosphere, thank you heavens, this incredible threefold beauty that surrounds us all the time, and it having just been Earth Day, I am bowing to that abundance right now. Thank you Gaia. Thank you mama Earth from which I grow, and you grow and everything grows. So today I have an episode that I've recorded twice, and could quite get it right. It's an episode ironically, on overwhelm. It did not come out of my personal experience over the last few weeks. It came out of a sense that I had from many friends and coworkers and listeners on the feeling that things are just too much to take in the world right now, between the big difficulties that we're seeing on economies and climate and the kind of political polarization that's been arising, people are having a little difficulty understanding which end is up. So the research on this episode comes in multiple parts, and they're all relating to how we return in a digital age of drastic like being able to see everything in the world at once, instead of just being able to see what's going on in our local community, and also being subjected to the kind of manipulations of media nano targeting that are causing us to increasingly be skeptical about our neighbors, the divisions that are arising. I really felt like this was an important time to talk about how we return to our core power and our core central self, knowing particularly in times of chaos and difficulty.


I originally called this episode Eros and Thanatos love death and the human fractal, staying awake in chaotic times. So I'd love for us to start with a breath together today to really arrive so that we can be in a deep, mutual listening space. You listening to me, you listening inside yourself. And hopefully when our feedback loop comes back, when you start sending me messages and things that I can be also in the listening space with you. So let's start with a big breath, just the biggest Breath Of The Day. Bring in as much air as you can. Fill the lungs, fill the bottom of the lungs, the middle of the lungs, the rib cage, the collar bones, open, open, open. Bring it all the way up. Fill the sinuses and the cavity of the head. Bring the air all the way to the top of the head. Ah, feels so good to be full. Let the breath nourish you, and then when you're really, really full,


ah, exhale, full. Exhale, letting everything go. Maybe a little shake, maybe shake the spine. Yeah.


Ah, and arrive. Here we are. Here we are.


I was sitting with my students in our classical Tantra class the other night, and, you know, I wanted to jump right into the cognitive material we were covering. But that was not what was happening in our field. Instead, the field was quite tense. Jaws were tight. People were arriving very distractedly. So we decided to start with some sharing. And basically the common message was that everyone was feeling so overwhelmed.


So I looked up the word, the etymology of the word overwhelm, and there is actually only welm. The root word is an old English word that came from nautical language, and it meant the point when a boat was so full of water that it was turned over or capsized or inverted. So there really is no overwhelm. They're the same thing well and overwhelm. You're just whelmed. You're flooded. That sense of being flooded, that emotional experience is the message from your body that you're full. You've had as much experience as you can take at the moment


and in the past months, not just with my class, I've encountered so many people who are standing at their own personal edge, who feel like they're just carrying too much. There's a lot of fear around money, climate, all of that stuff, as I mentioned in the intro. And I also have this sense that there's a deep ache, that maybe this time history is repeating itself again with abuse and suppression of voices and erasure, and that maybe this time we're really going to go through it again, and that there's sort of a specific kind of heartbreak that people are experiencing like They're trying to stay open as the times are contracting, they're trying to hold their own tenderness when the tide of cruelty seems to be rising again. It's like we just long for a life where we can do our work and love our people and make beauty and experience our bodies. But instead, we're confronted over and over with power structures that would dominate and harm and don't see us in the magical Earth as magical and chanting, you know, sort of missing out on the core gratitude of life, and there's some kind of unique sadness in that.


So how does one notice overwhelm. For most of us, it doesn't arrive with panic attacks and thunder. I mean, that can happen, but it mostly comes in like a little tip toe. It slowly creeps up on you, and it sometimes even has this mask of something like, I'm fine. I'm just fine. But people are tight in the chest, there's a little flicker of dissociation. Sometimes your language or your logic, your words aren't coming together in the same way, or you have a smile that is not quite authentic. Some people report that they have a sense of forgetting to breathe or going completely silent, or conversely, starting to talk non stop. Sometimes people in overwhelm have a little soft panic engaging with people. Here are some words that people used in my interviews. What does overwhelm feel like to you? I got these answers. Time seems to be speeding up around me, but I'm just shrinking and getting smaller. Another person said, My chest feels like a sealed vault that I don't have the code to and neither does anyone else. Someone said my brain tabs are multiplying, but none of them are fully loading. I heard someone once talk about the sense of overwhelm, as if you had one of those old timey slide projector carousels that spin around and it's like projecting onto your forehead, and they're going so quickly past the slide that you can't really focus on any one of them, so you just cycle through the slides over and over. Someone said overwhelm to me, feels like my inner narrator is on a caffeine Bender, and then a lot of people just came down to a sense of wanting to disappear or fly out into space, out of the body, or to scream or do violence, or like wanting to do something and not knowing what to do. So all of these things, absolutely all of them, no matter how you respond to the feeling of being whelmed, these are holy data points, because overwhelm itself is not failure. It's just a signal. It's the internal system whispering, I need help. I need space. I'm full. So.


Let's just pause again and take another one of those big breaths and notice what it would be like to invite your own system to have more space, even right now in this moment.


So now as we inhale again, imagine that your breath is creating space between all the molecules in your body, a softening and opening in the body,


right? It's nice feeling.


It's a nice feeling. So you might notice as you get quiet that it's not the same kind of anxiety and overwhelm that we've had in the past. There have been times in the past when our lives might have felt like a little too much or, you know, there was a market collapse or something, but there's something that's a little different right now. And I want to say that the things people are telling me is that what they're feeling is that we're not just individuals losing our balance, but that we're feeling how sensitive our systems are, how we're part of these larger processes and worldwide systems that are trying to metabolize some really big changes that we actually can't hold alone, and that this cruelty that we're feeling, this pattern that exists in human culture, it's not a punishment of us as individuals, when systems start to tremble and we seem to be in the middle of a historical reshaping of vast empire that There have been many, many times throughout the human fractal history that we've been through these things. So I would like for us to take a moment to tap now into the inner knowing that all of the things that are happening outside of us in the human fractal, they're not new. They are part of a long arc and pervasive undercurrent of human suffering in all of mankind that has arisen through our entire genetic memory, that this feeling of being whelmed or fearful that might be arising now isn't ours alone. It's a collective memory field that we're tapping into. So I want us to feel before we go into our regenerative nature and our resilience. I want us to feel how this has always been with us. So I invite you to take a little journey with me, to tap into this more pervasive pattern. If you're not driving and it feels good for you, close your eyes, and let's time travel into the collective undercurrent. Because, yes, yes, yes, we've been here before.


So let's go all the way back, all the way back to the tribal wars in the Bible,


the stoned, the smited, the smoted, the salt pillars, the people turn to dust. We'll fast forward. We'll go to the Middle Ages, the cons, the conquests, the burnings, the Crusades, to the Americas, the colonial invasions, the genocide manifests destiny, slavery, yes, the enslavement of land, of body, of spirit in the last centuries, the Spanish American War, World War One, two, Civil War, Vietnam, Korea, apartheid, on and on over all of human history, war, war, war, violence, suppression, extraction from the earth and each other, racism, gender violence, the desecration of all that is holy. And now, now imagine the people, all the people across time, who lived inside of those collapses, witches before the burning Poles and Jews and hiding children in war zones, poets writing through revolution, prophets in exile, farmers during the Dust Bowl, mothers during famine. If we read their journals, their letters, listen to their prayers, we hear the same thing that's echoing now written to us throughout the ages. People in every time in history have thought that this can't be happening and this can't go on. It must be the end of times, and we'll never survive. And yet, each time the world ended, it began again, over and over, collapse, remaking, collapse, renewal. There's a rhythm to it, a deeper pattern.


There's a word in the ancient Greek for this, the force behind the collapse impulse. It's called Thanatos, the death urge, the unconscious pull toward disconnection, destruction, toward power over and Thanatos, isn't just something we feel in war zones. It shows up in our own lives too, and in our relationships, where withdrawal replaces communication or the.


Instinct to suppress or end something rather than feel it takes over. Addiction is a way of giving into the death urge of Thanatos, as is shame and numbing out and pretending and forgetting. So Thanatos, or this urge to death, is not just personal, but it is personal. It's not personal. But everything that lives in the human field also lives in us personally, because we are part of lineage, if suffering and the Thanatos urge lives in our lineage and in our karma, in our memory, in our cellular memory, it does live inside of us, even if it didn't originate in our own lifetime of embodiment. Do you remember that song? I think it was Billy Joel, where he's singing, we didn't start the fire. It's been always burning right since the world's been turning so we're here, and this time, all of this crazy is in our unique experience, and we are called to be present with the burning that is happening now. We don't necessarily have to fix it, but we can't bypass it. We need to see it very clearly together and stop participating or agreeing to be a helpless bystander when the Thanatos urge begins to take over culture.


What I think is happening right now in the world is that something is arising to be met by more consciousness than has ever been available before, and that what we are encountering in wars and dissociative acts of violence may not be new, but that our own capacities to meet it might be new and that this is actually the sacred invitation of this time. It's not to stop this incoming urge to dominance and power over these Thanatos patterns by meeting them with force, which is actually the same frequency as the thing that is creating the pattern, but to interrupt the pattern with our awareness and to witness the pattern with love and mercy and to stay fully human inside of the pattern. So that means for me, and maybe now this episode will take a little bit more of a positive turn tapping into the opposite of Thanatos. Because if Thanatos is the contraction, the pull to disconnection, collapse, then its opposite, Eros is the pulse that keeps rising no matter how many times the sky falls. Now, Eros is usually treated as a sexual energy or a love energy. In our culture, it's often talked about in that way, and we had a very beautiful podcast from Nicole de Don, who wrote a series of books called the arrows sutras, which speaks to this, and it includes sexual energy. And that's true, but it is not just sexuality or romance or beauty. What arrows is is the urge to life. Eros is the love of life. It is the Holy Yes. It is the force of connection. Eros is the movement and emergence of life toward itself at all times, life wanting itself. Eros is the sprout pushing through the soil after a wildfire. It is the mother singing to her child in a refugee camp. Eros is the friend who brings you soup when you stop speaking and just sits there with you while you eat. It is the impulse to reach out, to connect, to create and to stay present. Eros is that breath we took in the beginning, the breath that reminds you you are still alive. Let's do another one.


Oh, I love life so much, and Eros never has an urgency or performance aspect to it. It just whispers and it hums and it waits. Eros for me is the undercurrent of OM, the life that's always there, this vibrating


Thanatos, that's a screamer, that's a drama queen, a destructor, an End Times freak or outer, but Eros whispers and holds the field, saying, I'm here. Life doesn't leave life wins in the end.


I also need to say that Eros is not in opposition to Thanatos, even though I've been kind of talking about it as if it was opposite, because Eros includes Thanatos. It looks at everything with mercy. It's it's like, it's not a binary. They live in the same soup, but Eros doesn't fight. It just keeps pulsing. It doesn't argue or resist. It's like water. It just keeps being the life force, even in what looks like collapse, it keeps living. So just as I invited you to feel the pulse of the suffering throughout history, to.


Touch that line of collapse and that cry that echoes through time. Now I invite you to feel into the other thread.


So go with me, if you will, to somewhere in your lineage where there were people who held the light. If you're here, your ancestors held the light in famine, they prayed. In war, they sang and even in exile, they remembered how to love. They ventured across the world to start new lives, to build new families with bravery and resilience and regeneration. Eros lives in your own life too, because your processes have been built over the course of a life of surviving and even thriving despite what's happening in the outer world. So in your moments of overwhelm, maybe you forget that you come from this amazing lineage. So right now, I want to remind you who you are and speak directly to any part of you that thinks you're not ready for these times, or you can't handle these times because you're not behind, you're not too late, everything you've lived through up till now, every moment you've returned to your heart, every breath that brought you back, every act of tenderness, bravery that you've learned from all of that, every time you opened a book of self improvement or spiritual inspiration, every time you went to a therapist, had a long talk with a friend, worked on yourself, came back and sat with your beloved and made amends when you didn't want to. Every time you forgave, every single thing that you have done to build your capacity, to hold your center in the chaos of the world is bearing fruit for you now we can come now back to our own embodiment and to our own lives.


I know many of you who listen, and I know that you have been born into lives of service and joy and life arrows that many of you have been working since you were young to learn how to hold more and more of your experience, how to hold more of your experience so that you don't spew out onto others, that you stay in response, not reaction, that you stay present with suffering and act with kindness and remember who you are. You know that you are the healing field, that you are the prayer that you are the one, one of the ones that life moves through. So if you find yourself occasionally dropping into the space of fear or despair when confronted with Thanatos, remember that you've been cultivating this for a long time, and that even if we acknowledge the brokenness in the current systems, or we're speaking into a vision together, and we're standing on the edge of a portal of a new society that wants to be awakened, and that there might be discomfort here as we witness the demise of the old, or we witness collapse that, Yeah, okay, there'll be difficulty, but then on the other side, there's a possibility that might lead to peace, and that we indeed were born for these times and have been cultivating the skills to shine in these times, and we hold that up to the light now.


So I'd love to bring this portion to a close by having you call up in your memory, in your mind's eye, one of your deepest moments of unity, when you felt one with the universe or with another person, your deepest, sacred moments of everything being utterly radiant, effulgent and fine, and just go there, into your own memory of the perfect union of it all, and bring that memory into the space of your body, let it fill the edges of the body, and know who you are all the work that you've been doing, you'd know yourself as regenerative soul, and know that coming back to this space is always available. I'm


going to talk a little bit now about some things that I think are really, really vital for how we move in the world, what the critical skills are for this time in human history, and the first one is something that I was just alluding to, our ability to hold more of our experience. So what does that mean? Actually, sometimes when we're very young, we'll have an experience that is met in the family system or the world we're in with a strong response, and we learn that that experience is just too much for us to take, or that it's so disapproved up that we freeze it up into our system and stuff it down into the corners of our body or into our memory. We put it into sort of a deep freeze, and it sits there and then later in our life, when we encounter so.


Similar circumstances, they hit against those old frozen places and memories, and we bounce away. We bounce away, and that's what's called the trigger. Something will happen and we don't know how to manage it, or it hits an old freeze, and we react instead of respond. And very often, it's in these times when we lash out at other people. We blame them for our circumstances, we shame them, we name call, we fight, we argue, we turn mean, and that actually there's another option possible, and that is to take in what's coming at us, and instead of reacting and jumping away from it or fighting that, we just take it in and feel the feelings that we couldn't feel when we were littles, and to know that, yes, we can hold it now, just stay with the feeling. Breathe through it, hold it and don't act. Just breathe and feel and breathe and feel, and your capacity will increase so that you can hold more and more of your own experience, your grief, your anger, your sadness, your joy, yes, even your sacred joy can be one of the things that wasn't allowed, and you might need to relearn how to hold the most joy possible in your daily life. But I believe that this is one of the core skills for the new society, is us being able to sit with our own feelings and our own experience without lashing out or turning out to others. Now this isn't to say that we can't lean in, be held, be felt, be mirrored, be attuned by other people in the times when we're feeling it, but we don't have to reach the point where we can react. So that's number one. That's my number one skill set, continue to learn to hold your center in the face of triggering environments, so that you can walk in the world as a peacemaker and a being of light that you don't continue to perpetuate the systems of Thanatos and difficulty. Okay, so that's number one, learning to hold more of your experience. And there are plenty of ways to do this, communities of practice like Thomas Hubel or Patrick's or even some of my own circles, where you can come and practice with other people. We do a good community Satsang once a month, where we sit together and we feel and we talk and we hold things and we learn how to witness others without projecting or reacting or triggering or pulling away. So practice holding more of your experience.


Okay. Then number two, another thing that I feel is vital at this time in human history, and that is to begin a very conscious process of creating a post capitalist identity for yourself and helping others to do so also. What does this mean? What do I mean when I say post capitalist identity formation? I mean that so many of us have been taught that we are our stuff, that we are our accomplishments, our position in life, that we are the things that we surround ourselves with, where the money we have. And then, you know what happens to those people? What happens is if their home burns down like it did for so many people in the Palisades fires, or the Santa Rosa fires, or countless others around the world. Or an earthquake comes, or a lava eruption comes. We suddenly are at complete loose ends. We don't know who we are anymore. The people I know who've gone through those tragedies and come out well on the other side, you know what they have in common. They know themselves to be a core soul, essence, that their possessions are fun and their careers are fun. But that's not who they are. They're themselves, their essential soul, and they have value beyond what a capitalist society tells them that they have value. As you know, where else this shows up, particularly in the masculine our our man, friends who have been told so often that they are their ability to earn or they're the job they have. So many men even come to the point of suicide when they lose their jobs. Suicidal ideation, the kinds of depression and addiction that takes place when you no longer have a purpose in a world that says you're defined by this job, thing that you do so in a world where one out of seven people is very likely to be displaced through climate migration issues in the next decades, where one in seven people will lose their home and their things and their community and have to rebuild, we have to get very, very good together at knowing that we belong, that we value ourselves and each other beyond these capitalist identities. And it's not just climate. The entire class of creatives and many of the labor jobs that we do will be rapidly overtaken by artificial, generalized.


Intelligence, large language models, things that we call AI that are now being married to robotics. You know, the singularity, as Ray Kurzweil said, is near when the combination of biotech, computing and robotics will make a very, very different world than we're used to. And that means that all of those identities that we created out of the capitalist hierarchies that we were trained into. Either have to be let go and we have to rediscover ourselves as magical essence of soul, or we're going to have a very difficult time of it. Luckily, most of the spiritual traditions around the world, especially the Eastern traditions, where you are invited to explore who you are, who is having these thoughts, those traditions, are available to us. They go so much deeper than what you do for a living, or who we parent or where we live, or what we have, or what we consume so or what we look like even, oh my goodness. So that's the second major task of the age, is to lose that capitalist identity and to start to cultivate the identity of the unchanging essence of the soul.


Third task of the age, I promise I'm not going to just talk at you the whole entire time, but the third task of the age is to learn to defend ourselves against what I call the tort against our subconscious. Like when marketing was invented, like market research was invented, we began to bring forth an assay of subconscious manipulation techniques to get people to do things that might not always be in their best interest. Often it was just to separate people from the content of their wallets, and then later, as that got more sophisticated, we had neuro marketing really people would do tests, like with different images, and then measure whether you got micro sweats or micro tremors, something called galvanic skin response to different images to see where the like old brain stem was activated the limbic brain in the viewer, and then use the ones that activated the subconscious limbic brain to market to you so that you would, you would make decisions without even knowing why you were making decisions. So great, great. We survived all that. I still think that that's a mental tort, an invasion of your internal system, and should not be legal. Neuromarketing, in my opinion, should not be legal. It puts a vast array of resources out there that the individual does not have the capacity to combat. So now fast forward into this current era, the algorithmic understanding now coupled with massive computing power that can not only micro target you based on your emotions, but nano micro target you and feed you specific information that will target all of those little trigger receptors that we were talking about before, all the places inside of you that, because of your identity, you will respond to in a certain way. This, my friends, it is what is causing the level of polarity that we're seeing where we're turning neighbor on neighbor based on false information, feeding people the most biased possible content to trigger them into a limbic and unconscious brain response of aggression and demonization of the Other, a algorithmically manipulated separation from our fellow man. So knowing that this is happening, and if you have not already listened or read the book by Sarah Wynn,


careless people, look at Chapters 3738 39 where it describes what happened at Facebook in the 2016 elections and beyond in the United States, look at what it says about what happened in Myanmar and the genocides and how people were being manipulated into acting in the real world against their neighbors and friends through these manipulation techniques online. And we have to become defended against those in ways that we've never had to do before, and one of those is to relearn the somatic experience of our own body, our own embodiment, to return to what we know to be true, directly with our neighbors and friends. The third major task of this age is to return to the scale of our own embodiment and to understand what is really happening and not to allow ourselves to be manipulated. I will post some extensive resources on how we unlearn, how we understand what we're being exposed to, and how that is being manipulated to create a worldview for us that.


Our next door neighbor is not seeing and that we are not that different. We're just basing our decisions on massively different information sets. And in the very knowing of that and the awareness of that, we can soften our nervous systems and come into a more trusting dialog. Hey, want to see my feed. You can really start to see how we are not that different. We're just working off of very different information sets. So do we agree we will begin to understand ourselves beyond capitalist identity? Will it begin to defend ourselves against forces that would divide, separate and manipulate us into going against our neighbor, and that we will learn to hold more of our experience, especially in difficult times, to prepare ourselves for the new society that is being built. All right,


I'm going to move on to a whole nother part in this long episode, which is on overwhelm, but it's also really on regeneration. And I want to name something that I've also been encountering in my groups and friendship circles, and this is what I would call the quiet rage of the responsible. So it kind of goes into this layer that is a core sort of irritation that people, that some people are carrying, like I've done everything right, and it's still not enough, because someone else's recklessness, or a technology that I didn't ask for can undo the whole field that I've created or lived into, like a structural change. Somebody's out there inventing an AI art generator that is so good that all of the painters and graphic artists are suddenly out of a job, like what you know, the that is, of course, evolution. But if you have built your whole life around refining and crafting a skill set that is suddenly being rendered less relevant or less obsolete, and it's been done by ingesting your intellectual property, your beauty, you've created in the past, it's like adding salt to the wound, right? So there's a little bit of a quiet rage in this like how many of us have grown up and gone through one wave after the other of collapse and repair and rebuilding and just kind of get getting through it and then been exhausted by it, whether that's the.com bubble bursting or the mortgage crisis in 2008 or I don't even remember anymore, I'm sure you have your own List. What I would say is that this invisible architecture that we've inherited, especially in these western capitalist, colonialist and hyper individualistic societies, where we've put a lot of the responsibility on the individual to create the conditions for this success, while not giving them many levers of control in the larger structure for that success that we get, not just this personal frustration that, oh God, you know, I'm trying so hard and I can't quite get it together, and it's my personal failure. It's also like a deep body knowing that something is profoundly out of balance, right? We have internalized a cultural myth that says, If I do the work, I'll be safe, if I stay present, if I regulate, if I heal my trauma, if I meditate and breathe and read the right books and use the right words, that somehow I'll transcend the chaos. But the myth of that only really translates into reality if the world is somewhat just and it isn't. So we have put so much burden of the repair of the world on the individual, especially the most sensitive, empathic, relationally intelligent individuals,


while leaving out the systems that generate that harm, leaving those systems more or less intact. We have said over and over, speak kindly, heal your inner child, set better boundaries, even what I said about not being triggered, that's all valuable. I don't want to discount it at all. We need it. We need that. We need everybody to do that work. But if we do that work without systemic levers like collective accountability or structural repair or honest reckoning about what the technologies that we're bringing to market are doing to us, where those are sort of held in the private sector, but they're not really, they're not really being addressed by us collectively while they're impacting all of US. So so much. So we need an honest reckoning for all of the changes that are happening. So the other thing that I'm seeing in the quiet rage of the responsible category is that you go along, you're going along, and you're self regulating, and you're doing your very, very best, but then the culture rewards those.


Noisy, noisiest, dysregulated, most outrageous people, because they activate the triggers, and that creates news. So I do my inner work. You do yours, and then we watch people who have no real interest in being in peaceful relationship to others, and they are wielding power, and that can be kind of enraging, so we tell people to carry the weight of the world inside of their own tissues. Call that growth, but what we really need is for the culture itself to hold power with maturity and soul depth. We need to be able to have our leaders say no to the harm, and then be supported in the stance of that by the culture. Not just do it in our private lives. We need our structures to be in relational repair, our group nervous systems to be settled, and maybe we are the leaders to do that. I'm not going to externalize the leader. I as a leader, commit to being a field for non harm in the public sector and for relational repair and a calmed group nervous system.


This quiet rage of the responsible isn't immaturity. It's not ego. It is the soul saying I am willing to be responsible for my part, but I am not willing to be punished for the other's refusal to grow and do their part. And I cry out from that because it's something that helps me be more clear that something here is not right. I will stand and advocate for a culture that moves towards Eros regeneration, the love of life, over and over and over, I let this irritation with the forces of death and the death urge and the collapse urge and the power over urge, I let that irritation become a vital sparkling fuel that helps me move in the world and helps me make the kind of changes and practical terms that I feel are needed. So if you are a person who has the quiet rage of the responsible, you know it doesn't slam doors, it doesn't post long rants on the internet. It doesn't even raise its voice. It's just there, like a steady, hot thing that we might bury under layers of self regulation, under the relational intelligences that we've all cultivated under our spiritual maturity, but that little fierceness that we carry that will fuel us being Good agents of change. I'm talking about things like a facilitator who holds group safety while one ungrounded participant hijacks the space, or a leader who spends years building a culture of trust and is undone by someone coming in, some charismatic manipulator and has and they have to be in response to that, or a partner who goes to therapy, who's learned their attachment style, who's doing all of the relational work, but their Counterparty and the relationship won't do it, and weaponizes their words, and, you know, they just can't meet them. Or it's a it's a person who's really committed to healing or breaking intergenerational cycles while co parenting with someone who won't do that work. And maybe more relevant even now is that it's watching history repeat itself again and again, another war, another megalomaniac, another reckless King, another empire built on extraction. So I think that question that's sitting at the center of us that can form like, why am I doing all the work while others still get to wreak havoc? Why am I the one carrying all of this when care doesn't seem to translate into cultural change, or who gets to hold the mic in this culture? It's a righteous sort of ache. It's a slow burn grief of someone who knows the cost and the reward of being in integrity and watches how little of that sometimes is required by those who claim power. So this is a little bit of a structural heartbreak, as I said before, maybe I'll try to say it more specifically. Now we live in a system that has individualized responsibility while protecting collective harm, sanctified performative things and showmanship while ignoring their impact, glorified the momentary charisma while silencing or disregarding the deeper relational skills. So now the sensitive ones, the steady ones, the survivors, the empaths, the people who work for the National Parks and the Science Foundations, the deep listeners, they're trying to hold the thread in a world that keeps cutting the thread and trying to self reg.


Regulate in a system that seems to reward the dysregulation, trying to stay relational in spaces that valorize domination, trying to lead with care and institutions that are mistaking control for leadership. So if you're wondering why your nervous system might be feeling whelmed or overwhelmed or fried, if you're feeling that sort of unnamed quiet rage, that little freeze, I want to say clearly, you're not wrong to feel this. This is your integrity. This is your integrity that is letting you know that things aren't sustainable, reciprocal or okay, and you can use that irritation and that well to be a clue to invite you to a higher plane even here. Can I include even this in my love, even this resentment, even this exhaustion, even the part of me that wants to roll my eyes and walk out of the room? Can I bless the drama that I didn't consent to? Can I bless the part of me that's sick of being the only grown up in the room? Can I bless the chaos that I didn't cause, even though I'm the one who's staying there and cleaning it up to ask these questions, to include it and love it all is not to condone harm, but it is to widen the field of love and to stop pretending that love is always calm or tidy or sweet, but that love is a fierce inclusiveness. It's this kind of love. I see this distortion. I won't make myself small because of it. I won't go into fear body. I won't let it calcify into contempt. I can feel myself. I can feel my sadness, and I will meet it with clarity. I won't respond with cruelty. Our love will include our holy knowing. It includes our own exhaustion. It includes our own sobbing. We include it all. We don't have to like it. We don't have to be open to it all at once, but we can get nearer and nearer to the core of it. We can witness all of these things and be with the feelings and not banish them. So that's letting ourselves be part of what's happening, letting the whelm capsize us, and then continuing to right ourselves over and over and over again.


Okay, that got a little theoretical, so I want to come back into it's the middle of the night, you're waking up, you have an anxious dream, and talk about what the research on overwhelm says about how to handle that. You're mid zoom, you're standing in the cereal aisle, maybe you're in the bath. Who knows when it's going to hit you. The first thing you do is you just name it. You just say, Oh, wow. This is overwhelm. This is overwhelm. I'm I'm getting flooded. And that one sentence can break the trance. And then we do the somatic things, all the stuff that we've talked about a million times on the show, come back to your body. Do specifically what we were doing in the beginning. Big breaths. Big breaths. Put your hand on your heart and your belly, one hand on the heart, one hand on the belly. Take the slowest inhale you can put sound on the exhale, deeper breaths, deeper breaths. One time, I was taught that if you get a panic attack, you breathe into a paper bag because it means you're getting more oxygen into you. So as you as you take that inhale and then you put sound on the exhale, a sigh, a moan, a growl, whatever is true for you. And then a trick that I was given early on is that if you're overwhelmed and anxiety starts to rise as you're breathing, you then press your feet into the floor. You move your toes and you feel the floor like try to get in the ground, try to get in the body. Press, Press down into the floor,


and then locate yourself in whatever space you're in. That's a lamp. Label the lamp. There's a blanket, and look at all the details. There's my friend. He's wearing a red checkered shirt. There's my kitchen sink, and it is dripping water like you start to label and see, because it takes you out of the spinning mind and brings you right back into this current reality.


Locate yourself firmly in the room, and then you can offer yourself a reset. You can shake your limbs, shake, shake, shake, shake, like a wet dog, disperse all of that tension. You can lie on the ground and collapse and become one with the floor.


You can slow yourself down so much that you take a glass of water and you drink it as exquisitely slowly as you can, and try to taste and feel everything about that water coming into your body. You're trying to do any activity that brings you into really no.


Sing the Body hum that really works. Let your hum go until your rib cage vibrates hum, and if you do need to, you can scream into the existential void. You don't have to make it palatable. My stepmother used to go down into the basement when she got overwhelmed and take a pillow and whack it with a tennis racket. I know somebody who goes out and jumps on the trampoline, just move it through your body.


And I would say also, if you're in a group and you're feeling a little near the edge, or someone's near the edge in the group, that even though we're not trying to fix each other, that you can help the other just through presence. If you notice someone is tipping, you can pause the moment saying, you know, can we take a breath together? Do you want a little space I'm here if you want to name what's moving through you, or you might even pause whatever the group is doing and say, Hey, let's all, let's all take a breath together. And if you're the person in the group that is sort of at your edge, you also have the right to say, like, boy, you guys, I'm really right at my edge. Can someone witness me or breathe with me, or just come and be next to me and put your body next to me? Or can we just take a break here and re enter this conversation when I recalibrated. I mean we are allowed to ask and to give each other permission in overwhelm, to pause, to unravel, to do a reset and return back to wherever we're at, maybe even a new place to begin from, so that we can feel what we're going through and we're not re implanting ourselves with a freeze. We come back to our center, and then we continue onward with whatever we were working on, with everyone attuned and there, fully there.


Okay, there's one more piece I want to share before our time together is up today, and this is something that is for the people who are not just working on you know, their personal growth, their personal growth journey, being able to handle their personal overwhelm, but are committed to living into a new society, committed to living into a more just, fair and equitable society. And it's coming from the research I did for my 2019, book, bending the bow. Bending the bow came about because I was curious as to how people who were out there 20 to 30 years before a great social justice movement got started, who just knew that something wasn't right, and they stepped out and started articulating what needed to be done for things like women's rights and children's rights and racial justice and things like that. And these people who did that were met with such incredible violence and reactivity, I wanted to know in writing that book, how did they hold themselves? What were the commonalities among these people? What was it like for them? So when I did this research, I pulled together across eight social justice movements, what the commonalities were of these great leaders. So I one map from there that I'd like to share with you. For those who are walking the long road of positive change,


there is a sort of spiral and soul seated memory of the 1000s in the culture that have walked the road of positive change before you and I call that the arc of the visionary. So here's how it goes. First of all, you might be surprised to learn that it never begins with a plan. These social justice movements begin with a feeling or a rupture, a thing in you that will no longer let you sleep. So for some people, it was like witnessing abuse in slavery, or it was watching children going to work 14 hour days in the factory at the age of nine, or it was a sense that they were married to people who could not get their shit together, and they wanted to have self determination. So these social justice movements begin with a feeling, a disruption, an awakening, this crack appears, and some sort of internal veil lifts. You see something you can't unsee, and this truth breaks through some acculturated denial of this truth, and you it's just like is moving in the soul of the unwitting activist, there's a whisper in their hearts. This situation isn't right. It isn't right. It's not in alignment. Some kind of conflict is there, and it goes from a whisper into a shout, and then, usually, out of some pure intent, the young person is almost always a young person who has this conscience, steps forward and they take some sort of action. Maybe they hang up a sign, or they write a letter to the editor, or they defend someone at the dinner table. They speak when silence would have been the safer bet. Maybe they circumvent an unjust law, or they stand up for a stranger.


There, but then backlash comes. And in that stage of the backlash, we're in, like stage three of the arc of the visionary here, when the world pushes back, it can be very, very brutal. The status quo comes at people in incredible ways, and you have a choice in this moment as an activist or visionary, you either give in and abandon your soul and go back into the fold for your own safety or to not make waves in the family, or you stand up for what you believe to be true.


And then the advice from all of these people is to really buckle up. They have met, historically, the most aggressive ways of being taken down by the culture at large, the most aggressive forms of oppression or opposition, even having their factories and homes burned, being run out of town, being run out of the state. I think it was a man who was running an anti slavery and abolitionist newspaper, and they burned down his house and chased his family out of town and broke his equipment and tried to do everything. But you know what it did? It changed him. He got even deeper in his convictions. He turned inward. So this is the next thing that happens in the ark of the visionary, once that is internalized, and they might even begin to see how if something were to happen to them, they really have to create a network of others who, if they were killed or knocked out of the out of the race, that 10,000 others would be available to arise and pick up the torch, so they learn that the long arc of change is not reactionary, that it is fueled by not intensity, but of devotion and long arc stamina. So change agents then begin to move, not from the force of adrenaline, but from deep practice, the same kind of communities of practice that I was mentioning earlier, they develop a direct understanding of the invisible force that connects us all, almost all of these great activists over the 300 years that I looked at them had either a meditation practice, a prayer practice, nature practices. They all had transpersonal experiences of unity consciousness. They lived and walked with deep empathy. They found places in their lives to be rested and replenish and to think of themselves beyond the body and beyond their own lifetimes. When this realization comes, they start to pace themselves. They stop thinking about getting it done. They start thinking about that network that I mentioned. They stop measuring their success by speed, and they begin living their life while doing the work. The expansion of the spirit into unity, consciousness becomes a fuel that lets them do their work without identifying with the outcome. So they stop being swept into despair by the headlines, and they start thinking like an ancestor, they start thinking much longer arc and being less reactive to what's going on in the daily news feed. So that's a very important lesson for all of us. Know what you're about. Stick to your values. Know the long arc. Show up with love. Do not get distracted by the tempest of the day. The other thing that I will say from the research into bending the bow on the arc of the visionary is that we always hear about the charismatic front man or front person in a movement, but the change never happened through lone saviors. Every single movement I studied happened through pods, groups of five or six committed people who utterly trusted each other and could lean into one another. They tell us over and over when they recite their stories of who's around them and who they leaned into and who they learned from that we were never meant to do big movements alone or to live life alone. So we create our pod in the modern time too, five or six people who emphasize transmission, Alliance, building and networks that they do that from a position of depth and care, that you do that and become a mycelial network that survives and supports what wants to bloom next in the society, and that you always, always come back at some point During the day, to the ritual and the beauty way, because you cannot live this life in strategy and struggle. You have to come back, even if you're doing the difficult work of the time. You come back to the body. You come back to delight, to wonder, to song, to dinner tables and lovers and trees and late night dancing. One of the people I interviewed told me for that book, you must renew yourself by living a common life. Because life is the point the storm is not the point the Eros is the point. The beauty is the point, the love is the point. All of that, all of that sacred is always there. So.


So if you're feeling the well, if you're feeling into the overwhelm, know that you're nested in a long chain of unwinding power structures, of unwinding internally ingrained beliefs, and just be faithful and tenacious and believe in the long arc of our collective unfolding.


Alright, if you're with me, still a full hour of me just talking, talking, talking, I would love to invite you to go and listen to an episode I did with Patrick Connor on unconditional love and the field of no make wrong. It is another critical component of the society that we're living into and the world that we're inviting to be born. So please have a listen to that.


Okay, let's come back to a little bit of a recap. Now, overwhelm is a message from the body. It says, I'm full, but the deepest antidote to overwhelm is in control or escape or numbing or efforting to figure it out. The deepest balm to overwhelm is inclusion. When we stop trying to carry only what's acceptable and instead start including everything. Include our contraction, our craving, our disorientation. To do this is to do the work of Eros, to step into our erotic selves. We are an erotic people, to step into this life force that says and invites everything. I want. It All. I want to touch the places that I've banished. I want to rise even though I'm aching, even though I have the rage of the responsible. I want to rise, not just in my light. I won't deny the grief, the harm, the injustice. I will hold it, I will include it, and I will rise up fully as Eros embodied, not in a holy, kind of purified form, but in its undomesticated form. We we live into and Feel This Moment, include this moment in our love. I remember when I started singing in a sort of a non denominational choir, and they did this song from Ricky Byers back with which was like, you're only here for love. And I didn't really get it at the time. I just liked singing it. I liked the idea that I was here for love. But I realize now that this is actually the most potent thing. I release, I let go. I let spirit run my life. I'm only here for love. So how do we step from the position of overwhelm into a world where we are operating straight out of the heart of that book, straight out of the Book of Love? We're just here to love, to let it move through us, to become porous enough that grace can find us, that we can remember that life doesn't need us to have it all together or to be strong all the time, that we're just available to the feeling. We're just available to the connection to our own experience, our own suffering, our own joy, and to that of others. So Thanatos, no thank you. I've had enough of you. I'll include you. I'll see you. I'll be compassionate for you, but I am for Eros. I am an erotic people. I remember who I am. We all can remember who we are. Come back to our own center, respect and feel and live from the body, allow everything tap into our own direct knowing and become and act from this field of unconditional love and learn from the arc of the visionaries of all time and space who have been birthing a new world. And we're part of that unfolding spiral we are that you've been through a lot. You know who you are, and you've got this when things disturb you, or the wellm experience comes, remember that you are born from and into unconditional love of life and all of creation. You're all of that. You are all of that. Until next time, my friends, I'm Christine, take good care of your heart and Shine, shine, shine.


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Maker of psychoactive gummies for human wellness derived from Sacred plants worldwide. Also, if you'd like to join in person, we are running a retreat in the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina. May 14, the 19th, 2025, and you can find out more information about that at Christine mariemason.com just go to the events tab. Look up Blue Ridge Mountains. It's right there. It's going to be an exceptional program with some of the most loving and potent co guides in embodied joy. I know you will have an amazing experience, so you can find out more about that, and let me know if you want to join us all love all the time. You.




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