On The Polycrisis

Reflections from our CEO and Co-Founder, Amy Elizabeth Fox .

I have been thinking about how we begin to understand the impact of the polycrisis on our emotional landscape. Years ago, I landed at Logan Airport and noticed a magazine with a cover picture of a polar bear on a shrinking iceberg looking terrified. I fell to a chair, sobbing. I realized later that this kind of ecological crisis and species depletion is an unnatural grief, one we are not meant to know how to hold.?

Much that is happening in the world right now is of that kind of "unthinkable' or "un-feel-able" nature. We do not know how to hold it or stay open in the face of it.

Of course, we have already seen generation on generation of atrocity, violence, and abuse that has caused such universal numbness and disassociation. This moment is different, however.

It is a compound crisis that endangers life on the planet itself and many feel the existential threat geopolitically as well.

My teacher Thomas Hübl, PhD created a beautiful collective practice, global social witnessing, that expands our ability to stay present with this level of suffering.

It is our shared responsibility to widen our capacity to witness and receive others' pain, especially as we aspire to the work of restoration and healing collective trauma. We must get stronger to bear the pain, grief, rage, and details of the generations of trauma and violence that have been inflicted and in which, sadly, we are all complicit.

I worry that this can get relegated to personal anxiety and that this will be met with a readiness to treat that rising response that could otherwise call us to attention as if it is an individual problem to be treated with medication or a sabbatical or some other near-term "fix."

We, as healers, need to be diligent in differentiating between what belongs to personal process work and where personal breakdown mirrors wider systemic and relational dysfunction that point to a need for wider, collective remedies.?

There is a vital intelligence in the ennui and distress many of us are feeling.?

We are starting to see essays and commentary on the policy implications and political dynamics of the polycrisis.?I hope to start a shared reflection on the emotional dimension of living in such an inflection point. We know that movements of hope, love, and healing are essential. Paying attention to discern what is happening to respond as activists and agitators is required.

We also need to start discussing the toll it is taking on our hearts, our quality of attention, relational strain, and our sense of ground. Acts of self-care and self-kindness will become ever more important, and communal spaces for co-regulation and mutual compassion will become life-saving.