Feeling unhinged right now makes sense.

Your body may feel called into action. And the human in you may be experiencing any number of feral feelings: like grief, rage, horror, heartbreak, terror, activation to DO something.

Right now, our collective nervous system is going through a rollercoaster. Popping off into hyperarousal and falling down in to the depths of hypoarousal. Rapidly.

This makes sense given what’s happening in our environments, but hyper individualistic solutions unwittingly promote dealing with these ups and downs in a socially disconnected way.

But this is a tired, dirty Band-Aid, my friends.

Checking out is an understandable instinct, however that can feel terrible and disempowering. This can also shut down your efforts to protest oppression.

Here’s the deal, the quality of our disconnection matters.

Disconnecting from your people, your culture, or yourself is harder to shake than finding a way to disconnect to re-connect.

That right there is a clue: we need to bring social connection in to the process.

So, let’s do this. Let’s rant, rave and rest – together

Here’s how you can organize this with your people:

1. Commune: Host a Gathering

What are you doing Friday night? Find a way to fit it in this week. Make it simple – pick a time and see who’s available. It doesn’t have to be big, but it does need to be soon. The nervous system can only handle being put on hold so long.

Friendly call out: don’t do the American thing of being so overbooked that you don’t have time for feelings or community. If that’s your life, real talk: take some time to re-evaluate what your priorities. Is this how you want to live your life?? I know this is a hard question to hear, but I ask it with great love. I want you to start living right now.

The other reason I am being so blunt about this is because your body doesn’t give a damn about business as usual. If you do not take time to process its response to the state of the world, your body will ground your ass. It will put you into shutdown with fatigue, disassociation, and depresso feelings you can’t shake. Let’s get ahead of this.

Send this post to your friends so they understand the assignment.

2. Rant: Share Food + Your Feelings

There are lots of reasons why we associate food and love. Food and love are both sustenance and nourishment for your body and soul. And this connection existed even before humans evolved. Even cows eat together.

Food is often a medium for cultural connection as well. And right now, so many cultures are under attack. Push back on this, reconnect with your culture with the food that makes you feel loved and share love.

Bring your best dish. I totally vote doing this potluck style because this is all about collective action. Not saviorism or some woman martyring themselves for the group. Unless you really fucking love to cook and that’s your party trick. Just make sure you don’t take on all of it – this is about co-creation.

So, we are gonna share food (especially cultural food) AND we are gonna share our feelings. Children who grow up with regular family dinners are more socially well-adjusted–same idea here. None of this surface level chit-chat. I want you to share your fears, what’s making you angry, your grief, anguish, concern.

IT’S OKAY AND RECOMMENDED TO CRY!!!!

Our culture has gotten it sooooo twisted thinking “crying doesn’t do anything.” That’s bullshit. Crying helps you process your feelings and MOVE them.

Feelings that aren’t shared and allowed to move become stuck.

Stuck feelings cause mental and physical health issues.

You could also argue that much of the violence we see in the world is due to undealt with core wounds that have gone RANCID. These neglected festering wounds in a person with great influence becomes a wildfire with grave consequences.

This is a pro-feelings space we are creating. I want you to LET IT OUT. And don’t you worry – crying is not where this train stops.

Root down in your cultural identities with defiant joy, pride, connection. Celebrating your culture is an act of reclamation. Make it special. Go all in.

3. Rave: Meet the Intense Feels with Shared Movement

Ok, before you get super down, I need you to stay a bit more connected to your hyperaroused feelings – your rage, fury, fire, outrage, injustice, and the like. And I need you to channel that with your people into some kind of shared experience of physical movement.

This is where we get stuck with big feelings. We think we need to banish these. We shut them down and then wonder why we feel so disempowered.

Emotion literally has the word motion embedded.

So, I need you to think of ways you want to move with your people. And not in a calm, down regulating way (yet), in a way that meets the intensity of the energy.

These events are creating HYPERAROUSAL in our systems, aka the body wants to go into high energy mode. So, meet the activation with a high energy outlet.

You can do this in any way that makes sense to you and your people. But I would recommend making it FUN. You can’t have fun without safety and connection, and that’s what we are cultivating here.

A go-to idea? DANCE.

There’s a reason why dance, like food has been fundamental to so many culture’s rites and rituals. And why dance is one of the best exercises for long term health. When we dance we breath, feel, connect, engage in diversity of movement throughout the body, and move activation. Make a playlist, play a track radio to a fave dance jam, co-create the playlist in the moment, or borrow mine and fucking dance your ass off.

If dance and music is not your thing, what about a sport of some kind? A group rage room? Throwing axes at an axe bar? A water balloon fight?? Kicking ass at some video games?? Knitting red caps?? A Jackson-Pollock style painting sesh? A Cannon-ball competition?? Trampoline time?? Roasting the PDFs with a poetry slam?! Screaming some Alanis Morissette songs (singing actually helps to settle the nervous system by activating the ventral vagal branch – triple points for this!!)?!?!

You get the point. Get creative.

4. Rest: Create Space for the Come Down

This next step is crucial. With your nervous system, what comes up needs to come down. And we can do this with the group or solo.

Either way, we need to have space to rest and digest our experience. But we have to make space for this process to occur. After releasing the edges of hyperarousal, within rest you digest the experience, physically and emotionally.

Releasing this energy like this will help you feel more grounded. From there you may have some major a-ha moments about how you want to be a part of the help in today’s chaotic world.

So, you want to have space for this process and a way to capture the ideas of how you want to meaningfully act to counter oppression.

If doing this together, this could look like returning to nibble and process feelings. Or taking a relaxing walk in nature together. A little restorative yoga. Along the way, brainstorm how you want to help each other and organize yourselves to stay resilient and resist.

Another friendly call out: We Americans have become SO overbooked. DO NOT line up plans for after. Sorry to be a hardass about this, but we habitually treat social time like labor and that is part of why it feels like labor. If you never have space between then you’re just keeping your body in GO mode, never getting a chance to ENJOY the settling you just worked to create.

Reclaim This Primal Rhythm

Our ancestors lived in tribes. They hunted together. Ate together. Danced together. Made art to make meaning of their existence.

Compared to other animals, humans are wimps. We are not as fast a cheetah, as ferocious as a lion, larger than a great white or as strong as a bear. Our superpower has always been social. It’s time to reclaim this aspect into the rhythms of our daily lives.

I hope this helps you move through all the nervous system states with connection, embodiment and community. If we are to persist, we will need to take breaks from witnessing the violence impacting our communities. And we have choices. We can do that by disassociating into oblivion. Or we can do that by finding a way to connect to ourselves, our people and our values.

Use it. Every week if you have to. This might be what we need to get through this time with more agency and power to fight back.

Use it. And get into good trouble.