Meltdown – economic, environmental. Popular metaphors echoing hard truths

This is a time of deep structural change. A global shift. No longer can we get away with rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. All of us need to face the massive change inside and out. There is no running to…only delay of the inevitable.

We are in a Meltdown. The whole world. Individuals, companies, states, nations, and the environment.

If you are up to date with science, you will know that everything is connected. There is no such thing as having a thought in your head in isolation. There is a collective way of being, a global mindset, cultures, tribes, and world views. So using a term like “meltdown” is not to be taken lightly. As Buckminster Fuller would say, we must always start with Universe. And our current situation is not just another economic recalibration or environmental crisis. No, this one is a confluence of events – a crash of the titanic forces…the environment, the economy, our values system, globalisation, technology, peak oil, energy, any form of fundamentalism, poverty, the increasing gap between the rich and poor.

Isn’t it interesting that the collective word for this crisis is “meltdown”? And that proposed solution includes a “credit freeze?” Caroline Myss, one of my teachers, has talked about the great depression and the language that was used at that time. People and nations were ~crippled~. At the same time, the world was also dealing with a polio epidemic, in which people, including the American President who led the people out of the depression, were crippled. It was only after the economy was no longer crippled, and the prevailing psyche was also no longer crippled, that we found a cure for polio. We had to move through the collective language and experience and find a place that was not crippled, in order to come through.

From an archetypal point of view, expressing our global economic crisis as a meltdown links this event directly to the meltdown in our environment…the emerging awareness of climate change…the melting of the ice caps. The economic crisis simply cannot be disconnected from our environmental crisis. They are two faces of the same coin. A credit freeze speaks of the free flow of money being caught in ice – in the ice caps perhaps? If so, do we need the ice caps to melt in order to free up the flow? Are we seeking to continue to rape the environment in order to free up the God called cash? Is this what we are asking from the expression of the collective unconscious? Or is the freeze simply our paralysis? Extreme fear blocking flow?

Just like the crash of ‘29 crippled people, our crisis is causing a meltdown, in a holographic way and on every level. The very parts of us and the world that we have held as being solid are melting before us.

The prevailing feeling is of walking on ground that is unstable, shifting, unpredictable. Humans like certainty, constancy, and mild to zero change.

Well folks, embrace change. Because it is the strongest event in the room right now, and it is blowing a gale.

What is the change that is required of us to move through this? What does the Future of Business look like? Perhaps integrity? Beautiful Business?

What is it that needs to be restructured inside us all? What parts of ourselves do we need melting down? These are the questions we all need to ask and explore. For as surely as the wind blows, the work to be done is both internal and external.

For myself, I had to look at some of the big questions. What is money? What is wealth? Success? What do I value? What parts of myself are no longer valid and needing expression, and what parts of myself will emerge through the meltdown? Do I have a credit freeze? Aka–are there parts of myself that are frozen and not in flow? (Internal)

Finally, given all this, how do I now express myself in the world? (External) What value do I offer that is required in our post-meltdown world? Or, even, how can I support people and companies through the meltdown?

My meltdown was not pretty. I wasn’t sleeping, crying a lot, and occasionally paralysed with fear. I spent a lot of time speaking with my coaches and my mastermind group. I wrote in my journal. I prayed. I went through waves of hopelessness and completely lost all sense of possibility.

I discovered that slowly, over many years, I had lost parts of myself that are essential to my being. These parts had been buried, because other parts had become dominant. Kahlil Gibran describes this in words far more eloquent than I am able.

~And tell me, people of Orphalese, what have you in these houses? And what is it you guard with fastened doors?
Have you peace, the quiet urge that reveals your power?
Have you remembrances, the glimmering arches that span the summit of the mind?
Have you beauty, that leads the heart from things fashioned of wood and stone to the holy mountain?
Tell me, have you these in your houses?
Or have you only comfort, and the lust for comfort, the stealthy thing that enters the house a guest, and then becomes a host, and then a master?

Ay, and it becomes a tamer, and with hook and scourge makes puppets of your larger desires.
………
Verily the lust for comfort murders the passion of the soul, and then walks grinning to the funeral.~

What I needed to meltdown was the parts of myself that had become my master. Things like working like a fiend to be able to buy more stuff. Spending money I didn’t have. I was responsible, and only I could create this through my actions. Be in action–create–create. The burden was on my shoulders.

I also needed to meltdown what success means to me. Hmm…would I rather a big goody bag, or a life of rich experience? And then to really choose a life of rich experience. That is not to say we cannot have both. But to take on life, really go for it, surrender completely to it, and be completely OK with what shows up. To get that there is a bigger plan than I have any idea of, and that the daily, moment-to-moment surrender to this is where my joy lives. This is a successful life.

And to do that I need to slow down and listen, the let go and trust, before I take action. To act from spirit and with grace by my side. To take Universe/God on as my full business/life partner.

The parts of me that I have found again that were frozen within (my interior credit freeze) are the belief in the miraculous. That life doesn’t follow some straight path of cause and effect. There is a whole other dimension here that is beyond our comprehension and will be forever so. I had to remember the world of grace, and synchronicity, and the mysterious. I have known this all along, however, I discovered I had forgotten how to access this…and that more than anything, this is my starting point.

I found the path to this by recognising that I had also lost connection to a daily experience- a full-bodied experience- of beauty.

It is through music, classical, instrumental, that I can ~be~ joy in a heartbeat. More than just looking at a sunset, being a sunset. Being joy dancing barefoot on the beach.

Again, quoting from Gibran

~But if in your fear you would seek only love’s peace and love’s pleasure,
Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love’s threshing-floor,
Into that seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears.~

I needed to meltdown those rigid structures to find the immense well of beauty, love and truth that has always been and will always be. That this is the life I choose. First and foremost. Watered by the springs of compassion and shared with beloved friends. Is there anything else?

What joy…

Written 2009.