What Is The Polycrisis Asking of Me?

The practice of doing our inner work is about wakening our souls and tuning in to the wisdom and gifts that abide within us. Our souls remember our dignity and worth — not over and above someone else. Not in spite of someone else. Not in comparison to anyone else. Our soul is that aspect of ourselves that always remembers our ultimate significance and our connection to the vastness of the cosmos. Our soul is in touch with our inherent somebodiness, and the inherent somebodiness of others.

~“Doing Our Inner Work,” Unitarian Universalist Association

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls.

~Carl Jung, Collected Works, “Psychology and Alchemy”

One world is now gone and a new one has yet to emerge; we are now at the beginning of the beginning.

~Zachary Stein, “Covid 19: A War Broke Out in Heaven”

One week ago, the United States bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities. What the ultimate repercussions of this event will be, we do not yet know. As we witness and are impacted by climate chaos, which is dispersing millions of climate refugees around the globe, the deaths of nearly 300,000 people as a result of America’s termination of USAID programs worldwide, and ghastly war and starvation in places like Gaza and Sudan, how dare anyone be so myopic as to ask what these unprecedented catastrophes are “asking of us”? And yet, I am proposing just that in this post.

**Willingness To Begin A Journey: Gathering information about the polycrisis is not for the faint of heart because it is not an intellectual matter. It may begin with processing facts and connecting dots, but almost immediately, deep emotion will be stirred, and that reality cannot be metabolized cognitively. One can choose to proceed in learning more about collapse or not. Understandably, few people actually persist. The choice is ours, and we should not judge or be judged for declining the journey. Once we allow the facts of the polycrisis to touch us, there is no turning back, which is why so few entertain them.

**Opening to The Emotional Realities: Countless individuals have attempted to research and metabolize the polycrisis exclusively on the cognitive level. Because they lack compassion for themselves and for others who are struggling to process information about collapse, they may alienate their peers and become distant, if not obnoxious human beings. While understanding the facts of the unraveling is essential, processing the realities of collapse is not primarily an exercise in cognitive behavioral therapy. Instead, we may at times feel suffocated by what we are learning, as well as terrified and deeply saddened.

**Willingness To Journey Using Emotional Intelligence: The facts we amass in studying the polycrisis are not merely facts. They are inherently disturbing and disorienting because they immediately confront us with an existential crisis. Forgetting that there are four fundamental emotions in the human psyche--fear, anger, sadness, and joy and that all other emotions are nuances of these, we often ingest the facts without full awareness that they will emotionally ripple through us, and we will either choose to allow the feelings or shut them down.

If we allow all emotions and do not distance ourselves from them, we can expect to be broken. Heartbroken? Yes, but also ego-broken. We may at first experience shame that our species has so thoroughly desecrated our planet. To defend and protect from this shame, we may be tempted to detest humans, disconnecting from the fact that hating humans is hating ourselves. While hating humans is uncomfortable, for some, it is easier than opening to the heartbreak—the searing sadness we will feel as we contemplate what we have destroyed and what we are losing.

Commitment To Connect: Not only is it impossible to persevere on the collapse journey in isolation, it is our responsibility to continue the journey in relationship with other living beings. Isolation itself is one of the contributing factors to the polycrisis. Collapse is demanding that in order to survive and thrive in the midst of the demise, we must do so with other humans and with myriad aspects of nature. The moment we choose to feel the emotions engendered by the polycrisis, we need other humans alongside us, as well as trees, soil, rivers, birds, and the land itself to accompany us. The emotions we feel are not ours alone and cry out to be shared with and cherished by fellow earthlings. We need and are needed by others.

Dedication To Service: With increased information comes a responsibility. Sadly, many humans believe that they are responsible for awakening others to our predicament. Often, we want to inform others so that we will not be alone with what we know or in order not to feel crazy in a sea of willful ignorance. We may feel a need to “gift” our fellow earthlings with important information about collapse, but what if we don’t? What if we simply love and serve them? What if we do not need them to see what we see and instead simply relate to them with kindness and compassion?

The Inner Work Of Self-Care and Transformation: Waking up to the polycrisis is a monumental, life-altering event for the human nervous system. Think about it: We are actually contemplating the potential extinction of our species. We cannot expect the brain to metabolize that information in the same way it processes any other information. It is impossible to un-see what we see as we increasingly add to our collapse repository of facts and insights. However, amassing more information does not fortify the nervous system but profoundly weakens it if we are not deepening our emotional intelligence and deeply connecting with other human and more-than human beings in the process. In other words, collapse is compelling us to become a different quality of human than we have ever been or are remotely familiar with. As a result, I and others who are exploring this new territory speak of the inner work of collapse. Unless we are prepared to become a different quality of human, anything and everything we learn about collapse is useless, and we all need assistance with that process.

Knowing this, I wrote my first book on the polycrisis in 2008 Sacred Demise: Walking The Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization’s Collapse. It was my first attempt at exploring the inner work of collapse and joining with others on a similar journey. Over the years I have realized that this inner work is an essential, evolutionary endeavor for anyone who wishes to learn from rather than simply learn about the polycrisis. The inner work of collapse fortifies us to not only be fully present in the polycrisis, but to become an island of sanity in a sea of chaos.

Paradoxically, the polycrisis is also asking me to grieve deeply and experience the unprecedented joy that results from doing so—joy that resides in the meaning and purpose that only suffering can access and that can never be savored in business as usual.

In her masterful book, The Work That Reconnects, Joanna Macy suggests five vows for answering the call inherent in the polycrisis:

1. To commit myself daily to the healing of our world and the welfare of all beings

2. To live on earth more lightly and less violently in the food, products, and energy I consume.

3. To draw strength and guidance from the living earth, the ancestors, the future beings, and my brothers and sisters of all species.

4. To support others in their work for the world and to ask for help when I feel the need.

5. To pursue a daily spiritual practice that clarifies my mind, strengthens my heart, and supports me in observing these vows.

Thank you for reading this post to the end. If you’d like to learn more about the inner work of collapse, visit my website at www.carolynbaker.net.