A shocking invitation from a mental health professional
How one eco-therapist advises us to learn to accept a warming world
I was ranting. I couldn’t help it. Our interview was almost over and I was desperate for her take on how parents can find some peace in modern life. “If we all just do one thing,” I moaned, knowing I was repeating myself, falling back to the same stale argument I’d been making for years.
Nell Azuri, an Australian mental health counselor, asked if I’d taken the time to invite in the dialectic.
“Dia-who-lick?”
“Aristotle’s concept that opposites exist together. Thesis/antithesis, obviously, but there’s also dueling ideas we hold in our minds like the world is burning up as we decide if we want to get drinks tonight with friends.” She explained that we often camp out too heavily on one side of the dialectic and forget that there are a multitude of ways to land in the middle of heavy concepts. And that middle ground, she says, might help us function with more ease.
Azuri wrote her masters thesis on how mental health professionals were dealing with big feelings about climate change. What she found surprised her—they weren’t. Even the folks with the best strategies to deal with our climate crisis were avoiding facing it much of the time.
Today, she asked me to face it, like really face it. She asked how much time I spent in my eternally optimistic days inviting in the despair.
Why on earth would I do that?
She advised that maybe spending 10 minutes a day meeting the despair would help offer me a more grounded perspective and would help me feel better, less desperate. 10 minutes? That felt like forever. I’d spent the Trump years feeling overwhelmed, depressed, grief stricken, I’d dealt with those big feels and really didn’t want to invite them to return anytime soon.
But nope. They’re there. In a big way, I came to find out. And they scare me so much that like the mental health pros Azuri interviewed, I’d rather look away.
On Earth Day no less, I decided to sit with the despair instead of getting all kumbaya about the state of the planet. I’d been actively ignoring all those hopefully or doom and gloom social media postings when everyone seemed to have an opinion on the state of the planet and decided that I would seek some healthy balance by inviting the ever-present gravity into my morning.
During my morning meditation I stopped blocking out the things that deliver despair. Because I assume you have your own list of vomit-inducing environmental nightmares, I don’t have to bombard you with my own other than to say that it is much easier to just ignore the facts of a warming world than invite them to sit with you and your morning coffee.
As that despair settled in, I felt my heart rate start to rise, my blood start to pump harder, my hands got sweaty, my head hurt. I looked at the clock—2 minutes in. Ughhh. I knew how to breathe through it. I knew that like a hard workout the intensity would end. I knew, I knew, I knew.
When the timer finally rang, indicating my mediation was over, I felt wrecked. Exhausted. And so so sad.
So what did I do? I took a deep inhale, thanked the despair for being there to show me I was alive and looked out my window. At that very moment, a hummingbird slurped nectar from the purple sage flower I’d planted for that very reason. My favorite Barry Lopez quote popped in my head:
“You can enter the place inside yourself where you privately meet your fears and say, “Yes, I know. But please come with me. What we’re about to see is greater than the thing you’re running from.”
“Successfully locating the proper frame of mind and then acting is not, I think, about refusing to accommodate fear. It is about the cultivation of love.”
I’m not going to ask you to do anything in this post. I know it’s hard to look at the dark places of our fears. But I wanted to share this strategy with you because right after I carved my way out of that dark cave of dreariness, beauty arrived. A hummingbird sighting wasn’t going to completely shift my perspective but it sure made me feel more grateful to be present, aware and alive right now.
~Michele