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  • Home
  • About
    • The Happy Fan Club
  • Offerings
    • Redesign Your Life 2.0
    • Get Creative
    • Personal Coaching
  • Creativity Conversations
  • LET'S CONNECT!
  • Blog
    • Live Free Your Way
    • Seeing Things Differently
    • Mistaking Assumptions for Truth
    • How Humor Keeps Us Sane
    • Know Thyself
    • Peach Pie for Breakfast
    • Explore Experience Express
    • Should You Be Downshifting?
    • Stop the Hustle!
    • Do Your Habits Serve or Sabotage
    • Settle Down? Down Where?
    • What Lights You Up?
    • Saying Yes When Your Mind Says No
    • Independence From What?
    • Letting Ourselves Off the Hook
    • Letting Go of Assumptions
    • Is Kindness Allowed?
    • How to Throw a Wrench in the Works
    • Happiness
    • Daring to be Lighthearted
    • What Happens When You See Things Differently
    • Find Delight in Everyday Life
    • Are You Saying What Needs to Be Said
    • Is Your Life in Alignment
    • Are You Trapped by Your Past
    • Can You Love Your Life
    • The Hallmark of Creativity
    • Out Of Ideas?
    • Waking Up to a New World
    • Are You a Possibilitarian?
    • Want to Love Your Life?
    • Is Creativity Necessary
    • What's Stopping You?
    • An Unexpected Discovery
    • Free Your Mind
    • Is Your Creative Genius Hiding
    • Empty Headed or Clear Minded?
    • Is Stress Really Necessary?
    • Will Creativity Improve Your Life?
    • Is Creativity In Your Future?
    • Replace Fear With Love
    • How to Get Out of Your Own Way
    • Just Take A Moment
    • You Don't Have To - You Get To
    • The Good News About Being Stuck
    • Interested in Inner Freedom?
    • Are You a Hoarder?
    • What Remains
    • Co-vid 19 Free Pass to the Roller Coaster
    • Grace Under Pressure
    • Now is the Time To Notice
    • Hanging With the Wrong Crowd
    • Make Your Life Simpler
    • What Could Be Different For You
    • Everything is a Miracle
    • Do You Have A Negativity Bias
    • Are You Really Seeing Or Just Assuming?
    • Happiness and Resilience
    • Wherever You Go, There You Are
    • Is Stress Making You Sick?
    • What I Wish My Humans Knew
    • Looking Backwards
    • Daring to Change Course
    • Lost in Thought or Taking Action?
    • Still Can't Focus?
    • Do Your Thoughts Get Dark and Gloomy?
    • Can't Focus?
    • An Instant Formula for New Ideas
    • Talk Yourself Out of Another Great Idea?
    • Is Your Busyness Keeping You From Getting Things Done?
    • What's that Feeling In the Pit of My Stomach?
    • How Cool is This?
    • How to Make Your New Year Happier
    • Why Be Open To Life?
    • Simple Ways to Transform Your Life
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    • The Number One Way to Keep Your Vision Alive and Well
    • Why Stop Trying to Figure it Out?
    • What Are You Trying to Prove?
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    • 3 Convincing Reasons
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    • Why You Need to Be Inspired Now
    • Change Your Life in Just 48 Hours?
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    • 5 Infallible Ways to Stay Inspired
  • Newsletter

5 Reasons to Do Good in a World Gone Bad

10/9/2017

4 Comments

 
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​I recently heard Caroline Casey (visionary activist and shamanic astrologer) quote a writer who said: “Tragedy is not a credential. it’s an assignment.” That struck me as a wonderfully radical and inspiring call to action, which got me thinking about how we could respond to our current personal and global disasters.

Right now, we’re facing so many tragedies on so many fronts - personal, political, social and ecological - that we could claim, in a broad way, that we’re all survivors. But most of us cannot claim that we are in any way, shape or form in the same category as those who’ve been brutalized, neglected or abandoned by other humans or have lost everything to natural disasters. Still, suffering, when it comes, can make any of us believe that we may never get over it and may always need help.

I see two kinds of survivors. The first kind, when they describe themselves, you realize they mean the kind of survivor who’s still significantly limited in their ability to re-engage with the world. They’re still identifying themselves with a painful past rather than a promising future. So in that sense, surviving tragedy has become a kind of credential - a badge, a special status conferred by limitation. This is not a judgment here, but an understanding that it’s based on the belief that they don’t have the resources within themselves to transcend or transform their pain. And that prevents them from taking action.

The second kind of survivor is able to view tragedy as an assignment. These are the ones who inspire us with stories of impossible difficulties which were faced with enormous courage, faith and resilience. In what’s probably one of the most well known examples, Victor Frankl described his experience in the Nazi death camps of World War Two in his book, Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl saw, over and over again that, although we cannot avoid suffering, we can choose how to respond to it. And this choice involves embodying those values that make us truly human. 

Which brings me to the here and now and how to deal with the many tragedies that are coming fast and furious these days. What are our choices? Do we stay immobilized or do we make the effort to go against the rising tide of fear, anger and helplessness that’s touching so many of us?

Here’s the answer I find most compelling: Take the assignment and Do good. Practice altruism. Even just physically, it feels really good to do, and that can be a valuable incentive. But perhaps more importantly, it helps you move out of helplessness or despair into action that’s likely to be the blessing that someone else desperately needs. Here’s why, based on scientific evidence, psychology and spiritual wisdom, doing good is a good idea.

  1. When you make the effort to do good, you feel good. How you reach out to others, whether it’s with a blessing, a smile, a touch or a helping hand, it decreases your own stress levels. Doing good decreases your blood pressure and increases your body’s immune systems.
  2. When you help others, your body’s chemical messengers (called neurotransmitters), like dopamine and endorphins, trigger the feel good “circuitry" in your brain. They reduce pain and increase a sense of pleasure.
  3. Oxytocin, another hormone that acts as a neurotransmitter, is stimulated when you help others. Called the “love hormone,” and considered part of the “tend and mend” response in the body, it increases a sense of bonding with others. And since we all share the world together, that’s a really good thing.
  4. Doing good deeds, helping one another, is built into our DNA and has been essential throughout the evolution of the human species. We need one another, always have, always will. It’s been a biological necessity. And, it increase our capacity to respond with hope and positive action in the face of immense suffering and pain.
  5. When you help others, you help yourself. Your thinking and your actions  are based on true wisdom and compassion rather than fear and insecurity. As you heal the wounds of others, you heal your own wounds. It’s not about being self righteous. It’s about tending to the one world and the one heart we all share.

Caroline Casey describes the circumstances we find ourselves in as our “dangerous, beautiful assignment". We have this amazing opportunity to take an active role in our own healing and that of others. Why would we say no? It's time to find out how, when we do, we'll be helped and inspired by those beings - both seen and unseen - that are dedicated to being a force for good in the world.

This is how I see it. What about you? I’d love to have a dialogue with you about this important topic, so I invite you to share your thoughts with me.

(Photo courtesy of Neil Thomas)
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