We Must Allow Our Hearts to Break if the Planet is to Heal
Anyone who has ever been hurt, or hurt someone for that matter, knows the struggle of coming to terms with it. Thanks to progress in areas like exposure therapy, we know grief must be felt in order to be healed. Difficult as it is to turn towards grief or trauma, acknowledging grief almost certainly means feeling more of it. The question then becomes, how?
One of the best tools I’ve come across is mindfulness. Whether considering mental health issues like PTSD, or eco-anxiety accompanying the global climate crisis, or the hyper-localized trauma felt in the wake of American gun violence, engaging with the grief that follows allows us to heal and ultimately grow.
On July 3rd, my mum texted me a photo of Jon Kabat-Zinn’s book Meditation is Not What You Think. Having recently invested in a daily contemplative practice myself—motivated in part by the collective trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic—I was excited my mum was interested in exploring a practice of her own. So, we made plans to chat all things mindfulness at our annual Fourth of July gathering the following day. But that opportunity never came. Instead, I received a text from my mum the following morning, this time telling me she was safe but sheltering in a then-unknown-neighbor’s apartment while the police responded to an active shooter at their local parade.
We now know the shooter committed the atrocity from the roof of my mum’s building. With her building an active FBI crime scene, my mum spent that night with my wife and I. The next morning, instead of wallowing in our pain, we stumbled into a conversation about mindfulness after all. We talked for hours about how she came to be recommended Kabat-Zinn’s book and the incalculable value I’ve found through my own practice. In the days that would follow, my mum and I shared intimately with each other, navigating the senseless tragedy and, perhaps more importantly, engaging with the ugliness that left seven dead and dozens wounded.
A few days later, while listening to a podcast with Stanford researcher Dr. Andrew Huberman, he shared something that resonated with our conversation. “If you look at the successful treatments for trauma, they all involve getting close to the trauma inducing mindset,” Huberman said. “Rarely, if ever, are people with serious trauma encouraged to get as far away from the feeling [as possible].”
Heartbreak, or grief to use the clinical term, is something all of us will undoubtedly become intimately familiar with over our lifetime. And while I don’t wish it for myself or anyone else, some of the most valuable growth I’ve experienced in my life arose out of heartbreak. Thanks to brain imaging studies conducted by Huberman’s fellow Stanford researcher, Dr. Mary-Frances O’Connor, we know grieving leads to a motivational state. A state meant to usher us towards a healthier future, one that may seem anything but possible in the moment. Difficult as the grieving process is, Huberman and O’Connor both suggest we embrace it. “How comfortable one is with feeling their feelings is going to strongly dictate how quickly one moves through grief or trauma,” Huberman points out.
During the same podcast, Huberman identified three factors that define our relationship to grief: space, time, and closeness. In the event that we lose a loved one, the grieving process allows the brain to make sense of these relationships, reconfiguring how we relate to their memory. Perhaps unsurprising, challenging breakups function much the same. While the individual is no longer available in time and space, it’s as if the brain must think the person is actually gone in order to heal. “Loss of love and death grief are virtually identical,” according to Huberman.
At present, I believe the relationship we in the West have with the planet is at an impasse, something akin to that of a breakup. While it may be painful to let go of the notion of Earth as a boundless supply of resources for the taking, we now know this perspective is naive. Instead, each of us has the opportunity to grieve this loss while participating in shaping the future we know is possible. Something most breakups don’t have on offer.
While comedian George Carlin was right, the Earth isn’t going anywhere any time soon, that isn’t to say that life on this planet will share the same fate. There have been five mass extinctions in our planet’s history and we are currently living through the sixth. If we’re ever to make the transformative changes scientists are calling for, we cannot do so without first engaging with the heartbreak of living on a planet in pain.
