Yesterday I figured out that I need to take a look at the cocktail of feelings arising out of the 2016 United States Presidential election still driving my thoughts opinions and conclusions today (05-20-2019 Do I need to Take a look at my 2016 resentments?). For a couple of weeks prior, I’d been re-exploring Emotional Freedom Technique aka EFT aka Tapping since installing a free app called
Being stubbornly self-reliant, I told myself I needed to adapt one of the lovely 10 minute meditation/tapping sessions they have on there to begin to release the feelings from the 2016 elections. But I didn’t.
This morning, I opened up the Releasing Grief meditation (which, full disclosure, is NOT one of the free meditations–I paid $50 to get a year’s worth of full access). The phrasing is designed to help you release grief for the loss of a loved one. Turned out it was PERFECT for me to process the 2016 election. I grieved the loss of President Obama, the loss of the Founding Fathers (who, I learned from the musical Hamilton, are also now black), the loss of the Constitution, the loss of reproductive rights (very fresh and acute)–lots of stuff. I was surprised to find myself sobbing during the meditation (for a spiritual softy, I’m not much of a crier, definitely not a weeper). But there’s more. The direction in the meditation talks about how I don’t have to “just get over it” and how I’m entitled to my feelings. And how it’s also okay to create a new normal. These are all very real useful concepts for someone grieving the loss of a loved one, but I’ve never applied them to the loss of a presidential election before.
It strikes me that in political deaths as in personal deaths, it feels absolutely like a betrayal, a mistake and impossible to “get over it.” With my political grief, it feels dangerous to get over it. What if in getting over it, I forget to call my congresswoman or to protest or to, God forbid, vote?
Let me lay a couple of Truth bursts on you that descended on me in this process: 1) grief could actually immobilize me and cover up anger that I need to get my on my feet — so letting go of grief feels politically and spiritually productive; 2) I really got compassion for the grief that my sisters and brothers on the other side of the divide must have felt when Obama was elected and maybe again in 2018 with the long slow blue change of climate. Perhaps they could benefit from this grief work too.
Recently Dr. Deborah Johnson, Inner Light Ministries, reminded a group of us that when Barack Obama was first elected in 2008 there was so much grief and fear that, in many parts of the country, stores were sold out of ammunition. Doing my own belated grief work on my feelings from the 2016 election allowed me to access compassion for what those folks must have gone through– the incredible pain that must have driven that idea that they needed to defend themselves en masse.
Could it be partly the goal of healing this separation, this fear, this gulf or divide that is causing presidential candidate Marianne Williamson to run, Bernie Sanders to adopt the slogan Not Me Us and Joe Biden to say he wants to “restore the soul of this country”?Maybe. But no presidential candidate can restore our souls unless we are about that business too.
Let’s get busy ending the civil war within our own hearts today so that we can be up for new reconstruction of the nation tomorrow.