A Metaphor for Bridging the Deep Divides
What are the Ultimate Truths guiding your life, relationships, work, and activism?
Yesterday, I visited one of my favorite spots in the country: The Corona Arch in Moab, Utah. Above is a picture of me doing a yoga wheel backbend to mirror this incredible sandstone arch.
I see this photo as a metaphor for bridging the deep divides facing our country!
I love the profound consciousness shifts that arise from surrendering to the vast, enduring, and mysterious power of the natural world. These shifts shake up the familiar ground I stand on, humbling and reorienting me toward larger truths beyond my own story.
Existential-humanistic psychologist Kirk Schneider put it best:
The capacity for profound, intimate experience is in jeopardy. [Social media] is replacing face-to-face friendships and corporations are manipulating what we see, think and feel—as well as how we vote and get our news. In short, we are losing our capacity for presence, discernment, and psychospiritual depth. We seek after the instant and neatly packaged.
Near the end of his life, psychologist Abraham Maslow came to see that our highest human need is not just self-actualization, but self-transcendence: the ability to live for something greater than ourselves. Self-transcended leaders are no longer driven by personal grievance, unresolved trauma, or the weapons of ego like retaliation, moral superiority, judgment, and enemy-making.
Instead, they ground their work in the “Ultimate Truths” that Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. lived by: the transcendent truths that bring us together into a collective, shared story beyond any one ideology or “side.” In the world of nonviolent activism, these Ultimate Truths can only arise from open dialogue, listening, curiosity, humility, and a reverence for viewpoint diversity.
When we get out of our own singular viewpoint, we’re often told we’ll be indulging in dangerous misinformation or hateful ideology. But I’ve found the exact opposite was true when I started reaching beyond the social justice narratives I found so much certainty in. When I surrendered my certainty, I found incredible nuance and complexity, and therefore new understanding. I witnessed change, healing, and transformation in places I never thought possible.
Imagine a world where we go beyond media and social echo chambers designed to keep us in fear and driven by propaganda from powerful forces manipulating both sides of the aisle. A world where our collective conversations are grounded in the courage to surrender to something larger than our opinions, egos, identities, and the need to be right.
Here’s an Ultimate Truth I live by: To create the world I want, I must know myself outside the distress of oppression and fear.
What are the Ultimate Truths guiding your life, relationships, work, and activism?
Comment below!
Thank-you Amber. I had a talk with Raul yesterday and he spoke of you and your work, amongst other things, and I think that on the surface, the world has gone insane, but, in the moment, in our grounded, everyday reality, when we are with nature and people, calm, presence, beauty, love triumphs over fear/worries and the manufactured dramas attacking human consciousness from the world stage. So, we need to simply stay sane, in our hearts, and hope that there are enough loving, life honoring, peaceful people in the world to calm those infected by the false narratives and the psyops that continue to try to divide and conquer. The best thing we can do, sometimes, is just walk away from our computers and get out into heart of nature.
Thank you Amber for that excellent essay. I will share it with a group I have been meeting with for the past few months, a group of friends who have diverse cultural, political and religious backgrounds and opinions but are willing to listen to one another with open minds and seek truth together.