Set Your Pulse: Take a breath. Turn your attention to your body and release any tension. Breathe slowly into the area of your heart for 60 seconds, focusing on feeling a sense of ease. Stay connected to your body as you read. Click here to learn why we suggest this.
Throughout human history, we have always changed our minds about things in the long run. But in the short term, it can be a lot harder. So while we are capable of changing our minds in the short term, what does it take?
I would suggest a willingness to do so, curiosity, a sense of safety in the body, and good faith (being fair as we explore). All key ingredients in my teachings around Embodied Sensemaking.
What does it look like when we don’t employ those qualities?
We call people names when they disagree with us. We refuse to include pertinent facts in our narrative and instead sweep them under the rug as if they don’t exist. We ignore the fact that our body sends a signal of resistance and defence (clenching and twisting), which shapes the cognitive bias we enter into - all while pretending we’re being objective.
These are just a few layers of what occurs. We can also mention ideology, echo chambers, algorithms etc.
With Embodied Sensemaking the invitation is to settle the body, notice it, pay attention to where resistance comes in, and get curious about why it’s there so we can stay at the table and make sense in good faith - with honest true curiosity. This helps us steer clear or be aware of our cognitive bias, and keep going. It helps us stay in a connected and curious mode, vs. a defensive and attacking mode.
Ya, it takes work, but it’s our birthright to feel and explore this way. Our culture is so divorced from our natural self and we are so cognitively oriented that we’ve lost sight of how to make sense more deeply. It’s probably been like this for thousands of years. We kill each other, burn books, and hide information just to hold onto the old or maintain power.
All of this leads to what I want to point to regarding an important and controversial subject - the Israel and Palestine conflict and the Israeli government’s current genocide of the Palestinian people.
Gabor’s Shift
Gabor Maté is a Canadian doctor who has spent several decades focused on nervous system health and trauma. As a result, he sees personal illness, behavior, conditions, syndromes, etc. in a different—more complex way— that looks at what drives these things rather than judging them as bad or wrong.
The complexity of his thinking, willingness to look at deeper layers, and attunement to himself and emotions in the process help him look at tough things in a more meaningful light to make sense of them.
As I have suggested via Embodied Sensemaking, this process of exploring what drives us doesn’t have to stay stuck in clinical settings, it can be applied to how we make sense of our history, society, and future. This is the entire thesis of my work with Collective Evolution. But it takes some skill building to truly do it.
In the clip below, Maté describes his history of being a Jewish Zionist, and how that changed over time and through experience and gaining greater perspective.
This clip is a reminder for us to stay humble and ask: when it comes to any situation we feel so strongly about, what would it take for us to change our mind about it? If we can’t name something, it might mean we hold the idea too tightly. Further, if we want another to be open to changing their mind about it, how might we approach it?
Transcript
“I was one of the Zionists. I grew up places a young adolescent and into my late teens early 20s really believing that dream of the Jewish state. And of course, missing from that dream was the nightmare that was being inflicted on our Palestinians to create that Jewish dream.
As somebody already said, there was no way to create an exclusive national state for one people when there was another people already living there. So all the cruelty and all the dispossession, it had to happen and it did happen. And at that time it was justified as “well we were so hurt we were fighting for our survival.” OK if that was ever true, and I no longer agree with that point of view, if it was ever true it's certainly not true now.
After the first Intifada, I visited the Palestinian territories I cried every day for two weeks that I had actually bought into this nightmare because even then it was horrible the cruelties the daily brutalities of the occupation. The injustice of it. The sheer effrontery that I as a Jew born in Hungary could land in Tel Aviv airport tomorrow and claim citizenship where some Palestinian who was born there had ancestors rooted in there and they can't even visit as a refugee. The sheer injustice of it.
I travelled around the Palestinian territories with the medical delegation these days when demonstrators in Hong Kong throw stones at the police or demonstrators in Myanmar use slingshots against the army the New York Times celebrates them. When Palestinians throw stones at the police they're criminals whose army is justified to suppress.
I have something in my hand here I'm gonna knock it on the table. This is one of these so called “rubber bullets” that I picked up in the occupied territories that was shot at the heads of Palestinian kids. Rubber bullet? It’s metal encased in sheer plastic. So this is how fair that fight is.
When something like the current situation happens what people never hear about is the daily background. Daily, Palestinians are marching to the border demanding the right to return.
Now tell me, if I have the right to return having been born in Budapest with my ancestors maybe 2000 years ago having lived in the Middle East, why don't the Palestinians have the right to return? But when Palestinians demonstrate peacefully and they are shot and killed, their deaths are not even recorded in the newspapers here.
So my heart really hurts when I see this happen and people say “You support the Palestinians, you’re a Hamas supporter.” No you're not. But Hamas is nothing compared to the terrorism of the Israeli government. We're talking about a government capable of killing 20,000 civilians in Lebanon in 1982 and then we complain about Palestinian terrorism?
So what's lacking in this conversation is a complete lack of perspective. One does not have to support the policies of Hamas in order to stand up against this injustice. Nor does one have to support the policies of anybody to admire the resilience of the Palestinian people.”
Thanks for sharing this, enjoyed hearing Maté's perspective. As someone who has watched many conversations around this issue, people seem to think it's so simple.. trying to find a lynchpin in history that proves things one way or another. But it does not exist. I like that you and Gabor point that out.
I am always surprised by some comments as they don't quite seem to get what you are getting at and instead revert back to the tropes you are trying to point out. Trying to find that singular point that proves someone is right to do something so awful to another. Anyway, thanks for sharing this, I did not know Maté's position on all of this. Seems reasonable and open.
i've always had an inherent sense of supporting the Palestinians, ever since the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli wars when i saw my parents side with the Arabs against Israel. i would say they were anti-Semitic coming from their beliefs and experiences in their country of origin in Europe which they fled from as the Soviets invaded, with the German's help near the end of WW II.
Going to university in the 70s, i met and made friends with Jewish students, one of whom became a roommate, and i came to see that it was not the people about which the "geo-political conflict" dynamic is really about, but dictators and the CIA trying to run the world, at the people's expense. Still i could not deny my inherent feelings towards the Palestinians over the Israelis -- but only in regards to that arena over there -- the so-called "Holy Land." "What is it," i kept thinking, where i seem to support at some deep level inside myself -- the success of bombings and bloodshed done by the Palestinians during the Intifada, while i have Jewish friends here in my personal life ?
Then as the so-called "asymmetric" nature of the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis became more and more apparent to all who are not completely taken in by the MSM, plus with the sense of extreme brutality and "crimes against humanity" being committed by Israel, can i now say that my long-time feelings of support of the Palestinian cause to have been justified all along, especially too as the public opinion of my peers comes on-side ? To be honest, "No," these feelings seem to exist somewhere else, still rooted in my parent's beliefs. Or were their beliefs rooted in something else too, something even deeper ?
i would say it's essential to make a clear distinction between the powers-that-be and the people who have been caught up in these geo-political conflicts orchestrated by these "powers" since the beginning of history. Like Maté, lots of Israelis have divorced themselves from the actions of their government, just as those who marched in the anti-Vietnam War protests did, as even the American GI's did in the Gulf Wars when they witnessed their part in non-sensical actions against Iraqi citizens who actually were in support of the coalition cause, and as did too the Canadian truckers at Parliament Hill in the face of Trudeau's brutal globalist mandates.
But to me there is something very unique about Israel. In the book by Andrija Puharich, Uri: A Journal of the Mystery of Uri Geller, Puharich describes an event he was instrumental in during the 1973 Arab-Israeli conflict -- where he was in effect part of a channeling situation, enabling a race of ETs to influence the course of the war through the authority had as a human on Earth that the ETs didn't. At one point the Syrian tanks were free from Israeli opposition on the Golan Heights above Israel, and could have easily secured the strategic location for Syria, yet the tank commander inexplicably retreated. Based on Puharich's testimony it was because the ETs were able to influence the tank commander's mind through his own acting as a relay for them. It was likely that Israel losing the Golan Heights would have set a new timeline in motion, one unfavourable to Israel and the ETs who support it.
Personally i have lately been involved in a weekly online prayer circle that originally was part of Robert F Kennedy Jr's election campaign, run by a spiritual leader guiding participants in conventional prayer as well as targeted manifestation procedures. What we seem to be doing is similar to what was related in the 2018 movie, The Trump Prophesy, when evangelicals using directed Christian prayer where apparently able to bring about the unexpected Trump win in 2016. However after RFK Jr gave up his presidential bid and joined with Trump, i've become a bit concerned, even as i continue my efforts with the prayer circle to make RFK Jr's "Make America Healthy Again" campaign successful through Trump becoming President again. i trust Bobby and although i certainly don't trust whatever is behind the Democrats, i feel a Trump win will again be about support for Israel -- in a different way than it has been under Biden. i don't dismiss the idea that there could be different ET elements vying for lucrative power bases on the planet, which could swing one way or the other based on the results of the upcoming American election.
Considering all this, i don't dismiss my undefined feelings against Israel either. How far this goes with the Jewish religion can maybe best be represented by how i feel about Christianity as a religion -- in that it has been hijacked by the Roman Church, from its pure spiritual base and made into a system of control. But Israel is a country, not even a religion per se. It has been however, since pre-history, a highly valued spiritual base on the planet, some say a stargate. Even the Christian mystic, Rudolf Steiner inferred that Judaism was an expected and valued position that needed to be maintained in the coming times, for all of humanity's spiritual evolution. But Steiner never addressed the ET issue, except he did talk about the threat of the Asuras, dark spiritual beings which are alien to the solar system's nature and evolution. So maybe it no longer is any 'geo'-political dynamic, but a galactic or universal one (and maybe it always has been).
i think the best approach in the coming times -- would be to distance ourselves from all religion, the state that we hold citizenship or birth in, even our race -- and think of ourselves simply as human, since it could be that only the significance of being human will capture the true essence of the conflict we are increasingly facing. All the differences we have come to believe are between us, ones that have been encoded in social conventions and institutions, are in danger of being used to divide us. As citizens of this planet, we must hold on to the one identity which can't be used to separate us, and with which we will walk with the good ETs of the Milky Way Galaxy, as equals -- the Human Form.