You may have noticed that the world feels a bit like a dumpster fire these days. A dumpster fire in a nuclear waste facility. And yet, as a congenital optimist, I don’t see the chaos of our time as total ruin. It’s messy, yes—even catastrophic at times—but I also see signs of hope. Maybe even transcendence. A kind of spiritual composting is underway.

Our task is to transform the toxic waste dump into the kind of ferment that nourishes new life, new beauty, new kinds of abundance.

The Default Mode: Horror, Retraction, and Despair

Over and over these days, I hear people saying:

• “I can’t spend much time reading the news. It’s too much.”
• “I scroll through my social media really fast, just trying to see my friends without knowing too much about what’s happening in the world.”
• “This is all too much for me. I just literally can’t.”

This comes even from people who love reading and discussing current events: They tell me it’s too awful, too dispiriting, too psychologically crushing just to read the news.

And along with this mood of general dread comes a kind of retraction, a pulling inward, like someone reflexively going into ‘child’s pose.’ Many people are not only giving up on the world situation, but also their personal hopes and dreams.

This is so, so understandable. But it’s not necessary. Actually, it’s a tragic mistake. Because right now, surrounded by breakdowns of all kinds, we’re also surrounded by the possibility for major breakthroughs.

We just have to know how to feel our way into them.

This is a very unusual way to react to the world coming apart. We need to radically reassess how we cope with the garbage.

Jettison the Toxicity, Keep the Scraps of Life

We need a new way of processing all the crap that’s hitting various fans these days. If we’re appalled by the news, by social media, by all the people who seem so certain, angry, and dangerous, retracting in horror isn’t enough.

It’s a perfectly normal reaction, though, so let it happen.

Then, when you’re tired of being curled up like a traumatized pillbug, try this: Amp up the attention you use on discernment. 

Priming Your Discernment

Discernment Step One: Ground into Your Sense of Truth

You have what I sometimes call a “sense of truth.” It’s a still, relaxed openness you feel with someone who’s loving and honest, or a book that speaks clearly to your soul, or your favorite pet. I have a phrase I use to help people find this sensation. I’ve found that this works for almost everybody. Try this: Breathe gently but deeply while repeating to yourself, aloud or silently, “I am meant to live in peace.”

Your body and emotions will react to this the way a flower turns toward the sun—naturally, effortlessly, clearly. Your muscles will relax. You’ll feel a slight-to-major sense of relief. Ground into that by focusing all your attention on it. Got it? Good. Move on.

Discernment Step Two: Test Your Reactions to Any Situation

You have now sampled two visceral reactions: horror and truth. To separate toxic waste from compost fuel, go through your thoughts and see which ones create the first reaction (GAAAAAAHHH!!!) and which lead to the second reaction (Whew. Okay. This is real, and I have to deal with it.).

For example, when I read that people with no history of illegal behavior are being detained, accused, and punished for things they didn’t do, I feel a general horror-based retraction. But if I parse through my reactions, I find some poisonous thoughts—these intensify the horror—and some simple truths. For example:

• My inner voice screams, “Everything and everyone I love is going to be attacked! I must stop all planning and hoping until the destroyers are destroyed!” 

This is an honest reaction, but it’s also toxic. It makes me wilt from ‘child’s pose’ into ‘road-kill hedgehog pose.’ It totally flattens me, makes me prickly and unpleasant to be around.

• So I look for the kernel of truth in my initial reaction. It says something like, “This is a very serious situation. I need to pay attention to the people I trust, and to my intuition. I need to respond the very moment I feel an urge to act.”

This second thought isn’t exactly cheerful. But it feels truer. And when I focus my attention on this truer option, I feel myself uncurling just a little. 

I feel myself making sensible plans. 

I feel myself returning to hope and creativity. 

That means this thought isn’t toxic. In fact, it’s potentially fertile.

Discernment Step Three: Reject the Toxins and Build on the Compost

Even though it’s tempting to stay curled-up and moaning, that’s not nourishing—it’s poisonous. Gently, repeatedly bring your attention back to your more compost-y kinds of thoughts. Keep your intuition calm but alert. 

And when it tells you to act, do what it suggests.

Many, many people, from sociologists to survivors of tumultuous world events, tell us that if we can stay in this alert-but-not-anxious place, we not only stand a good chance of surviving. 

We are positioning ourselves to thrive amid the chaos.

Let the Wild Ideas Begin to Grow

Human recorded history is like a field that’s been plowed and re-plowed, planted and re-planted with the same tired energy: domination, fear, scarcity, panic, and furious, constant activity based on all of the above. 

The soil is dried out, drained of nutrients.

There’s a reason it’s cracking.

Something else wants to grow through the cracks.

As you may know, my woo-woo self believes that what’s cracking isn’t just human institutions, but a way of being, thinking, taking any action whatsoever. 

And what shines through the cracks as they open is a new consciousness, a new way of being human.

This thought has passed my discernment test over and over. It turns my fear into alertness, despondency into curiosity, hopelessness into a strange bloom of fascination.

That’s why I see it as the compost that reinvigorates my heart, mind, and soul. In the shambles of my preconceptions, once they’ve been gleaned of fear, I find a rich trove of nourishing ideas. I’ve made a career out of them. I believe you can too.

When things are broken and the fans are flinging, coming to the quiet place of truth will show you your own wild garden, ready to bloom. You’ll see small shoots first, thoughts like:

• “Hey… what if I finally started that thing?”
• “Wouldn’t it be cool to collaborate with and make something?”
• “What if I just said ‘screw it’ and went all in doing what I love?”
• It won’t just be one idea. In hundreds of tiny thoughts, you’ll begin to feel the message, “It’s time to plant something.”

In the middle of the chaos, you’ll find that the energy of the truth is a frequency that draws abundance. Abundance of creativity, of companionship, of strength, of joy, and yes, of money.

This frequency, this consciousness poking up through the cracks in a failing system, is steady. As everything else shudders and breaks, it remains serene, pure, vibrant.

Your brilliant ideas are waiting for you to separate the toxic reactions in your own heart and mind from those that nourish a new life. Not one of us has much impact on the huge events underway. But we can change our way of thinking. We can reject toxins and accept the truth that nourishes.

We can change everything within ourselves.

And then, as the wild new garden begins to grow, it can change everything else.

Steady on, brave souls! We are planting the future.