I have a friend that inspired me to go vegan that isn’t vegan anymore.
And the second i found that out, i said to myself… if this person can shift such a staunch belief, literally anything is possible. “Truly, I’ll never say never EVER again,” i said.
I don’t judge this at all.
In fact, during the pandemic i read a book about chakras where the author claimed that visceral attachments one direction or another between vegetarianism and carnism actually had to do with issues in the root chakra.
I’m not talking about people that want to be vegan because of the extraordinary amount of data in support of that lifestyle with regard to health, environmental sustainability, and animals.
I’m talking about people that become attached to the beliefs of others so much so that they have visceral reactions.
What is it that can shift someone away from a perspective they so fervently believe in? That they’ve studied, researched and confirmed is a belief system they will hold to such an extent that their entire lives would change if that perspective ceased to exist?
When i did my survey last year on beliefs that divided people during the Pandemic and asked the respondents to also take a chakra test, i found a correlation between those with under active root chakras and have what are considered “liberal” belief patterns.
The root chakra is associated with family, your ability to be grounded and feel safe and secure. Anecdotally, I’ve discovered that those that have suffered traumatic childhoods can sometimes tend to have underactive root chakras.
Childhood trauma breeds significant empathy.
But your root chakra is your ability to feel grounded and sometimes this can impact our ability to be triggered by others, particularly if we haven’t healed it yet. Picture it like a tree with a very shallow root system. A hurricane can uproot a tree very easily with a shallow root system. However, a tree with a substantial, grounded root system cannot be uprooted by even the strongest wind. Someone might call that tree rooted, stable and secure. Some also might call a one that refuses to move at all stubborn, hard headed or inflexible.
Many that experience trauma often find themselves trying to rid the world of it. Empaths make incredible superheroes.
Is there anything wrong, after all, with making the world a better place?
This is the charge of the empath.
They themselves have experienced great suffering and hardship, so they don’t want others to experience great hardship.
“Wait, Amber. Are you saying that conservatives are heartless???”
Absolutely not.
I am saying that those with less rooted first chakras may be more likely to carry a torch in the interest of well-being at the expense of other factors. That the well-being of those around them may be a priority.
“I am willing to accept personal inconvenience in the interest of the betterment of all.”
Do you think this is an unreasonable statement? Non-specifically?
The extent of that personal inconvenience may vary depending on the person.
Those with more open or overactive root chakras might be more likely to feel secure in the world. Often their struggles are not the same as those with under active root chakras, and so they find themselves standing firm in the understanding that they have their own struggles to account for and it is reasonable for them to believe that personal accountability should be enough to balance out an unbalanced world.
“If I can take care of myself. You should be able to as well.”
We might find differences in beliefs regarding budgetary allocation, the extent of the masses responsibility to hold up a disadvantaged population or personal medical freedoms.
I watched a short video on Instagram comparing the current situation to the complacency that allowed Hitler to get away with mass genocide during WWII.
It was an interesting perspective that leveraged a very horrific situation to move people in a direction.
But i find it ironic that by the end i considered that either side of our biggest debate could’ve taken that narrative of perspective and used it in support of their belief.
If you’re interested, watch it:
https://www.instagram.com/tv/CR7Syhcl_z2/?utm_medium=copy_link
One side of the current debate on medical autonomy versus protecting the masses might use the argument that the continued complacency of those that choose not to be inoculated is similar to the complacency that allowed for the deaths of 11 million people.
The other side might argue that the complacency of not demanding medical freedom sets a standard for the involvement of the government to overstep in other ways in your life.
So, who is right?
Everyone is right.
I know.
I know you didn’t start reading this for me to validate someone’s beliefs that exist outside of your own.
I can literally hear the eye rolling, sighs and desire to stop reading, immediately.
I’m not sorry that I am here to say things you might not want to hear, but at this point I have very little attachment to whether or not someone agrees with me, so you’re going to hear this regardles
What i find the most interesting in my studies on the perspectives of others is not the opinions themselves, it’s the visceral and aggressive way that we hold on to those values.
I watched the show Explained the other night and there was an episode on Monarchies. The function of it was to essentially show they were outdated, but a random tiny part of the show piqued my interest.
It was in a section where the narrator was discussing that to keep Royal blood lines pure, they married their family. The interview transpiring was with a man in a Royal family who was communicating how happy he was that he was able to choose his own partner.
“She holds all my same beliefs,” he said.
What an interesting statement, i found.
When did we come to a point where the people we surround ourselves with must agree with everything we say?
When is it that we decided that everyone having the same opinion was the best thing? And that anyone that held a perspective counter to our belief system shouldn’t just not marry us, but cannot exist within our reality?
Enter: cancel culture.
Imagine if, whenever you encountered someone who believed differently than you, you said this, “I am entirely unwilling to recognize that your perspective is valid. In fact, i will consider you less than for having it. It doesn’t align with mine. You don’t exist.”
And then you pushed them down a hole in the floor like on Game of Thrones.
Ta da.
We don’t have to deal with them anymore.
Imagine the boring world we would live in of homogenized peace where no one disagreed but nothing ever changed?
What if, instead of sending people through the floor, we sat with them to find common ground to understand – maybe your belief systems, though their core values may differ significantly from my own, are actually based in a logic that makes sense but holds different priorities than my own?
Is it possible that, given the absolute endless variables that occur to make someone into the person they are, we are all existing in totally different realities and all of us are right to a certain extent within our reference points of how we view the world?
“I lost my daughter to Covid.”
“My child is vaccine injured.”
“Racism is still a huge problem.”
“Our biggest problem right now is not racism, other basic liberties are at play.”
Any of those statements trigger you?
Maybe they challenge your belief systems.
My friend Ryan, who seems to send me all the books that change my life, sent me a book called “Think Again” by Adam Grant.
This book is about how the most important thing for humans to come together and society to be better is the ability to rethink our perspective.
Here are a few quotes from it:
“We live in a rapidly changing world, where we need to spend as much time rethinking as we do thinking.
We’re mental misers: we often prefer the ease of hanging on to old views over the difficulty of grappling with new ones.
Even our great governing document, the U.S. Constitution, allows for amendments. What if we were quicker to make amendments to our own mental constitutions?”
You might think that the people in opposing perspective to yours aren’t actually looking at the facts.
You’d be wrong.
They’re just looking at different facts.
In Chapter 5 of his book, Grant goes over what he believes is the most successful way to win over those that believe differently than you… and sorry to burst your bubble, y’all, but it’s not by using facts and logic.
He believes the best way to shift perspective is by finding common ground in alternative beliefs before presenting your own evidence.
He outlines a debate wherein a widely acclaimed debater debates an Artificial Intelligent bot that can recall 400 million pieces of data, scholarly articles and facts and shifts the audience from 92% in disagreement with his stance to the entire room rethinking their perspective by acknowledging and validating the facts presented before bringing them into question.
I spend a lot of time, guys, trying to bring harmony to the world. And largely that comes from my OWN childhood traumas where to be at peace i had to make sure everything was perfect.
I don’t see this as a big character flaw, i see it as my opportunity to change the world.
See, the moment that i stopped trying so hard to exact change by demanding energy shifts and shoving my own perspectives onto the world was the moment that people really started to listen to me.
I told a friend at coffee the other day.
“If one side is here”, and i gestured to my left, “and the other side is here,” i gestured to my right, “I’m not trying to bring everyone into the same belief system. I’m just trying to bring them in enough to not have to be so viscerally angry with people that don’t believe what they believe.”
Your reality as you see it exists because of all the pieces of individual data that you decide matter the most. Your priorities and what matters most to you will vary because all of us came from different backgrounds, have varying perspectives and our priorities are at odds because of that.
But isn’t that what makes this world so beautiful?
That billions of people share an existence and maybe, hopefully, eventually, a greater empathy for one another?
I’d like to invite you to stop being so easily triggered by things that you find that are counter to your belief system and consider that the greatest change may start by having a little empathy for the opposing side.
As someone who spent her life with the people closest to her devaluing her perspective, opinions and desire to be heard and seen and validated, MY biggest torch-carry is to make sure that others are heard, seen and validated.
Just because someone’s opinion or perspective varies significantly to yours doesn’t mean that it isn’t valid and cannot ever be changed.
Don’t tell someone that is black that their rights aren’t a priority. Don’t tell someone with a vaccine injured child that vaccines are safe for everyone. Don’t tell someone who has lost a loved one to Covid that Covid isn’t serious. Don’t tell someone who values their rights and freedoms that they should give them up.
The beautiful thing about the world is that we are ALL different and the more we see the beauty in those differences and how they allow us to empathize and come closer, the more conflict will fall away.
Every time you trigger on an issue because you place the security of your own values and the torch you carry over the understanding that someone can prioritize the world differently than you is the second you give your power and inner peace away.
Take that power back and shift your perspective to understand that the way we make decisions has SO much oomph behind it that perspectives can only be shifted by one person, the person carrying them.
Perspectives CAN change.
But you have the be willing to see that maybe, to some degree, we’re all a little right before you can actually start changing the world around you.
? “Man we sit on the brink with a drink in our hand
And the other with the grip on an iPhone
Never looking in each others’ eyes
Let alone the stars one day wonder where the time gone
Time beats waking up when the ball drops
Too many hearts stop beating when hearts stop
Can’t wait for the world to change
That’s like waiting for the end of days
We gotta wake up, get up and do something
We gotta wake up, get up and do something
Yeah it ain’t gonna be perfect
Nothing ever has, but we could try
Just imagine that
Somewhere off in outerspace
There’s a world no wars, no hate
Where all the broken hearts are safe
I don’t know where it is
I just imagine it” ?
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