I want to explore how we can live in this world in a conscious, grounded way, when so much around us feels unconscious and destructive; insane really. Things are clearly not okay—and they seem to be getting worse, and the rate at which they are getting worse feels like it’s accelerating as well.

Whether we look at the environment, climate, war, the loss of rational government, how people treat one another, inequality, injustice, polarization, and rising levels of distress and disease—not just physical, but people not being okay with themselves and each other—it’s hard to find anything unaffected. And yet, here we are, trying to live in a good way. Trying not to be victims or reflections of what we can call the poly-crises, but to be OK in spite of it, without cutting ourselves off from the world around us.

When I was in my early twenties, I had fantasies about going “back to the land”—living in a commune, with good people on a beautiful farm, separate from society. Some people tried that, and it rarely worked out as imagined. It is really hard to get along. Ultimately, we can’t escape ourselves, or each other. Even if someone is able to leave for Mars, that doesn’t solve the problem: they are not going alone. And the rest of us are still here, in this together.

So the real question is: how do we live in this world without being crushed by it?

I want to offer things I actively practice myself, that are doable and make sense. They come from both relative and absolute understandings; the relative being the realm of the human mind and heart, the small self; and the absolute being non-dual reality, the pure consciousness and being that all is.

Of course, daily meditation and periodic retreats are essential, but that is well established and hopefully in place. I am sure there are other things that could be added to this list, so let this be the start of a long conversation and experiment.

The first approach is not surprisingly: feel everything fully.

This means fully allowing and feeling our emotional response to what we perceive as happening in the world. Feeling our anger, rage, sadness, despair, grief, anxiety, fear, terror, guilt, shame, and uncertainty. Instead of suppressing or numbing these feelings, we let ourselves experience them fully. We take the stance of courage and let it all come to us, as it is.

This creates a kind of purification—by facing our fear of our emotions we overcome denial and repression; we are no longer victims. By not letting fear numb and deaden us we learn to feel what is present inside without being overwhelmed or broken by it.

What’s happening in the world is painful to the point of being unbearable. This compels us to resist and repress our own emotional responses. In doing so we create even more suffering and powerlessness for ourselves; what Buddha called the “second arrow”—and this we must work at not doing.

Remember, what is happening around us is not perfect, not permanent, not personal. Life is messy, everything changes, and very little of it is actually about me. These reminders can help loosen the grip of our reactivity and restore perspective, without denying or repressing what we feel.

The feelings in us are already ours to feel and integrate, and if we resist them, we pay a steep price emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. Sometimes simply being able to express and share our truth: how we are feeling with all that is happening around us is sufficient. Other times it needs to go much deeper, using meditation or other skillful means to uncover and feel our own pain and sorrow. Then and only then is an appropriate response, authentic action, possible.

We also need to moderate our exposure to media, news, opinions, information and devices.

It’s not necessary—or healthy—to immerse ourselves constantly in highly charged content. Staying informed is one thing; being consumed by news is another. You may have an interest or need to know about a particular topic, that is fine, find good sources and learn as much as you need to know. It is like driving at night, you need headlights to see in front of you, where you are going. You do not need floodlights illuminating all around you to a great distance. That would be overwhelming and distracting.

Much of what we encounter—especially opinion-driven media—is not particularly useful. It often reflects other people processing their own biases and emotions in public. You don’t need everyone else’s highly charged content, much of it is not especially true or useful, it is just prompting clicks for someone by getting you emotionally entangled in reactions and counter-reactions.

A basic general level of awareness of what is going on in the world around us is enough for most people. Beyond that, excessive news can become distracting and harmful. You cannot keep a good, healthy mental and emotional life, let alone a spiritual one, while taking in large amounts of overwhelming and unactionable information.

You do not need to have an informed and correct opinion about everything. Nor do you often need to voice the opinions you have. Most casual discussions about the world are more venting and arguing than listening, considering and learning. Watch what goes on in these situations and don’t get trapped into more news simply to make better arguments. Most of the time people are not really listening, they are thinking about the next thing they want to say.

In Zen, this is sometimes referred to as “Don’t Know Mind.”

Everything we know about the world comes through our minds: it is totally based on perceptions, thoughts and images and our emotional reactions to them. We take in raw sensory data—what we see, hear, touch, taste, smell—but that is then turned into what we think we know, which is actually just beliefs, constructed in the mind over and over.

Each of us is living in a different version of the world, our own unique subjectivity. If this weren’t so, people would agree on what is true and what is necessary to be done, and get along without much conflict. Clearly, this is not the case.

If you remember the late 60’s, it’s like the old Firesign Theater album title, Everything You Know Is Wrong. It’s funny, and it points toward something profound. Most of what we call knowledge is a thick layer of interpretation, assumption, memory, and belief, on top of a bit of direct experience.

Realizing this we need to question our own beliefs and understandings about the world. Is what I believe to be real actually real, is what I believe to be true actually true? Or is it colored by the projections of my mind? If people have so many different views about everything, why do I suppose mine are correct? It is more likely I am just as deluded as anyone else, so I should remain open, curious, and uncertain about what I think I know to be true.

Questioning ourself in this way creates distance from our minds—and that distance can be very healthy. Awareness itself—the part of us that is aware, of thoughts, feelings, and perceptions—is inherently free of beliefs, and at peace with what is. It isn’t in conflict with anything. It simply is.

The Non-Dual Understanding at the heart of most spiritual traditions, is that Being Aware, our Being, is not judging or resisting or grasping onto any aspect of what is. It is at peace, it is love, and full acceptance of what is. That is realizing or remembering the great perfection of what is. This is not a philosophy, it is the truest experience of what is, uncolored by the mind or ego.

We begin by accepting that we don’t know anything for sure. We don’t know for sure what’s happening, what it means, what will come next, what is a right response, what is a wrong one. There are no truly reliable reference points in our mind, or in our perceptions of the world. Our mind can only reference other thoughts: basically itself. We cannot truly know.

Much of our suffering comes from living in imagined pasts and futures. Yet past and future are not present realities, they are simply current, subjective thoughts; thoughts we call past and memory; predicting and planning. Some of this is useful and necessary, but much of it is compulsive and repetitive—an attempt to change or control outcomes that cannot be changed or controlled. We replay conversations, anticipate disasters, and construct scenarios, believing that thinking more will make us safer. Typically, this only results in stress.

Recognizing this is liberating. We do not need to rehearse or rehash our lives. We can attend to what actually requires action and let the rest remain unknown. Returning to immediate experience—to awareness itself—often reveals that what is happening now is far simpler and more workable than the stories we create about it.

This isn’t meant to be conceptual—you have to see it directly in your own experience, in the moment. When you look closely, you begin to notice that your mind is just thoughts referring to other thoughts, images referring to other images. It seems to be a connected and real whole, but it isn’t at all. Our mind is just a linear progression of thoughts: it is not reality.

We believe we know ourselves, other people, the world, situations, events—but we don’t, not really. All we “know” is sequential fragments of perception and thought, filtered through other thoughts, which we call conditioning, expectations, and bias. The mind then builds a picture from these fragments and pronounces it is reality.

Don’t trust that. Look beneath it. Understand in your own experience that you don’t know anything for sure, except that you, awareness, are. You exist. Not knowing can be unsettling—but it’s ultimately freeing. Not knowing is freedom, peace, because it is the truth.

Another approach is to step back—far back.

Imagine seeing the Earth from a vast distance, just a tiny dot in an immense universe filled with countless galaxies, existing for billions of years. From that perspective, life on earth is an extraordinary, but probably not unique emergence.

Human beings evolved through immense pressures of competition, survival, and adaptation. The traits we now struggle with—aggression, fear, competition, dominance—evolved to enable our survival. Humans had to overcome countless environmental challenges, including massive repeated glaciations and being hunted as prey by huge, fierce predators. This required us to become both fierce and competitive, and cooperative and loving.

In how our society operates today, the imbalance of those traits is clear, but this isn’t anyone’s fault. It’s the present outcome of impersonal evolutionary processes that shaped our minds and capacities. Where we are now as human beings collectively is not so much a choice as being what we are presently evolved to be. Let looking through this evolutionary lens soften blame. Even those whose actions we strongly oppose are the products of causes and conditions they did not choose. Most human beings act out of wounds, fears, and conditioning they are not even aware of. Understanding this does not excuse harmful behavior, but it can reduce our reactivity and increase our compassion.

From this perspective, even human extinction—if it were to happen—would not be a mistake or an aberration, but simply another outcome of evolution; the end of a species that could not adapt to wise use of its power quickly enough, and succumbed to the consequences. We realize we are part of something much larger and longer that we cannot fully understand or control.

What is at stake is not the planet. The Earth has been around for billions of years, and many mass extinctions. The last one was the Chicxulub meteor, 66 million years ago. Nothing humans can do could come close to the violence and destruction of that event, which is estimated to have equaled the force of 100 million megatons of TNT (all current nuclear weapons are “only” a few thousand megatons, horrific to contemplate and more than enough to destroy civilization, but tiny in comparison). This impact caused the extinction of 95% of the species alive at the time, including the dinosaurs, making room for mammals, and eventually us, to evolve.

Now, we humans, and the animals, plants and environments we know and love are all at risk, but the Earth is incredibly creative, resilient, and capable of moving beyond us, if that is what happens. It will adapt, evolve, and ultimately generate something new, and perhaps smarter and more balanced. Who knows?

One of the most important things we can do is simply be in nature.

This cannot be overemphasized.

The primary root of much of the suffering and confusion around us, and inside of us, is the trance of separation. Being in nature is a simple and powerful antidote.

Even with all the imbalances humans have introduced, nature remains more regulating, more grounding, and more real than most of what we surround ourselves with. Don’t go into nature thinking about how it should be—just experience it. The life, the movement, the beauty—it’s all still there. Put down your phone, your devices, and let yourself walk and sit in presence, without trying to do or get anything. You can call it meditation, but don’t make it a technique or a practice; just be aware and present to what is.

Outdoor recreation and play are important, but they are activity on human terms; nature is just a setting for fun and goals. Being in nature on its own terms is radically different, letting ourselves do nothing long enough to remember our nature, that we are nature. Then separation drops away to beauty, peace and love.

True connection to the people around us, and those we love, supports our humanity and our sanity. The more we can laugh, cry, share, play, and listen, the more supported and connected we feel. Our hearts open, and we feel alive and whole.

The problems we face as a society and a planet were created collectively, and cannot be faced alone. If you bear the world inside yourself alone you suffer the worst of it. If we can instead meet it in some kind of community it is bearable, and we don’t lose ourselves in despair.

Being able to share our deepest emotions and thoughts with others, and being truly listened to, and then listening to them, is love, which is healing and empowering. With the intensity of what is happening in the world around us, if we can find or create sanghas that provide a deep level of sharing and caring, it is invaluable support. This is a different understanding of the role sangha can play in our lives. The format of just meditating and listening to a talk may not be enough anymore. We need spaces where we can connect deeply, listening and speaking, so the burdens of fear, grief and uncertainty are realized to be collective and impersonal.

This is not to say that relationships are easy, or free of conflict and pain, but in meeting others deeply and authentically we meet ourselves in the same way, and find our way to healing and growth.

One of the most effective antidotes to despair and depression is giving to others. When the problems of the world feel overwhelming, doing something tangible for other beings can restore a sense of meaning and power.

This does not have to be grand; you are not trying to be a savior. Bringing people together, helping a neighbor, volunteering, adopting a pet, caring for someone who is struggling, sharing wisdom, creating beauty, or helping others connect with nature are all forms of service. Small acts matter.

Acts of generosity remind us that while we may not be able to solve the world’s big problems, we can reduce suffering and increase connection in the parts of it we touch. It shifts our attention from helplessness to participation, from despair to contribution. The simple fact is, giving and generosity feel good, they are energizing, and those are rewards enough.

Yet service alone is not enough: We have to live our own lives fully. Live your own wisdom. Live your own heart. Wake up. Being happy is a radical act!

We do not need to wait for the world to become sane before we allow ourselves to be sane. We do not need to wait for peace to be peaceful, or for love before we are loving. The invitation is to be and live the qualities we wish were more present in the world.

There is no precedent for the situation we find ourselves in. All of this is new, it is an experiment on the part of evolution, nature. Everything we do is both a response and a new input. Whatever you do that contributes to sanity, calm, openness, kindness, wisdom, and compassion is good. Keep doing it and sharing it.

Don’t fall into the belief that nothing matters. It does. Everything does. Wake Up!