Empathic Resilience: A Response to the Unraveling

Pamela Boyce Simms
2 min readJun 2, 2020

Witness to the unraveling.

We are alive at this time to courageously bear witness to the unraveling.

There are choices available to us, inherent in every moment.

Our task is to witness and choose.

That the unraveling is excruciating is inevitable. Labor pains without the anesthetic always are. We saw it coming, yet didn’t know what form it would take. Since complex systems are dissolving, the unraveling is multifaceted, sucking health, economic and political systems into the vortex at once.

We can allow ourselves to touch and feel the pain without being swept up, swept away, or immobilized by despair.

If we abide the pain for a protracted moment we’ll see our way clear to our individual and collective choice-points.

Change is multidimensional — occurring on countless frequencies, i.e. bandwidths, simultaneously.

We inevitably choose a bandwidth that resonates most fully with the current state of our relationship with our true-selves.

We can choose…

….. To numb out and succumb to a range of countless states of overwhelm.

….. The exhilarating bandwidth of tearing down and dismantling of that which no longer serves us in all of the forms that process takes.

…..”Empathic resilience,” That is, to:

Allow our hearts to break open yet remain coherent. This invites pathways toward purposeful action to emerge organically.

Beam consciously, purposefully, steadfastly directed flood tides of compassion to those in travail under the wheels of the behemoth chariot, and to those who collectively, ….quietly, …skillfully pick up the reigns. Not the reigns of ostentatious power, or kumbaya, feigned spiritual piety but of resilience-building for long haul thriving amidst ever-cascading crises.

Some, self-selected among us, are invited to place our feet firmly on a path that authentically builds resilience for the transformed emergent world to which we are giving birth.

© PBS @ Imaginal Cells, CSE LLC, June, 2020

--

--

Pamela Boyce Simms

Evolutionary culture designer; an environmental resilience-builder working with international Quaker, Buddhist, and African Diaspora networks.