Unmoored

Interior of a small chapel on the Island of Sifnos, Greece

The word unmoored is lately swimming about in my brain as the best description of how I often feel these days.  In the photograph above, the ship is hanging somewhat precariously from the ceiling of a sacred chapel,  unmoored from the ocean, as it were, yet surrounded by a plethora of sacred beings.  Perhaps these saints and angels were painted with the explicit intent to send spiritual courage and protection to local fishing vessels that might all too easily get swept up in a perilous storm.

People like you and me might occasionally feel unmoored like a vessel trying to negotiate the ever-changing weather patterns of the Aegean Sea. We might at times exhibit “symptoms,” including sensations of insecurity, deep dismay or confusion, even a sense of having lost contact with reality, or at least the reality that we once knew. 

Watching the news can make us feel unmoored, for we might ask ourselves why there seem to be so many leaders who claim to be saviors but who promote the very opposite of love, or a genuine concern for the plight of other human beings. It leaves us feeling untethered, moreover, when we are lied to, either in person or telegraphed through the media. If we could only sit down and process what exactly “hit” us so hard, as untruths and distortions tend to do, we might regain composure and a sense of inner congruence and stability.

We might pause to reflect on how people can generally sense when they’re being lied to.  Being fed falsehoods the same way a baby might be fed cotton candy feels wrong, as if we’ve been slapped down hard, violated in potent yet intangible ways. 

One strategy might be to turn away from the deluge of misinformation that continuously comes at us.  False information registers in our hearts as if we’ve been blindsided by a harsh betrayal. To cope with these oncoming and continuous blows we might numb ourselves to the pain, or try to erase it, by confabulating a world in which “everything’s okay,” the ultimate betrayal of our sense of inner knowing.

A toxic environment of propaganda and misinformation means to render us overwhelmed and incapable of thinking critically, or with courage. But we can regain our sense of baseline intelligence and agency if we reclaim the domain of silence and allow ourselves time away from the disorienting work of attempting to make sense of a deluge of information born of a world in which any human being with a cell phone now has a platform.

Oh but the myriad of ways that an episode of feeling unmoored might be triggered—often by the very tools of communication that we hold in our hands!  In a moment, we might download the energy of people in our actual or virtual presence.  We might sense hostility instead of love, a flash of anger instead of peace, or betrayal instead of steadfast affection.  Oh how can things change in a micro-second!  Where there was once a job, there’s none, once a loved one, now a person departed from the earthly plane, once a baby, now a mature adult.  The very fact of change, “good or bad,” can unmoor the body and make us feel as if the ground beneath our feet has profoundly shifted. 

It’s unmooring, too, in the most deeply sad way, to observe what at this moment is happening in the history of humanity, as we live through a time of genocide, famine, and historic levels of displacement. Our fear-driven, zero sum game cultural narratives encourage us to buy into the illusion that we can inflict unspeakable traumas on entire populations without consequence. It’s unmooring, isn’t it, to think that we still don’t understand the implications yet of the spiral of violence (explained so well in the archbishop Helder Camara’s book Spiral of Violence, 1971), or the consequences of creating intergenerational trauma. The trauma born of violence, displacement, and famine will, after all, be passed down through generations, impacting our children, grandchildren and beyond.

It’s easy, and moreover natural, to feel unmoored on our earthly plane in a time as exciting and also challenging as the one that we’re all experiencing.

But what can we do, because for me feeling grounded, and at peace, is something I not only need but require, if I am to function like a healthy, non-toxic human being.

I imagine that we all have our ways of re-tethering ourselves, so that we can return to a state of being that feels more generative, heart-centered, and stable.

Here I will sound like a typical “spiritually-oriented” person, but for me it helps very much to isolate myself for “a minute” so that I can calm my nerves, sink into silence, and truly feel the emotions that often pour through me when I take the time to pause.  Deep meditation and yoga help my body and soul immensely, and if I’m outside, and feeling warm winds on a fall day, this entering into silence and nature is a balm to my soul. 

I’m no whirling dervish, but that sort of dancing must be absolutely transporting.  For others, it might be engaging creatively in a myriad of ways, including gardening, or simply gazing out a window.  I recently read a short story by Edith Wharton called “Mrs. Manstey’s View” (see The New York Stories of Edith Wharton) about a woman who in her old age did nothing but gaze out of the window of her room.  This activity eventually inspires her to attempt to burn down a neighbor’s house because of their plans to build and thus block a segment of her view. Not everything we try to do to stay calm and occupied actually works. But  it’s worth developing a repertoire of practices aimed to bringing us back into a non-reactive, more reflective state of mind.

But even with these practices ‘in place” what’s the bottom line here?  How can we leave the fractured, tortured, unmoored self behind in order to step into a broader, more expansive and healthy sensibility? 

The key is in cultivating our own authenticity, in learning to love ourselves for who we truly are and not for what others (or society) has told us in a myriad of ways we should be.  It comes when we are able to say, “The way I am made is so imperfectly perfect just as it is, because this is how I was created, and it is only in emanating my truest self that I can truly find peace, composure, and a confidence that I truly belong in this world.”

In this way, when we feel unmoored, psychologically at sea, lost, we must step by step walk ourselves back to our authentic selves, where there’s nowhere to go but more deeply into our truest essence, into the heart of that person we were born to be.

It’s by taking a sort of “inner stand” that we can contribute to shifting the global energy away from fear and violence and into a state of mutual respect, understanding and peaceful coexistence. All the external elements that threaten to unmoor us, and that frequently succeed, can be countered by the inner work that we do to remain essentially stable in the face of chaos. We may think that our inner state will have no influence over external forces, but it’s the opposite.

We can change the global vibration by doing the inner work that brings us into harmony with ourselves and other sentient beings across the globe; this is important and practical work. It's a powerful tool of resistance, and a refusal to remain unmoored in the face of terrifying realities.