Commit to a daily personal practice (e.g., meditation) to build resilience and prevent difficult emotions like anxiety, fear, and fatigue from becoming overwhelming over time. This practice helps you meet emotions, experience them, and let them go, rather than getting caught up in reactivity.
Prioritize self-care, as it’s not selfish but essential for your well-being and ability to effectively care for others. By understanding and meeting your own needs, you become less of a burden and more capable of service.
Engage in regular rest and self-care practices to ensure your longevity and ability to remain helpful over the long term, rather than burning out by investing everything in immediate responses to urgency.
Develop a direct and open relationship with fear by asking what it’s preventing you from doing and what you’re truly afraid of. Consider what you will regret if fear dominates your choices, but also discern if fear is signaling a lack of resources for an endeavor.
Cultivate an open heart, as this vulnerability can dissolve fear by reversing the energy of aversion and rigidity, allowing for fluidity, interconnectedness, and space to respond rather than react.
Begin the practice of empathy by first empathizing with yourself, acknowledging your own pain and discomfort, which then allows you to recognize that others are also experiencing similar struggles.
Create clear boundaries around your accessibility (e.g., public work, personal interactions) and personal needs to protect your mental health and ensure you have time for self-care, especially if you find yourself overextended.
Avoid repeatedly engaging in conversations or pushing others to change their beliefs when you know it will lead to conflict or a ‘dead end,’ especially with family members, to prevent harm to the relationship.
Maintain important relationships by modeling your choices around safety and health without forcing others to adopt them, allowing them agency while still expressing love and reducing harm.
Be clear about your boundaries and how far you’re willing to go in influencing others’ choices; sometimes reducing harm means backing off and holding space, connecting to your own grief about their choices.
Expand your understanding of violence beyond physical harm to include emotional harm, recognizing when personal boundaries are crossed, leading to disappointment, confusion, or a loss of trust in yourself or others.
By creating internal space through practices like an open heart, you can shift from habitual reactivity to thoughtful responsiveness, enabling you to choose actions that are helpful rather than merely avoiding discomfort.
Rather than avoiding discomfort, invite it in, as this counterintuitive approach can lead to greater freedom than constantly trying to suppress or escape pain.
Accept outrage, anger, and fury as natural emotions, rather than judging or getting mad at yourself for experiencing them, as this acceptance is key to developing resiliency.
Consult with people who love you and are invested in your well-being about their perception of your choices, especially when navigating tricky emotions like fear, to gain external perspective and support.
Cultivate empathy by first ensuring you have enough self-care to feel safe and open to reflect on others’ discomfort, as being overwhelmed with your own discomfort can shut down the capacity for empathy.
Be highly aware and attentive while driving, as being overwhelmed or distracted can lead to dangerous choices and a loss of focus on basic safety, causing you to ‘coast’ on critical tasks.
Actively seek restoration to rebuild your resiliency, which is your capacity to bounce back from stress and overwhelm, by figuring out what sparks joy, inspiration, or provides rest.
Supplement meditation with other personal practices like yoga, exercise, and creating a sense of ‘home making’ to cultivate a restorative refuge, especially for introverts who recharge in solitude.
Actively protect the boundary of your home as a refuge for restoration by saying ’no’ to external demands and scheduling time for stillness, silence, and enjoyable activities.
Make a conscious effort to reconnect with activities that bring you pleasure and fun, even if traditional outlets are disrupted, by finding alternative ways to experience restoration.
Utilize entertainment (e.g., streaming services) skillfully as a form of self-care for temporary breaks from the world, but avoid self-indulgence by ensuring you return to important work and relationships once restored.
Foster communal living by sharing resources and support with friends, family, and neighbors, especially for parents or those feeling overwhelmed, to create opportunities for breaks and mutual care.
Critically question why your life is so overextended that you lack time for self-care or family, and consider making different choices to prevent work from dictating your life.
Disrupt patterns of over-consumption by asking what you truly need and what you can do without, recognizing that materialism often serves as a substitute for internal emotional labor.
Cultivate a rich, direct, kind, and loving internal practice of self-care to reduce reliance on material consumption for emotional well-being, allowing you to engage with the material world more mindfully and disrupt over-consuming habits.
When consuming less, reinvest your energy and resources into things that are truly restorative for yourself and others, which can lead to more authentic engagement and the ability to hold space for people.
If you find yourself over-resourced, consider how you can authentically care for people by offering extra resources to others in need.
Reframe ‘apocalypse’ not as an end, but as an opportunity for profound shift, unveiling, and the emergence of truth, especially during times of multiple, simultaneous changes, to touch into underlying reality.
Practice constant self-inquiry throughout the day by asking ‘What do I need right now?’, ‘How am I doing?’, ‘How’s my mind/body?’, and ‘What do other people need around me?’ to maintain self-awareness and ensure you are resourced.