“I feel numb” said my colleague.

She was worried that she was loosing her ability to feel.

She’s a therapist so she wanted to experience at least some pain, to keep alive her capacity to empathize.

But the mass shooting in Orlando and widespread violence around the world had scared her.

What about you?

How are you doing?

Feeling overwhelmed? Confused? Or stone cold?

Let’s talk.

The point of feeling numb.
Imagine that you’re a passenger in a car with no shock absorbers. You’re headed down a dirt road riddled with pot holes, being jostled and bumped. You yell to the driver to stop but your cry’s are drowned out by the engine noise.

Without shock absorbers, bruising is inevitable.

Acts of human brutality are never easy to encounter or contemplate.

But numbness is the mind – body’s intelligence at work.

When faced with trauma or pain your innate healing wisdom creates a buffer to cushion shock. It wraps itself around you like a blanket to protect your spiritual sensitivities and amazing capacity to love in the face of horror.

So set down the conclusion that feeling numb proves that you can’t take anymore.

Instead of signaling that you’ve become, or need to become, disconnected. Numbness points to the intelligence of your design. It’s proof that you have shock absorbers.

But there is another step that’s needed to keep your shock absorbers working.

The gentle thaw.
After repeated pounding the shock absorbers on any car will need replacing. And so it is with humans.

If we turn away from pain over and over. Adding numbness to numbness. Our heart hardens into bitterness. And bitterness into hatred.

So turn towards the numb feeling. Like you would turn towards early morning light breaking over a frosty winter horizon.

Gently explore the deeper pockets of your own life.

We all hold the capacity to cause harm and to bring about the end of harm.

To crave and want as much as let go and feel complete.

To act in anger and stand for peace.

The mighty thunder.
When you accept the dark and the light in your own life you lift your heart into a higher plane. You see the common humanity in all people and all human acts.

It’s then that you discover that your power to change the world lives in the willingness to embrace opposing dimensions in your heart.

And this. This radical embrace. Is the awakening in yours, mine and our hearts that transforms our blinkered reality into the realization that we are all One.

One heart. One body. One world.

And this expanded understanding in consciousness is what delivers fresh insight and inspired actions that bring about healing, harmony and peace.

So allow any numbness to be the temporary shock absorber for your delicate yet indestructible essence.

Be willing to embrace all of yourself. Because when you do, what you and others perceive as evil turns into a torrent of Love in your heart’s openness.