Back in 2020, when Covid first happened and people were understandably concerned, many of my clients wanted to know how to navigate these uncharted waters.

But it wasn’t just Covid; prior to 2020 the world had already seen many major disruptions.  In 2008, the Global Financial Crisis widened economic inequality and fuelled populist and anti-establishment movements. The Arab Spring revolt of 2011 ignited hope for many, but resulted in deepening the polarisation in many countries afterward.  The Brexit referendum in 2016 revealed sharp cultural and political divides in the UK.  And the US general election of the same year, between Trump and Clinton, amplified existing divisions in the U.S. and had global ripple effects, energising nationalist and populist movements worldwide.  Throughout all this, social media platforms had become dominant sources of information for many, amplifying echo chambers and disinformation, and grassroots organisations began organising calling for equal rights and progressive reforms.

By 2020, the global polarisation was palpable, with huge divisions in the worlds of politics and culture, with the rise of the far-right globally and anti-establishment sentiment growing.

Into all of this, Covid hit.  So, I felt that it was time to ask for guidance.  I asked my Helping Spirits, “What is happening?”  

Guidance

They first responded visually.  Immediately, I saw myself in the eye of a tornado.  The storm was raging above, the sky was dark grey and the wind was ferocious.  Suddenly, I saw a car flung through the sky by the wind, and it was then that I realised, “Actually, this is dangerous”.  I then asked, “How do we navigate this?” To this, the response came calm and succinct: “Compassion and kindness, compassion and kindness.”

At the time, ‘compassion and kindness’ felt like soothing, if ordinary, advice.  It felt generic, like the advice you might give to someone asking for how to help a friend who was bereaved, or who’d lost their job.  Not bad advice, but just not particularly specific.

Five years on, and that advice is absolutely specific.  And tailored, and precise for every confrontation that these times of great change are bringing.  Let’s dig into why that might be the case, and see how useful it might be for us moving forward.

Where We Are Now

The polarisation, disruption and shifting that we are facing in the world, can be unsettling and even scary.  Large numbers of people have left the United States, for instance, and moved to different countries and continents.  There are fears around what is coming next that can make us feel powerless and ‘on edge’.  In the United States, particularly, many people in traditionally marginalised groups are feeling deep concerns for their own wellbeing, such as many in the Trans and Gay communities, women needing access to terminations, contraception and other medical assistance, undocumented people, legal residents who are not white, People of Colour, Indigenous and others.  There is fear for personal safety and for the constitution and democracy and those fears are real.

Alongside this, many people are waking up, becoming more aware than they ever have in their lives, and are finding themselves really leaning into empathy with compassion for others.  Tolerance and understanding, combined with a desire for all to be safe and to find their highest awareness, can be a courageous stance.  It can take real courage to not immediately react and to find the highest position of compassion before choosing how to respond to what is going on around us right now.

But, just as many people are waking up, there are many who are moving in the opposite direction.   For some, it can increase fear around whatever is considered to be ‘other’, making that feel ominous, or “needing” to be shut down.  There is emerging, in the right-wing media and groups particularly, a sense of mania, a kind of urgency around ‘rooting out’ the enemy, whoever that might be; immigrants, “illegals”, anyone with a progressive agenda, gay people, trans people, people of colour, etc.  Some people are going into exaggerated fear states, a kind of ‘driven hysteria’ of entitlement, and others are succumbing to demagogic politics and surrendering their power, swayed by the chaos and the division.  

The Polarisation is Giving Us A Choice

The polarisation is asking people to choose.  The choices are between selfishness and compassion.  On the one hand, we can choose what we want for ourselves, with ourselves as the priority, and on the other, we can choose what is best for everyone, leaning into empathy and compassion.  This choice also happens to be the second of three main milestones in the consciousness journey of every human, the milestone that asks: can we surrender the ego?  As individuals, as we grow and increase our awareness and raise our consciousness, at some point we reach this milestone.  It can feel tricky at first; if I surrender my ego, if I don’t put myself first, who will take care of me?  I need to prioritise myself, because without my ego, I am nothing.  It’s quite a childlike way of seeing the self.  Although it feels true when we first sit with this question, just like a childlike selfishness felt necessary when we were in childhood (as we were building good boundaries to create ‘the self’), we mature out of this thinking and come to realise that our identity is actually much bigger than just the self.  We come to realise that we are part of a much larger ecosystem, an ecosystem to which we all belong, and that we need to take care of everyone in that larger ecosystem, so that the ecosystem itself survives and thrives.  

As we come to identify with (belong to) this ecosystem, our identity expands beyond one person, to all of life.  This has a profound impact on how we see ourselves and others in the world, the planet herself and all of the other ten million species of non-human beings with whom we share this beautiful place.  This realisation is a milestone, in the sense that it is an enormous shift in consciousness, but it is a simple if profound step of compassion where we come to see others as equally as valuable as we see ourselves.

So, while all individuals at some point in their trajectory at some point come to this milestone of consciousness, at a macro level, humanity as a whole has now, too, reached this milestone and is being invited to consider this step.  We are being challenged to consider that it is no longer sufficient to say, “That injustice is happening to them, so it doesn’t concern me”, or “I’m not gay, so I don’t care about gay rights”, or “That war zone is far away, so I am not impacted”.  We are being asked to own our power and stand up and be counted when it comes to issues that we may not have considered before.  Injustice anywhere is everybody’s business.  This seemingly small shift in perspective has an enormous impact on how we respond.  If we see a child starving in Gaza, and we see the inhumanity of that and feel repulsed by that, we feel duty-bound to do something about it.  We can no longer be passive in our reaction.  We become compelled to act.

The Science of Compassion

And if we do actually act on behalf of another, the bonds of our humanity are strengthened and we get to live in a kinder world, but while that is good for everyone collectively, we are also changed by that individually, in a good way.  When we act compassionately, our brain releases dopamine in the ventral striatum, producing the “helper’s high”—a real sense of pleasure and satisfaction—which reinforces prosocial behaviour.  Kindness triggers the release of oxytocin, sometimes called the “love hormone”, which reduces stress (lowers cortisol), increases trust and strengthens social bonds.  Regular compassionate action strengthens areas like the prefrontal cortex (decision-making) and anterior cingulate cortex (empathy and emotional regulation).  

Over time, this makes compassionate acts self-reinforcing: the more you act kindly, the more your brain rewards you for doing so, increasing the likelihood of repeated kindness.  The more we do it, the more natural it becomes, until kindness is no longer a choice but a reflex.

These hormones can also influence the recipient and even bystanders, creating a biochemical ripple effect in social networks.  The ‘mirror neurons’ in the brain fire both when we experience an action and when we observe it in others.  So, when someone sees an act of kindness, these neurons activate, producing empathetic feelings and can inspire a chain reaction of kindness within a group or community.

Studies in social neuroscience show that groups of people acting compassionately can synchronise their brain activity in ways that enhance cooperation and trust.  Essentially, shared kindness literally aligns brain chemistry, making collaborative action smoother and more effective: compassion ripples outward, igniting others, knitting communities together, creating trust, cooperation and solidarity.  One act of generosity can spark another, building a chain reaction that reshapes neighbourhoods, cities, entire societies.  

In witnessing care, we are inspired to act.  In acting, we become braver, wiser and more connected.  This is the biology of activism and the neuroscience of social change.

So, the benefits are that this makes us better at managing stress and more resilient, but also at the collective level, it makes our communities more stable because as we become more emotionally balanced, we interact more constructively.

How Can We Develop Compassion?

We can train ourselves to harness this power of compassion.  Through mindfulness, loving-kindness meditation, small daily acts, perspective-taking, holding gratitude for what we have and engagement with our communities, we increase our empathy.  In so doing, we transform our neurochemistry; we rewire neural pathways, so that in our hearts and minds compassion becomes reflexive and the world around us is impacted by that. 

The beauty of this work is that the impacts of these conscious acts become like pebbles dropped in a pond; we can never know how far those ripples extend, but we know that they impact the giver and receiver and that they have a contagious quality that spreads empathy.

The Science of Hostility

So, what about those who choose the opposite of compassion?  Neurologically, when individuals consistently reject compassionate impulses, measurable changes occur.  Functional imaging shows reduced activation in regions that are central to empathy and the perception of others’ pain; the anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortex.  Over time, this desensitisation decreases emotional resonance and moral sensitivity.  At the same time, structures in the brain’s reward and threat systems (the amygdala and ventral striatum), become more reactive, particularly when aggression or dominance produces a ‘sense of control’.  This shift reinforces antisocial behaviour through dopaminergic rewards, similar to mechanisms observed in addiction.

Importantly, engagement in hostile acts also elevate cortisol levels and promote stress as the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis is dysregulated.  In long-term hostility, the brain responds in the same way as it does to long-term stress, in that it keeps pumping out CRH, ACTH, and cortisol long after the stressor is gone.  This leads to a suppressed immune system, disrupted sleep and fatigue, anxiety, hypervigilance, irritability, impaired memory and learning and cardiovascular strain, raising blood pressure and the risk of heart disease.  At the same time, the decreased connectivity between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala weakens the emotional regulation and moral inhibition, leading to impulsivity and diminished social judgement.  Reduced oxytocin and serotonin also correlate with lower trust, attachment and well-being.

The persistent choice of cruelty or indifference remodels the brain to a neurobiological profile characterised by stress, isolation and diminished capacity for prosocial emotion.

Macro-Level Hostility

Individuals are guided by their own levels of consciousness, how evolved they are as a soul, so that influences those who have chosen hostility, to some extent.  But at a macro level, as the collective is asked to reject the ego in favour of compassion for all, what is actually happening is that the ‘lower frequency consciousness’ of how we had behaved as a species in the last millennia is coming to the fore to be expressed.  Expressed, as in opinions shared, but also expressed as in ‘squeezed out of’, flushed out of the consciousness of our kind.  The hostility that we see in the world today is unprocessed trauma, entitled, under-evolved consciousness and the ‘under the surface’ hate that is the festering boil coming to the surface to be lanced.  

Our Job Now

Prior to this, the establishment was largely in denial about the inequality and the intransigence keeping it in place, the inequality that keeps the disempowered dispossessed.  What we are seeing now is that establishment mindset exactly for what it is; self-serving and disinterested in the populace.  Which is why so many people are standing up for what is right and shining the light of awareness onto that intransigence so that it can be seen for what it is.  

Low-frequency consciousness thrives in darkness.  It is when we see it, and call it out, that it shrivels and withdraws.  We need to call out the hate in our consciousness wherever we see it, so that it loses its ‘permission’ to be in our species.  It’s only when we have collaborative compassion for all of life that we can shake the prejudice out of the systems that maintain it, and find the new world that we intuitively know is coming.  

Blessings to all on the path!