Wake Up, Human
Wake Up, Human is an exploration of the native powers of the human being. This podcast examines the ways we humans have become disconnected—from our innate wisdom, from each other, and from the natural world—and explores practical strategies for reconnecting to wholeness. Drop in for information and inspiration to help us reawaken and heal ourselves, our relationships, and our planet.
Wake Up, Human
Ep.24: Israel, Palestine, and the Hatred in Our Own Hearts
The seeds of hatred can take root in any human heart—even those most committed to compassion and peace. In this episode, I share my journey through betrayal and rage alongside reflections on the genocide in Palestine, exploring parallels between personal and collective trauma.
What happens when appropriate anger—that evolutionary response designed to protect us—has nowhere to go? Like an encounter with a bear in the wilderness, anger can serve us brilliantly in moments of danger. But when that same energy gets trapped, recycled, and amplified through experiences of victimhood and righteous indignation, it transforms into something far more destructive.
"Resentment is like drinking poison and wishing someone else would die," goes the saying—yet that poison can taste surprisingly good. From social media rhetoric that dehumanizes "the other" to generational trauma passed down through bloodlines, hatred perpetuates itself with remarkable efficiency.
The antidote to violence lies not in denying our anger, but in redirecting its energy toward healing solutions that connect us across even the deepest divides.
This isn't about ignoring structural violence or colonial oppression. Rather, it's about fighting the problem, not the person—recognizing that the real enemy isn't any group of humans but hatred itself. When we drop from our heads into our hearts, we discover a different kind of power—one that can stand firmly against injustice without perpetuating the very cycle we seek to break.
Join me in this difficult but necessary conversation about what it means to wake up human in a world on fire.
Hello everyone and welcome to this episode of the Wake Up Human podcast.
Shannon W.:I'm your host, Shannon, and in this episode I'm going to be talking about what is happening in Palestine. This episode has been a long time coming, it's been on my heart for a long time and it's coming out at a moment when I finally found the words to be able to talk about this horrific situation in a way that feels true to me and, hopefully, helpful to the situation. So I certainly do not have all the answers I don't even know if I have a single answer but I am going to explore that exploration for answers and how we can learn through our own experience how to show up in better ways in the world and, when it comes to hatred and violence, to not perpetuate that hatred and violence, to not pour more fuel on that fire, but instead to be attempts to be part of the healing. So that's where I'm going with this episode and before I move on, I want to dedicate this episode to someone very special, very important and someone who I'm going to miss. Just a couple of days ago, on the eve of the summer solstice, we lost the lively and loving presence of Mr Jack Roberts. I interviewed Jack for episode number 13, ancient and Sacred Sites of Ireland, and he has been a special influence in my life as I have worked to reconnect to my own ancient roots and my own ancestral traditions and understanding of what it means to be a human. So remembering and grateful today for Jack and for his passionate exploration of symbols and mythology and the ways that human beings have built monuments to meaning to remind ourselves of who we are. Dear Jack, you will be missed. May the world live up to your vision of what it once was and what it could yet still be. And as for the rest of us, I'll see you on the inside.
Shannon W.:Welcome to the Wake Up Human podcast. I'm Shannon Wills, a curious wanderer with a passion for digging into life's mysteries and mining them for wisdom to apply to our modern lives. This podcast explores the ways we humans have become disconnected from our native ways of knowing what we have lost and what we can gain by coming back into wholeness. Each episode will explore this theme of reconnecting with our innate human power in order to heal ourselves, our relationships and our planet. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let's jump into the latest installment of Wake Up Human. Hello everyone and welcome to this episode of the Wake Up Human podcast.
Shannon W.:Today I'm going to be talking about a topic that has been on my mind for months, as I'm sure it has for many of you, and I've been wanting to speak about it on the podcast for months as well, and there are just so many different things I wanted to say. When I sat down to write some notes for this episode down to write some notes for this episode I did sort of a brain dump and I wrote and I wrote and I wrote and by the time I got done writing all the things I wanted to share, I had like 12 or 13 pages of a Word doc and I just I looked at that and I went there's no way that that's going to all fit into a podcast episode, but it really showed me how much, how many thoughts I do have about this topic and how much I care about it through and organize 12 or 13 pages of notes I'm going to use that expression as a just a foundation for talking about this topic and knowing that there is a starting point that I have to speak about this and I'll just start from there and then I'll move forward and before even starting there, I do just want to situate myself in this conversation. So as a white American woman of Northern European and Scandinavian and Celtic ancestry, I am not a Palestinian, I am not an Israeli, I am not an Arab or a Jew or a Muslim. I am not speaking from the experience or for the experience of anyone who is directly involved, the groups who are indirectly involved in this conflict, in this war in Gaza, and I don't propose to speak for any of those people or what they should or shouldn't do or how they should or shouldn't feel.
Shannon W.:At the same time, I think that the war in Gaza is something that affects all of us. It's a representation of the kinds of social inequities and colonial violence that has happened and is happening all around the world and that affects us all. So I'm going to speak from that perspective, from my own personal perspective and my own personal lens, and I'm going to trust that what is coming from me is coming from my heart and it's coming from compassion, and I might make some mistakes in some of the things that I say, and if I do, feel free, reach out, call me in, let me know if I've got some blind spots here, but I am going to talk from my own story, because that's where I believe we can really stand in who we are and what we believe and the truth of our own experience. So that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to share from there, from my own experience, and as an intro to that, I want to take a moment to just be clear about where I stand on this issue of Israel and Palestine right now. I am not impartial in this. While I'm coming to this conversation wanting to participate in a way that's not judgmental, I'm not impartial in this. While I'm coming to this conversation wanting to participate in a way that's not judgmental, I'm not impartial.
Shannon W.:I believe that what's happening in Gaza right now is a genocide. I believe that Israel is an imperialist colonial power propped up by other imperialist colonial powers, including the United States, especially the United States. This doesn't mean I don't think that what Hamas has done is wrong. I can take a step back and I can consider why Israel is doing what it's doing and why Hamas is doing what they're doing, from a historical and a psychological and a spiritual lens, and I believe that war and killing is wrong and inhumane, whoever does it. I've been following this conflict for a long time, many, many years, and I've been watching what Israel has been doing and what the United States has been doing, and as a citizen of the United States, which is paying to fund this genocide with our tax dollars right now and then, simply as a human being with deep empathy for the suffering of other beings, I'm compelled to speak out against genocide, against colonial violence and for compassion, for rehumanizing ourselves and for ending the massive destruction that the fight for political and economic power in the Middle East is causing in Palestine right now and for generations. So I'm not going to be centering this conversation around politics, but I do want to name that so you know where I stand.
Shannon W.:Dr Gabor Mate, who I respect and admire, recently shared that he comes from a Jewish, his family lineage is Jewish and he's intimately connected to this conflict. Some of his very close family members were killed by the Nazis in the Holocaust, were killed by the Nazis in the Holocaust, and he has been speaking for a ceasefire and to end the savage oppression of the Palestinian people. And he said recently that people have been asking him oh so you're pro-Palestinian? And Gabor Mate said no. His response to that is I am not pro-Palestinian, I am pro-truth. When I heard that it really touched me because that's where I feel I also stand. I am not pro-Palestinian, I am not anti-Israeli. I'm not pro-Israeli or anti-Palestinian. I am pro-truth, I am pro-sovereignty and I am pro-peace and because of that I believe I'm standing on the right side of history when I call this a genocide and I call for a ceasefire.
Shannon W.:Because, as Gandhi says, when you see a man with a gun and he's up in a gun tower and he's ready to take out a bunch of people, kill a bunch of people with his gun, you don't just stand there and watch him. You do the most loving thing you can possibly do, which is that you tackle him and you take away that gun. You stop the oppressor from being able to oppress and that is the most compassionate thing we can do, because it serves life and that serves the oppressed, but it serves the oppressor too. It saves the oppressor from his own hand. So I realize you may or may not agree with me politically, depending on which side of this conflict you're on. But I'm not here to make political arguments. I'm here to look at ourselves and our hearts and the reasons that we get ourselves into these destructive situations, not only internationally, but in our own lives, and that goes for my life too. So if this perspective of standing on the side of truth is something you can hold in your own heart, if you can agree with me in this intention toward healing, even if you don't agree with me then please stay with me.
Shannon W.:Come along for the rest of the conversation, because now I'm going to start talking about myself and all the ways that I may or may not have followed all of those rules I just mentioned, and hopefully you might see yourself or find some value in this conversation too. It's not meant to be about me, but about all of us. So if you've been listening to this podcast for a while just a little while you know that I've, over the past six to nine months, I went through a difficult separation from my partner and there was some very painful betrayal in that separation that really hit me hard emotionally and the amount of anger and rage that came out of me and through me as a process of working through that betrayal. It was massive. It really overtook me, and I touched on that in some of my previous episodes. So I'm not going to go completely there now, but I do want to say that when Hamas killed the 1,200 innocent Israelis on October 7th of last year and took hostages and Israel begun its retaliation against Gaza, I was deeply enmeshed in my own pain and anger and rage.
Shannon W.:And as I watched this latest explosion of violence in Palestine it's not the first one. There's many, many, many explosions of violence in Palestine over the decades and I watched this one develop and I went here. It is again and this one is horrific and I could hear the hatred spewing from people on both sides of the conflict. I could hear and I don't just mean Israelis and Palestinians, I mean people here in the US and I don't just mean Israelis and Palestinians, I mean people here in the US spewing anger against people supporting the other side.
Shannon W.:And there was, just along with the explosion of violence, there was this explosion of not just anger but hatred, and I could feel in my own heart being so overwhelmed with anger myself. I could feel how easily anger can turn to hate. And I looked at my own life and I looked at my own situation and how angry I had been and I could feel that the anger and that the resentment that I had built up in my heart, not so much toward my partner, but more so toward my friend who betrayed me with him. I could feel it building and building and perpetuating itself in the stories I was telling myself about her and about betrayal and about what she did and what they did and how I'm a victim of this, and I could feel that just churning in me. And I could also feel it over time, as I continued to be in that story, that what had been anger was starting to congeal into something that felt much more dark. It was starting to congeal into hatred. It wasn't just anger anymore, it wasn't just that flash of anger that comes out, that very understandable and appropriate response to being wronged or to being in a situation in which anger is appropriate.
Shannon W.:There are situations in which anger is appropriate, where anger is like a fire that can either purify us or it can push us forward. It can kick us into action, it can bring us into solidarity with each other. It can also save our lives. So, for example, back when I was oh gosh, I was in my 20s, I think, and I was camping with my partner at the time and we were in the California forest and there are a lot of bears in that forest and we were camping and it was nighttime and we were making our dinner and we had had all of our food stored in the bear box. So if you know about camping where there are bears, there are bear boxes which are bear proof metal containers, and when you're camping, what you want to do is put all of your food in a bear, won't be tempted to come to your campsite and rummage through and in an attempt to steal food, take food and potentially, you know, find themselves in a violence or a dangerous situation with humans.
Shannon W.:And so we had. We were camping and we had taken all of our food out of the bear box and put it aside while we were making our dinner. And then we sat to eat dinner and we hadn't put the food back in the bear box and put it aside while we were making our dinner. And then we sat to eat dinner and we hadn't put the food back in the bear box. So I went over to the box and I or next to the box and I went to get something for the table and I heard a rustling behind me and it was dark. So I had my flashlight in my hand, so I turned around and my flashlight landed on a bear. The bear was probably 10 or 15 feet from me. It was close and I saw the whole bear, the eyes, everything. And the bear had in its mouth a plastic bag. It was our plastic bag that had our bread in it.
Shannon W.:The bear was standing there looking at me with the bread in his, her mouth I'm going to say his and what came through me in that moment was an absolute, angry, furious scream and I said get out of here. And it didn't even sound like my voice. It sounded like someone else's voice, came from the depths of my being. It sounded three octaves lower than my voice and what I felt was I don't know if I would have called it anger in the moment, but it was that energy of anger that I will do anything I can to chase you away with this energy that I have within me, this sort of furious energy. I said get out of here, get out of here.
Shannon W.:And the bear looked at me like he wasn't afraid of me one bit. He just looked at me like who's this curious human screaming furiously at me? Hmm, should I care about this? I'm not sure. I'm certainly not going to drop the bread. So I continued screaming and I could feel myself just on fire, lit up, and slowly he kind of turned around and he just started to saunter off. And he turned around and looked at me and like, hmm, well, okay, I guess I'll leave you there with the rest of your food. And then he did a little trot and just kind of trotted off into the darkness and I could see his little bear shape, you know, trotting off and I could see the bag of bread swinging back and forth in his, you know, from his mouth as he trotted away.
Shannon W.:So he got the bread and, on the one hand, that anger had been, it had come from fear, it was, it was a fear response. I could feel the anger coming from the fear and then it's interesting because it didn't last long I was shaken up, for sure, but I went back to the table. Of course my partner had recognized what had been happening and he had come running and I was shaken up and we sat and we talked about it and we, you know, we ate our dinner and we talked about, well, what do we need to do next? You know what? Do we need to change our camp spot? Do we need to move our tent somehow in order to feel safer. We made some decisions from there.
Shannon W.:But what I wanted to share from that is that that kind of anger coming from that fear response or that protective response, that's the kind of anger that is appropriate to a situation and when we think about what happens to people in this world, there are so many times that anger is appropriate to a situation. Certainly, in Palestine, up checkpoints, set lands and livelihoods and fields and trees and animals destroyed for generations, we can see how someone would be angry and then, like my experience with the bear, when the source of that fear and potential danger was gone, I was able to work through that and calm myself from that. The anger moved through me. But when the anger doesn't get to move through us and it perpetuates and it perpetuates, then it can raise itself to a level where it's no longer appropriate or maybe it still is appropriate to the situation, but it's like it's not going away and it becomes unhealthy because the situation is unhealthy. So imagine that the bear just kept coming back, kept coming back, kept coming back. And imagine we weren't able to go anywhere, we weren't able to move, we weren't able to protect ourselves. Imagine that. Or we did move and the bear followed us, or we did move and there was another bear at the next campsite.
Shannon W.:Then that fear and other responses to the fear, which might be anger and might be other things, those are going to keep on cycling through us. We never get the chance to sit down at the picnic table, take a breath, take stock of what just happened and say, okay, what are our options? What can we do next to keep ourselves safe or to not have this happen again? Can we see this in the experience of the Palestinians right now too? Nowhere to run. Nothing but a buildup and a cycling of trauma over and over again.
Shannon W.:But so about the perpetuation of the anger when it doesn't move through and release? If that anger builds up and turns to resentment or hatred within us, then it ceases to be I believe it ceases to be an intelligent, evolutionary response and it starts to become more like a cancer, like a cancer cell that is isolated off from other cells and then wants to replicate itself. That, that resentment and that hatred, is like an isolating force that pulls us back and wants to replicate itself. And in replicating itself, it's building up in us. And that's where that phrase about resentment makes sense. Have. Have you heard this? That resentment is like drinking poison and wishing the other person would die. That's true. That's true in my experience. And it's also like the poison tastes really good. In that moment You're like, yeah, and I'm going to go ahead and drink the poison and then I'm going to spit it on you Because it's feeding the cancer of the hate, whether it's turning to resentment, whether it's turning to hatred. I think we all know this right.
Shannon W.:But it bears repeating that that anger hurts us first, that hate hurts us first because it brews and festers and boils inside of us on the way out. And then where does it go? It goes to whoever is closest to us. It goes through us on the way out, and then it hits our friends, our families, our communities, often the people who love us and care for us, and it hurts them too. And then sometimes it feeds their anger and their resentment, and that hurts them from the inside and from the outside. And then we're all brewing in the anger together. And this is when we see hatred passed down from family to family and generation to generation and spreading like a cancer.
Shannon W.:Far beyond the original impulse, the original insult, far beyond the original impulse, the original insult, there was a quote that I wanted to share from Italy's defense minister, guido Crosetto if Israel attacks Rafah, then there will be a red line beyond which we will not cross in our providing arms to Israel to continue this war. And then Israel did advance into Rafah and bombed what turned out to be a refugee camp for people who had already been displaced from the north, killing and maiming and wreaking terrible havoc. And Italy's defense minister Cossetto said this quote Israel, with this choice, is spreading hatred, rooting hatred that will involve their children and grandchildren. And this is what happens when we've seen this in Israel, we've seen this in Palestine, we've seen it all around the world hatred that is being passed down from generation to generation. Not only that's perpetuated in their daily lives, but then you have the collective trauma, the generational trauma, the ancestral trauma that's literally being passed down through the bloodlines, and people are being born into situations where they don't even have a chance to develop an appropriate anger, as though a bear just came out of the darkness of a forest. The forest they're born into is already filled with bears.
Shannon W.:So as I witnessed the unfolding of the conflict in Gaza, the expansion of the violence, I could feel that seed in my own heart of that kind of feeling like wow, kind of feeling like wow. First of all, I have it in me, right, I can feel it in me. I have seeds of this in me and feeling that is humbling. I will tell you, it's humbling because it keeps me from being able to look at them and say, oh, look at them, oh, what a bunch of you know, I wouldn't say animals, but because I respect animals and think they're very wise and intelligent, but something someone might say is look at them, all acting like a bunch of animals over there. Who am I to say that, when I can feel the very impulse for hatred in my own heart? And I know that that impulse for hatred can so easily turn into violence, especially that violence that comes from the survival instinct of wanting to protect our community, our families, our children.
Shannon W.:And we can see that on both sides, in Israel and Palestine, we can see the narrative being around survival. You know, the narrative for Israel is that this is about their survival. It's about their survival as a nation, as a country, as a homeland. It's about their protection, about their safety, about their security, and that's why they're building the walls and that's why they've got the checkpoints. And we could certainly come up with some arguments about whether those choices have actually made Israel safer or more secure. I would argue no. But we also see it on the Palestinian side. We see the absolute desperation, frustration like incredulous confusion, right, like how is this happening to us? And we're trying to protect ourselves and there's nowhere that we can run. We can't keep our children safe, we can't keep ourselves safe. So I am continuing to work on this in myself. I am not going to say I am past this.
Shannon W.:Most days, pretty much every day, I still hear a hateful thought toward my friend in my mind. Sometimes I actually say it out loud something hateful about her or to her. It's there, it's there. Something hateful about her or to her. It's there, it's there, and I don't know why, by the grace of God, by the grace of my spiritual practice fear of the law, I don't know. But the anger and hatred that sort of built up in me over this time, I never have acted on those in any kind of a violent way, thank God, right. But we need to be able to see what we're capable of so it can help us to understand how other people act this way, even Benjamin Netanyahu. Right, I look at him and I go. How, in the name of God, could the president of a country carry so much hate hatred in his heart that he will annihilate entire swaths of people, even when he is being begged to stop by the world? And the fear of insecurity, that sense of victimhood, being such a strong foundation for that, as it has been for me in my own struggle with losing my relationship, and then the fear of losing my home and the undermining of trust in what I believed would keep me safe and turned out to be the thing that, when I let those walls down and trusted so many of those unconscious fears came true. I mean, can we see how fear turns into fury? I'd like to say I could never be Benjamin Netanyahu, but what if I were him? Then I would be. Does that make sense? Because he's a human being with the same human machinery that I have within me. So, just as in the Bible it says you know, before ye judge thy brother, look at the moat in your own eye. I can look at where the hatred is in my heart and I can work on that. If I'm feeling hopeless and like there's nothing I can do, that is always something I can work on, that If I'm feeling hopeless and there's nothing I can do, that is always something I can do.
Shannon W.:Back in probably 2001, because I think it was just after 9-11 and the second Bush invasion of Iraq I was talking to a friend of mine and he was really into cultivating himself spiritually. And he was really into cultivating himself spiritually. He was really into practicing ways to walk in the world more peacefully and I was really impressed at the results that he was getting. And I asked him you know, can you help me to be a little bit more peaceful, like you are? I mean, I had a lot of anger in me even back then and I knew that and I could feel it. And I asked him could you help me with this? Is there something you could tell me that would guide me to not be so angry, or to express myself in a different way when I'm so angry about things that I see happening in the world?
Shannon W.:And he said well, is there anyone you hate?
Shannon W.:Is there anyone you hate? Is there anyone who you would like? If they were dead, you wouldn't care, you'd be glad they were gone. And I said, oh no, no, there's nobody. And then I went oh yeah, there is George W Bush. George W, I pretty much hate George W. If he was gone off the planet I wouldn't be sad, and that felt really good to say that. And my friend said, uh-huh, there's your work, there's your work. And I went no, I don't want to work on not hating George W, I hate him. And my friend was like, well, you asked, you asked where your work would be and that's where it would be. And I never forgot it and I knew that in that moment that he was right. If I was going to work on my hatred and that's the person I felt hatred toward there was my work.
Shannon W.:I've used that statement as a guidepost for my own work for a long time now and I've been using it actually as a guidepost in this latest chapter with my friend, like, wow, I feel this impulse of hatred toward her very strongly. Okay, there's my work, as much as I want to hate her because it feels so good, there's my work. So I do want to share as I've struggled and as I've looked at ways that I might work differently through this appropriate anger that has sort of begun to congeal into this hateful impulse that I do not want in me and I ask myself what's working. There is something that does seem to be helping and that is a certain version of compassion, right? So compassion is something that I seem to naturally have a lot of toward, certainly toward non-human beings and more and more and more toward human beings, just in general, that I have compassion for our shared suffering that we are all living in at different levels by virtue of being human.
Shannon W.:As the Buddha teaches, all life is suffering. Suffering is part of life. Buddha teaches All life is suffering. Suffering is part of life and I have great compassion for that. And I can see. Even when someone acts terribly, I'm pretty good at having compassion in my heart for them because I can understand why they may be acting the way they do. There's an animal element in that as well, or I should say like an evolutionary element in that as well.
Shannon W.:If we think about a dog who's injured and in pain and if they're approached by someone, even if that person who's approaching them is wanting to help them and coming with good intention and healing intention and love, that dog may very well lash out and bite as a protective mechanism, even if it's normally a very loving dog and I can see that in me. I am normally a loving and compassionate person, but boy did I lash out in my pain. And I can see that other people lash out in their pain the same way, including Benjamin Netanyahu, I dare say, including the leaders of Hamas. Would they be doing what they are doing if they weren't in incredible pain? If they had everything they needed and they were secure and safe? Would they be doing what they're doing either? I'm going to say no. So if I can expand my compassion to that dog who bit me or that raccoon who bit me I did actually have a raccoon who bit me, so I'll use him. Can I possibly expand my compassion to include my friend and understand that, while I don't know how she could do, how she could do what she did, can't believe she could do what she did but can I somewhere understand that there is some kind of reason that she did do what she did and that for her it served some kind of need, and can I have compassion for that need, even if I can't have compassion for her?
Shannon W.:This is actually the basis for nonviolent communication. Nonviolent communication has a couple of parts to it, but the part that I love the most and value the most is the shared needs inventory. So the shared needs inventory is it's a teaching that at our root, as human beings, we all have the same basic needs and those needs are for love and security and protection and to be seen and to be heard and valued, to be able to express ourselves, to be able to be free. And there are others. There's quite a list that Marshall Rosenberg, the founder of nonviolent communication, put together, and I recommend just Googling shared needs, nonviolent communication, and it'll come up. And what Marshall used it for, and one of the things he used it for was taking it to mediation, to conflict resolution, where, when you find something that's just seemingly an intractable conflict, there's just no way that these two sides are going to be able to come together and find a solution that works for everyone, because they're just too far apart from one another. Rosenberg's argument is that if the two sides were able to be brought backward or inward to really discover what those basic needs are that they are trying to meet in this conflict, what are the basic needs I'm trying to meet with my anger? What are the basic needs that my friend was trying to meet by starting a new relationship with my partner. I mean, I can kind of imagine what some of those needs might've been, but we could take it to a, you know, international level.
Shannon W.:What are the basic needs that Israelis are trying to meet by building walls and checkpoints within an apartheid state? Side note here that Israelis, many Israelis, israeli children they don't see it that way. They're actually being indoctrinated into fear. They're actually being indoctrinated to think that this is the way that Israel must behave in order to be safe, in order to save itself from annihilation. So we could look at an Israeli child, we could look at Israelis and we could say what do they believe is true about their situation and what are the basic needs that they are trying to meet by acting the way they're acting? And this is how you get an Israeli child. I mean, they're forced to do this, but this is how you help an Israeli child believe that they should be conscripted into the Israeli army because they've been told that this is what they need to do for their safety and the safety of their people. That's a basic human need, human need, and we could certainly see Palestinians coming to the table and having similar basic needs of their own and when we get into the international stage and so many players and so much manipulation of narratives, I want to say I know it's not that simple, but still having a sense of what basic human needs are trying to be met in a conflict is a really smart practice and it can really help us in our own lives, in our own conflicts.
Shannon W.:I know that when I was first learning about this and I was really into discovering the basic needs behind people's words and actions and I saw my mom and my brother got into an argument and they were yelling at each other right in front of me, just facing off, and there was like a little translator going on in my mind saying, oh, but he's trying to meet that need and she's trying to meet that need. I could see the needs, but what was coming out in their, their words and their expressions was you said this and you did that and you hurt me this way and you hurt me that way and if you wouldn't have done this, I wouldn't have done this. But what was underneath that was, you know, I have a basic need to be heard and I'm not feeling like I'm being heard, or I have a need, a deep need to be respected and I'm not feeling respected right now. That need's not being met and it's interesting because I've been thinking a lot lately about the value of bringing my energy from my head to my heart, because so much of conflict sometimes and the stories that we tell ourselves and the ways that we get wrapped into them and the ways that those transform into anger or hatred so much of that can be an intellectual exercise and simply by bringing the energy down, by visualizing the energy down, by literally rubbing my head, touching my head and pulling my hand down to my heart, breathing, and breathing a longer out-breath than the in-breath, so a shorter in-breath and a longer out-breath, which has the effect of sort of letting the energy drop down into the heart and even breathing into my heart space consciously. All of those are things that I have been doing and energetically they're very helpful for moving through anger, diffusing the heat of anger with that cooling drop into the heart space.
Shannon W.:And what occurs to me also is that in nonviolent communication, when we drop into that space of shared needs, we're also dropping into that heart space. We're moving away from that intellectual exercise of he did this and she did this and they did this and this is what happened to me. All of this, right, and we're going into that heart space where we go wow, what am I actually feeling? What is it that's hurting me? What is the need beneath this and how can I address that need? And I do want to say, okay, let me be clear. This is not all on us. This is not a conflict in Israel and Palestine or any of the other conflicts. We did not create this by our individual angry or hateful impulses alone. This is structural violence. It's colonial violence. It's built on imperialism and greed and capitalism. So make no mistake, I'm not trying to say that that's not happening. I'm not trying to say, oh, every one of us just needs to be able to find love for that person that we hate and all the world will be healed. No, there is structural change that needs to happen, and what I'm also saying is that, for that structural change to happen, there are things that we can't control. There are things that we can control, and something we can control is how we show up for the fight. You know, in nonviolent organizing. One of the things that's also said is we fight the problem, not the person.
Shannon W.:There's a quote by Michael Nagler in his book Search for a Nonviolent Future and I don't have it in front of me, but he says something in his introduction to the book about hatred and about the violence and the destruction that it leads to. He says something like the problem is not hatred of Americans, the problem is not hatred of Arabs, the problem is not hatred of Jews or any other race or ethnicity or religion. The problem is hate itself. So if we look through that lens that the problem is hate itself could we potentially stop hating each other and turn our anger toward the real enemy?
Shannon W.:There's a woman who I follow a bit and she's been very vocal on Instagram about being pro-Palestinian, and I have an issue with this, not with the woman, but with the way she's presenting her pro-Palestinian point of view in the rhetoric that she's using, which is extremely hateful, and I won't say more about her or the things that she's saying. But basically, by wishing suffering upon Israelis with the purported intention of alleviating the suffering of Palestinians, and saying that in incredibly hateful words towards Israelis, that is not fighting the problem of hate. It's throwing fuel on the fire of hatred, perpetuating the very hatred that she's trying to solve. And then, in the comments of her posts, I will often see hundreds of people replying back in support, saying things like so glad you're actually speaking truth to power here, grateful for you and your words and everything you share. Yes, fully agree with this. So appreciate you for standing on the side of justice. Nobody is saying anything about the hateful words. They're being completely normalized in the conversation. So not only is this woman throwing fuel on the fire of her own hatred and hatred toward the situation, but she's also actually feeding that energy in the other people who are showing up in a way that's not really being noticed. So I don't know if that is really a generational passing on to children and grandchildren there though it could be but certainly it's a dissemination of the hatred through the web of connections we all share.
Shannon W.:The last, most recent, post I saw from this woman, she was saying something like F these people, f those people, f anyone who supports them, f America, and she's also American. So there is an element of self-hatred or self-loathing in a statement like that as well. Not that this woman has self-loathing toward herself I'm not trying to say that but when we are a part of something and we express hatred toward it, there is an energy of self-hatred, that we are a message of self-hatred, that we are a message of self-hatred that we are sending to ourselves. So when I saw this last post from this woman, it was interesting because after I saw it and I went, oh, that hits hard. That feels like a knife. She's just stabbing the world there.
Shannon W.:And I scrolled down and immediately after that post was someone had shared a reel of the great Maya Angelou and she was speaking about kindness and she said something which, of course, I'm paraphrasing. She said everyone who has ever been kind to me I carry them still with me and anytime that I am in a situation that is really challenging or difficult, all that kindness is there with me. Kindness has helped to make me the person I want to be and helped me to show up like the person I want to be. And she said please be kind. You'll never know the impact you'll have long after you're gone. And I was so thankful for that message from Maya and I was grateful for that reminder from the Instagram scroll that for every impulse of hatred that goes out into the world, there's an equal and opposite impulse of kindness ready to push back and say there is another way.
Shannon W.:So back to the woman sharing hateful words on Instagram. Compassion for this woman, too right, because, again, the seed that she has in her is the seed that I have in me. There's no holier than thou here, just a recognition that we're going to all do better if we're fighting the right problem and I know this isn't easy to let go to do our work to set the poison down. But if we can see that our anger is hurting us more than it's hurting them, and that it's hurting the people who hear us and the people who read our posts more than it's hurting those people on the other side of the world who will never read them, isn't it worth just setting down the knife, taking a breath and asking ourselves what need that anger is really trying to fill? If you're struggling with this, please know you're not alone. I'm over here, waving at you, saying hi, and that's actually the great news. We don't have to do it alone. It's in community, together, that we have the power to transform our anger and transform the world.
Shannon W.:Giving a quote, this comes from my very first yoga teacher, the lovely Patricia Hansen, who I studied with probably over 20 years ago now, and she had studied in the lineage of Swami Satchitananda and his lineage of integral yoga and she as a part of that lineage.
Shannon W.:She closed each one of her classes with this phrase may all beings be at peace. May all beings find that true peace within our own hearts. That's it for this episode of the Wake Up Human podcast. Thank you so much for listening and thank you for joining me in this time of so much suffering, and I hope you find yourself held and heard and seen and safe and supported through all your own struggles too. If you appreciated this episode and you know someone who you think would benefit or enjoy it, please forward it to them. This podcast is still a labor of love for me and I'm thrilled if it can be of benefit to other people too. Oh, and I would also be thrilled if you would leave me a review if you like this podcast, so I can help reach more people with my work. That's all for now and I'll see you on the next episode.