Why I feel peace after Trump’s Election
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Hi there, it's me Aitabé with Green River Family Constellations and Sensethinking.
So I wanted to talk a bit about why I feel peaceful. I feel peace after the U. S. elections and I live in a community of people who are solidly progressive left and and who really care. I mean, we work together with, even if imperfectly, even if very humanly the thing I see is a kind of an experience, is a real earnestness, a real commitment to being good, really doing their best to be we're all doing our best to be of good service and to make this planet a better place. And so it seems so obvious to most people here that it makes sense to be deeply disturbed by Trump's reelection. And I don't feel that way. So I wanted to talk a bit about why that would be and how constellation work has shaped this in me.
And I'll start by sharing a little bit about something that happened in 2016. 2016, as you know, was the. The year that Trump first got elected. And it was as disturbing for me then as it was from most of the people in my world, like just like shockingly, unbelievably disturbing, but that didn't happen until November of 2016. In the summer and early fall of 2016, I was involved in organizing, uh, collective constellations. And I did a couple that summer. One that one that me and the other organizers did. It was it rocked our world because it was actually so hard. It really imploded. So this was in the summer of 2016 and I helped to organize an event called Social Alchemy and it was an entire weekend of collective constellations really taking on the biggest issues in the world.
In the world, like the biggest issues that we care about issues like racism or and social justice issues and climate change and and, What happened on the very very first night, the very opening was like a tornado came and swept through. We had invited, I wish I could remember the numbers. Is it 40? Is it 60? It was quite a large group for us. And this was the first of its kind a consolation event that was convened just for working with social and collective issues.
We put in so much care. For this event and the moment we started the event opened and as I said, it was like a tornado that came through all of our plans. Just got completely disrupted because something else was happening in the field. And the whole weekend felt like this. It felt like the things that we had imagined and the kinds of questions that we, the ways in which we thought we could enter into these questions, instead it came with such a force of disruption, which of course I understand now.
Looking back on it, and I've put so much thought into what happened and I, even the colleagues and I, we have different views about the meaning of that event. But for me I came to understand that event portended, it was foreshadowing what would happen in the fall. That we were, we're about to experience a disruption that none of us in the room.
As good progressive people, none of us in the room believed was even possible. And so this was the beginning of an understanding that I now call the projected future. And I've talked about it over the years. If you follow me, some people who might know me and know my work have heard me or even participated in a process called the three futures.
And this is a combination of six futures. Of insights that I've gained from other facilitators Jan Jacobs Dam in particular in the Netherlands, who, who talks about the emergent future. And my own work, which is about, which and which came Again, largely through this experience in the summer of 2016, what I called the projected future.
And what that means is that when we, when we constellate, we're stepping into the field because we're looking for something that can create a change that will allow our future to be different from the past. And so we often are working with dynamics in the past that we want to see in the present.
You want to shift in the present so that they can open up to a new future. And instead, what I have come to understand, or not just instead, in addition, and this is what 2016 revealed to me, I have come to understand that we are also, we need to be conscious that we are also working with the future and that we need to be able to look at our expectations of what we think the future will be.
Because at, in the times we are living right now, the future cannot be predicted. So another way of saying that is we've been projecting, we project in 2016, we projected into the future what we thought would happen. We thought we would have the first woman president in Hillary Clinton, for example.
We projected that and we were we were orienting, we also projected that we. We understood that we understood the larger social dynamics at least significantly. We felt we had a clear and great, like a solid analysis of what the nature of reality was. And so in some ways we were designing constellation work that, that was all about the elements of the reality as we understood it at that time.
What we. What I have come to understand that we were being shown is that we were wrong. For one thing, we were wrong. And but what I mean when I say we were wrong is that we had a framework that was not, oh, there's my, I don't know why that's happening, but we had a framework that Was incomplete.
I'll say a little bit more about the projected future. The projected future often comes with a phrase that's just how it is, or you've gotta be realistic. Right? That, those are, the projected future is an idea of what the future is going to be like based on our experience of the past. And in 2016, we had ideas that we considered to be progressive.
We're going to have a woman president, for example. We had this idea that the future was marching in a certain direction and we could predict that future based upon our past and our present and it was going to be this outcome. And so we were preparing to. to plant something in a future that was not going to exist.
And that was part of the reason why I believe we experienced so much disruption when we presented this constellation in 2016. Now I went through 2016 and all the way through 2020, like most people in my circle, at least just incredibly disturbed and activated all the time. Like I was basically in a constant trauma response during those years.
But I want to share with you another incident that also happened in 2016 that also took me years to figure out. And it's, and these things all connect to why now, I'm 24 in 2014 eight years I'm sorry, 2024 in 2024, eight years later I am. I am in a very different inner position.
So it has a lot to do with these two experiences in 2016. So the other event that happened was in the fall of 2016. I was invited to facilitate another collective constellation and it was in Boston, actually in Cambridge on not technically on the campus, but in really in the campus area of Harvard University.
And The people in the room were, again, a group of people who I identified with very closely at the time and still do. I still consider this to be my community, even though my views have diverged in some significant ways. But We considered, we really were the smart people, like we, again, we had an analysis of the nature of reality, and this particular constellation was focused a lot on climate change, and and asking the question of what can we do to get those people to come over to the reality that we understood it to be?
And what happened? Really surprised me because I honestly thought that we did have the answers. And so when the constellation was set up and we represented people like us and we represented people like the other What ended up happening as the constellation continued is that the people representing the other who are, by the way, represented by people like me at the time, right?
These were not strangers to us. In their representation, they, there was, they started pulling away and standing around the perimeter of the room. And literally by literally actually, materially, moving around, The chairs to stack them up to build walls between them and us. Meanwhile, there's the group of activists in the center who were, who we thought of, the activists thought of themselves as the kind of almost like a celebratory crowd.
The mass of succeed, successful activists. And we would look at the people on the perimeter and we thought we, they, if they come over here, we've won, right? We've got it. And we, every time people in this activist group would try to approach the people on the perimeter, the people in the perimeter were literally terrified.
They simply did not trust this activist core. To their perception, that group in the middle were mob, was a mob, and they did not want to be talked to or convinced. And as I said, they were literally building a wall of chairs between us and them. Now, again, this is in the early fall of 2016. The election comes, and as I said, I'm as shocked as anybody else, and then, building a wall, as you remember, if you remember that time, was a big theme, was the big theme of, one of the big themes.
But what surprised me, And also what I learned, this for me has been one of the big gifts. I will tell you that as a facilitator, which I'm celebrating this fall, the 12th year my 12 years facilitating Constellation work. So as a facilitator, one of the things that I've been struck by is how often I've been humiliated.
Now I'm using that word with a sense of humor. I really mean humbled. by the field. But I could say humiliated because my ego comes in and thinks it knows. It's I think I know what to do. I'm going to set up this constellation and it's going to show the world as I understand it. And that's not what happens.
And so in that room in Cambridge, Massachusetts in this, in the, September of 2016, we thought we knew the answer. But when we set it up in the field only showed us polarization. It showed us separation by this boundary, and we thought our job was to take down that boundary, and we would just somehow convince the others to join us.
And yet they saw us as a crowd, a mob. And one of the things I learned about constellation work is that the answer does not come to us instantly. if it's not in the room.
Now, if you've never done constellation work, this, what I just said might be confusing, but an example would be if you're doing a personal work. We've all had the experience in our own personal healing journey where we try things and they don't work, right? Because they weren't the right answer. They weren't the answer. Or, something about how we applied our answer, let's say it wasn't complete.
So it's not complete. Maybe not the right answer isn't even the best language. Just, it's incomplete. Something that needs to be included has been excluded or not yet seen. And that's one of the principles of constellation work. That what's included, what belongs. And until it's included, the system will not cohere.
So what belongs. And there are things that belonged in that system that we did not see at the time.
Now fast forward to 2020, to COVID, and you can see COVID is another moment of what we, what I could point to as a kind of We, we were shown in a really stark and shocking way how the re the future that unfolded for us and the projected future were so different. Right? No, none of us could have anticipated the degree to which we would experience disruption in our lives through, based on what we had understood from the past, right? So we couldn't have projected or predicted what the future would look like. So for me, that's another example of the collapse of the projected future. And again, we are living in a time where the projected future does not exist. Something new is emerging.
Now, I happen to really deeply I deeply believe in forces of love, in, in the field of coherence. And what I mean by that is that there, there's a river, there's a movement that is far greater than what our, my left brain can conceive of. My left brain, the part of me that wants to analyze and categorize and compare and contrast, keep things in the domain of what the kind of thinking mind can know.
Meanwhile, I've got this whole other area of awareness, the part that I think of as connected to my heart and that part of me really trusts deeply that we are in an emergent space. in which the flowering of humanity is vibrating. The flowering not, and when I say flowering of humanity, I'm, it's really probably it's not, it's insufficient.
The flowering of the planet, the flowering of existence on this planet the, our capacity as humans to become, to really step into our potential as knowing and sensing beings. This for me is, this is actually my truth. I know this to be true. So for me, the collapse, the falling away, the fact that a person who represents the projected future in my case, now from my point of this, you will you, of course, please disagree with me.
And I, I'm curious about your thoughts, but for me I see Kamala Harris and the sort of the mainstream media and the Democratic establishment and the Republican establishment, by the way, so both parties in the U. S. I see how they are part of a projected future. And as shocking as it is to most people, and I can't, I'm not suggesting that this is, that I would never suggest, in fact, that Donald Trump is any kind of savior, please, I, that is not what I'm saying.
I simply am pointing to the fact that we are in a space where the old systems must, they are collapsing. I saw, I often say unsustainable systems are unsustainable. And I say that because for so many years, my entire life, really, we talk about unsustainable systems, but we talk about them as if there's some kind of future, a future in which something might collapse. But the thing is, we are now in that time. The unsustainable systems truly are unsustainable. They cannot be sustained. They are collapsing. They must actually collapse. And what is emerging is it, if we allow ourselves to really connect into it. is coming from this place of heart, this place of love, this place of something that is far beyond what my human mind generally conceives of.
And I think in some ways the best way to access this is to drop into our much greater spiritual awareness, into a domain of our ancestors into the domain of spiritual guides into the domain of nature and the elemental forces. So into the domain that's beyond the shape of the human mind, at least the current shape of the human mind.
And for me, that's one of the gifts of constellation work is that I am put in the field every day. And I am tapping into that larger mind, the mind that is not held at all by a human. brain, but actually expands out into, through the, through all the dimensions through, in fact, I would say any place where I put my attention.
Of course, it's filtered through my humanness and through my itabeness, it's filtered through me. But as much as I can, I am tapping into a larger mind, a larger field of consciousness.
So it's with that awareness and trust that something beautiful is emerging and the recognition that projected systems will collapse, the projected future will not exist anymore. And it's not, and it's okay to be unsettled by it. I understand. But for me, the energy of that fear has really, it left my body years ago and 2016 and my, and even that first Trump term really forced me to work through a lot of those fears because I knew that it, I was serving no one if I'm constantly walking around in the state of trauma activation.
But it I will tell you, it's been very humbling to be at this point now to get to a place where I recognize that things are much more complex. but also much more beautiful than the mainstream messaging that we're receiving. And I promise you that you can tap into that directly through the knowing of your own heart and rest in that place.
And not just rest in that place but create from that place. And that really, if there's any, mission that I have in my work is to help people drop into that sort of solid ground of their own being, which is beyond their human body, and then create in relationship with the emergent future. Like to really create not from scarcity or from past trauma, but create in relationship With the beautiful thing that is coming towards us.
Okay, so there we go. That's my, that's 25 minutes talking about this. I hope this is meaningful for you in some way. I'd love to hear what you think about it and if you're interested in working with me, check out my website greenriverfc. com or if you're an educator who wants to understand how to use constellation work or just the kind of intuition in education, check out sensethinking. com where you can download a free ebook all about how I developed a pedagogy that centers intuition in teaching and learning. All right. Take care.