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31 Aug 2024
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The Forgotten Medieval Habit of ‘Two Sleeps’

It was around 23:00 on 13 April 1699, in a small village in the north of England. Nine-year-old Jane Rowth blinked her eyes open and squinted out into the moody evening shadows. She and her mother had just awoken from a short sleep.

Mrs Rowth got up and went over to the fireside of their modest home, where she began smoking a pipe. Just then, two men appeared by the window. They called out and instructed her to get ready to go with them.

As Jane later explained to a courtroom, her mother had evidently been expecting the visitors. She went with them freely – but first whispered to her daughter to “lye still, and shee would come againe in the morning”. Perhaps Mrs Rowth had some nocturnal task to complete. Or maybe she was in trouble, and knew that leaving the house was a risk.

Either way, Jane’s mother didn’t get to keep her promise – she never returned home. That night, Mrs Rowth was brutally murdered, and her body was discovered in the following days. The crime was never solved.

Nearly 300 years later, in the early 1990s, the historian Roger Ekirch walked through the arched entranceway to the Public Record Office in London – an imposing gothic building that housed the UK’s National Archives from 1838 until 2003. There, among the endless rows of ancient vellum papers and manuscripts, he found Jane’s testimony. And something about it struck him as odd.

Originally, Ekirch had been researching a book about the history of night-time, and at the time he had been looking through records that spanned the era between the early Middle Ages and the Industrial Revolution. He was dreading writing the chapter on sleep, thinking that it was not only a universal necessity – but a biological constant. He was sceptical that he’d find anything new.

So far, he had found court depositions particularly illuminating. “They’re a wonderful source for social historians,” says Ekirch, a professor at Virginia Tech, US. “They comment upon activity that’s oftentimes unrelated to the crime itself.”

But as he read through Jane’s criminal deposition, two words seemed to carry an echo of a particularly tantalising detail of life in the 17th Century, which he had never encountered before – “first sleep”.

“I can cite the original document almost verbatim,” says Ekirch, whose exhilaration at his discovery is palpable even decades later.

In her testimony, Jane describes how just before the men arrived at their home, she and her mother had arisen from their first sleep of the evening. There was no further explanation – the interrupted sleep was just stated matter-of-factly, as if it were entirely unremarkable. “She referred to it as though it was utterly normal,” says Ekirch.

A first sleep implies a second sleep – a night divided into two halves. Was this just a familial quirk, or something more?

An omnipresence

Over the coming months, Ekirch scoured the archives and found many more references to this mysterious phenomenon of double sleeping, or “biphasic sleep” as he later called it.

Some were fairly banal, such as the mention by the weaver Jon Cokburne, who simply dropped it into his testimony incidentally. But others were darker, such as that of Luke Atkinson of the East Riding of Yorkshire. He managed to squeeze in an early morning murder between his sleeps one night – and according to his wife, often used the time to frequent other people’s houses for sinister deeds.

When Ekirch expanded his search to include online databases of other written records, it soon became clear the phenomenon was more widespread and normalised than he had ever imagined.

For a start, first sleeps are mentioned in one of the most famous works of medieval literature, Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (written between 1387 and 1400), which is presented as a storytelling contest between a group of pilgrims. They’re also included in the poet William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat (1561) – a satirical book considered by some to be the first ever novel, which centres around a man who learns to understand the language of a group of terrifying supernatural cats, one of whom, Mouse-slayer, is on trial for promiscuity.

But that’s just the beginning. Ekirch found casual references to the system of twice-sleeping in every conceivable form, with hundreds in letters, diaries, medical textbooks, philosophical writings, newspaper articles and plays.

The practice even made it into ballads, such as “Old Robin of Portingale. “… And at the wakening of your first sleepe, You shall have a hot drink made, And at the wakening of your next sleepe, Your sorrows will have a slake…”

Biphasic sleep was not unique to England, either – it was widely practised throughout the preindustrial world. In France, the initial sleep was the ” premier somme“; in Italy, it was ” primo sonno“. In fact, Eckirch found evidence of the habit in locations as distant as Africa, South and Southeast Asia, Australia, South America and the Middle East.

One colonial account from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1555 described how the Tupinambá people would eat dinner after their first sleep, while another – from 19th Century Muscat, Oman – explained that the local people would retire for their first sleep before 22:00.

And far from being a peculiarity of the Middle Ages, Ekirch began to suspect that the method had been the dominant way of sleeping for millennia – an ancient default that we inherited from our prehistoric ancestors. The first record Ekirch found was from the 8th Century BC, in the 12,109-line Greek epic The Odyssey, while the last hints of its existence dated to the early 20th Century, before it somehow slipped into oblivion.

How did it work? Why did people do it? And how could something that was once so completely normal, have been forgotten so completely?

A spare moment

In the 17th Century, a night of sleep went something like this.

From as early as 21:00 to 23:00, those fortunate enough to afford them would begin flopping onto mattresses stuffed with straw or rags – alternatively it might have contained feathers, if they were wealthy – ready to sleep for a couple of hours. (At the bottom of the social ladder, people would have to make do with nestling down on a scattering of heather or, worse, a bare earth floor – possibly even without a blanket.)

At the time, most people slept communally, and often found themselves snuggled up with a cosy assortment of bedbugs, fleas, lice, family members, friends, servants and – if they were travelling – total strangers.

To minimise any awkwardness, sleep involved a number of strict social conventions, such as avoiding physical contact or too much fidgeting, and there were designated sleeping positions. For example, female children would typically lie at one side of the bed, with the oldest nearest the wall, followed by the mother and father, then male children – again arranged by age – then non-family members.

A couple of hours later, people would begin rousing from this initial slumber. The night-time wakefulness usually lasted from around 23:00 to about 01:00, depending on what time they went to bed. It was not generally caused by noise or other disturbances in the night – and neither was it initiated by any kind of alarm (these were only invented in 1787, by an American man who – somewhat ironically – needed to wake up on time to sell clocks). Instead, the waking happened entirely naturally, just as it does in the morning.

The period of wakefulness that followed was known as “the watch” – and it was a surprisingly useful window in which to get things done. “[The records] describe how people did just about anything and everything after they awakened from their first sleep,” says Ekirch.

Under the weak glow of the Moon, stars, and oil lamps or “rush lights” – a kind of candle for ordinary households, made from the waxed stems of rushes – people would tend to ordinary tasks, such as adding wood to the fire, taking remedies, or going to urinate (often into the fire itself).

For peasants, waking up meant getting back down to more serious work – whether this involved venturing out to check on farm animals or carrying out household chores, such as patching cloth, combing wool or peeling the rushes to be burned. One servant Ekirch came across even brewed a batch of beer for her Westmorland employer one night, between midnight and 02:00. Naturally, criminals took the opportunity to skulk around and make trouble – like the murderer in Yorkshire.

But the watch was also a time for religion.

For Christians, there were elaborate prayers to be completed, with specific ones prescribed for this exact parcel of time. One father called it the most “profitable” hour, when – after digesting your dinner and casting off the labours of the world – “no one will look for you except for God”.

Those of a philosophical disposition, meanwhile, might use the watch as a peaceful moment to ruminate on life and ponder new ideas. In the late 18th Century, a London tradesman even invented a special device for remembering all your most searing nightly insights – a “nocturnal remembrancer”, which consisted of an enclosed pad of parchment with a horizontal opening that could be used as a writing guide.

But most of all, the watch was useful for socialising – and for sex.

As Ekirch explains in his book, At Day’s Close: A History of Nighttime, people would often just stay in bed and chat. And during those strange twilight hours, bedfellows could share a level of informality and casual conversation that was hard to achieve during the day.

For husbands and wives who managed to navigate the logistics of sharing a bed with others, it was also a convenient interval for physical intimacy – if they’d had a long day of manual labour, the first sleep took the edge off their exhaustion and the period afterwards was thought to be an excellent time to conceive copious numbers of children.

Once people had been awake for a couple of hours, they’d usually head back to bed. This next step was considered a “morning” sleep and might last until dawn, or later. Just as today, when people finally woke up for good depended on what time they went to bed.

An ancient adaptation

According to Ekirch, there are references to the system of sleeping twice peppered throughout the classical era, suggesting that it was already common then. It’s casually dropped into works by such illustrious figures as the Greek biographer Plutarch (from the First Century AD), the Greek traveller Pausanias (from the Second Century AD), the Roman historian Livy and the Roman poet Virgil.

Later, the practise was embraced by Christians, who immediately saw the watch’s potential as an opportunity for the recital of psalms and confessions. In the Sixth Century AD, Saint Benedict required that monks rise at midnight for these activities, and the idea eventually spread throughout Europe – gradually filtering through to the masses.

But humans aren’t the only animals to discover the benefits of dividing up sleep – it’s widespread in the natural world, with many species resting in two or even several separate stretches. This helps them to remain active at the most beneficial times of day, such as when they’re most likely to find food while avoiding ending up as a snack themselves.

One example is the ring-tailed lemur. These iconic Madagascan primates, with their spooky red eyes and upright black-and-white tails, have remarkably similar sleeping patterns to preindustrial humans – they’re “cathemeral”, meaning they’re up at night and during the day.

“There are broad swaths of variability among primates, in terms of how they distribute their activity throughout the 24-hour period,” says David Samson, director of the sleep and human evolution laboratory at the University of Toronto Mississauga, Canada. And if double-sleeping is natural for some lemurs, he wondered: might it be the way we evolved to sleep too?

Ekirch had long been harbouring the same hunch. But for decades, there was nothing concrete to prove this – or to illuminate why it might have vanished.

Then back 1995, Ekirch was doing some online reading late one night when he found an article in the New York Times about a sleep experiment from a few years before.

The research was conducted by Thomas Wehr, a sleep scientist from the National Institute of Mental Health, and involved 15 men. After an initial week of observing their normal sleeping patterns, they were deprived of artificial illumination at night to shorten their hours of “daylight” – whether naturally or electrically generated – from the usual 16 hours to just 10. The rest of the time, they were confined to a bedroom with no lights or windows, and fully enveloped in its velvety blackness. They weren’t allowed to play music or exercise – and were nudged towards resting and sleeping instead.

At the start of the experiment, the men all had normal nocturnal habits – they slept in one continuous shift that lasted from the late evening until the morning. Then something incredible happened.

After four weeks of the 10-hour days, their sleeping patterns had been transformed – they no longer slept in one stretch, but in two halves roughly the same length. These were punctuated by a one-to-three-hour period in which they were awake. Measurements of the sleep hormone melatonin showed that their circadian rhythms had adjusted too, so their sleep was altered at a biological level.

Wehr had reinvented biphasic sleep. “It [reading about the experiment] was, apart from my wedding and the birth of my children, probably the most exciting moment in my life,” says Ekirch. When he emailed Wehr to explain the extraordinary match between his own historical research, and the scientific study, “I think I can tell you that he was every bit as exhilarated as I was,” he says.

More recently, Samson’s own research has backed up these findings – with an exciting twist.

Back in 2015, together with collaborators from a number of other universities, Samson recruited local volunteers from the remote community of Manadena in northeastern Madagascar for a study. The location is a large village that backs on to a national park – and there is no infrastructure for electricity, so nights are almost as dark as they would have been for millennia.

The participants, who were mostly farmers, were asked to wear an “actimeter” – a sophisticated activity-sensing device that can be used to track sleep cycles – for 10 days, to track their sleep patterns.

“What we found was that [in those without artificial light], there was a period of activity right after midnight until about 01:00-01:30 in the morning,” says Samson, “and then it would drop back to sleep and to inactivity until they woke up at 06:00, usually coinciding with the rising of the Sun.”

As it turns out, biphasic sleep never vanished entirely – it lives on in pockets of the world today.

A new social pressure

Collectively, this research has also given Ekirch the explanation he had been craving for why much of humanity abandoned the two-sleep system, starting from the early 19th Century. As with other recent shifts in our behaviour, such as a move towards depending on clock-time, the answer was the Industrial Revolution.

“Artificial illumination became more prevalent, and more powerful – first there was gas [lighting], which was introduced for the first time ever in London,” says Ekirch, “and then, of course, electric lighting toward the end of the century. And in addition to altering people’s circadian rhythms. artificial illumination also naturally allowed people to stay up later.”

However, though people weren’t going to bed at 21:00 anymore, they still had to wake up at the same time in the morning – so their rest was truncated. Ekirch believes that this made their sleep deeper, because it was compressed.

As well as altering the population’s circadian rhythms, the artificial lighting lengthened the first sleep, and shortened the second. “And I was able to trace [this], almost decade by decade, over the course of the 19th Century,” says Ekirch.

(Intriguingly, Samson’s study in Madagascar involved a second part – in which half the participants were given artificial lights for a week, to see if they made any difference.

And this case, the researchers found that it had no impact on their segmented sleep patterns. However, the researchers point out that a week may not be long enough for artificial lights to lead to major changes. So the mystery continues…)

Even if artificial lighting was not fully to blame, by the end of the 20th Century, the division between the two sleeps had completely disappeared – the Industrial Revolution hadn’t just changed our technology, but our biology, too.

A new anxiety

One major side-effect of much of humanity’s shift in sleeping habits has been a change in attitudes. For one thing, we quickly began shaming those who oversleep, and developed a preoccupation with the link between waking up early and being productive.

“But for me, the most gratifying aspect of all this,” says Ekert, “relates to those who suffer from middle-of-the-night insomnia.” He explains that our sleeping patterns are now so altered, any wakefulness in the middle of the night can lead us to panic. “I don’t mean to make light of that – indeed, I suffer from sleep disorders myself, actually. And I take medication for it… ” But when people learn that this may have been entirely normal for millennia, he finds that it lessens their anxiety somewhat.

However, before Ekirch’s research spawns a spin off of the Paleo diet, and people start throwing away their lamps – or worse, artificially splitting their sleep in two with alarm clocks – he’s keen to stress that the abandonment of the two-sleep system does not mean the quality of our slumber today is worse.

Despite near-constant headlines about the prevalence of sleep problems, Ekirch has previously argued that, in some ways, the 21st Century is a golden age for sleep – a time when most of us no longer have to worry about being murdered in our beds, freezing to death, or flicking off lice, when we can slumber without pain, the threat of fire, or having strangers snuggled up next to us.

In short, single periods of slumber might not be “natural”. And yet, neither are fancy ergonomic mattresses or modern hygiene. “More seriously, there’s no going back because conditions have changed,” says Ekirch.

So, we may be missing out on confidential midnight chats in bed, psychedelic dreams, and night-time philosophical revelations – but at least we won’t wake up covered in angry red bites.

Original article here

28 Aug 2024
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20-Somethings Are in Trouble

What if I told you that one age group is more depressed, more anxious, and lonelier than any other in America?

You might assume I’m talking about teens. Mood disorders, self-harm, and suicide have become more common among adolescents in recent years; article after article reports that social media is toxic for teen girls especially, eroding their self-esteem and leaving them disconnected. Or you might think of older adults, often depicted in popular culture and news commentary as isolated and unhappy, their health declining and their friends dropping away.

So perhaps you’d be surprised to hear the results of a Harvard Graduate School of Education survey on mental health in America: Young adults are the ones most in crisis. Even Richard Weissbourd, who led the study in 2022, was taken aback. His team found that 36 percent of participants ages 18 to 25 reported experiencing anxiety and 29 percent reported experiencing depression—about double the proportion of 14-to-17-year-olds on each measure. More than half of young adults were worried about money, felt that the pressure to achieve hurt their mental health, and believed that their lives lacked meaning or purpose. Teenagers and senior citizens are actually the two populations with the lowest levels of anxiety and depression, Weissbourd’s research has found.

Other studies of young adults have similarly alarming findings. According to the CDC, in 2020, depression was most prevalent among 18-to-24-year-olds (and least prevalent among those 65 or older). A 2023 Gallup poll found that loneliness peaked at ages 18 to 29. And, according to one meta-analysis spanning four decades, more and more young adults reported loneliness each year. When Weissbourd repeated his survey last year, young-adult anxiety and depression had also risen, to 54 and 42 percent, respectively. Still, the struggles of young adults have gone widely unnoticed. When Weissbourd got his data, “it was really upsetting,” he told me. “What is going on here? And why aren’t we talking about it more?

The phase between adolescence and adulthood has long been daunting: You’re expected to figure out who you are, to create a life for yourself. That might sound exciting, as if all the doors are wide open, but much of the time it’s stressful—and modern challenges are making it harder. Young adults are more vulnerable than ever, but much of American society doesn’t see them that way.

One thing that gets Jennifer Tanner fired up is the myth that young adulthood is a carefree time. Many people see it as a perfect juncture, when you’re old enough to have agency but young enough to be free of big responsibilities. Commonly, though, it’s the inverse: You have new obligations but not the wisdom, support, or funds to handle them. Tanner is a developmental researcher studying “emerging adulthood,” typically defined as the years from age 18 to 29, and she thinks that many more established adults wish they could go back to that period and do things differently; in hindsight, it might seem like a golden age of possibility. “Everybody who’s 40 is like, I wish I was 18.” Meanwhile, young adults are “like, The world’s on my shoulders and I have no resources,” she told me. “We’re gaslighting the hell out of them all the time.”

Of course, being a teen isn’t easy either. Depression and anxiety are increasing among adolescents. But in high school, you’re more likely to have people keeping an eye on you, who’ll notice if you’re upset at home or if you don’t show up to school. Adults know that they should protect you, and they have some power to do it, Weissbourd said. After you graduate from high school or college, though, you might not have anyone watching over you. The friends you had in school may scatter to different places, and you may not be near your family. If you’re not regularly showing up to a workplace, either, you could largely disappear from the public eye. And if life is taking a toll, mental-health resources can be hard to come by, Tanner told me, because psychologists tend to specialize either in childhood and adolescence or adult services, which generally skew older.

As soon as you become independent, you’re expected to find housing, land a satisfying job, and connect with a community. But achieving those hallmarks of adulthood is getting harder. College tuition has skyrocketed, and many young people are saddled with student loans. With or without such debt, finding a place to live can feel impossible, given the current dearth of affordable housing. In 2022, a full half of renters spent more than 30 percent of their income on rent and utilities—a precarious situation when you haven’t yet built up savings. Under rising financial stress, finding fulfilling work can come second to paying the bills, Weissbourd explained. But that might mean missing out on a career that gives you a sense of self-worth and meaning. Jillian Stile, a clinical psychologist who works with young adults, told me that a lot of her clients are “feeling like a failure.”

On top of that, the social worlds that young people once occupied are crumbling. In the recent past, young adults were more likely to marry and have kids than they are today. They might have befriended other parents or co-workers, or both. Commonly, they’d belong to a religious congregation. Now they’re marrying and starting families later, if at all. Those with white-collar jobs are more likely to work remotely or to have colleagues who do, making it hard to find friends or mentors through work, Pamela Aronson, a sociologist at the University of Michigan at Dearborn, told me. Religious-participation rates have plunged. Americans in general are spending more time alone, and they have fewer public places to hang out and talk with strangers. For young adults who haven’t yet established social routines, the decline of in-person gatherings can be especially brutal. “Until you build those new systems around yourself that you contribute to, and they contribute back to your health and well-being,” Tanner told me, “you’re on shaky ground.”

Sources of companionship inevitably shift. Today, for example, more young people are getting support (emotional and financial) from parents; 45 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds live with their folks. But that can be isolating if you don’t also have friends nearby. Family bonds, no matter how wonderful, aren’t substitutes for a group of peers going through this sometimes-scary life phase at the same time.

Without a sense of belonging, the world can seem bleak. In Weissbourd’s study, 45 percent of young adults said they had a “sense that things are falling apart,” 42 percent said gun violence in schools was weighing on them, 34 percent said the same of climate change, and 30 percent reported worrying about political leaders being incompetent or corrupt. These issues don’t affect only young adults, but they might feel particularly grim if you can’t imagine what your life will look like in a decade. When it comes to “anxiety and depression,” Weissbourd told me, “it’s not only about your past—it’s about how you imagine your future.” And young adults? “They’re not hopeful.”

A rocky start to adulthood could cast a shadow over the rest of someone’s life. Aronson reminded me that, on average, Millennials have “less wealth than their predecessors at the same age—because their incomes were lower, because they started their jobs during a recession.” Gen Z spends a greater portion of its money on essentials than Millennials did at their age. That doesn’t bode well for Gen Z’s future finances. And there are other concerns: Maybe, if you can’t afford to pursue a rewarding job when you’re young, you’ll work your way up in a career you don’t care about—and end up feeling stuck. Perhaps if you don’t make genuine friends in young adulthood—commonly a time when people form long-lasting bonds—you’ll be lonelier in middle age. And if you lean exclusively on your parents, what will you do when they die?

Leaving individual young adults responsible for overcoming societal obstacles clearly isn’t working. “I don’t think we’re going to therapize or medicate our way out of this problem,” Weissbourd, a therapist himself, told me. He wants to see more “social infrastructure”: Libraries might arrange classes, volunteer opportunities, or crafting sessions that would be open to people of all ages but that could allow isolated young people to feel part of something. Doctors might ask young-adult patients about loneliness and offer resources to connect them with other people. Colleges could assign students an adviser for all four years and offer courses to guide students through the big questions about their place in the world. (Weissbourd teaches one at Harvard called “Becoming a Good Person and Leading a Good Life.”) Aronson suggested that workplaces should hold mentoring programs for young employees. And of course, student-loan-debt forgiveness, government support for higher education, affordable housing, and more extensive mental-health-care coverage wouldn’t hurt.

First, older adults need to acknowledge this crisis. Seeing young people as worthy of empathy means understanding today’s challenges, but it might also involve recalling one’s own youth as it really was—and finding compassion for one’s past self. While older adults may have regrets, they probably did their best with the perspective and resources they had. And they could stand to remind the young adults in their lives: Even flawed choices can lead to a life that, however imperfect, encompasses real moments of joy, accomplishment, and self-knowledge. If our culture romanticized that growth a little more and the golden glow of youth a little less, young adults might feel less alone in their distress. They might even look forward to finding out what’s next.

Original article here

27 Aug 2024
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Murmurations: From Rupture to Repair

This is one of my deepest truths: If we are in relationship, no matter how scared or unskilled I may be, I want to repair with you. Part political commitment, part survival strategy, part just essence of who I am, holding out hope for repair is at my core.

Rupture is a given. We will disagree. We will hurt each other. We will sometimes find ourselves facing the irreconcilable. And we will need ways to make ourselves—and each other—whole in the aftermath of rupture.

I have grappled with the dynamics of repair throughout more than 20 years of practice with transformative and restorative justice. In this age of deepening cultural and political divides, facing the election of our lifetimes and whatever comes after, it is more critical than ever that we learn how to be in principled conflict and repair with each other. Three things stand out to me in this high-stakes historical moment: We have much to learn about the possibilities of genuine repair, our unrepaired places are where we are most vulnerable to ongoing harm and domination, and the human capacity for repair is vast and stunning—when we are given the support to move toward it.

The Possibilities of Repair

This seems to be a principle of dominant society, often internalized and acted out by our communities and families: You will live wounded, unrepaired, and you better not expect anything more. Yet this grim promise is juxtaposed with an evolutionary drive toward relational healing. I believe each of us comes from a lineage—no matter how buried—that knew how to heal, how to repair with each other. Throughout history, we have survived by bringing our harms to the circle of community and quite literally humming and drumming through them together. It is by design that most of us have no living memory of these possibilities. And still, they are there. We can find them.

We don’t have to repair in every possible direction in order to have a meaningful experience of repair. The criminal legal system, especially in the United States, has limited our imagination to a zero-sum game: There’s a victim and a monster, and punishment is the only healing anyone gets. While this system may not have room for the possibilities of repair, our communities do. Sometimes we can’t repair with the person who hurt us most, but repair is possible within ourselves, with our close people, and with our larger community, which can offer us the medicine we need.

The Unrepaired

Those organizing systems of supremacy exploit our unrepaired wounds for their gain. They use them to split us, to co-opt us, to draw us to their ranks. They understand that without repair, the trauma they unleash will create cycles of violence in which our survival strategies will never get us to freedom. And despite our critique of these systems and strategies, many of us have internalized the carceral logic that tells us our best shot at healing requires separation from and disposal of those who have hurt us. How many projects have you seen fall apart, how many coalitions are under strain, because when conflict happens, we quickly choose sides, close ranks, and tell each other the story of how impossible and unworthy repair is?

It is time for us to tell each other new stories. People change differently than systems do. The strategies we use to push back on systems, to force them to change through shame and blame, do not produce life-giving change in people. The work of repair requires us to risk beyond our righteousness and bridge across narrow notions of identity, allegiance, and whose pain “counts.” When we can hold the pain of multiple, divergent truths and lived experiences, we can remember our wholeness, our shared humanity, and let it guide us towards the mass-based people power we need to win.

Our Stunning Capacity

I will never forget sitting in a basement courtroom as Jonathan read his survivor impact statement, for the first time seeing the face of his shooter. He told in excruciating detail how the random shooting, as he was gardening on an early spring evening, had paralyzed him for the rest of his life, putting him in daily unrelenting pain, taking his career as a carpenter, his love of movement in sports and outdoors, and leaving him to answer his newborn daughter’s questions when she someday soon asks, “Why can’t Papa walk?” In the midst of all this, Jonathan told the court, “A longer sentence will not help me heal, and I don’t believe that more time will help my shooter. My shooter can’t undo what he did on June 6th, and locking him away for longer will not enable him to heal. I believe he deserves a chance to do better.”

I’ve found that the degree to which people can be open to the humanity of those who have hurt them is directly related to the degree to which they have been held well in their own wounding. Facing and feeling the immensity of our losses, the dignity of our rage, the depth of our sorrow, grows our capacity for connection beyond what we can imagine. I’ve seen it while holding circle with Jonathan and so many other survivors of profound violence, with everything they’ve lost, still reaching across the chasm of excruciating pain for repair.

The Irreconcilable

And then, there is that which is irreconcilable. This word has often felt like the truest thing in the aftermath of Oct. 7, 2023. I was sitting in a grief ritual, surrounded by safe, imperfect humans, looking at an altar full of things we love and have lost, and I could not reconcile the images in my head of what was happening in Gaza at that exact same moment. I looked out the window at the trees blowing in the breeze, my child playing, warm food in my belly, and I couldn’t make sense of it. Why are we here and not in the midst of a genocide? How can life be like this and like that? Marching and organizing and sitting on bridges and still, this terrible ache, this desperate feeling of complicity and helplessness. And so I fell down and wept, screamed and flailed with all that is unreconciled, irreconcilable.

Facing the irreconcilable is part of repair. It is the part where we get really honest about the things and the people that we cannot change—at least in this lifetime. It requires the vulnerability to surrender into the limits of our agency, to know that we tried as hard as we could and still did not get what we wanted, what we needed, what we deserved. When we cannot face the irreconcilable, we often try to destroy each other instead. Our grief and rage get directed at each other, as we cannot tolerate the contradictions we live within—and which live within us.

Rather than annihilating those with whom we can’t repair, we can draw close to our trusted people and grieve what we do not know how to resolve. In this way, we can repair with ourselves and each other, even when accountability and justice are not possible. Repair is to make whole, not to make perfect. Not even to make right. Some things will never be made right. In accepting this and finding ways to live together with it, we expand our capacity to repair in the places where the openings are.

And so, I want to learn to repair with you. I want to sit in the circle with you, tell you in the rawest detail about how I’ve been hurt, even by you, and hear in the rawest detail, how you’ve been hurt, even by me. I want to hold it all, together. Witness the carnage, grieve it in the loudest and quietest of ways. Face the irreconcilable. Agree not to annihilate each other, even when we are heartbroken. I want to try and try again. It’s the place I’ve found the most palpable hope, in the face of all that we are up against. I believe you can find it there too. We can find it together.

Original article here

22 Aug 2024
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Living Your Best 5D Life

The new era of 5th dimension (5D) access brings with it the quality of more awareness – our higher nature — generating more respect for Earth and every one of its people, taking us into our galactic citizenship!

Being in 5D is a vibratory zone frequency choice available to all who choose to ascend. Being there doesn’t guarantee you’ll stay there, but once you’ve been in 5D it becomes easier and easier to get back to. When you go there frequently, it also becomes easier to stay for longer periods until your need to slide back into 3D evaporates. Like a sine wave, you’ll slide into 5D and back to 3D regularly, until you don’t!

How do you live your life as a 5D being? Here’s how to identify events and activities you may experience that will allow you to know you are actively in 5D so you can move forward with grace and ease. You may feel normal, but things just don’t add up. The unexplainable happens to you regularly. You start to read about 5D, and suddenly the light comes on! You have changed vibrationally, affecting everything around you. You find humor in everything you encounter and your joy is high. There is no going back. Welcome to your new home!

The Hathors tell us, through channel Tom Kenyon, that fear is the number one way humanity is controlled. To the human, fear of the unknown is very real when one exists in a 3rd or 4th dimensional reality. Why? Because one believes it. When you are in a complete state of calm, it’s like you are in the eye of a storm. Nothing can touch you.

REMINDER: If you believe it, it is real. The key to 5D is to challenge what you have believed, in order to make room for a new belief system and new expression in your reality.

Connecting the dots in 5D means you are ready and willing to abandon old ways of doing life, and are open to being so compassionate toward anything and everything that nothing bothers you. When everyday drama makes you laugh — not at others, but at the absurdity of 3D life from a 5D perspective — that’s confirmation you are in 5D.

5D Tools For Transforming Your Environment

Each day we must determine who or what we are aligned with. We get to select who we love, what we will do, how we will change, when and where we will do it. We get to find the resources, the tools, and the opportunities to make the magic happen — and we get to ask for help.

I have two favorite tools for helping to stay in 5th dimension. The first is to repeat this phrase at least once daily: “I am asking for a day of heaven on Earth, for me and everyone I’m in contact with, and everyone I am in contract with!”

This key phrase will improve communications with everyone you talk to. My other favorite tool is to announce when going to sleep, “I am waking up in 5D.” This announcement to yourself and your angels and guides sets your intention for the day to come.

What tools do you have? What tools can you use? Don’t be distracted away from the changes you know you need to make.

Replace the words “I have to,” “I should,” etc., with a new pattern.
Let yourself own your actions instead of passing blame or passing shame.
A polarized perspective prevents you from finding your middle way. Changing how you approach life will help you stay in 5D.
Discover awareness and curiosity, rather than passing judgment about new and interesting things that may surprise or scare you. Curiosity will keep you out of judgment.
Stay in wonder! Identify what keeps you curious without comparison.
Noticing your connection to higher self will help you to act in the highest way.
Find your bliss; maybe it’s a song or maybe an experience like walking in a park or on the beach.
Keep smiling. Bless those that hurt you; they need it.

When you are in judgment, you are locked into 3D. When you are in 5D, you find you no longer desire to keep track of what others are doing because you truly don’t care. This is not because you are heartless, but because your love for yourself and others allows for the greatest compassion for each of you. Now you are operating in the new paradigm of 5D!

What if you are being accused of something you did not do? If you are offended by the accusation, you are still in 3D holding judgment. When you laugh at the accusation, you are in 5D. You are not threatened by someone else’s accusation because you don’t care whether they believe you or not, and because you are so sure of your own actions, you find what might be an annoying accusation actually amusing! Being in integrity is about being self-aware within yourself, knowing with absolute certainty who you are and at the same time being willing to hear others or your guides when you need to change.

Symptoms Of Approaching The Ascension

Certain ascension symptoms are now presenting in our world. Being aware of them will give you peace of mind, even with the discomfort! Understand that ascension symptoms can be extremely mysterious and hard on the body. If you cannot determine the cause of these symptoms through consultation with traditional doctors or alternative healers, consider they may be coming from the many upgrades you may be getting in your body. Your health care professional is an important first line of action when encountering any health issue, but humanity is developing a crystalline base. Your physical body will become the ascended master you. You will not need to die to make this happen.

Ascension symptoms can include headaches due to the expansion of your pineal gland. Your brain may feel like the cranium is too small. You may experience vertigo, dizziness, forgetfulness, joint and body pain or aches, cramps in your legs, or changes in your sight and in your awareness of your immediate space. You may feel feverish or flu-like symptoms, cramps and diarrhea, or even kundalini experiences. This may result in anxiety attacks that come and go quickly.

Many of these upgrades can occur at night, and you might wake up for “no reason,” and decide to use the bathroom. This is often a signal that you are giving permission to whatever upgrade the benevolent ETs of light may be assisting you with. Announcing, “I am waking up well rested no matter what the night holds,” will also ease this transformation.

You, as a vessel of light, are being upgraded in many ways. Humanity has chosen this path, albeit painful or uncomfortable. One way to address this is to notice it is happening, and to say the following: I ask that this divine upgrade assist me and allow me to pursue my highest purpose in this lifetime with the most evolved appearance, and expressing in the kindest, most generous and gentle way possible.

Self-care of the physical body is your highest priority right now. Massage, bodywork, craniosacral work, long baths, etc., will do much for the integration of this new evolved energy. You are becoming 5th dimensional. Seek to integrate it with grace and ease.

Your hearing structures are going to be rewired. This has caused some of you to start hearing extra-ordinary things, which most people do not hear. Some of you can hear light; some of you can hear the screeching of Wi-Fi. Your perceptions are growing, yet in the field of 3D they may seem painful or annoying.

There is more light on the planet for each of us to experience. As you bring it into your own body, it will take considerable effort to allow these experiences to become your new normal. Your physical body is learning to be the ascended master you. This involves accepting more light into your every activity, and especially into your physical body.

You will let go of a certain denseness in your physical body as it becomes lighter. The crazy thing about this is the less heavy your cells and vibration become, the more your physical body may resist this lightness. This means your body will try to compensate by resisting, becoming more of a couch potato and gaining weight! There is more to this. The more light you bring in, the more physical exercise is needed. The higher frequency energy can create stress on your nerves, and physical activity balances that!

You can allow more spiritual mass into your body by doing more physical activities such as walking, exercising, running, and swimming. The more physically demanding, the better. Even weight training will be helpful as you spiritually advance. Find a way to spend a good portion of this exercise time outside in nature, as you are becoming 5th dimensional from the inside out and producing a crystalline body that can transcend 3rd dimension into 5th.

Humanity is going through countless shifts and upgrades. As you grow and shift into the new 5D human, you are stepping into your power as a co-creator shaping your reality in profound ways. Everything you create in your world has the opportunity to grow and change. This is the opportunity to take your ascension work to another level.

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