Flight or Fight... OR Respond with Love & Compassion

Published Friday, October 16, 2009 by Dan Gainsford | E-mail this post

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This is another entry on my series of entries looking at the nature of conflict and my own personal need to 'make peace' with conflict.

Recently I had the opportunity to sit down and chat on-camera with Andy Lipkis of Tree People in L.A. and although we spoke about ecology, water and the importance of trees, the part of the dialogue that has been resonating with me since is the part about human nature and our evolutionary fight or flight response.

I like to run away... my response mechanism has a tendency towards flight rather than fight. I don't like conflict and, in fact, living in a van was originally my way of leaving the world to avoid what I see as an inevitable future of calamity. 

This has all been shifting for me lately thanks to some great insightful conversations with interview subjects and others who have been challenging my personal paradigm.

One thing Andy spoke to was this idea that humans have evolved to always be in a process of scanning their environment for predatory threats, potential crisis', or anything that threatens survival. From this I am led to the idea that basically we have evolved to essentially live in fear. This is convenient for a media empire and ideological state apparatus that actually feeds off fear, but that is actually another direction all together that I'm not ready to get into right now.

So here we are constantly scanning our environment and actually in many cases seeking out fear. Why would we seek out fear becomes the question. In my view we've all become so complacent and comfortable that we no longer are in touch with our original survival instincts. Cheap energy and ubiquitous stuff surrounds us to the point that many of us live in a world of wants and desires, our survival needs long ago satisfied. This leads to us possibly craving a return to the senses, a return to ourselves, and/or a return to nature.

As Andy put it, we scan the evening news looking for things that trigger that place within us, and when we don't find it on one channel we flick the clicker to the next. This is why the media thrives on fear and tragedy and why we rarely find positive and heartwarming stories on CNN. We want to be connected to what's going on and we want to feel the triggers of our authentic primordial selves. 

This all leads to the notion of Fight or Flight. I'm a runner I like to run, but in my running away from society as a whole I've found myself doing something else. Andy put it well when he spoke to the fact that fight or flight is limiting. It sets us up to only have a choice between running away or entering into conflict. There is another road and that is the road of responding. It's unhealthy for us to feel trauma, fear, or those innate triggers within ourselves and do nothing. This by the way is what most of us find ourselves doing.. numbing ourselves to the reality in which we live. Feeding ourselves drugs, alcohol, and television in an attempt to be distracted from the greater picture. Meanwhile, in our daily lives, we are being triggered into fear by our government and media, yet most of us do nothing to respond.

To not respond is to deny our survival instincts, and potentially even damage our bodies with undirected adrenaline and emotional energy. The key however is to realize that we need not only fight or flee, but also realize we can respond with love and compassion in even the hardest and most difficult situations. If we can draw that up within ourselves we can bring conflicting parties together and heal real and serious traumas. It's not a easy task in the wake of all the challenges facing our world and it definitely will not be achieved by us sitting, staring blankly at the media machine, but it is possible. In my own life where I am trying to integrate these ideas, I'm beginning to find that it's the only way for me. I'm done running, and I long ago let go of fighting as a means to solve problems. 

So again we've come full circle to the idea that in order to restore our ecosystem perhaps we first need to restore our egosystem. We need to move forward together resolving issues with love and compassion instead of the fear-based fight or flight option.

peace,d






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