How I personally choose to navigate and manage dark energy on social media. I hope that by sharing the headspace I am coming from, you will be inspired to create an intentional approach that allows you to find some more peace.

And while you're at it — be better at it than I am.

They don’t have any mountains to climb so they pick hills to die on.

*There's a text transcript below...

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51 - Radical Lack of Attention

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This is not going to be easy to talk about. I’m only going to even get close, if I get close. I’m going to fail miserably and leave a lot out.

But I had some part of this conversation in a session with a client named Marissa from the Automatic Intuition community. She said she found my thoughts and strategies helpful in dealing with some online PTA communication.

It’s something people ask me about a lot in my personal life—those who are both my friends on social media and in real life. So I felt compelled to just share some of it with you guys.

Nobody needs to know you don’t like them. one of those “rules to live by” learned the hard way, as they say Unpack that. Notice all the things that means. It can only serve one purpose, to hurt the other person by having them know about your hate. It’s putting your hate in their consciousness. Absolutely NO situation is improved by this. Even if you want to engage in a war, you willfully choose to … there’s no advantage to alerting your enemy, to warning them before you strike. It only makes people defensive It escalates disharmony It makes you a target It draws attention to you Do you need attention so badly that you’ll take any kind of attention, negative attention? A lot of people will. That’s all they can get — or they think that’s all their worth — and they spitefully demand it.

In this age of media Flame wars and online truth bubbles

Nothing is more effective at shutting down the attention-seekers than silence. Total lack of engagement. A part of you might be tempted to participate. People constantly talk about not wanting drama, but they want drama. It makes them feel important, engaged, alive. Unfollowing isn’t just some passive insult to others, unfollowing is the best way to ensure you don’t even know or care. Which for anyone who might want to perceive you as an enemy is a total bitch slap, but it’s also a truly healthy disengagement. If you really don’t want it, you don’t care to know about it at all.

These comment wars are misplaced sense of purpose. For some people, it’s tapping into outrage and a connection to a cause.

They don’t have any mountains to climb so they pick hills to die on, almost at random.

You have a higher outlet.

I’ve told the story about experimenting with putting out some writing as a blog in 2006. That’s how Shift Your Spirits came to be.

There were 2 contenders—I seriously considered doing either a political blog or a blog about spirituality and personal development.

I could easily have gone either way. I have plenty to say about politics.

It was a hard decision. I received a name and a concept—a shining sentence—a clairaudient download — for the political blog, just like I did with Shift Your Spirits: 83% fewer hearts and flowers than most new age blather.

It came down to: which energy could I bear carrying everyday.

I knew Shift Your Spirits would encourage me to be a better version of myself. Now, don’t get me wrong, the religiosity of fundamentalism is a constant source of anger.

Political blogging would have meant running a toxic channel 24-7. Even if I was careful to put something better into the stream, I would have been at least beholden to listening and observing and analyzing all the other toxic political comment.

Resist. Fuck yes. Be involved. Vote. Donate. Gather. Preach. Sit in. Stand up. All of it.

But online posts on social media aren’t really any of that. They are a pale shade of true action.

Act. In meaningful ways.

Getting in arguments on FB. Kinda no skin in the game. It’s the catfishing of giving a godamn.

If it’s all you got, so be it. If your political analysis is valuable, put it out there. AS AN AUTHOR. There is a tradition in publishing. Authors do not talk back to reviews. You’ve spent 100s of 1000s of words already - carefully making your statement. Anything beyond that is trivial, small by comparison.

If you must comment or post, I have a few rules that might help you keep it constructive. *By the way, sidebar, I think these work in relationships as well. Don’t use always or never. Those words are immediately inaccurate and will inspire pushback. Don’t tag anyone. Don’t address any individual personally. Compose what you want to say on a separate screen. Don’t talk about what you don’t like or get in your own punch on re-stating the problem, state the issue as you observe it in the CONTEXT of what can be done to help the situation Mic drop and walk away.

DO NOT respond to any comments on what you posted. Ever.

Leave it for the lesser minds to squabble over.

The true reason I do not post political stuff is ... I can’t do it a little bit. What is 2%? How it is different than 10%? 10 becomes 75 in a hot flash of being baited. You lose all day to anger and rehearsing — a mental spinning that is obsessive and useless and draining.

You give away your time and energy and you feel stressed and tired afterward.

Was that really worth it?

For me, a cold hard white hot silent NONE is the only way to manage it. 1% is 100%. That’s like being a 1% smoker. What the hell is that?

ZERO. It the only way for me to manage it. A little bit is not an option.

I was listening recently to Oprah on an interview with Van Jones talk about giving energy to the darkness, to the other side. Thinking about it, engaging with it, hating it is giving energy to it. You cannot fight it head on. You have to transcend it.

That’s what the ZERO hard line is for me. It’s managing part of my attempt to transcend it.

I have to be on Facebook a little bit. I have a community on there, and the technology is great for managing a private group. So here’s what I do. I set tabs to open on my browser to window to all the sites I’m monitoring — email, mailing lists, scheduler, web sites, podcast … I set a Facebook tab to open to the Group itself.

That way, I can come in as an admin and keep an eye on my group without swimming out into the larger FB ecosystem.

That which you give your attention to expands. For a million different reasons.

In so many ways and contexts that statement is true.

So don’t it give your attention.

Everything you respond to — even just to give a “like” expands. This is not even just metaphysical. Online, the algorithms will promote posts that have been liked more, commented on more, and shared more. In a world where we all want to be acknowledged and valued—whether in darkness or in light—nothing holds more power than a radical lack of attention. What do I mean by “radical”? I am NOT advocating being clueless or uninformed. I find it infuriating when someone equates being willfully ignorant with an attempt to be more spiritual. Pick a single news source you trust. You will notice if you follow me on social media I often repost items from NPR. That started because they do not use a lot of embedded advertising. I will not reshare even a legitimate news item that clicks through to a site where you have to jump over hurdles of embedded Google ads. No. If I want to share the actual core story, I will go and search for NPRs version of that news item. That’s my preference. You may have your own. Just give it some thought and install some protocols for yourself and stick to them.

What I mean by radical lack of attention... I’m getting at the idea of removing your attention from a LOT more than what you just obviously find abhorrent. Don’t just block the haters Curate what you want to see, actively. I unfollow everyone unless they prove they have something to offer my feed that I want to see

One boring item or just something irrelevant. I go to their profile and look at their last 5 or 10 posts.

There is someone who posts in a language I can’t read. 100% of the time. I don’t follow that. Now that person is likely bilingual and can read English and follows my posts, and that’s awesome. But I can’t return the attention because of my own language.

But... I make room for what I can consume and what I want to consume.

Sometimes I want a challenging different opinion that is intelligent. There are people with different political opinions who are extremely intelligent and I respect what they thoughtfully put out and I am CURIOUS about where they are coming from. They are the best representation of people who are different than me.

Or I choose to follow a different racial perspective that is eye-opening for me. I have an author friend who is very passionate about whitewashing and issues of race, and she’s brilliant. I want to hear what she has to say.

I don’t “enjoy” the posts that challenge me...

But I value them. And I choose them. I’m not passive about what invades my mental space.

I try not to BE irrelevant to others. I try to be authentic and personal but less fluff. Less detritus. Less stuff you see everywhere else.

(I don’t always pull that off. It’s just an aspiration running in the background of my mind.)

Everything I want to say, politically, is being said. I see my opinions represented. I don’t need to tell you a news item of the day—20 of your friends just did.

I don’t need to tell you what kind of human being the President is—he shows you and he tells you every day.

I don’t have to say a thing.

I don’t have to say anything negative. I don’t have to give my attention my focus or my voice to darkness.

I don’t have to magnify anything with my attention without choosing to do so.

Do as I say, not as I do.

And at the end of the day, we are one race, stuck together on one planet, and I pray we survive long enough to evolve beyond the petty divisions. One of the things I think will be most impactful about contact with an intelligent extraterrestrial civilization is it will change our perspective on what is Other. It will shift the otherness away from our human family.

Hopefully, we will use this as more leverage to Ascend.

For the record, I haven’t given up hope that we will Ascend as a species.

As always, there's an Oracle Message at the end of the audio show...

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