A lot of links to articles and more in this email. Here's what's below: (Please distribute the resources to anyone you think might find them helpful. We're all in this together.)

1. A long letter about my experiences over the last two months
2. Two articles published after Oct. 7, including “Keeping a Cool Head and Warm Heart During a Crisis" and "Psychotherapy, Psychoanalysis, and Society in a World Held Hostage”
3. A four-part series on trauma and healing, written or presented before Oct. 7. (but some published after) - includes podcasts, YouTube, and essays, and a very important aricle and podcast about creating communities that share distress and joy, What Do We Feel When We Feel Close? The Dim Sum Dialogues
4. Extremist rhetoric playlist on YouTube
5. Mindful Self-Compassion resources

Hi all,

Well, it's been a pretty horrific two weeks in the life of the world. I thought people got pretty thin-skinned during COVID, antsy for power and control over little things: honking at you when you're waiting for pedestrians, weaving across lanes on the highway, being rude to restaurant workers when their orders were delayed....

Then the first GOP debate happened, and my fears of what might happen over the next year and next November ramped up. The racist and violent rhetoric was off the chart, again. DJT began openly threatening judges, court room clerks, the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley... I started curating a YouTube playlist of violent rhetoric, and ramped up my writing. I was invited to a retreat for Tsuru for Solidarity, the Japanese American social justice organization. On the first day, we were present as a distressed man spewed racism and smashed windows at the Wing Luke Museum in Seattle. A few days before that, a white man broke into an Asian American family's house in Georgetown, Texas and beat a six-year old boy with a baseball bat. Little Jeremy is still in the ICU, fighting for his life, and we can continue to get updates via the GoFundMe set up for his care.

I delivered a talk on "Treating America's #1 Addiction: Abusive Power" on Gandhi's birthday, October 2nd, the International Day of Non-Violence.

5 days later, the world said "hold my beer."

One week after October 7, I was walking into a Wal-Mart, and a white man tabling for signatures (for a petition to recall a DA the organization says has been 'soft on crime'). I was wearing my jacket with the "Love Forever" and "Won't You Be My Neighbor" buttons. The white man shot me a look of total, murderous hatred. It took me a few minutes, but finally I sorted out that I was being coded as a threat, as a Brown man, as someone to be blamed. After 9/11, American racism went into overdrive, and there were many, many hate crimes against people who looked basically like me. 

I texted several friends to be careful because "it's in the air, and I feel like something is going to go down." That same day, a six-year old boy in Chicago was murdered by his 71-year old white landlord for being Palestinian American. The white man had been listening to conservative talk radio, and became enraged when Wadea El Fayoume's mother suggested they should "pray for peace." The mother is still in the hospital, reportedly asking after the health of Mr. Czuba's wife, and saying that while she was grieving for her son, she viewed this as "god's test." Her husband said in a statement almost right away that this wasn't about politics or religion, but just about parents grieving their child. CAIR-Chicago is raising funds for the family.

My god.

On Wednesday, a veteran killed 18 people in Maine. Who knows why. Maybe he didn't get the care he needed? Veterans have been under increased stress during the pandemic, with higher rates of suicide, PTSD symptoms, and substance abuse.

And you all know what you know about what's happening in Gaza and Israel. It feels like the world's history of colonialism, genocide, and inhumanity has been squeezed into the last two weeks. 

Uh, that's a lot of intrapsychic and interpersonal pressure. As I've put it before, that's quite an historical transmission we're receiving. Please take gentle care of yourself, even as many of us press for a cease fire or humanitarian aid. There's a lot of hatred in the air, ugly things being said and done to Muslims, Palestinians, Jewish people, and Brown people. Take gentle care of yourself, and recognize that we have to create a transitional space to heal current and ongoing, intergenerational, transhistoric, cultural, and racial trauma between all of us. (The topic of one of my essays and talks.)

I wish our first move in trauma treatment wasn't to arm survivors. I wish we had a Marshall Plan for the treatment of all forms of trauma, disconnection, and alienation. I don't think anyone would be left out of this plan. Maybe that plan would be our route to belonging. I am going to write more about this, but I was thinking about a Frank Capra film called "Let There Be Light," (viewable online) which I saw when I was a psychiatry resident at the SFVA. The film documented how American GI's were given communal re-entry programs, including sports, good food, and psychotherapy after WWII. If only the whole world had gone into mourning. If only we had fallen in love, and stayed there. Instead, the world went into boomtime economies. Wealth would solve all our problems, right? Well, the civil rights, women's rights, and queer rights movements took off some time after that, too, but so did more wars. I guess it's always "going down." We didn't start the fire, as the Billy Joel song goes.

And here we are, at the precipice of another abyss. What fire is burning within our hearts? What can we start building?

A number of things have happened in my personal life that tell me that tempers are frayed thin, and many people seem to be reacting in haste, when time and empathy are more in need. But this week, I've been focusing on being extra kind to everyone, spending a little extra time connecting to everyone I can, whether it's on the street, in stores, online, with friends, with loved ones, or in my work. It's a concrete form of tonglen, receiving suffering and sending compassion. But this stuff can get under your skin quite easily.

The world is made of Swiss cheese and we keep falling into holes. These holes feel like great abysses, created by neglect and people rising on power and ambition. Uhhh, A-holes perhaps?

Being human is hard.

We all make Swiss cheese. Maybe we can make something better, like an omelette out of eggs broken by careless hands, bent on making their point, their index fingers pointing in blame, three fingers pointing back at them. But it takes an open hand to hold this human heart. I hope I’m not dropped. I am doing my best not to drop anyone myself. 

When in a Swiss cheese hole, maybe the best we can do is "be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle."

Being human is hard. It seems like uncaring “gods” or a callous “devils” have it easier. They just power on, gaining followers on InstaGod or DevilGram, or whatever they use these days. X, I suppose. FaceWaste. Sigh. I'm on there too, livin' a full, modern, dissonant life. 

I’m just a human, a tiny mouse in the scheme of the world. A mouse in a world where dinosaurs rule, and haven't yet gone extinct. Our mammal hearts beat in dragon-egg shells, and we haven't worked out what we'll be when our beaks break out.

It’s not easy being human… and it’s not easy being green … so I’m being a greener human and hopefully that will make things easier somehow... as we look out for where we are.

Earth is our homeland, and it certainly isn't a homebland, amirite.

Just since August 25, since the alarm bells really went off for me about violent and racist rhetoric at the first GOP debate, I have written 8 articles at Psychology Today, 4 articles at East Wind eZine, presented at Tadaima on abusive power to 30 live participants (with the YouTube presentation now with about 300 views), recorded and mixed 3 podcasts, spent 4 days in Seattle at a social justice retreat, created an anti-racist videopoem which is in submission to film festivals in San Francisco and beyond, and initiated an Action Paper on defining dangerous influences in the American political process for the American Psychiatric Association, which will come up for a vote soon. Wish me and my collaborators luck. I'm not saying any of this to brag, at all, but just to say - "all hands on deck. This is not a drill." We need to keep putting out all the calm, love, belonging, compassion, and wisdom we can. This isn't just rearranging deck chairs. This is the fight of our lives, the fight of all our generations. Build whatever peace you can, because it is going to come in handy, in the near and distant future.

Here are is my output of the last month or so, that Extremist Rhetoric playlist, and MSC resources:

Posts of interest written after October 7

Keeping a Cool Head and Warm Heart During a Crisis | Psychology Today,  October 17, 2023

As a psychiatrist, I am most concerned that there are individuals and institutions that do not yet have enough distress tolerance, insight, compassion, and relatedness to prevent even worse outcomes.

Psychotherapy, Psychoanalysis, and Society in a World Held Hostage | Psychology Today, October 24, 2023

During the war in Vietnam, Venerable Zen Master Thích Nhất Hạnh was asked if he was from the North or South. He replied, half in jest but wholly earnest, “I am from the middle.” He actually was from the middle, the city of Huế, but he was also emphasizing his third way of nonviolence and peacemaking, far different from either opposing faction.

4 part series on trauma and healing

Four part series on trauma and healing, with two posts specifically about JA intergenerational trauma, and three connected to Tsuru or Tadaima (JAMP) events, published Sept-Oct 2023 (mostly at Psychology Today, with 2 cross-posted at East Wind eZine with better images) Three of these have associated YouTube videos, and two have associated podcast episodes.

1. Dr. Satsuki Ina on Japanese American Trauma and Healing (Psychology Today, September 26, 2023)
2. Cultivating Sense of Self to Cope With Trauma and Life (Psychology Today, October 3, 2023)
3. MOSF 18.9: On Creating Transitional Spaces to Heal Intergenerational Trauma (EAAPAAO Part 5) The conversation is available as an audio podcast with added music and intros and outros on SoundCloud and Apple Podcasts and on YouTube.) (October 7, 2023, with a version cross-posted at Psychology Today.)
4. MOSF 18.11: Abusive Power and Megalomania Perpetuate Racial, Cultural, Transhistorical, & Intergenerational Trauma (Part 2) (October 15, 2023, with a version crossposted at Psychology Today.) A podcast version of this talk (with added music and intros and outros by me) on Soundcloud and Apple Podcasts, as well as YouTube.

In addition, this post goes along with the series:

What Do We Feel When We Feel Close? The Dim Sum Dialogues | Psychology Today (September 19, 2023)

A discussion about creating communities that share distress, with links to associated podcast on YouTube, SoundCloud and Apple Podcasts The podcast includes that famous scene from THE FAREWELL about East and West, with a discussion.

Extremist Rhetoric Playlist

To keep the community informed about the threat of political violence, I created this playlist:

Playlist: Extremism: Leaders push an ecosystem for violence 

Including:

Garland: Survival of democracy depends on restraint from violence & threats (60 Minutes 10/1/23)

Marcus and Brooks – Trump escalating violent, authoritarian, manipulative rhetoric. Newshour 10/6/23

Trump amplifies violent rhetoric against his perceived enemies as civil fraud trial begins

and my personal prior videos on the subject –

Late night thoughts – on violent rhetoric – while listening to Beethoven

More thoughts on listening to Beethoven – the power myths of the culture

Hopefully we can get some action on preventing bad outcomes.

There's also this set of Mindful Self-Compassion resources:

Take the Self-Compassion Test 

The Neff Germer Handbook of Mindful Self Compassion

SF Love Dojo lecture on Mindful Self-Compassion - on YouTube

“Self-care and Dealing with Burnout” with Dr. Ravi Chandra

SF Love Dojo Guide to working through the MSC Handbook

Being your own ally - and  Active Compassion - on YouTube, by me - Pema Chodron’s meditation on active compassion is obviously much better :) 

Microdosing bravery podcast

More to come!

May you fall,
in love,
and stay there.

Warmly,

Ravi