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For many months now, people have been sharing their anxiety about what this U.S. election

pertains. And there's been enormous stress. We all know it. It's part of a larger atmosphere

of fear and distress about violence, wars, climate-related catastrophes that are really creating suffering globally.

So here we are the day after the U.S. election.

And for many, there's a whole range of inner experiences.

You know, some on the intense end is full-blown distress, alarm, devastation, agitation.

And as often when the grounds are shaken, there's a real spinning of the mind.

Our brains are predicting machines. So it's like,

what's going to happen? What can we do? And yet what I really want to invite is a pause,

that we all take a true pause. The outer tumult will unfold as it does, and we can only respond

wisely to our world if we take the necessary pauses to arrive inwardly and with each other.

We really need to steady our hearts and resource ourselves.

I often think about trees, how the stress of wind causes trees to develop heartwood,

the inner fiber that gives them strength and allows them also to be flexible and move with the winds,

not break. So stress creates this heartwood in trees and it also impacts the growth of roots.

They're deep interconnecting roots with other trees around.

And for me, this is just such a crucial remembrance that if we pause, we can find out

how the stress of our current times can grow our heart space, our strength, our flexibility, our connectedness, our capacity to love.

You may well have experienced this in your own lives with times of real upheaval, pain, loss.

It might have been losing a job or in a relationship, someone dear that dies, a cancer that really threatens

...