Are My Opinions on Too Tight?

Have you noticed a hyper-amplification of the sheer volume of opinions flying around recently? If opinions were those airborne car-spaceship things in The Jetsons, the skies would be one endless traffic jam, with each opinion trying to honk louder than the others, or maybe even blast opposing opinions out of the sky altogether.

I haven’t been on social media since probably around November, but I can still sense and feel the cacophony in the collective field.

During this past week, since the apocalyptic fires in Los Angeles, my spidey senses tell me that the amplification has amplified. Amongst the very necessary sharing of information, resources and support - a beautiful, generative use of social media, imho - barrages of opinions, some cunningly disguised as passive aggressive virtue signaling, are being flung around from hyper-aroused nervous systems in dire need of a long overdue screen detox.

Opinions that are white-knuckle gripped onto for dear life as the very fount of existence and identity. Like people possessed, any disagreement with our precious opinions is just cause for the total dehumanization of other humans with different perspectives.

So many opinions about how we should be, do, think, show up, demonstrate care; about who deserves, doesn’t deserve, who’s to blame, who’s not to blame…and, this one really boggled my brain stem and got my own opinions grumbling when I heard about it, on how some of the people in charge in Los Angeles are incompetent because they’re women…

(Because of course, no man has ever been incompetent. But I digress, while tightening around my opinions, while simultaneously validating a certain state of consciousness as trigger-worthy.)

The point is that none of us are immune to having opinions. Anyone who knows me will tell you I’m pretty opinionated on certain topics. I too have brandished my opinions from a hyper-aroused nervous system blinded by self-righteousness.

And we don’t have to be immune to having opinions. They’re healthy and dynamic - when they’re rooted in our soul’s values. They become unhealthy and cause harm when we use them to dehumanize and demean each other, at which point they’re no longer established in our soul’s values. (Our individual soul’s values, whatever they may be, are incongruent with dehumanizing and demeaning.)

Opinions become disconnected from our values when we grip onto them tightly, when we become identified with them, and by extension, derive a sense of self from being right and making others wrong.

The elegant fissure in this sort of externally derived self-definition is that I would cease to exist if those other people with their other bad and wrong opinions did not exist. My existence and sense of self literally depends on them.

Aaand, release.

The moment we start to loosen the death-grip and hold our opinions lightly, the ones that were misaligned naturally fall away. And the ones that remain can finally wriggle free and plant themselves back in the nutrient-dense soil of our soul’s values.

We can also re-orient back to the soul, via our values. We can move away from an externally derived sense of self to a Self (soul) derived one.

So my invitation into embodied inquiry is this:

Who would we become if we held our opinions lightly?

What would this world be, how would it feel, if we opened up to the possibility of holding our opinions lightly?

How would the way we relate to each other change if we held our opinions lightly?