"What the older generation puts to rest, the younger generation awakens in us"

It's really interesting to me to look back at the Simpsons writers now that I'm finding my own feet in the Wild West of the Present Moment... not as prophets; not as any kind of future-predicting magicians; but as people who are so comfortable in the Present, they are able to clearly read the patterns that are swirling in the air as they write each season. It's not necessarily that much of a strange phenomenon they wrote an episode where Trump was president, and then he became the actual president, if you understand the power of a thought (the "8 fold path" teaching from the Buddha provides clues to this power). When you introduce a new impression, or thought, into a Collective, then they will start processing it through the emotion "desire cycle." Once that desire cycle is close enough to being complete, you may begin to observe individual action taken towards manifesting that thought into the reality we see around us (some people have the capacity to swim through this cycle faster or slower than others). There were certainly people who went through the desire cycle of, 'oh that would be horrible' and left it there, but there were people (possibly including Trump himself) who were thought, 'oh that would be fantastic wouldn't it?' and started taking action towards it.

Thus is the power of consciousness (and a necessary reminder: you do not have to be a "good person" to have access to this power; the ability to focus, the ability to create plans and follow them, the ability to observe how the external comes together to match your internal efforts). It can empower our choices, actually, to understand how much the power of a thought, a mere mustard seed, has to take down the mountain of belief in your own head. 

Artwork by Peppermintea

But what I really want to focus on is how interesting it is that, through Homer constantly choking Bart when HOMER is angry (doesn't matter what Bart was doing), shows us how the parent is constantly silencing the child by choking off their capacity for personal expression. There is another way to express one's frustration that does not silence the other person, who, really, is just... being their Self, beyond all your personal expectations of how they must be. We can, actually, learn from our own personal experience, and then observing externally through the lens of that experience. Silencing others through our urgent anger by 'cutting off their head' has an effect even on our esteem of ourselves: it continues this broken cycle that guarantees we will then silence our own self. In fact, that's exactly what you communicate to yourself in the very moment you are talking to another in this manner; the lower part of the brain, the more subconscious part, has no inner voice on its own to say, 'hey, but not me, right?' It believes 'you' are talking to 'it', exactly how you say it to another person. 

The conscious way through this moment is communication from a calmer state of mind (or consciousness). It is and always will be, actually, a momentous personal choice to pause in the immediacy of Anger or some other heavy emotion, [either go to another room to calm yourself or do so visibly right in that moment, breath work and all] as a way to teach your inner child, and then again open up the channel of communication to whoever it is you're speaking. This is a now empowering scene, that you can use later in reflective retrospect. Remember: our inner children are always observing and absorbing.

What a perfect personal metaphor that became, though, a that is exactly how I feel as a millennial that boomers have done to us. Perhaps I'm being too specifc by saying Boomer, but look around you: what are our parents and grandparents doing now as they continue to silence us with their puerile anger? 'No, you can't be that - You must be what we say.' 'No, you aren't allowed to do that - You must do what we say.' 'No, you may not, so we're going to take it away.' They also inculcate younger generations into their swirl of self-hatred.

The way the physical abuse and emotional neglect affected my self-esteem; how I understood who I am; that it isn't safe to express what I actually believe; sometimes it isn't even safe to express my EXPERIENCED truth... That's our generation, our moment in time into which we were born. It seems that Generation Z has been having a rather different experience. I am looking at Taylor Swift and her cultural influence, I'm looking at Chapelle Roan and what influenced her culturally, but more recently I'm looking at Doechii. 

I first came across her performance on the Colbert show in December, a beautifully choreographed medley from her mixtape. (You see, the honor she shows for the influence of the past on her creativity in not even calling it an album? And the following month goes on to be the third woman who received the Grant for Best Rap Album.) Vulnerably, I'll admit there was something about that performance, at first I thought, is this a lesbian awakening? Ha! I just was so attracted to her energy, and I had no frame of reference to attach to it. Now I observe the conscious way she approaches her music, the way she puts herself together, the songs about things she experienced (that I've experienced too?!) had the effect of kicking me squarely in the solar plexus. Somehow this grace kickstarted my heart back into motion, though it had been frozen since childhood. I'm not going to get into the consciousness of her music in this post (I'm sure that at some point I will write something huge in gratitude to what her hard work--her courage--has awoken in me), but I write to point out my logical conclusion: if this is happening to me, it must be happening in others too-- if not you as well, dear reader. I wanted to highlight my experience so that anybody who is reading this has the opportunity to observe within and without themselves, if they had not already been doing so, that Gen Z is out there saying some real Truth, and it will do the Collective a great service to listen to how they are transmuting their experiences in real time for them-- and for us. And then, perhaps, we can awaken to that very power within us, because: we are all co-creators with each other as well as creators of our own personal, especially inner, experience.