And other reasons why TikTok therapy doesn’t work.
A crowded field of galaxies: NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope
(read posts and access the audio version on my Substack, Unsevered)
A few weeks ago, I was having a particularly rough evening. Feelings of grief over my dog and anxiety surrounding work were intense and I felt stuck inside of them in that kind of existential “what is my life” sort of way. I decided to get up off the floor and go for a walk.
The air was still, my neighborhood was very quiet, and the 10 p.m. night sky felt serene, especially for Los Angeles.
I walked alongside my feelings until my feelings let up, at which point I recalled one of the recent Artemis II astronauts describing Earth as an oasis. We live on an oasis surrounded by a powerful vastness. What an extraordinary thing to be living here on this exquisitely potent planet, considering the alternatives.
As these thoughts unfolded within me, I began to feel the trees and plants pulsing, everything underfoot and overhead so utterly pregnant with life. I breathed in as the soil exhaled. I exhaled as the songbirds inhaled. I inhaled as the roses exhaled. I exhaled as the bark inhaled.
I was vibrating alongside and within the frequency of planetary life. As if on some psychedelic journey, I began to laugh and cry at the wonder and beauty of it all. I was overcome.
And. I was also completely out of my previous funk. The existential stagnation of an hour earlier transmuted into an enlivened and reinvigorated connection.
I got out of my own head by getting into a deeper substrate of existence.
Decidedly not woo-woo.
Somewhere in the middle of my Ph.D. program, we read a piece by evolutionary cosmologist Brian Thomas Swimme. In his book, Swimme suggested that instead of imagining yourself looking up at the night sky while lying flat on “top” of the Earth, try instead to feel yourself on the “bottom” of the earth gazing down into the Milky Way:
“As you lie there feeling yourself hovering within this gravitational bond while peering down at the billions of stars drifting in the infinite chasm of space, you will have allowed yourself to enter an experience of the universal that is not just human and not just biological. You will have entered a relationship from a galactic perspective, becoming for a moment a part of the Milky Way galaxy, experiencing what it’s like to be the Milky Way Galaxy.”
(Swimme. The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos. P. 47)
This created a mind-altering shift for me that buzzed throughout my entire body and sent tingles down my spine. I felt my heart leap out of my chest as I was turned upside-down yet still connected to the planet, like being on a rollercoaster without the harness attached.
I’ve jumped out of airplanes more than 50 times and I’ve tripped on Ayahuasca and neither of those things was as disorienting of an experience as this short, written passage I took in while sitting on the floor of my living room.
Awe strikes us in unexpected places.
And disorienting moments can also be reorienting.
When we are turned around or forced to reframe how we experience something, there’s a dizzying feeling at first. We feel destabilized because we are knocked off of an axis we assumed was concrete, knocked off an epicenter we assumed was our own self. Moments of awe shift our axis and transcend boundaries of understanding that we once knew as fixed and firm. Much like standing up too quickly, our blurred vision takes a moment to refocus.
Experiences of awe are foundational to psychological development, beyond what we understand as behavior or personality development. Even William James—considered a founding figure of psychology in the United States—stressed the “priority of religious and mystical experience” and denigrated abstract systems that attempt to substitute for “vital, living interaction with the unseen world.”
What Rudolf Otto and later C. G. Jung called the “numinous” or ineffable was a foundational part of my psychology program, and of most psychological practice up until the moment we all misguidedly decided the brain was merely a computer that controlled the body. Awe is no longer a foundational aspect of most modern behavioral or statistical psychologies — including what is packaged and sold as psychology online by talking heads with influencer degrees.
But there is no psychology without awe.
And there is no reprieve from the microcosmic pain of existence without periodic transcendent experience that reorients us to the macrocosm of inexplicable but shared wonder, the numinosum – the profound, the holy, the divine, that which is both terrifying and fascinating, synchronistic, awesome.
This is not unscientific. Nor is science the arbiter of soul.
Awe has been mused upon at length throughout the history of human discourse and appears even now in bestsellers as a key aspect of fulfilled living.
This is the province of awe. The mysteries that connect us from beyond our personal fixations.
Awe is my late-night walk where I laugh and cry at the miraculous life we have on a gorgeous oasis of a planet.
Awe is the gasp that pulls me from my wallows and reinstates a devotional reverence for all matter of life and experience and how I might contribute to it.
Awe connects us beyond the personal to the cosmological, to the grand and universal.
Awe gets us out of the individualistic paradigm that life must be lived through the myopic lens of personal gains and personal suffering only.
Without a larger context, we struggle to find meaning, to feel meaningful.
But awe, awe is a path that connects us. Awe transcends this great barrier between our inner lives and the world and people and all living beings around us.
Awe literally gets us out of our own heads.
Until next time,
Dr. Erika Leigh Raney
