Over the years, I’ve achieved a state of effortful ease about curating what I allow to come into my headspace and impact the quantity and quality of my energy, my lifeblood. I take care about the songs I listen to, the films I watch, the people I spend time with, the places I go, the work I do, the things I read, the conversations I have, the things I eat and drink and even my home and physical surroundings.

I even have brilliantly colored art on my walls, in part, because it creates a big boost to the state of my energy every time I walk through the living room, or simply glance up.

But there’s one wall that has the power to deactivate my normally well-curated, high energy state: my Facebook wall.

I realized this way before the Election. Over a year ago, I became acutely aware that 30 minutes on Facebook was an incredible emotional rollercoaster. From the highs of my friends’ incredibly, almost unnaturally adorable babies and dogs and videos of hyperactive baby goats in pajamas to the lows of ISIS and the (bizarrely named) Tea Party. The fever pitch of the pre-Election media cycle only intensified both the highs (oh, Michelle) and the lows (let’s just leave them nameless, kinda like we do Voldemort).

So, as the tenor and tension increased, I redoubled my efforts to manage what entered my consciousness. I told my friends I’d opted out of Election Anxiety—not the Election itself, I would and did vote. Just the anxiety around the Election. And trust me when I say that this took mighty and mightier efforts, as things played out. I didn’t watch a single debate. I didn’t read the books my friends were reading. I didn’t click on those links. I even went to Europe for a few weeks near the end of things.

I told people I wasn’t voting to give the reins of my country to Mr. Trump, and I wouldn’t be giving him or my well-meaning, distraught and afraid friends the reins to my peace, calm or sanity, either. I saw it as my responsibility to guard my heart and manage my energy so I can do the work and be the person I was put here to do and to be. That meant a lot of days away from Facebook, and still does.

And yes, I was caught off guard by the results of the Election. But we all were, not just those of us who chose to follow it only as closely as it took to stay responsibly informed. My aim was to be informed, but not conformed, not upset and not overwhelmed. I know a lot about content strategy, marketing and a lot about media, and I know that many businesses profit from the emotional upheaval of the masses. There are whole industries built around how to build website and media that people can’t stop clicking on. Because this is my job, I know enough to guard against getting hooked.

Some people flat-out disagreed that my way was the right way, but the truth is that none of my Election-fixated friends were any less surprised at the outcome than I was.

Since this “upset”, there’s been a ton of talk about how Facebook might have played a role in the surprising nature of the election outcome to so many of us, all around the world. The Wall Street Journal reported: “scholars worry that the social network can create “echo chambers,” where users see posts only from like-minded friends and media sources.”

Here’s my two cents: yes, the algorithms create echo chambers. And no, most of us aren’t doing the work it takes to seek out dissenting opinions. But Facebook is not the problem. We create these echo-chambers in real life, anyway, left to our own devices.

• Exhibit A: Many, many people I know have mentioned having to unfollow or unfriend people on the other side of this election from them, a move that definitely creates a more one-sided view.
• Exhibit B: I live in the Bay Area, where people were crying in the streets the day after the election.
• Exhibit C: My parents in Bakersfield had the opposite reality – the whole election, they thought I was bonkers to expect a HIllary win because all their neighbors were vocally pro-Trump.

In real life, many people don’t have the privilege I realize I have, of having been able to move to a place where the zeitgeist aligns to my personal beliefs, so they probably are exposed to differing opinions in real life more than they are online, which is not my personal experience.

But even then, Facebook isn’t the problem. That people are emotionally wounded is the problem. Deep-seated, heart-level pain and that feeling of being utterly unloved that festers into anger, hatred and violence. Human disconnection. These are the problems that need solving, not the Facebook algorithm.

Here’s the other problem: we have to be the bosses of our technology and use it for our purposes, versus letting it use us. We need to use it to study and learn and heal divides, but also to bring our souls fully up on deck and mend what’s within our reach. Technology, even Facebook, is very, very well-designed for this use. Here’s how I know.

Last year, I was on Facebook, right during one of those times where there was so much upheaval: church shootings, police shootings, and ISIS were inescapable. One of my Facebook Friends posted this video:

The video was shot at the Paris Marathon. As the mostly white, muscled, male runners swooped past, an anomalous participant came into view: a stout, Black woman, wearing traditional African garb, bearing a plastic container I’d soon learn is called a jerry can atop her head. She wore a sandwich board sign that read “En afrique les femmes parcourent chaque jour cette distance pour l’eau potable.”

Translation: “In Africa women walk this distance each day for drinking water.”

A marathon’s distance is 26.2 miles. Let that sink in. As we sit in front of Facebook, stressing out about subjects both worthy and unworthy of our attention, there are hundreds of thousands of school-aged girls who can’t even go to school because they have to walk 10 miles each day to get often dirty water for their families.

Part of what’s so worrisome about what we read on Facebook is the helplessness factor. We care about these things, but can’t do anything about them. When I watched that video, I had this epiphany that there actually are problems we can fix or contribute to the fixes for. There are things we can help do something about, with our time and money and care.

So I looked to learn who was working on real, long-term fixes for the water problem, and found charity: water.

I looked to learn who was helping refugees and disaster victims and found Save the Children, the International Rescue Committee, Doctors without Borders and one of my favorite organizations of all time, New Story.

Someone is out there working really, really hard to fix the things that upset you the most. Black Lives Matter. The ACLU. Planned Parenthood. Your local food justice organization (that’s a plug for City Slicker Farms, btw). Your church.

Curate your newsfeed aggressively, but just make sure you curate in the work that so many are doing to heal and fix and fight the good fight. And don’t just learn about it, support it. Engage in it. The cure to anxiety is not always, or often, action. But when it comes to Facebook Anxiety, that might be just what the doctor ordered.

P.S.: I’ve just pledged my birthday to raise the money for 166 people around the world to have access to clean water. Can you help?

P.P.S.: I issued a 30 Day Writing Challenge for Conscious Leaders a few weeks back, and over 150 brilliant souls signed up! I decided to take the Challenge right along with them, and it’s been a profound journey for many of us. Most people are journaling or free-writing every day, privately. I wrote this post on Day 11 of the Challenge. I’ll be doing another writing Challenge in January; click here to get on the list for the January Challenge.

I love the way my old Pastor used to tell the story of Jesus turning water into wine. He really unpacked it. First off, Jesus hadn’t done a single miracle before then, which meant that for his Mom, Mary, to expect one was pretty bold. But when they were at a wedding and the wine ran out, Mary told Jesus to do something. And Jesus pushed back.

I imagine Jesus was like “MOM. Why are you putting my business in the street? Ugh.” I’m sure the way I imagine this has a lot to do with my relationship with my own son. 😀 But I fact-checked my memory of this story as I wrote this, and Jesus actually said “Woman, why do you involve me?” So, it’s not all in my mind. He really did push back. I just added the “ugh”.

Even after His resistance, Mary was like “Servants. Don’t even trip. Just do whatever He says.”

And the servants did that. And they had a bunch of large, empty stone water jars at the ready. Jesus told them to fill the vessels with water, which then became wine, which was so good that the wedding guests marveled at how the hosts had saved the best for last. (Note that usually the hosts would serve the best first, counting on the increasingly drunken state of guests to cover up the increasingly inferior wine they normally served as the night went on.) This became Jesus’ first known miracle. 

There’s one under-appreciated principle this story surfaces beautifully, the idea that you must create space for miracles to happen. Without the empty vessels, and the servants on standby, just waiting for Jesus’ word, there would have been no miracle.

I’ve found this principle to be true over and over again in my life. The more space I create for miracles to happen, and the more intently I watch for them, the more and more and more I spot and receive. And just like eating a bite of delicious bread begets the desire for more, delectable carbs, miracles beget miracles, in my experience.

Here’s what I mean. I’ve written about how I quit the best job I’ve ever had, and not because the job had grown terrible. I quit that job because (a) circumstances had changed so that the company and I were no longer aligned as to purpose, and (b) I needed to create space for miracles to happen in my life.

When you’re constantly overloaded in your calendar and overextended in your budget, the stress and pressure makes it easy to miss your miracle. When you have the practice of saying yes when you really mean no, you don’t allow space for those happenstance conversations, surprise opportunities, synergistic relationships and chance encounters that so often kickstart a miracle story.  When you chronically run on spiritual fumes and anxiety or are in a constant state of low-grade blahs, it can be hard to zoom out and stay clear on your true purpose.

In that myopia, it’s easy to miss the specific paths to the general reason you were placed on this planet, because they might not be where you are looking. And the miraculous ones are almost never where you are looking.   

I won’t belabor the point, because I think the principle is relatively simple. The practices that unlock the power of the principle just take practice, and a lot of it, because they definitely buck the trends of culture, and of the way most busy leaders operate.

But you’re not an ordinary leader. You are a conscious leader. So take that consciousness and use it to create some margins, some cushions, and some space in your life and your spirit. Let me be a little more specific.

Create little margins where you can of time and money. Get out of the practice of allowing or creating mini-melodramas of calendar or cash. Live more lightly than your income would allow. This might take years, but it positions you to not have to take jobs for money, which in turn creates a pause in which miraculous opportunities can burst.

Cultivate margins of wellness and joy, too. Practice mindfulness and build in joy-inducing experiences, intentionally, to your everyday routines and rituals. With this margin, you’ll be able to flex more powerfully around incoming challenges and circumstances and spot miracles instead of shifting into shut-down, fight or flight.

Do the work of healing traumas and emotional wounds, pulling out the triggers and spiritual thorns that outsource your peace and power to a memory or a trigger. Once you’ve cultivated this deep, unconditional state, you will have the superpower of being able to tune into what’s right and what’s wrong about relationships, projects and opportunities. Once your internal chaos is calmed, you’ll know that internal agitation is a sign that a project might not be the right thing, and that peace is a green light. You’ll be able to operate on a pure signal, and to trust that signal with your life and your life’s work.  

To be clear, each of the “create space” recommendations in the last three paragraphs is, in itself, a lifelong journey and can involve a great deal of inner and outer work. But the work bears fruit almost immediately. You’ll learn to detect and trust that signal, all along. And my experience is that your signal will often point you right in the direction of your miracle. But it can only point you there if you’ve created the space.

P.S.: I issued a 30 Day Writing Challenge for Conscious Leaders a few weeks back, and over 150 brilliant souls signed up! I decided to take the Challenge right along with them, and it’s been a profound journey for many of us. Most people are journaling or free-writing every day, privately. But I wrote this post on Day 8 of the Challenge. I’ll be doing another writing Challenge in January; click here to get on the list for the January Challenge.