Grounding & Grieving in Tyrannical Times

Written by Milo Primeaux (he/they), a white Lebanese American queer transgender witch, ecstatic embodiment enthusiast, wielder of Virgo superpowers, LGBTQ+ civil rights attorney, and anti-racism / anti-oppression consultant.

TLDR: This time on the Clock of the World sucks; the Death Cult of the present empire will try to take us down with it; we can ground and grieve one day at a time so we can better connect with each other and the earth and survive to build a better future together; this post contains ideas for how to do that.

Dear Friends,

As I write this, the back left side of my neck is frozen solid in pain. 

Milo at his home office with Terrence -- a small plushie sloth stuffed with lavender who's been warmed in the microwave -- pressed against his achy neck. A small comfort for the pain manifesting from the collapse of empire!

I’m not sure what happened – it was fine last night when I went to sleep after spending the evening talking with my partner about the state of the world, the meteoric rise of technofascism in our ingloriously failed democracy, the catastrophic impacts on the Earth’s capacity to carry us much longer, the rapidly escalating attacks on our bodies and right to exist as queer transgender people, and the need to start serious safety planning. 

You know, the usual.

It was like most other nights in recent months – why should this be different?

The culprit, I think, is the sustained doses of overwhelming stress, anxiety, fear, and grief that my nervous system, my muscles, and even my bones expertly compartmentalize and stash away for my own immediate safety. This highly sophisticated security system developed over millennia to ensure that we can survive acute crises and live to process emotions another day.

Only the crises we are in are not acute. They are – by design – ongoing, relentless, and fucking frightening. They are deliberately and strategically crafted, timed, executed, and reinforced to wage war on our sensual, spiritual, and mental intellects and wisdoms. 

I’ve heard many folks refer to the architects of this nightmare as a “Death Cult” and that feels spot on to me – meaning a movement with unusual and often extreme beliefs and rituals hellbent on the exploitation and destruction of our natural resources, art and culture of any kind, diversity of thought, experience, or expression, and the literal eradication of all that stands in their way of success.

And this Death Cult's assaults on our bodies are real and intense, manifesting as physical and emotional disorientation and dizziness, heightened or dulled senses and sensitivities, headaches, high blood pressure and heart palpitations, gastrointestinal issues, fatigue and depression, social anxiety and feeling isolated, aches and pains, insomnia, skin rashes and irritations, shortness of breath, difficulty concentrating, irregular eating habits and sexual energy, sudden and seemingly random outbursts of tears, wailing, or rage. 

Are any of these symptoms especially resonating for you right now? Many are for me.

Any one of these can be debilitating on a good day, but multiply them within any one body by factors of intersecting traumas of systemic oppressions, and multiply that within families, within workplaces and communities, and across a country steeped in the perception of irreparable ideological rupture and divide, and to an nth degree of prolonged, uninterrupted, and indefinite period of time, and you get… well -- you, me, us, right now. 

Suffice it to say, this sucks, and it isn’t sustainable.

While we might wish it to be different, and while there are concrete steps we can take to resist what’s happening (more on that in future posts, I promise), the truth remains that we cannot control, stop, or fix what is happening at this very moment. 

But there’s some good news! We can practice ways that offer some soothe and balm to our aching bodies, hearts, minds, and souls today. 

The practices you choose are entirely up to you – they are yours, for you, for your wellness, for your survival, today. 

It doesn’t have to be fancy, take a lot of time, or involve spending any money. It doesn’t have to be done indoors or outdoors, doesn’t have to be done alone or with other people – whatever floats your boat on any given day. The point is to practice something that supports you today.

As the inimitable “Black queer witch, writer, apocalyptic cosmic optimist, and gardener of healing ideas” adrienne maree brown reminds us:

“You are always practicing something. You might be practicing what you want, you might be practicing what you don’t want. And you’re always changing things. You might be changing in ways that bring you back to the familiar.” 

In a recent episode of the podcast Movement Memos, host Kelly Hayes chatted with queer and trans liberationist, author, and law professor Dean Spade about how we can cope with and be together differently in this moment.

There, Dean offers:

“For me, liberation is responding to the actual conditions that are happening, instead of being stuck either in a cultural script that tells us that something else is happening and tells us to see the world that way, or an old reaction that worked for me at another time or that I adapted at another time. I want to be like, ‘What’s happening right now?’ and be able to perceive as much as I can, and respond according to what I actually believe in, instead of just doing what I’ve always done.”

I completely agree with both of these great humans. What we practice matters! And what is familiar will always feel strangely good because it’s familiar – I have muscle-memory and heart-memory for it, but that doesn’t mean it’s serving me well now. 

So my invitation to you – which is also a reminder to myself – is to practice changing in ways that serve you now, in this time and place. 

What we practice now, as things are and before they get worse, will become the new familiar muscle-memory and heart-memory we will need to fall back on and sustain ourselves and people we care about in the harder days ahead.

Here are the steps I’m taking to do this – I hope some of them are helpful for you, too.

1. Ground yourself at least once every day.

Collage created by Milo Primeaux

Grounding is a practice of intentionally reconnecting with our bodies, the earth beneath and around us, and this very present moment in time. It is a practice of reminding ourselves that we exist, that we belong, and that we actually do fit into this moment of Time and Space (despite messaging by the Death Cult to the contrary). 

There are so many ways to ground. It can take 30 seconds or 30 minutes, whatever you have to offer the practice. Here are some of my favorites:

• Four-Square Breathing. Finding a relaxed place to sit, stand, or lie down, I close my eyes or soften my gaze, and bring all of my attention to my breath – that thing that happens every moment of my life with or without my attention. I intentionally slow down my breathing, counting slowly to myself up to 4 as I inhale through my nose, filling my lungs as much as I can; hold my breath for a 4-count; release my breath slowly through my mouth for a 4-count; hold my breath there for 4-count; and then repeat with the inhale through the nose and so on. For even more relaxing results, I try to make my out-breath last to the count of 8 while keeping the other steps as 4-counts, which physiologically resets my sympathetic nervous system and tells my brain that I am safe and can relax more. I do this as long as I need to feel calmer than before.
  

• Five Senses. Finding a relaxed place to sit, stand, or lie down, I try to slow down my breathing and bring my attention to each one of my five major senses in turn. What are 5 things I can see in the space around me? Keep breathing. What are 4 things I can hear right now? Keep breathing. What are 3 things I can feel? Keep breathing. What are 2 things I can smell? Keep breathing. What is 1 thing that I can taste? By the end, I usually feel calmer and more present in the moment and my immediate surroundings.
  

• Butterfly Hugs. I just learned about this one from a friend and I love it! This practice involves bringing awareness to slowed breathing while very gently tapping myself with my hands – either on my chest while my hands are held together in the shape of butterfly wings, or on my shoulders while giving myself a gentle hug, or on my thighs or knees if that’s more accessible to me. Here’s a helpful video that demonstrates this practice. This one has worked wonders for me when I’m feeling especially activated or triggered, which is a more common reality these days, unfortunately.

2. Bring more conscious and compassionate attention to your thinking and behavior.

Collage created by Milo Primeaux

Especially in times of overwhelm, we are prone to go into automatic mode – behaving in ways that may not serve us at all but we can’t seem to slow or stop. Like, doom-scrolling, choosing foods that make us feel unwell or overfull, snapping at or ghosting people who try to connect with us, or a nearly compulsive need to binge watch really stressful TV or read the news right before bedtime. (I can raise my hand for all of these, especially in the past few months.)

I have to remind myself that I am always practicing something. If what I’m practicing doesn’t seem to be serving me well, I need more information about what I’m already doing (or not doing) before I can hope to change it, which requires bringing real attention to my unconscious attitudes and behaviors. 

Try spending time for one whole day or couple of days noting and writing down: 

• Your conscious and unconscious behaviors

• Your inner monologue – what’s the story you’re telling yourself in those moments about yourself, other people, or your sense of safety and security?
  

• The emotions underneath these thoughts, like anger, resentment, sadness, incredulity, fear, rage, grief (here’s a Feelings Wheel, if it’s helpful!)
  

• If possible, where in your body you notice those emotions and feelings show up.

For example, just now as I was writing this, I went to find post on Instagram to share with you all, but as soon as I got on the app I found myself immediately scrolling through post after post about all the terrible things happening in this country right now. When I finally came up for air five minutes later, I felt really disoriented, realized I was hunched over my phone (which did not help the pain in my neck), my breath was very shallow, and my eyes were tearing up from staring unblinkingly at my phone screen. I took a deep breath and it felt like I hadn’t breathed in days. But with that deep breath I remembered my own advice, and I tried to recall what story I was telling myself while sliding down the rabbit hole – it was something like “I knew things are as bad as I feared; I need to repost all of this; I need to being doing more; I am not doing enough.”

So just to reiterate what happened – I am writing this piece on the importance of life-giving practices around grounding and grieving to survive tyrannical times, and I myself slipped back into a strangely familiar practice of physically closing in and holding my breath as though trying to remain undetected by a predator in the jungle, and feeling overwhelmed, isolated, and hopeless. 

Why? Because I am very practiced at that behavior and thinking, and am not as practiced at mindfulness, conscious behaviors aligned with my values, and compassionate self-reflection. Why? By design. We all have been deeply conditioned by white supremacy culture and capitalism, especially with the rise of technology and prevalence of social media, to disconnect from ourselves, our bodies, other people, and nature in incredibly important and meaningful ways, all under the guise of being more connected than we’ve ever been before. But it’s a facade, an illusion. 

This compassionate awareness practice begs us to come back to ourselves, to our bodies, to each other, to community, and to nature in genuine, earnest, kind, thoughtful, loving ways.

This can be hard and scary – we may not like what we see, or feel like we don’t have the bandwidth to grapple with what we find. That’s why approaching this process with a lot of love, compassion, and grace for yourself is so important. 

If you don’t think you can do that for yourself, consider asking a trusted friend, family member, or coworker to do it with you. Be ready to share with each other what you discover about yourselves and offer each other positive affirmations about what a good job you did being so brave and vulnerable.

If you don’t have anyone to do this with, find a way to offer that same loving kindness to yourself – maybe with self-loving messages written on or around a mirror you talk to as you share what you find.

Just remember, this is just a practice, which means it will happen imperfectly (see my example, above!), so be gentle with yourself as you go.

3. Lean more into what you love and what brings you awe.

Collage created by Milo Primeaux

I always say, “I am what I eat, and I am the company I keep,” but I think I’m going to start adding onto that, “and I am what I love.” 

Since the election, I’ve leaned hard into all the things I love most – writing, making art, making music, being in nature, sharing meals with friends, doing rituals to refill my spiritual cups and cauldrons, spending time with my beloved. I even overcame my intense fear of failure around learning languages and started learning Arabic, which is the tongue of my maternal Lebanese family and has brought me a lot of awe and joy. 

Mind you, in my whole life I never considered myself an artist or a maker, and so I self-consciously hesitated to claim those activities for myself, but more often than not now, my love for them overrides my insecurity about how good I or other people think they are. It’s not for anyone else but me, and the proof is in the pudding – I am exponentially happier when I make time for these people, places, and activities than when I don’t. I love the idea of being what I love, and I get closer to that reality every day.

Start with one thing, and lean in fully. See what grows from the awe and joy you find there, and give yourself permission to experience more and more of it. Pleasure is a birthright.

4. Try to limit taking in bad news alone, and make space in your body and day to feel grief. 

In that same Movement Memos podcast episode mentioned above, Kelly Hayes and Dean Spade reflect on our cycles of seeking stimulation, instant gratification, and self-numbing, and how this plays into how we encounter and absorb the impacts of painful news without actually allowing ourselves to experience emotions or grief over that news or integrating what we learn about ourselves and the world. This part struck a chord with me:

Kelly: “We can sometimes drift through this sea of bad news without fully embodying an emotional response to any of it. Sometimes we may pause to indulge a reaction, but often we’re just absorbing headlines and recognizing facts without reckoning with them psychologically. That too can really begin to make us numb. And without understanding why, we might chase that feeling. That sense of knowing a bit more without coming to terms with what we encounter. We jump to the next fact, story, or take before the feelings become too real. I think for me, part of that is about avoiding grief. If my mind keeps moving, I don’t have to sit with my grief and really feel it.”

Dean: “I was thinking about what doom-scrolling or scrolling is like – I see an image of genocide, and then I see an ad, and then I see a funny meme, and then I see an image of the icecaps melting, and then I see an ad, and then I see my friend’s breakfast. There’s no digestion, no integration – it’s kind of the worst-case scenario. It’s kind of terrifying that people are going numb while watching the things that should bring up the deepest empathy – it’s like we’re practicing being numb to the most painful things. And it’s not like we’re meaning to – it’s just the way the technology is designed. I just think all the time about how we’re animals, we’re designed to live in groups… and we’ve never, in the history of human evolution, gotten bad news alone. You get it from another person, like another animal body with facial expressions is there… And now here we are for the first time in tens of thousands of years of evolution, receiving bad news totally alone… this is so hard on us, and of course we’re going into these coping mechanisms of numbness and shocked immobilization, and we really need to connect and mobilize right now! We need so many people to engage in caring and disruptive action with others… it’s the opposite response than what the technology is training us for.”

Collage created by Milo Primeaux

Sitting with this call for more space for grief and connection, I am letting myself see where and how often these scenarios show up in my own daily behaviors and routines (see above my own unconscious doom-scrolling rabbit hole slide while writing this very piece!). 

Here are some self-reflection questions I’ve started asking myself: 

• Am I being intentional about where, when, and how I consume news? Do I seek out media outlets I trust, or do I randomly encounter headlines through social media, emails, texts, in-person conversations, or someplace else?
  

• Do I tend to be with other people or alone when I consume news? Is this an intentional or unconscious choice?
  

• How are my answers to the above questions contributing to my sense of overwhelm, stress, anxiety, and tendencies to numb out from what I learn?
  

• What might help me be more grounded, present, and available to psychologically and emotionally process and integrate what I learn?
  

• How can I communicate with other people in my life about where, when, and how I want to hear about, talk about, or process news? What would that look like? What kind of agreements will help us be more present, supportive, and connected?
  

• What is my relationship with grief? How has it looked for me in the past, and today? How do I feel about that relationship? Is there anything about it I want to change?
  

• What would it mean to set time and space aside every day or every few days to grieve what’s happening in the world? What could that look like? What support do I need to do that safely and well? Who can I ask for that support?
  

• How can I be intentional to balance bad news and grief with joy and connection? 

5. Write love letters to Future You.

A collage created by Milo Primeaux

In recent years, I’ve started a practice to heal and give a lot of love to Past Me – especially the versions of me ranging from age 3 to yesterday that, whenever I think of them, bring up feelings of sadness around what I’ve lost, disappointment in myself and others, resentment over the way I was treated or ignored, cringe-worthy regret for things I did or failed to do, unhealthy ways I dealt with fear and grief, and so on. These feelings would come up automatically like a muscle memory, even though the truth is that with time and perspective, I have gained so much love and compassion for Past Me now, that sweet imperfect human who really did the best they could with the tools and skills they had available at the time. 

In that practice, I sit quietly with myself, find some grounding in the here and now – some connection to the elements of earth, air, fire, water, and spirit within and around Present Me – and I imagine reaching out to gently place my hands on the back or shoulders of Past Me, offering reassuring unconditional love, forgiveness, and encouragement to keep going. 

“We make it through OK, Love,” I say to Past Me, “Look at us now – look at this beautiful moment in this beautiful life. We make it. You’re doing just fine. Keep going.”

It has been a profoundly healing practice for me, one I cherish and return to regularly. More and more, I can be with those memories of Past Me and not feel the pang of lingering hard feelings, which feels like an extraordinary gift to Past Me and Present Me.

And it only just occurred to me in recent years that Future Me – who is always ever so slightly further along our spiraling curve of Time and Space – is doing the very same thing for Present Me right now! It blew my mind to think that in this very moment, a slightly wiser version of me is sitting quietly, fully grounded in their body and reality, reaching out to place their knowing hands gently on my back and shoulders, offering reassuring unconditional love, forgiveness, and encouragement to keep going right now. 

I am actually tearing up as I type this… it’s such a beautiful gift to receive.

And so I am starting a new practice this week of writing love letters to Future Me.

I let them know what is happening for me right now, what feels good and what feels hard, and to share the fear I have in this moment and grief for what we’re losing and stand to lose. But I also tell them how much it means to me that they exist, that Future Me finds a way to show up and make it through each day in a way that Present Me sometimes cannot fathom yet. I thank Future Me for their courage and compassion, for forgiving me for not doing all the things perfectly (trust: Future Me knows “perfection” is fabrication of the Death Cult that we can let go of any time), and for loving me unconditionally no matter what. I thank them for whatever gifts they can offer me, just as Present Me finds new and beautiful ways to gift Past Me each time we meet. I tell Future Me I love them. I write them poetry or draw a picture or add a funny sticker to the page.

This is more than a journaling practice! Maybe Future Me will read these letters one day, maybe not. That’s not the point. 

The point is for Present Me to connect deeply with all of myself, including a version of me that exists in the future – which is a pretty radical act of resistance and resilience in a world that increasingly seeks my erasure.

What would you want to share with Future You? Are there words to put to your feelings, or movements of your body, or just tears that drop down onto a blank page?

All are welcome. Future You can hold it, I promise. And if you don’t believe that, believe that Future Us can definitely hold it, together.

In so much gratitude, admiration, and solidarity,

Milo

P.S. Here are some additional resources you might enjoy:

• Read “deep practice”, a love note by adrienne maree brown (March 2022)

• Listen to “Practices for Care and Endurance” from the How to Survive the End of the World Podcast, featuring Hala Alyan with adrienne maree brown, Spenta Kandawalla, Adaku Utah, Sepideh Moafi, Noor Tagouri and Layla Feghali (Dec 2023)

• Check out Love in a F*cked-Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell Together by Dean Spade (2025)