Years ago women’s magazines delivered the exciting news that we ladies have a G spot. While some conspiracists believed the elusive G was concocted by aforementioned media to sell magazines and G spot-seeking products, there are many of us who will attest that yes, yes, YESSSSS!… the G definitely exists.
And yes, finding it did change my life. Or at least enhance it. The good news is: there’s a new life-changing spot! An amazing spot we all have that can create an incredible sense of complete wellbeing and joy. In fact people who find this spot are happier than people who don’t. They’re also known to live more meaningful lives with more purpose. And people like them. Actually, they love them.
This elusive spot is also non-gendered – everyone has one. It’s the E spot! Some of us find it easier to make contact with our E spot than others. In fact, I’d say if you find your E spot and use it regularly you’ll not only change your life, you’ll change the life of everyone you meet.
All the people I admire touch their E spot regularly. In fact the more you touch it the bigger it gets. People like the Dalai Lama, Mahatma Ghandi… Nelson Mandela. They all found their E spot and used it so much people are STILL talking about them.
It’s your Empathy Spot.
Basically it means you have to give a shit about people. Oh, and there’s one more thing – you have to do something about it. Sound easy enough? Apparently it’s a lot harder than you’d think. Right now most of us are all over the A spot. That’s the arsehole spot. That’s when you’re an arsehole to everyone you meet because you have not so much a ME-too mindset but a ME-first mindset. That’s when everything in your life is ALL ABOUT YOU.
When you realise that you could do something to change someone else’s circumstance but don’t because IT WOULD DISADVANTAGE YOU. You take what you want, treat people like shit, and assume a general unwarranted sense of entitlement because you are a big baby who cries IT’S MY TURN even when you’ve had heaps of ‘turns’.
When anything goes wrong in your life it IS SOMEONE ELSE’S FAULT. It’s always someone else’s fault. People who use the A spot NEVER accept RESPONSIBILITY.
And of course, there’s the classic default, when you don’t get what you want or people don’t agree with you, YOU BECOME AGGRESSIVE. In fact when you overuse the A spot your E spot atrophies. In some cases it disappears altogether.
Not having E spot makes it much easier when you go online and abuse people who don’t share your values. You’ll find people with over-active As on social media a lot. They love it because they get to feel big and powerful especially when posting really abusive personal stuff and especially about people they don’t actually know.
Go onto any social media site and you’ll find heaps of these people with giant A spots. It’s sad. Is that who we are? Angry self-invested hateful bigots who get joy when we kick the vulnerable?
It’s not just individuals who act like this. Our governments act like this. So do corporations. To change who we are, and to have even the slightest chance of steering our good ship Planet Earth away from the impending doom of climate change we have to find our E spot now. If we don’t then we won’t make it.
This planetary nihilism has had me flummoxed. How can we be so smart and so stupid at the same time? We all know what we have to do – so why can’t we do it? Why are we still using plastic, and driving petrol cars, and approving new coal mines? Answer: Because we’re operating from the A spot not the E spot.
We can’t let go of our capitalist belief that life is a pyramid and that any one of us may one day reach the top. We won’t. Everyone at the bottom will die, and the apex of privileged at the top of the triangle will blast into space and start again somewhere else leaving us to our zombie apocalypse.
Life isn’t a pyramid, it’s a circle. We need to lose this sense of entitled individualism. Replace it with a sense of connected community. We need to see ourselves not in the frame of our iPhone selfies, but in the faces of the people we love. And the faces of people we don’t know yet.
That’s my resolution for 2019; I hope it’s yours. To change the world – not with the power of violence and hate but the quiet power of love and empathy.
Join me in the ‘empathy revolution’. Find Your E Spot. And use it. (Find out more at Starlight Festival when Margot Cairns speaks on just this!)
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
