Finding out how I actually feel in the wake of Trump's Election

Starting with how I feel right now, I feel afraid in a kind of heavy-dull limbs-in-concrete-jello way.  I don’t want to feel this too much.  Really at all.  This election result.  In one way, It doesn’t change much about how I’m going to be operating my life for the next 6-7 months.  I’m finishing my dissertation (actually finishing it this time).  That in itself means reduced interaction with the public sphere.  Politics, current events, music.  This election result, Trump/Pence elected and Republican control of House and Senate, feels like a wake-up call though.  I could make it about people like me collectively, but I’m mainly going to speak in my own terms so I can stick to my experience right now.  

I really don’t know what to do.  I keep finding myself running down paths trying to explain how we got here.  There’s the sense that if I knew how we got here, I’d know how to feel.  In the Shambhala teachings we talk about ‘the cocoon.’  The cocoon is made of the layers or habitual patterns of thought and action we surround ourselves in so that we don’t have to encounter anything unfamiliar or threatening.  For me it evokes a feeling of stale and sleepy.  No awareness, no curiosity.  When I’m in full-on cocoon mode, my allegiance is to comfort.  I’ve been having a hard time getting myself to practice lately.  Implicitly, I know that it has a tendency to put whatever’s going on for me on center stage, even, or perhaps especially, if I’ve been avoiding something.  What do i do?  How do I help?  I don’t know.  That feels like the first layer of what I’ve been avoiding.