“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” —Viktor Frankl
There are moments when the world feels so fractured, so dangerous, and so beyond our influence that even the most grounded among us can feel disoriented. War, climate instability, political division, economic insecurity, public health crises, and a relentless stream of alarming news can leave us feeling helpless—trapped between caring deeply and feeling powerless to effect change.
This sense of helplessness is not weakness. It is a natural human response to conditions that overwhelm our capacity to make sense of what is happening.
I learned this personally in 2009, during what I can only describe as a dark night of the soul.
One morning, I woke up and realized I was seeing double. Looking straight ahead, my vision was fine. But if I glanced left or right, I saw two of everything. An ophthalmologist rushed me to the hospital for tests. The scans revealed nothing abnormal.
Later that day, my wife Laurie took me to her holistic chiropractor, who quickly identified the issue: a severely tightened muscle around my eye, caused by prolonged stress.
At the time, I was carrying a great deal—concerns about my health, job security, my marriage, and a simmering mixture of anger and hopelessness. My body was holding what my conscious mind had not yet fully acknowledged.
After a few sessions, my vision returned to normal. I was reminded of the old metaphor of the man who was so angry, he couldn’t see straight.
That experience stayed with me—not just as a health scare, but as a lesson. When we lose orientation internally, our perception of reality itself can become distorted.
The state of the world can do this to us, too.
When we take in too much suffering without a way to metabolize it, fear rises. Anxiety follows. Our nervous systems move into fight, flight, or freeze. We doom-scroll. We argue. We withdraw. Sometimes we even get sick.
And somewhere along the way, we forget something essential: we still have choice.
But choice requires a frame of reference.
Without a way to see where we are—and where movement is possible—“choice” can feel like an empty platitude.
This is where mandalas entered my life, not as spiritual decoration, but as practical tools for orientation.
The hand-drawn mandala shown here is one of the earliest frameworks I created during that period. It is simple, even crude, but it became profoundly useful. It is a quaternary map—a four-part structure—that helped me understand my inner landscape and my relationship to the world.
At the top of the mandala is the World. At the bottom is Me. On one side is Fear; on the other, Love.
In the upper left quadrant is what I came to call the trap: the belief that I am just one person and cannot make a difference.
When I fall into this space, the world feels overwhelming and unchangeable. Helplessness and hopelessness take hold. Fear dominates. Stress and anxiety rise. My nervous system reacts. I may lash out, shut down, or freeze.
In that state, I consume more news, reinforcing the cycle. The body bears the cost. For me, that cost once showed up as impaired vision.
But the mandala does not end there.
Movement is possible.
The lower right quadrant represents self-care: forgiveness, surrender, courage, grace, compassion. This is not avoidance. It is the necessary work of tending the inner world—regulating the nervous system, softening self-judgment, and remembering that I am not meant to carry everything alone.
From there, something shifts.
When fear loosens its grip, love becomes accessible—not as sentimentality, but as grounded presence.
The upper right quadrant represents making a difference, even if that difference is small. This is where I remember that while I may not be able to change the whole world, I can still show up for one person, one conversation, one act of care.
This is where the Starfish story comes in.
A child walks along a beach littered with stranded starfish after a storm, tossing them back into the ocean one by one. An older man scoffs and says it won’t make a difference. The child tosses another starfish into the water and replies, “It made a difference to that one.”
The power of this story is not moral—it is psychological. It restores right-sized agency.
Viktor Frankl understood this deeply. A psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, Frankl observed that even in the most brutal conditions imaginable, those who retained a sense of meaning and choice were more likely to survive.
In Man’s Search for Meaning, he argued that while we cannot always control our circumstances, we can always choose our response. That choice—however small—is where freedom lives.
The Starfish Mandala embodies this insight. It does not deny the scale of suffering in the world. It simply refuses to let that scale paralyze the human spirit.
Health, in this sense, is not merely physical or emotional well-being. It is the capacity to remain oriented, compassionate, and engaged without being consumed by despair.
It is the ability to move from fear to love, from collapse to contribution, again and again.
We will all fall into the trap at times. The work is not to avoid it, but to recognize it—and to remember that there is always a path out.
Even now.
Even here.
Even when the world feels like too much.
Choice remains.
And sometimes, choosing to return just one starfish to the sea is how we remember who we are.
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Clay Boykin is the author of The Mandala Within: A Guide for Intuitive and Logical Minds. His work integrates symbolic frameworks, lived experience, and meaning-centered reflection to help people find clarity, agency, and inner orientation during times of personal and collective uncertainty. Drawing on insights from mythology, depth psychology, and contemplative practice, he offers practical ways to navigate overwhelm without losing compassion or coherence.
