Because humanity is in the process of letting go of how we’ve actioned in the world to feel safe, now is the perfect time to lean in and collaborate..

We’ve used the mind and its idea of how things “need to be” to control things. We’ve been conditioned to perceive the ways others need to behave, how we need to behave, or how things need to go. This has developed a rigidity in our lives.

A byproduct of forcing that sort of structure is that a lot of energy has been suppressed. Especially, energies of emotions, authenticity, mattering, and of a sense of clarity about who we are and what this world is really all about. 

The chaos and uncertainty we are experiencing in the world is in divine order. It is a friction and a polarization that allows for what has been suppressed to come up and be expressed. If life feels like a challenge in this moment, lean in because even though it looks crazy, it’s actually a great healing for people.

Long before it’s possible for us to be spiritually reborn, we must first awaken to ourselves.

Awakening is the sudden realization that somehow or other what I took to be the only world isn’t the only world..

But in a true awakening, I recognize that there’s a world beneath me. And the way I know there’s a world beneath me is that I can feel something pulling on me. Something wants to drag me down into depression. Something wants to pull me into anger. Something wants to move me into a state of myself where I can justify my agitation. Then, as I start to get irritated, angry, impatient, something else says, “Uh-uh. And it isn’t some moral platitude that’s been pressed into my brain. It’s an actual understanding that, “This hurts and I don’t want to act from it!”

Buddha said the origin of light came from within. The implication is that there is an inner plane of forces that mirrors the elements of the physical world. That as matter is a conduit for fire, water, earth, and wind, our wakeful consciousness is a conduit for the forces of inner light, which manifest as intention, care, compassion, and kindness. And while survival has us navigate the struggles of circumstance, the transformative way to meet and mitigate events is to express the inner forces of light into the kinships that strengthen the Web of Life. In this way, light has migrated for eons through our suffering and delight into the world. This, then, is our one assignment: to make our humanness the lens through which light comes into the world.

The story of Moses carries an archetype that we all must face and live with. Of all his brethren, Moses was closest to God. Indeed, he climbed Mount Sinai to receive the ten commandments and heard God directly. But due to an accident as a child in which his tongue was burned by a hot coal, he stammered greatly. All his life, he suffered an inability to easily speak what he knew to be true. Though he listened to God directly, he couldn’t convey what he heard to others.

Inevitably, this is everyone’s fate when crossing from the inner world to the outer world. We all have trouble speaking what matters and yet we must try. Often, we are misled to think that falling short in how we convey the truth is a failure, when it is not trying at all that damages us. For even light through a crack is illuminating.

Are you, like John Mayer sings, “waiting on the world to change?” Or are you trying, as Gandhi advised, to “be the change that you wish to see in the world?” Maybe, like too many of us, you’re humming that old Dusty Springfield song, “just wishing and hoping and thinking and praying. Planning and dreaming.”This makes me wonder: is the opposite of hope really despair? Or is it participation? Maybe life without hope is a life without waiting and may be our best chance for peace. I know it’s counter intuitive, but here’s why.

Each of us evolve and change; this is a delightful truth in our world. Thus, we are always offered new opportunities. Will this constant tide of evolution eventually bring us to the Age of Enlightenment? Will humanity discover a state of mind, where we no longer bomb our neighbors, or is the Age of Enlightenment reserved only for individuals to experience?

The world is a reflection of you because you are the universe.

Perhaps that seems like a bold statement.

I share it because I’m often asked, “How can I change the world?” The answer is for you to come home to the core and build circuits so that you perceive with clarity and a loving, compassionate, conscious presence everything happening in the world.

In a thousand different ways, we are meant every day to begin to realize that it’s so easy to just run on automatic. Everything just goes on, doesn’t it? It just goes on. Sometimes it’s good. Sometimes it’s bad. But it just goes on. We are meant to understand that as long as we live from a life that just goes on, no difference is taking place in our life or in the world we’re in. We’re just part of a great machine, churning itself over and over again. Repetition, reincarnation, recurrence is all that’s happening.

It’s the clarity of this understanding that produces the need and the willingness an individual must have to make a difference. And it can be in the smallest way – as when you’re polite to somebody at the cost of yourself, meaning that you catch the impolite person in yourself and don’t give it a voice. To make a difference means that you are being different in the moment so that nobody knows what you’re doing, what you had to give up. That’s the beauty of it. Those you have interacted with won’t even know anything happened. They won’t know that you suffered yourself and allowed something new to happen.

A quality much needed in a divided world but not often encountered is compassion. Compassion is a way of connecting the love and self-awareness within yourself to another person. Compassion is more than kindness, then. It’s a natural expression of kindness and understanding when you love yourself. Without a sense of love inside, compassion has no foundation in consciousness.

There is a path to loving compassion, as with any spiritual quality.  The path has a beginning, middle, and end. Let me describe them to give you an idea of how the path unfolds.

Beginning: You see yourself as wanting and needing love, usually more than you are receiving. You may feel insecure about being lovable, and so you love others according to how much they love you or appeal to your sense of romance, sexuality, and compatibility. Relationships involve a constant negotiation between what you want and what your partner wants. The words that apply to love at this stage include passion, attachment, dependency, romance, mutual need, liking, and compatibility. The seed of compassion remains a seed.

There are more than seven billion people living on this planet which means more than seven billion personalities, opinions and ways of seeing the world. With so many diverse and varying ideologies and socio-cultural milieus, someone is bound to act in a way, or say something that upsets another.

The question is: Do we always have to take everything so personally? If not, how do we make what seems personal, impersonal?

Ego: Why We Take Things Personally
From the time we are young, usually before we’re even ten years old, situations or moments in life occur where we feel unsafe or insecure, or someone says something that makes us feel unlovable. When this happens, we begin to develop a second self, or a false self. That false self is often the “ego,” which I like to call the “protective personality” because no one likes to have an ego, but people don’t seem to mind having a “protective personality.”

How and when did we lose our intimacy to our beloved Creator, to one another, to all living things but most importantly to ourselves?

How did we evolve by not evolving to forget that we are born out of this earth and therefore all of creation is truly one?

Where do we begin to die, live and be reborn to remember this quest of life we are so fortunate to be part of? 

Perhaps when we look at the word intimacy, this is the first place where we either could use more insight, more respect or maybe some deeper reverence. The word intimacy in the Temple Hayes dictionary which translates into--IN-TO-ME-SEE-- is a simplistic way to identify with our relationship with life. While so many people in the world are longing to grow up, longing to understand life’s meaning, perhaps aching to release addictions, not really wanting to die while they are living, feeling drained and disconnected, there is always going to be common truths no matter what anyone ever tells you--we all long to be loved, valued and respected.

History is filled with powerful forces that change the face of the Earth, and right now we are experiencing one, an explosion of a new coronavirus that has upended daily life. Forecasts of a changing world are in the air once the pandemic is over, but no one really knows what the reset will be, if there is going to be one.

I think the best reset would be over happiness. There is an unquenchable drive for humans to seek happiness, but this means very different things at different times. A day laborer hauling stone to build a cathedral in the Middle Ages was happy, even inspired, by backbreaking physical work that never changed and ended with the breakdown of the body.

That way of being happy is unimaginable to modern people. In developed societies, our formula for happiness generally involves the following: physical comfort, ample leisure, scientific medicine, higher education, endless distractions through entertainment and social media, and a steady supply of consumer goods. In the developing world these values are dominant, not as what people already have but what they aspire to have.