LETTING PEOPLE CHANGE
Spring is here – and it’s obviously the season for rebirth and renewal for Mother Earth and the benevolent forces of nature that govern this wondrous but imperiled planet. In human terms, the Spring season contains the promise of yearly transformation and renewal at both physical and spiritual levels (the Easter season coincides with spring because its inherent message, Christianity’s specific agendas aside, is likewise symbolic for the transfiguration process that is possible for human beings).
This year, particularly, there has been a tremendous amount of focus and expectation surrounding the Easter/Spring season among aware thinkers in spiritual, metaphysical and philosophical circles because of what is possible at this time. Change is all around us and it’s happening so quickly that many are having difficulty adjusting to the constant changes and shifts and, often, feeling either left behind or exhausted in the foot race to keep up.
There’s no question that Mother Earth is in the midst of grand changes for herself, many of which are compelled by the habits, resistance and consumption of the human race. She is changing and evolving and adapting because of us and we, in return, are being forced to re-evaluate our relationship to her and her needs. It’s a symbiotic relationship that is purely and completely inescapable, though many are just now waking up to this fact. We are part of this change whether we want to admit it or not and burying our heads in the sand is not really an option at this point.
It’s pretty hard to turn a blind eye to that awesome collection of plastic two miles deep and twice the size of Texas floating out in the ocean from trash we’ve discarded into rivers and lakes and streams that have ended up there; as it breaks down it ends up in the food supply of marine life which, in turn, ends up in our food supply (only one of a number of grave planetary concerns we might face because of it). How about the sudden and alarming disappearance of the amphibians from the planet? Frogs are literally disappearing across the globe and the result on the ecosystems, especially in rain forest areas, can be catastrophic. Algae overgrowth is already clogging and toxifying many of those waterways without the frogs and tadpoles there to eat and manage it. Manmade emissions of carbon dioxide are making our oceans more acidic — and thus threatening corals and shellfish — at a rate unseen in at least 800,000 years. "Oysters have gone extinct in many areas, especially in North America, Australia and Europe," said David Garrison, director of the National Science Foundation's biological oceanography program. How about the Ogallala Aquifer which underlies parts of eight states, stretching 174,000 square miles from South Dakota to Texas? The largest portions of the aquifer are found within Nebraska, Texas, and Kansas, with smaller portions found in Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Wyoming. It’s drying up and becoming toxic. Estimates are that withdrawal rates are 10 to 50 times greater than recharge rates. Infiltration of agricultural chemicals and excess nitrogen from fertilizers has resulted in groundwater pollution of parts of the High Plains Aquifer. In addition, toxic chemicals from industry and military sites are contaminating the aquifer. When we ruin this, what shall we do about our crops and drinking water? The same is happening in India: The fields of barley, rice and wheat that feed much of India are running out of water, according to a new study based on satellite data. The Indus River plain aquifer lost 109 cubic kilometers of water between August 2002 and October 2008. The bees are disappearing, too, and there is tremendous concern as to what this could mean for plant life on this planet.
Shall I go on?
It’s not just at ecological levels where startling changes are occurring – look around at society: our economy is shifting and changing in ways that appear to be extremely unstable to most, affecting our properties, our holdings, and our very way of life. It’s happening in the Universe, too. Scientists are observing a speed-up in the expansion of the Universe that they believe will eventually tear apart the Milky Way Galaxy, our solar system and, finally, even atoms. It could be billions of years before this ultimate scenario occurs, of course, but what does it all mean? It means that change is occurring at every level in our midst and we need to personally catch up or we risk being left behind in the dust. We can fight the flow of these dramatic and vast changes everywhere we look and cause a kind of immobility and “death” in ourselves, or we can let go the resistance and fear and decide to embrace ultimate change for ourselves as a personal mission and destiny.
Clearly, our world is changing so quickly around us that the split between what was and what can be is undeniable now; only moth-eaten threads hold the old to the new, and we are the only answer for what will occur within our infrastructure when those final threads give way. Aware human beings already are providing that safety net of consciousness for this advent, and we become a greater and more integral part of the Universe and Mother Earth’s plan if we get on now to the last patterns that lure us constantly out of the now where all things actually accomplished in reality occur. The “now” is where we break patterns.
This is the chance to say goodbye to all the ugly patterns that have kept our focus in a lower world, and everyone is exhausted from the struggles of this lower world. There is a window of time here at-hand, and light souls across the Universe are calling, supporting and insisting, and this is that moment we always knew would come when we’d have the opportunity to redefine who we are in the way we always knew we could. It’s here. But with SO many changes facing us daily now, where do we even begin to start?
I realize for some that breaking these oldest patterns might seem like an insurmountable task, for some it might feel inconceivable; our patterns have, after all, been our security blanket all through time when life felt the most loveless and coldest and most abandoning. It’s why we developed the patterns – to try to protect ourselves from that harshness, and everyone’s core protective patterns are different depending on the person’s sensitivities. Some people intimidate, some interrogate, some strategize, some manipulate, some avoid, some lie, some hide, some analyze, some confront, some divide, some gossip, some simply cut people off and either judge or isolate – but all cease to be effective means where we’re headed. These patterns haven’t worked very well lately, anyway, but that hasn’t stopped folks from reverting to them. The old patterns developed in a time of fear will not work for the frequencies this planet is getting grounded in now, and there’s likely to be a scarier and scarier response in the body until we are able to resonate harmoniously with the new flows and release the patterns inside that even caused us to know how to harm the planet to the degree we have to begin with.
Society’s patterns are no longer working and they are disintegrating right before our eyes, Mother Earth’s patterns are clearly in major transition and, likewise, we are each individually faced with our patterns which, in truth, puts us at the precipice of being able to make shifts in consciousness that may never before have been possible, if we choose, so that old destructive patterns no longer exist for us. It really is possible. It all begins, though, with each of us deciding that our lives are worth living and then addressing those patterns in our lives that have kept us living continually without reverence and worth (and living with or without worth doesn’t necessarily have to do with our bank accounts).
Patterns seem like behemoths in our lives right now, shadowing over us like great scary demons, and if you believe the six-o’clock news, there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot out there that looks too terribly inspiring to compel a shift in consciousness. There is a constant media reinforcement of these destructive patterns (addiction is at an all-time high, especially in this country). This is why the disconnect folks are allowing by escaping onto the internet and into texting and Twittering and Facebook-ing and farther and farther away from functional contact with each other is incredibly worrisome to me. It may appear that folks are connecting more fervently than ever, but are we really? It doesn’t look or feel that way to me; to me it feels like human beings are becoming more and more distanced from one another with the very implements designed to open greater dialogues. There is a reason to be making human contact with each other right now, and it’s very important.
Listen, it’s wonderful to have the technology we have; in some ways it does connect us all as never before and there’s no question that we have greater access to information because of it. And technology continues to help save lives the world over; again, no question. But while technology is a vital tool for the improvement and comfort of our lives, it should not BE life itself – and for some it is. The technological medium provides a chiefly cerebral form of contact that is best served for specific purposes – not a substitute for actual human dialogue. I’m amazed sometimes how people speak to each other in public anymore – or not. I don’t think people are becoming necessarily less kind, I think we’re generally becoming more desensitized and disconnected. In truth, we actually came here to do these things in person. OMG and LOL ultimately don’t really cut the mustard when it comes to making authentic contact from the heart in truly loving and artful ways (and good communication is an art), and that’s what we came here to do. That chiefly.
In order to make a change, we have to create a reconnection out of disconnectedness. It is imperative that we reconnect to what is real about our lives, and the only thing that is ever real is in the moment, not in the past and not in the future. What is real is occurring right now and only right now.
There’s a very sage quote that says: “Suffering is the resistance to what is.” What this quote really means is “suffering is the resistance to being in the moment” because the only thing that “is” lies in the moment. You might add to that by saying “suffering results from living in the past or daydreaming in futures that haven’t happened yet.” I’ve especially observed in the spiritual community that once folks figure out how to open their third eyes and work with them, they become for a time psychic nosey-rosies, looking at everything in the past and the future with not much personal responsibility (or permission from those they psychically invade) and sometimes a near-obsessive attempt to control past and, especially, future events. Neither the past nor the future occur in the present where life occurs. Only here and now can we make real and authentic shifts in our lives, and all the patterns we’ve developed to facilitate this disconnect and all their tools are the issues many folks face right now.
Change is not possible if we hold on in any way to what was. We know this, and yet some struggle desperately with the slings and arrows of what brought them to their place of personal collapse. But holding those dogged rags from the past means we hold all that pain continuously in the now and it recreates for us the very same distress it did then. Since our minds don’t know the difference between what is really happening in front of us and what we imagine to happen, it stays busy sending all these signals of conflict and survival over and over again through the body, leaving the body in a state of nearly constant trauma. Then we cannot reason, we cannot hear, we cannot connect, and we certainly cannot create. The decision to let go past and future is key; if you’re there in your mind all day, you aren’t living your life. You’re disconnecting in some way and cheating some miracle that could happen for you in the present.
To my eye, living both in the past and the future are attempts to control something – either in resolving something that did happen or in attempting to create some result in the things yet to come. But what are we attempting to control? Well, we’re trying to control the feeling of pain or potential pain, I’d say.
Pain is a tricky one. I’ve noticed some people are addicted to it, and others spend their lives running from it. And often all it takes is simply acknowledging it to make a lifetime of pain go away.
Forgiveness, then, becomes an obvious component in the process. My students know that I talk about forgiveness in terms of a virulent battle of tug-of-war between two people with a trembling rope held between them taut with intense exertion and struggle happening at both ends. Only a little give here and a little pull there. The issues of unresolved conflict in our lives are like that rope, with a white-knuckled hand clutched to each end pulling for dear life, each participant unwilling to give in and let go. But here’s the miracle: It takes only ONE person to decide to let go of that rope and the conflict is over. We have only authority over our end of the rope; the other person can continue to engage and tug but it will be just a personal struggle then, not a dual engagement. Forgiveness is that choice to let go and then actually doing it.
Once we regain our energies from the struggle, really aware people with an eye toward the principles of Universal dynamics and cause and effect finally come to understand that we ourselves co-create whatever conflict had us pulling on one end of that rope. This awareness ends the rule of the victim within, of course, because we realize our power to create the situations in our lives, our power to actually manifest the people necessary to facilitate our issues, traumas and dramas. This can give us a greater perspective of our power and help us understand that the same power of choice which had us tugging frantically at the rope can be the same power of choice allowing us to let it go.
That’s the first stage. The second stage is being willing to let the person who held the other end of that rope decide to change, too, even if it still looks like they’re holding the rope. We do them a humanly disservice to never forget the picture of them with the rope in their hands and the savage look of willfulness in their eyes as they pulled with all their might against us. But guess what? They saw the same horrible sight in our eyes while we held the rope in opposition to them. It wasn’t pretty on either side. We cannot change if we refuse to let others change, too. All is one, remember? If we deny others the right to change (by continuing to embrace what they once did to us), we ourselves are denied the right to change. Change is a holistic proposition.
Again, we forget the power we have to create in our lives and relationships. I cannot tell you how many relationships I see right now that are on some manner of unstable ground because they’re bogged down to near collapse by the people in those relationships who desire a change in the partnering dynamics but cannot allow the other person to actually shift, too. It is such a temptation to isolate even in intimate relationships right now because we’ve asked for change too many times without seeing it materialize. We mustn’t lose faith in each other that such a thing can happen in our relationships, though. Whatever we may feel they did to us, how they treated or responded to us, how they judged us – whatever (outside of a truly abusive situation where the individual is best to leave) – is all happening in the past. Clinging to old wounds and walking with those scars through our daily relationships helps recreate the same old mistrust and distress that traumatized us before, and this recreates the same old environment where the other person always feels guilty, always feels like they have done something wrong, are always in trouble, are always walking on egg shells, and pretty soon people absent themselves from the relationships in an attempt to find something inside that feels like peace. Lots of men, especially, evacuate to what I call “the garage society,” shutting down, disconnecting, and escaping inside and away from life (“the Bubble” as one of my students calls it). Not only does connected communication tend to stop at this phase, so I’ve noticed does the sex in the relationship. And then the couple effectively becomes brother and sister instead of husband and wife (or mother and son, or father and daughter – adapt it to your circumstance), and the partnership devolves into a whole other direction of confusing emotional pathology.
Isolation isn’t the key, either. It’s all about being present in the moment and choosing 1) to give ourselves the permission to let go the old and live in a new space and then 2) choosing to grant the other person freedom to also let the past go and find a new space to live in. When both participants feel they have the honest permission to be free of past deeds and actions, a miraculous thing starts to happen: relationships heal and people find themselves falling in love with their partner all over again. And that’s as it should be.
Think about this statistic: The typical adult spends, on an average, 92% of his/her mental energy in defending, justifying, protecting, or proving his/her self-image and story. This means that most adults have only 8% of their mental energy left over to simply be present and engaged in the loving moment, while 92% is tied up in a past that is dead or a future that isn’t real. It’s no wonder our relationships have been failing as couples race to counseling to express how absent their partners are.
If we can create the awareness to be mindful, to observe how our minds work and what they focus on, we then have the power of choice to decide to keep our restless minds out of the past and out of the future and in the present where the world of the living dwells. Remember: “Suffering is the resistance to what is.” The only thing that actually “is” resides in the now, in this moment. If we’re out of the moment, we’ve lost contact with ourselves, with those we love, and we’ve lost the contact with the living world where God is simply everywhere we look and in everything we see and feel.
PROCESS:
In order to be fully present in the moment, it’s extremely helpful to have a sense of grounded connection to our own soul alignment (little children tend to have this alignment intact naturally).
First, call on Highest Divine Source (whatever you conceive that to be in your paradigm) to assist you in raising your heart frequency to the frequency appropriate for your Highest Divine purpose. If you have vision and can see the energy, this raised heart frequency should for most people begin to take on vivid hues of pink and ruby. Then ask Highest Divine Source to assist you in grounding your heart in an impermeable alignment with the highest heart frequencies of Mother Earth and Highest Divine Source (again, whatever you conceive that to be). This is your daily grounding, best done each morning before you embark upon the activity of your day.
Then, throughout your day, when you find your mind wandering to thoughts of the past or the future or to scenarios that haven’t happened, decide to see that thought trail as a mental tentacle attempting to reach outside yourself to something unreal. Call back that mental “tentacle” from its unreal target and reground it back in your being in the now, in reality, and then bring back all your will and your mental, emotional, spiritual and physical energy you had invested in that illusion, grounding and expanding it back within your being. You will have created some manner of energetic substance by sending that mental “tentacle” to the past or the future, and so you’ll need to clear that creation to Source via your alignment to be dis-created and transformed so the body can again be at peace, unafraid and engaged in the now, and so you can have your energy and focus back in the now.
That’s the process, simple as it sounds, and it absolutely works if you’ll employ it. It will change the quality of your days to keep your mind in the now where it can work in tandem with the needs of the heart.
Study of the brain has taught us that it takes only twenty-eight days to re-pattern the brain if we are mindful and disciplined about avoiding the old patterns and replacing them with something healthier and more supportive. So try this process for the month. In June we’ll go a bit deeper to understand how and why the ego needs desperately to lure us so continuously out of the present. Until then, I’d like to leave you with a motivating quote that I keep hearing all over the place now (you’ve heard it, too): “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing each day and expecting different results.” This simple, practical process is a very effective means to help you begin stopping the insanity.
Enjoy May, everyone.
With Love,
Ron
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