Lockdowns and a suspension of our daily habits may have given some an opportunity to turn inwards and face our collective mortality, or seek to avoid it. And we know we’re not out of the woods with mutant variants vying for survival around the globe. In those rare moments of quiet within, when the din of competing thoughts jostling for supremacy dims, do you ever wonder about what brings you to this life? About how you might best fulfill your time here in this short passage on the planet. What happens in the interval between birthing and dying? What’s it all about, anyway? Like anything in nature, all living creatures grow, and learning about ourselves and each other is how we grow as human beings. Sometimes, through accumulations of experiences life throws our way, we develop habits of mind and certainties that can constrict our ability to see life with new eyes. One day blends into another, undifferentiated. We think we know what comes next. We expect a repetition of what we already know. Our life can become rigid, calcified within the parameters of our rote experience. What lies beyond the known becomes threatening to the fortifications of certainty we’ve built for ourselves. We can feel afraid. We can feel alone.
Yet change for the better, beyond our wildest imagination, is possible. We can transform beyond the chains that shackle us to the early wounds around which we’ve organized our sense of reality. We can grow far beyond our notion of what is possible, beyond even what we strive to reach. And we can change these looping habits of mind or the incarceration of our addictions.
This is a time of reckoning, recognizing that our ways of living have brought us to the brink of bankruptcy ecological, financial, moral and emotional. So much of it has to do with a pervasive mis-use of power, zero sum games, competition & the win/loose propositions at play within families, organizations, institutions, corporations and nations. What’s more, we blame the victims.
Our conventional approach to mental illness, for example, and to the “therapeutic good” points to the disconnection that has us look at people’s disturbed behavior and label it social deviance, without acknowledging its roots in the crazy-making, violent and unjust social and economic systems we’ve lived under that perpetuate cultures of despair, poverty, incarceration and servitude.
We deny and suppress the magnitude of the collective grief we’ve been burdened with down the generations, which is the cost of the conquests of our forefathers seeking freedom and fortunes at the expense of an Other. We label incremental norms of powerlessness and alienation as mental illness and do our best to medicate the symptoms into physiological submission.
We can do so much better. As human beings we have an amazing capacity to learn, to grow and to transform beyond the conditioning that has defined us thus far. We can remain compassionate to the truth of our origins, our family, our community, our country or our ancestry, no matter what we may have experienced. We can compost hardship as fuel for growth. And, in the words of Gabor Mate, we can redeem ourselves from the past.
Awareness, unflinching acknowledgement, humility and compassionate justice could go a long way towards healing our collective wounds into freedom, if only we could take responsibility for the thoughts and actions we perpetuate.
What if each of us could learn to orchestrate the full creative power of the multidimensional selfhood within us in its direct, unmediated connection to whatever creative Source you name. No religious or spiritual interpretations needed here, other than an innate connection to the memory bank of our inner wisdom, and to the practices of aligning ourselves in congruence with the biological laws of the nature within us, standing as ourselves with our feet on the ground, opening the roof of our awareness past our solar system, out into the Milky Way, beyomd our neighboring galaxies’ common center, out into the ever expanding multiverse of the stars that we are, bringing heaven on earth through our physical form.
We can expand our understanding of the humanity we belong to. We do not fully know who we are as human beings because we’ve been disconnected from our true inherent power in the petri dish of the individual or collective generational trauma and violence we’ve been conditioned by.
We can re-generate the right use of the energetic power within our bodies to fuel our health and our creativity. Releasing the domination paradigm that is finally meeting its expiration date, we can heal. We can find the inner strength and outer joy of working collaboratively with others towards a common celebration of Life.
Together, we can solve problems as win/win and globally-sustainable models, understanding that the welfare of a majority never comes at the expense of some, and that the welfare of a very few never comes at the expense of the whole. We can live more creatively, more expansively, more inclusively. And we can love so much better than we have. We can do this!
