Humanity First

Have you notice lately that life is on a fast track on the superhighway? We are living in the fast lane now. Now more than ever everything is speeding up, moving forward at lightening speed. This is a time of deep transformation and yet we are being asked to slow down as things are speeding up. The two might feel at odds with each other but in fact, slowing down is exactly what we need to be doing more of. There’s dismantling at every level now, individually, in families, communities, cities, states, and by nations. No one is oblivious to these rapid changes. We’re all feeling the pinch. What do we do in these times? Who do we trust? Do we sell our humanity to the highest bidder? Where are we going?

The first place I look to is within myself. I check in. How am I feeling? Have I become still enough to sense what I am feeling? How are the events taking place in my life and the events externally impacting me? What are all these feelings guiding me towards? Alfred Whitehead said “Feeling is a way in which the universe transmits energy and information.” When we have the courage to pause in the midst of the chaos to come home to ourselves and feel, to tune into the messengers that are our feelings we get a sense of it, the truth of what is claiming us all. Since we live in a collective shared experience, none of us are immune from the collective grief, sadness, injustices. How we choose to express and move the collective drama playing out will be different based on where we are on our spiritual journey. I’ve often struggled with where I land with the collective experience. Do I take the high road and spiritualize everything or do I stand with humanity. As I sat with this question in my meditation yesterday, I received the following message:

Open yourself to see and feel the suffering but don’t become the suffering. Open to seeing the injustice but don’t become the anger to the injustice. Open yourself to seeing the sick but don’t become the sick. Open yourself to seeing the poverty but don’t become the poverty. Open yourself to seeing the sadness but don’t become it. What you are here to do is to see what is real, to witness what is, to feel, to build greater compassion and to deepen into greater love beyond the self. Do not become what you see, instead, where you feel you are able through your gifts to offer a ray of light through free will you can offer that but do not become what you see. Do not become the suffering, the pain, the injustice, the sadness, the poverty. For in becoming what you see you give yourself to the world and not to the spirit of change. Experience then release all back to the whole.

As I sat with this response, I realized that my path is with humanity and spirit. It is the yoking of both as one, the middle way. My humanity is embodied in the spirit. They are not two separate entities as I would like to believe. I’m having this experience of being human because spirit is animating the entity I call as myself. I cannot turn away from the uncomfortable, the same way I cannot turn away from my own grief, because to stay and bear witness is doing something in me. If I am truly a human made of heart and love, it will shift something in me. It will reorder my consciousness to embody love and sacredness not for the few, not for those who are like me, not for those who have my views, beliefs, or my affiliations only. But it will reorder me towards love for humanity. It will reorder me to say with my heart, that this injustice over there, or that is grief, or that is genocide. It will reorder my consciousness to see the truth that whenever fear is at play, we don’t act from a place of love but rather we will act from an unwise place of fear and we will justify that why. We will give away our power to an authority outside of ourselves. I’m remembering what Terrance McKenna said “Insist on the dignity of human being.” If we don’t have this, we don’t have a humanity.

One of the greatest and deepest experiences of my life is the loss of my husband. His sudden death opened up locked doors and gates within my heart. It allowed me to see where I was blind, the shadows left unattended, and the privilege I had of believing and pretending that bad things only happened to other people. It demolished all naive thinking and beliefs. Grief is a powerful teacher. She shows us what we all take for granted in small and big ways, life.

It’s okay to acknowledge that we’re afraid. We’re afraid to die, afraid of sickness, losing our loved ones, afraid of getting cancer, afraid of becoming the minority, afraid of others that don’t look like us, afraid of losing our way of being in our culture, afraid of losing our livelihood, our identities as an individual and a nation, and so much more. Yet it makes me pause to ask myself, if I make decisions from a place of fear, would that decision be wise? Would it be a decision to benefit me and those like me or a decision that benefits the whole?

Grief showed me that I’m not in this alone, that change is the name of the real game. That I’m impermanent, that any clinging I do will only result in more suffering on my part and on the part of others. What is it that I’m truly afraid of? My demise? Finding the middle way is a journey, a bold walk to the center. It takes guts to open one’s heart to say “and you too are welcomed.” I’ve always thought of myself as having an open heart but it took events unfolding in my life to realize that having an open heart is opening myself to discomforts, for it is the challenges that applies the pressure to peel back the old thick skin of deeply held beliefs and programming.

I begin with myself. Am I able to hold the truth of all of me? Meaning, can I make room for all aspects of myself without sugarcoating anything to make myself look good? I am capable of dark things and light things. My PTSD experience a few years back revealed to me as much. In the end, it became a choice as to where I wanted to center my energies. In any moment, I could choose to do good or bad and I can justify it with my beliefs. It’s a thin line. What I don’t want to do is pretend, to disassociate from the truth, or gloss over the real. Reality is my truth. It doesn’t lie. This is where I make my home, the here and now. Not yesterday in how things were. Not tomorrow but planting myself to be here now. To feel, to witness, to say yes to this unfolding experience of my one life. Tending to my inner energies is key to my own liberation of narrow-mindedness and small living. The more open, alert, alive, creative, curious, and loving I become, the more expanded in my vision I am. This is the journey we’re being asked to go on, to become visionaries for Gaia. To make room for her to thrive. For as she thrives so do we. To develop inner and outer technologies where the whole ecosystem of humanity and beyond can share the abundance she offers.

So as this year begins and it has begun with a lot of charge, I’m feeling deeply, asking bold questions, and challenging myself not to escape what makes me uncomfortable. I’m also challenging myself when to pause, knowing when it’s time to take rest, time to be in action, time to play, be creative but always leaving the door to curiosity open. For it’s through curiosity we grow and evolve. May we also have enough wisdom to experience firsthand rather than holding on to belief. May we have the courage to know through direct experience versus what we’re being told.

May we all be curious enough to explore how we can all share this space, this Gaia, this place that is all of our home. None of us have any dominating rights to her. We’re here for a short while. Let’s enjoy her beauty. Leave love and joy on her doorstep, and leave even more beauty for those who will be here after we’re gone. Let’s remember the kindergarten motto we  all learned in school “Caring is sharing.” It’s elementary my dear.