Both Things Can Be True…

Everyone is fighting.  So much frustration, conflict, self righteousness.

My husband is reading “The Art of Happiness” by the Dalai Lama, and since I’ve dabbled a bit in Buddhism, he asked me yesterday, how can we just float along, with rainbows and unicorns? Being ever kind and tolerant and understanding. Doesn’t that make us zombies?

His point is valid. NOTHING is solved or altered or mitigated without recognizing discomfort, injustice, danger, etc. Innovation and creativity are nearly always preceded by destruction or disruption. If we ignore those things, how do we grow?

That is where “the Middle Way” comes into play. A key principle of Buddhism and a very difficult path to walk.

It’s a variation of my current mantra “Both things can be true”. The recognition that everything is not a binary choice; we don’t have to pick between A and B. There is always a middle ground, a middle way. Something that takes A and B into account and melds them as both being valid or both being invalid, I suppose.

So much right now, tries to force us into these binary choices.

For or against science. For or against one party or the other. For or against masks.

There IS a middle way. We can recognize that science is fluid and contextual. We can recognize that masks are definitely useful in many cases, but not all. We can recognize that parties have differing philosophies and look for areas where we might have a glimmer of agreement.

The Middle Way recognizes that life is both upsetting and glorious. “10,000 joys, 10,000 sorrows”. We have to always look to both sides of the path for truths and have the intellectual and emotional maturity to not ALWAYS choose sides.

Our entire society and in particular much of media and social media is designed to force us to choose one side or the other. It’s ALL about binary choices and that’s why we are feeling so epically divided and confused.

We run most everything through our political filters now. Meaning that we give up OUR authority to make decisions and value judgements. We turn it over to politicians, pundits, media outlets, websites, ‘opinion makers’, etc. And we are in denial of these influences.  We KNOW we are right and we can post the link to an article to PROVE IT.

So, yes, as mature grown-ass adults, we have to listen to our internal guides, compass, ethics, values. We have to consciously be empathetic, compassionate, open to other perspectives. If we do that, we can begin to mitigate some of our fear and anger that is in the driver’s seat.

Both things can be true. The Middle Way.

 

A higher vibration…

I’m angry.  I’m frustrated.  I’m not a lot of fun to be around right now.

It feels like the world as we know it, is on the brink of some huge shift that I can’t quite put my finger on.

Actually, I can put my finger on it.  In fact, I think that I can predict what is happening, but to actually verbalize that ‘feeling’ or vision, is almost too hard.

Talking about it makes me feel vulnerable.  When I talk about what I feel is happening, people tend to get a little nervous about my sanity.

And so, here we are. In a place where pretty much everyone feels some sort of similar, visceral knowing in their gut, that we’re on a precipice of….something.

Some are cheering, thinking that the obvious upheaval and collective discomfort in our nation is exactly what they had hoped for.

Some are convinced it’s the end of life as we know it; that the crumbling and destruction of institutional norms is irreversible and completely devastating.

Some are aching to move forward.  Some ache to move backward.  Expansion versus contraction.  Open-hearted, versus closed off.

So, yeah.  This is most certainly a ‘scary’ time for all of us.  Mostly because we are so outcome-oriented in our country and our culture.  You either win or lose. And we all know that losing is the worst possible outcome.

There is the seat of our fear.  We might be the ‘losers’.  In the richest nation on earth, the second most primal fear that we have (the first being death, of course) is to lose.  An argument, an election, a fight, a war.  Or maybe we just won’t get enough ‘likes’ or followers.

So, when winning becomes the ultimate prize, what happens to us?  Cooperation suffers.  Compassion and empathy are no longer useful or prized.  We cordon ourselves off from those who will not help us ‘win’ and we label them losers.

The quest to always win makes us selfish.  We only care about events and policies that help us. Period.

An example is measuring the health and well being of a nation based solely on the rise of the stock market.  Or paying huge sums of money to give your child an unfair advantage over less privileged young people.

If it helps me, then I’m all in.  Does it help other people? Nah, I don’t care because it might cost me in some way. Every man or family for him/herself.  I gotta look out for number one.

“A rising tide lifts all boats” is such a 19 or 20^th century way of looking at things.  It’s all about having the biggest, hugest, most beautiful boat of my own.

So, yeah.  You can hear it, right?  My anger?  My frustration?  Or maybe yours is drowning me out.  I get it.  Very difficult to get our bearings in this environment.

I’m trying to regain my spiritual practice, but it’s really, really hard right now.  The energies just don’t support it for me.  If you can still meditate or pray or levitate or whatever works, I salute you.

In a time when we need compassion and clarity to rule us, it seems nearly impossible.  I’ve damaged relationships, snapped at loved ones, lost my composure and burned some bridges over the past year or so.

I guess this is what transformation feels like.  What evolution entails.  I firmly believe that we are in a birth canal and when we emerge, nothing will ever be the same.

The trick is to just allow it, understanding that life and humanity and nature and the entire universe have birthed new eras a thousand times before.

That’s life.  Birth, death, rebirth.  Birth, death, rebirth a million times over and somewhere in this infinite process, our consciousness expands and ascends just a tiny bit higher.  We vibrate at a slightly different frequency.

Maybe that’s what I’m feeling.

On Forgiving….

Here’s the thing about forgiveness and compassion.

The more I read about the kid who murdered 17 people in Florida last week, the more it breaks my heart.

The whole situation is so incredibly devastating, but to read about a kid…yes a kid…a human…not a ‘monster’ or a ‘madman’, but a kid who had obviously had a difficult life and long standing mental/anger/anti-social problems doesn’t make me angry.

It makes me sad. For him, for his family; obviously for his victims and the entire community who will never fully recover.

He was not getting the help that he needed, his mother died and left him and his younger brother with no guidance, no place to go.

He was broken.

Now, here is the hard part: Forgiveness and compassion.

Remember when Dylan Roof, murdered all of those people in the church in South Carolina? And several of the family members told him, within days of this horrible crime, that they forgave him; some even offered love, based on their religious beliefs.

I was amazed by that reaction. Amazed. Heartened. Inspired.

BUT, just because we forgive or have compassion or love for someone who has done something HORRIBLE, does NOT mean that they avoid the consequences.

My husband and I have this conversation a lot; the whole concept of compassion and grace, usually when I’m complaining about something horrible that a politician did:). He will say “But, we have to forgive their bad behavior because we’re all flawed”. Forgive, but hold accountable.

I actually found myself having to ‘walk the walk’ almost two years ago when a FedEx driver hit and killed my dog Ember in our driveway. He was driving too fast, he knew our dogs and we were devastated.

I looked him in the eye a week later and told him that I forgave him and was sorry for the pain that he was in. I know that both of our hearts were broken. It doesn’t go away, but it lifted just a tiny bit of the burden we were both struggling with.

Just because we feel badly or our heart is broken over the challenges or illness that drove this kid in Florida to murder 17 people, does NOT mean that we as a society, don’t require consequences for his actions.

We can do both. It’s sort of along the lines of ‘love the sinner, hate the sin’, which I’ve always thought was such a stupid premise. But, I’m starting to get it; that concept is sinking in.

So, here is the bottom line concept: We CAN judge and we can forgive. Those two things are not mutually exclusive.

And in fact, in order for us to function, we need to tie those two together.

This is basically what all religions and spiritual ideals teach us. Love our neighbors/our fellow humans/; even those who are flawed and broken. BUT, do not let them off the hook for their actions.

This is hard….living and practicing grace is probably one of the most difficult things we will ever do….

We are starlings…

Undercurrents…energy….

We can feel it. We are being animated by these things that we can’t quite see or describe. If we squint or remove our strong attachments to outcomes, we can begin to see it.

Have you ever watched a flock of starlings when they collect and fly off? It’s like a gray-black wave that undulates as one.

You can’t really pick out one bird; it’s a collective decision to move and that wave is thick with birds, all working in concert.

That’s what collective energy is like among humans; or the whole universe.  Collective energy affects everything. I definitely believe the Earth herself is an active participant and she has been sending out warning signals for a long time.

If we were/are able to look down on the world from space, without any concept of space or time, you would see this synchronous energy.

It’s hard to see up close, in fact, I would suspect that an individual starling sees only chaos and the other birds immediately surrounding her.

But, when we step back; when we look back at the history of the world and of our nation, we see these turning points.

These are moments of either catalysts or evolution and the true turning points are mostly a combination of both.

Very few humans are able to see this in the moment. Some are. There are a lot of people with great vision, who often sound the alarms of what is happening or what is to come.

If we choose, we can use history as our guide and mentor and in some cases, predictor. If we open up. If we take the time to educate ourselves.

We are in a time, where the collective energy is shifting. It’s like when those starlings flap their wings for the first time, pre take-off.

They have no idea where they’re going, but they know it’s time and once they are airborne, something will click and they will coalesce into that huge, black undulating wave to begin their journey.

The current situation feels like the end, or the beginning of the end, of an era.  They are often so smooshed together that it’s hard to tell where one ends and the next begins.

The truth is, we just don’t have control of the collective. We only have us. We are but one ‘starling’, moving in concert with the collective, often with no clue as to why.

It feels to us as if we’re swept up and have no control over where that flock is headed.  That’s true, we don’t, but if we trust and we fly and we feel into it, we land some place completely different than where we began.

That’s so hard for us, isn’t it? We really feel as if we can muscle things into going our way. If we argue and present facts and statistics and experts and passion, we’ll change minds and hearts.

I’m not sure it works that way; in fact, as I’ve watched the unfolding over the past 10 days…oh hell, the last 10-20 years, I’ve seen people harden into their own tribe, beliefs and bunkers.

You know what has actually softened people? What has begun our evolution on this? Empathy, feelings, compassion.

It’s like the blinders of our rock hard ‘core beliefs’ have been chipped at or ripped away.

When we can see and connect with other’s pain and passion and grief, we soften.

This is our way forward; let’s FEEL our way, let’s sense what is right, instead of spewing out facts and statistics and experts.

This is where we’ve lost our way; we live in a culture where facts are king; where we have to have scientific “proof” for anything to be real. That leaves our humanity in the dust.

That leaves us to throw facts at each other and we all know that facts and stats and all of that cold, emotionless stuff can be twisted to fit our narrative. And we don’t connect that way.

We connect on a cellular and energetic and emotional level; we can’t quantify why we all feel the pain of this community in Florida or Connecticut, or Vegas, etc.

We are humans and in this moment of collective evolution, THAT is what we tap into. Don’t THINK so much, feel into this and then act on that core love of ‘all that is’.