Tag: love

Field of Dreams

Photograph © 2013 Peggy Kornegger
Photograph © 2013 Peggy Kornegger
The Republicans hate the Democrats, and the Democrats hate the Republicans. There are divisions within both political parties. The American people blame one side or the other, or they blame the President. Or the immigrants. Someone is always blaming someone else for something. There are real injustices and inequities that need to be addressed and resolved in this country—can’t it be done without hatred and name-calling?

We are living through Judgment Day. Not God’s judgment of us, but our own judgments of one another. What can possibly come of judgment except more judgment? Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, we are lost, wandering through the forest of our own separation. There is no wizard or wicked witch or emerald city, and the flying monkeys and munchkins are our brothers and sisters. Close your eyes, click your heals together, and the illusion disappears. There is no place like home, and this planet is our home. This universe is our home. And every person we meet is family.

Can we open our hearts and surrender our judgments to that profound realization? Maybe the key is to look inside ourselves to where we are judging ourselves. Love and acceptance of others begins with loving and accepting our own humanness. What parts of our identity are warring against other parts of our identity, angry and abusive? Are we turning our inner turmoil outward? At the deepest level, our souls see no separation, within or without. All is infinite spirit, existing in spacious loving acceptance. Individuals who have journeyed beyond this lifetime to death and returned to tell about it (Eben Alexander, Anita Moorjani) confirm this truth. Though not in a near-death experience, I too have been to that place of infinite love, without separation. No you or I, just oneness.

Perhaps we are here on Earth to have the experience of separation, realize it, and then consciously return to oneness. Perhaps the tipping point is closer than we think. In times of great fear or disaster (hurricanes, bombings, mass shootings), people drop their otherness and reach out to one another with compassion and love. Isn’t it possible to live like that every day? How many crises do we have to endure before we recognize our common humanity?

The other day, as I was walking down a Boston street on my way to the dentist, I passed a homeless woman holding out a styrofoam cup for change. Her oversize sweatshirt read “Field of Dreams.” I went by her, thought twice, and then reached into my pocket for my wallet. Turning back around, I saw her also turning and walking toward me, as if she knew my thoughts. As I placed a dollar bill in her cup, our eyes met and she said, “Bless you. May it return to you a thousandfold.” I smiled and blew her a kiss as I walked away. That 30-second exchange opened my heart completely and lifted my spirits for the entire day. For a moment, we both stood in that field of dreams together, no separation. May I remember, may we all remember, that that field is always present. We need only open our hearts to see it.

Peace, Love, and Extreme Fear

Photograph © 2013 Peggy Kornegger
Photograph © 2013 Peggy Kornegger
Is it possible to remain peaceful when you are faced with extremely frightening events? Can you feel fear and peace simultaneously? And hold love in your heart through it all? More and more, we are living the answers to questions like these. In Massachusetts, where I live, during the 2013 Boston Marathon, residents found themselves in the midst of a terrorist drama that dragged on for five days. As fate would have it, I was away from home, on retreat with Panache Desai in Florida, during that exact time period. Within the group of 46 people from all over the world, there were several of us from Massachusetts.

We first heard the news about the explosions at the Boston Marathon when the daughter of one couple phoned her parents in tears. Remembering with a terrible sinking feeling that my partner was at the marathon, I left the session to phone her. Finally, I got through and cried with relief upon hearing her voice. In the days that followed, those of us from Massachusetts kept in touch with loved ones back home, supported by the deep caring of others in the group, many of whom knew firsthand about living with political unrest and violence in their own countries. Panache himself grew up in London, where bombings were an ongoing part of life.

During the course of the week, together we held a space of peace, love, and compassion for those in Boston as well as for those elsewhere in the world who face terrorism, violence, and gut-wrenching fear. True, we were one step removed from the events in Boston, but because many of us had family and friends there, the fear was very real for all of us. Each day brought some new painful piece to assimilate. On Friday, when I learned that pursuit of the two suspected bombers was taking place less than a mile from my home, I once again felt adrenaline course through my system. On the phone, my partner told me that the entire city was under lockdown, and she could hear helicopters flying low over the house, searching the area. It was surreal—and frightening. Yet, even in the midst of it, she and I found we were able to remain relatively calm and centered. “Breathe,” she said to me. “I’m here. I’m okay in this moment.”

And that’s how we got through the week, one breath, one moment, at a time. Feeling everything and letting it flow through our bodies. All of us in Panache’s group were experiencing our various individual fears and pain within the larger spaciousness we had opened ourselves to—allowing instead of resisting what had occurred in the past and what was unfolding in the present. I’ve found such a deep wisdom in that process. For me, it means being open to every part of life—embracing it all, every exquisite or excruciating minute. Within that embrace is a peace that helps me to live my life with less suffering and tension, even in the middle of frightening or upsetting circumstances.

Back home in Boston, I was especially moved by the stories of those who stepped forward to help others during the explosions and by the community spirit that flowed within and toward Boston from individuals and groups across the country and around the world. A One Fund was established to help those most affected by what occurred. One, oneness—it was empathy and heart-felt love that people were feeling. May that love continue to expand, and may we peacefully heal the separation that gives rise to violence.

“The greatest gift that you can offer our planet is the gift of your peace.”—Panache Desai

Sacred Circle of Love

Photograph © 2013 Peggy Kornegger
Photograph © 2013 Peggy Kornegger

Are our ideas about love evolving right along with us? Yes, I believe they are. Today, in our seemingly chaotic world, beneath the surface of visible turmoil and divisiveness, there exists a gradual, almost imperceptible shift in the way we think about love. We are seeing an expansion from clannish familial love and romantic love based on physical appearance/attraction to a more inclusive universal love that encompasses all beings. In the past, this universal love has often been linked to the Divine love associated with a God or Goddess. In various spiritual or religious traditions, the Divine Mother is the primary image of unconditional, compassionate love. Historically, it has been difficult for ego-bound humans to express this kind of selfless loving. But all that is changing.

Now, during this time of accelerating evolution in human consciousness, we are opening our hearts to that infinite love without conditions or parameters. As we step into embodying the archetypal mother’s love for her child, we experience and radiate that love to all whom we meet on our life’s journey. The Divine within each of us mirrors the Divine in others: I love, you love, we love—the sacred circle of unconditional love. This is the love that is at the core of our being and at the center of the cosmos. In truth, both our universe and we were born in love. And we are finally awakening to that universal Divine love that permeates all things.

This February, the month in which people celebrate Valentine’s Day and romance, let us also recognize a love greater than cards or candy or our individual lives. A love that, if we let it, could redefine the way we live on this planet and make every day one filled with profound human connection and global harmony. Let us celebrate Love in the capitalized sense. Let us love the way Mother Teresa, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr. loved all peoples of the Earth. Let us love one another, and ourselves, with the delight and wonder a new parent feels when they look at their child. Let us, at long last, love from the depth of our souls, beyond limits and beyond words.

 

Child’s Play

Photograph © 2013 Peggy Kornegger
Photograph © 2013 Peggy Kornegger
Over the holidays, I received a very interesting tutorial from Spirit in the form of a New Year’s Eve game of Scrabble. Instead of strategizing and studiously mulling over possible letter combinations and words, I found myself just being present, doing nothing in particular. As if by magic, letters began to form themselves into words that I would effortlessly place on the board. My partner could barely finish her turn before I had a new word ready to go. This continued throughout the game, and I ended up with the highest score I had ever made (hers not far behind). But it wasn’t really about winning; it was about playing. The entire experience was almost surreal—I felt as if Scrabble was being played through me, and I was just the vehicle to allow the playing. Thus, the larger life lesson: When you let go and stop trying so hard, life flows through you. And everything becomes more play-full.

Effort, trying, has always been my approach to the world (I was born pushing hard to emerge from the womb, breaking my mother’s tailbone in the process). Only recently have I learned to slow down, breathe, and allow my life to be lived through me instead of trying to plan every single event and experience in my reality. It’s not as if I’ve never lived spontaneously—I was, after all, a flower child in the 1960s! Nonetheless, there has always been some part of me that believed that living life meant working hard to make it happen (write down a list of those intentions, and act on them—now!). Really, the greater truth is that life is meant to be played. And playing is the opposite of work. It’s being, letting go and flowing with the energies. Of course, that flow comes from an open heart, unblocked emotions, and trust in something greater than your individual life.

All part of human evolution at this time. As babies, we were easily playful, but we lose it within a social construct that demands serious effort from us at an early age. Now, as that old paradigm starts to disintegrate, we are beginning to reacquaint ourselves with that wise child within, that soul self more aware of what’s really important in life. Our soul knows that, first and foremost, we are here to love (the world and life itself), and that everything is a vehicle for that—a way to reach greater and greater levels of loving and harmony with our fellow beings. How do we do that? Play. Allow life to play with you. Let it be an adventure and a game, one that you are not here to win but just to play—with everyone in your life. Play it forward!

2013: Reboot to Resilience

Photograph © 2012 Peggy Kornegger
Photograph © 2012 Peggy Kornegger
The year 2012 is behind us. The world didn’t end. But it did shift in major ways for people all over the world, and those shifts continue. Many of the changes involved extreme challenges and emotional/physical upheaval, but the promise of the Great Shift was never instant utopia. It was transformation: the caterpillar gradually morphing and expanding within the cocoon until it breaks free, emerging as a full-fledged butterfly. During this transitional time of expansion and growth, our greatest strength is our resilience, our ability to stretch ourselves beyond limitation or growth pains and emerge triumphant. And 2013 is all about resilience, fueled by the power of our individual and collective evolution.

In 2012, my heart opened more and more—with love, with joy—until there were times when I felt as if it couldn’t possibly open any wider. In the process, however, I found that I also had to face the presence of pain that I had carried within me for a very long time. My heart was aching with the suffering I saw everywhere in the world, and my body itself struggled with pain in the form of headaches. Unconsciously, I felt a resistance to becoming fully resilient and healed because I believed that would separate me from other people. As I moved to a place of acceptance of the full spectrum of human experience on Earth at this time (pain included), my entire consciousness shifted. Pain/suffering is one part of a greater whole, and as we continue to evolve, that part begins to diminish in the face of human compassion and love, which brings all of us closer and closer together in the global experience of oneness.

What is more, as I/we expand and become more resilient (peaceful, joyful, loving), that energy goes out into the collective matrix and helps to shift everything/everybody. This is the power of interconnections and of the reverberations of light resilient energy. It is the butterfly that moves its wings in China and affects the wind on the other side of the planet. It is the human heart that opens so wide as to embrace every experience and every living being with unconditional love. It is the power of fully awakened spirit in human form.