Tag: peace

Nothing and Everything

Photograph © 2020 Peggy Kornegger
Sometimes the twists and turns of life on Earth can feel like loss or emptiness, especially now. Yet the greater significance of our experiences may not be completely understood when they occur. Time brings perspective. There are no mistakes, and we are never really lost. Everything we experience provides an opening into greater awareness and an opportunity to grow and trust in the trajectory of our own lives.

Two years ago I moved from Boston to Florida, primarily to live closer to several friends. Within a matter of months, the friends unexpectedly began to move to other states. The ostensible “reasons” for my divinely guided move (and it did feel that way) evaporated into thin air, and I searched for another reason to be here. Things that I tried just didn’t feel right. I spent more than a year watching parts of my life fall away to nothing all around me. What remained were my spiritual practice, my writing, my dear partner Anne, and my deep connection to Nature. The essence of my life really, and I appreciated them more than ever.

Still, I felt lost and “homesick” a lot of the time. By year’s end, I had become closed and cranky, feeling let down by friends, life, and God. Why was I brought here in order to lose so much? Ah, that was the key question that unlocked the closed door of my heart. Because as long as I saw only loss, letdown, and emptiness, that was my experience. As 2020 began, I intentionally “reset” my consciousness to accept all that had happened as part of my soul’s journey in this lifetime. I let go of expectation and disappointment and chose to trust that everything was unfolding perfectly, even if it didn’t look that way on the surface. Gradually I re-centered. Then came COVID-19.

What might have been yet another setback and reason to fall into despair actually became a catalyst for me to surrender at an even deeper level. I gave up every illusion of egoic control or planning in my life. As the world completely shut down in fear and uncertainty, I realized that something “greater” had put humanity in a timeout. There were divine forces at work on the planet that were more powerful than human “will power.” And my own life was part of the same cosmic flow. As I came to this awareness, a tremendous peace came over me. I settled into my soul’s perspective, my soul’s peace. And I have not left, even when I feel uncertainty or sadness about world events. Inner peace is always present in the midst of whatever else is occurring, and a broader understanding will eventually arise.

Over the past few months, as I’ve followed a daily meditation practice* and taken long walks in Nature, my feelings of peace and spiritual connection have deepened. I can see that these extraordinary global circumstances are part of an acceleration of planetary shifts in consciousness. It is time to let go of our mind-oriented, will-driven, egocentric ways and open to heart-centered, flowing cooperation and compassion. Our Earth home cannot survive unless we come back into harmony with our hearts and souls—and with one another, across differences in race, nationality, gender, age, and beliefs. We are being called to awaken to our own inner soul potential and create an entirely new paradigm of living on this planet.

The vast emptiness that many of us have been staring into in our lives is exactly like the infinite cosmos—full of possibility. Out of emptiness arises the entire universe, filled with energy and light. The mind fears infinity, but the soul is completely at home there. When we shift to soul vision, we see that within the “nothing” of infinity is a Presence that holds everything in loving awareness, and we too feel at home. Emptiness is full, ever-unfolding. We ourselves are ever-unfolding. Only when nothing opens up in our lives can we truly see that inside it is everything. And we begin to live from the infinite potential within us, which is our soul’s gift of love to the world.
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*Gratitude to Panache Desai for his online morning meditations and to Deva Premal & Miten for their afternoon meditations/music during this time.

Can You Keep On Loving?

Photograph © 2020 Peggy Kornegger

If you believe that love is humanity’s greatest hope and clearest path to a more compassionate inclusive planet, how are you feeling right now? When people seem to be hating one another with greater intensity. When rage and violent outbursts are becoming more common. Those who wear masks vs. those who refuse to; those who believe Black Lives Matter vs. those who deny it. Science vs. religion, Democrats vs. Republicans, health and safety vs. economic “recovery.” Individuals of different races, ages, nationalities, and belief systems fighting over statues and guns and face coverings. Where does unconditional love and kindness come into play in the midst of all this? Can we love our neighbor if our neighbor hates us?

These are questions humanity has considered for hundreds of years, but now they seem to be coming to a dramatic crescendo, particularly in the U.S., a country supposedly founded in the principles of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Yet the reality is that those words applied to white male slave owners and no one else. The land of the free was in truth based in systemic racism that continues to this day. Racial hatred that continues to this day. A hatred so deep that rather than let go of it, people start inventing a world of “hoaxes” and “fake news.” Is it possible to live with love in the midst of so much conflict and intolerance?

Martin Luther King Jr. did. John Lewis and countless civil rights workers did. Gandhi, Peace Pilgrim, and so many others did. Every individual who lives a life of integrity and compassion while being demeaned daily lives love in the face of hate. African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, Muslim Americans, Mexican Americans. Women of all races, the LGBTQ community, all immigrants. There are lives of courage everywhere among us, inspiring us with their commitment to life. To be alive is to love life so powerfully that you keep on living in spite of everything. At this time in history, we are being asked to stand strong and keep on loving in the same way. Against enormous odds.

There is a rift in the fabric of this country that won’t be easily sewn back together. A Presidential election can’t completely address the extent of it. Laws won’t fix it. Religion won’t mend it. Justice and restitution won’t entirely resolve it. It is a wound and a splitting so deep that it can only be healed at the level of the heart: Loving what is hated, on both sides of the divide. We have to love living in peace with one another more than anything else, including our own viewpoints. A seemingly impossible challenge.

Yet we chose this lifetime, this time of tumultuous change and upheaval. We came here to this troubled planet to heal the wounds of centuries, to bring peace to a world split by wars, internal and external. We came here to finally look in the eyes of our “enemy” and see a human soul, to choose compassion over power and empathy over antipathy. We came here to continue to love through every impossible challenge that shows up. Because at some point, some unknown and hard-to-imagine transformative moment, we will reach a tipping point, everything will shift, and humanity will know oneness again at last. That is the dream. Can you hang on until we reach it? Can you fulfill the promise you made before you were born: Can you keep on loving?

 

 

Your Unique Soul Journey

Photograph © 2020 Peggy Kornegger
Our soul journeys—how we find our way to recognizing the enlightenment or God that lives within us—are completely unique to each of us. I mean completely. Even your closest friend or wisest spiritual teacher is not on exactly the same path as you. We need to remember and honor the wisdom within us that is our guide in this, especially now at this time of such tumultuous change in the external world. The old religious structures that prescribed certain behaviors and beliefs, monitored by an external authority figure, are not the wave of the future. Neither are current spiritual programs that revolve around the popularity of one teacher or speaker. Previous paradigms of all kinds are falling away. We may eventually live in a “flexi-paradigm,” part of an ever-evolving and expansive collective consciousness. Within that, each one of us is singular, unrepeatable.

Over the years, I have found wisdom and inspiration in a variety of places. Everything I received from external sources, however, had to resonate with something inside me in order for me to experience it as true. I think this is probably the case for most of us. I came to realize that there is no one viewpoint or perspective that supersedes my own soul’s voice, the peaceful essence at my core. My life journey upon this Earth is unique to my particular human/divine embodiment. God speaks to, through, each of us differently.

My spiritual path has become primarily centered in a connection to Spirit through Nature and the beauty and light found therein. It is something I can find anywhere on this Earth. Even one flower in a single flowerpot holds that sacred life force. I celebrate this connection through my presence, love, and gratitude. Life becomes a living meditation, a never-ending prayer. It is not a mental process; it arises spontaneously from my heart and soul when I am immersed in the natural world. Simple loving awareness. No breaks in which I am or am not in meditation or prayer. I am always there.

Perhaps spirituality and religion began with the voice of one seeker speaking his/her awareness into the silence. Someone heard and repeated it, and then someone else repeated that, and eventually it was written down. Over the centuries form overtook essence, and we lost the free-flowing aspect of our connection to something greater in this universe. Now, in this unusual transformative time on planet Earth, form in all its various manifestations is falling away, and essence is once again appearing. The ancient wisdom “Look within” for God, for peace, is being heard again as if for the first time.

Truly, you yourself are God, as are we all. We can listen to, and learn from, one another’s soul stories, but we cannot walk this journey in someone else’s footsteps. Divine intelligence has given each of us a blueprint, a piece of the puzzle, which is our gift and blessing in this lifetime. Individually, as we live each moment in gratitude and compassion, we become part of a oneness that weaves each unique individual thread into a collective tapestry of peaceful universal consciousness. God returning to God, who never really left.

What About Love?

Photograph © 2020 Peggy Kornegger

Your mind can’t comprehend it, and your heart can’t absorb it: Sudden death—and the fear, pain, and anger that accompany it. Yet another African American man, George Floyd, murdered by a white police officer. Hundreds of thousands of lives cut short by a virulent worldwide virus. In the U.S. and internationally, thousands protest in the streets against years and years of racism, violence, and injustice. As COVID-19 circles the globe, people lose relatives and friends, their jobs and homes; immigrants are again targeted and blamed. Grief. Anger. Is this how life is going to be from now on? It is unless we make the conscious choice to change it. It is until we see our neighbors as ourselves.

We are at a turning point in this country and in the world. Our direction will determine our future. Will we repeat the fatal mistakes of the past, continuing to exist in a polarized “reality” of hatred and mistrust, separation and fear, every stranger a potential enemy, our green planet dying right along with us? Or will we wake up in the midst of this nightmare and recognize the madness for what it is: inner pain externalized. The idea of “other” arising out of a distorted desire to feel “better than.” Can we salvage something livable from this brokenness? Is it possible for humanity to learn how to value life again? And what about love?

We have that love within us. We were born with it. Look in a newborn baby’s eyes and you see only possibility, only love. Children have to be taught how to fear and hate. Can we erase the programming and start afresh? The coronavirus stopped the world in its tracks. In the absence of “things as usual,” the skies began to clear, and new ways to live were born out of compassion and kindness. Still, racism and attitudes about “difference” remained. Now is the moment of truth. Let’s not fall backward into old patterns of divisiveness and “otherdom.” Disagreements about wearing face masks that end up in physical fights, racial hatred that ends up in murder. We can choose differently. We can value the lives of every being on this planet. We can open our hearts in love instead of close them in mistrust and fear.

What will it take, you ask. Seems impossible. But the world we are currently inhabiting is just about as “impossible” as it gets. And that is becoming obvious to more and more people. An awakening is happening on this planet. Humanity is breaking through to the other side of hundreds of years of internalized and external separation. The concept of “other” is being shown in all its distortions so that we can at last see it for what it is—a prison that we are all entrapped in. As we awaken more and more, we begin to see ourselves in every person. What happens to you is simultaneously happening to me. The universal point of view suddenly opens up, and we recognize that separation is an illusion of the mind; at the heart level, we are inseparable. Oneness is not a concept, an unreachable ideal. It is the truth of our existence. There is no “other”; there is only the energy of love out of which we were all born and within which we always dwell.

Love is the awakening. Love is waking up to itself in everyone. Choose it every day in every way and transform the planet. Love everyone. Break through preconceptions and stereotypes (race, gender, age), opinions and beliefs, judgments and arguments. End the war inside you and live in peace with everyone. Allow your heart to guide you. Love every single person you encounter as you would a newborn, and love yourself as well. There is no way to “measure a life,” for life is immeasurable, unfathomable. It is a miracle of love and light that we are blessed to experience. Let that awareness fully awaken within you, and your life and the lives of all those around you will transform immediately. That is why you came to this planet at this time, to be part of an awakening. To open your heart to love even when you are facing a wall of seemingly solid opposition. Keep loving courageously, and the walls will eventually fall, the opposition dissolve. The awakening is in you and me and all of us. Our collective love and compassion are more powerful than “impossibility.”

 

The Last Attachment

Photograph © 2020 Peggy Kornegger
In the course of our lives, human beings form attachments to events, people, memories, feelings, beliefs, experiences, physical objects, and much more. If we choose at some point to follow a spiritual path, we learn, sometimes quite painfully, to see the impermanence of everything and to let go of many of those attachments. One of our strongest attachments is to the personality we have constructed over the years and the stories we tell ourselves about our lives. Lives that are in reality ephemeral and transitory—a truth never more poignantly visible than in the past few months as humanity confronts death on a daily basis because of the coronavirus. We are taking a collective crash course in letting go—of everything.

The very last attachment in life is to our physical form. It keeps us tethered to Earth and if held onto too tightly may prevent us from experiencing the seamless connection between the physical and the spiritual. Between humanity and divinity. However, when you step into the free formlessness of the soul, of living with and within God, you begin to flow with life and eventually let go of hanging on so desperately to your physicality. This may happen fully only at your death, but if you are fortunate, you may experience it in life as you open to the greater wisdom of nonattachment.

Over the past year, I have faced the unexpected early deaths of several good friends. Such losses seem to increase as the years pass, and we look at our selves and our lives with a new awareness of the fleeting nature of time. In childhood, we have a whole life of endless days and nights ahead of us. As we grow older, the days appear to shorten and the years pass more quickly. In counterpoint, our bodies slow down, and we realize there is no reason to rush through the days and years. This is precious wisdom, moving us gradually to releasing attachment to time and physicality. But now that process has been accelerated for everyone. When people are dying by the thousands everywhere on the planet, there is no time for gradual acceptance. The last attachment is front and center all the time.

How do you navigate that awareness so that it infuses your life with wisdom and not suffering? How do you come to accept the deaths of loved ones and/or your own eventual death? Perhaps this global acceleration has been given to humanity to help us to face all of life’s beginnings and endings with peace instead of panic. To fully realize the preciousness of each moment and live from love and acceptance rather than judgment and attempts at control. We are here on Earth in physical form for a split second in time. Yet our nonphysical souls live forever in eternity. If you open to connecting to that soulful presence within (through whatever spiritual practices resonate with you), you access a timeless inner peace that is not attached to your body. That experience can sustain you through life’s most challenging moments.

When you begin to see everything from your soul’s perspective, moments of peaceful connection can multiply and become continuous. Much of the suffering that arises from attachment to a fixed predictable “reality” will gradually dissolve, and you can be more allowing of life, even in times of crisis. Maybe the entire world is now learning to accept the process of living and dying as part of a greater spiritual unfolding in the universe. Our physical form is just a temporary costume. In truth, life at its very core, you at your very core, are Spirit, which is eternal. When you are no longer so “attached” to external physicality, you begin to experience that inner loving connection as a constant companion.