Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by external global events—the self-centeredness and cruelty that pervades so much of our social construct and that is spread through the media’s focus on acts of hatred and violence instead of love and inclusiveness. There are alternative sources of information that are positive rather than negative, and we need to pay attention to these. When I hear how so many people are coming together instead of being torn apart, I am uplifted and encouraged. The seeming chaos is happening for a reason: to clear out obsolete belief systems and centuries-old histories and divisions. We are living at a time that is taking us to the end of separation, judgment, and suffering.
All around us there are those who are making a difference in the status quo by living lives of caring and compassion. They reach out to others at times of crisis—whether global, regional, or individual—and help them in any way they can, with physical support (money, food, clothes, shelter) or a listening ear and kind word when it is most needed. This is the power of “we” that is gradually shifting the global balance to love instead of hate. People suffering in isolation are finding support and connection in community.
Those who live in fear talk of building walls; those who live in love talk of building bridges. If we live from our hearts, there is only one choice really: to reach out to our fellow beings (and I mean animals, plants, insects, as wells as humans) and share the love inside us. We were not meant to love only those who are exactly like us or to try to make others adopt our beliefs and lifestyles. We were born on this planet to come together and live compatibly in all our diversity.
Humanity is a rainbow tapestry of different races, sexes, ages, cultures, and religions. Yet we all came from the very same loving Source, which some call God. Our soul essence is love, so when we are being our authentic soul-selves instead of the “self” superimposed on us by social norms, we are living that love. It is a compassionate and inclusive love, and a small shift in awareness from “I” to “we” can make a huge difference in the world. That is why we are here, to celebrate and live the power of “we.”
Recently, a dear friend told me that he is moving back to California, which he had left two years before for Florida, where we both live now. (This, only a few months after I moved here myself from Massachusetts.) A week later, I received news that a long-time friend in Boston had died of cancer. Hellos and goodbyes fill my life these days. Friends and family passing to and fro in my experience and my memory like vivid but ephemeral spirits. And I myself am moving with the flow of my own life’s journey, loving and letting go again and again.
Through the years, as I live through cycles of beginnings and endings repeatedly, I am discovering that one of the deepest truths in life is impermanence. Everything is born, and everything dies: experiences, thoughts, emotions, flowers, trees, birds, stars—each breath we take and we ourselves. Humans embody impermanence within their very existence here on Earth. We are born and we die, just like everything else we experience within our lifetimes. That can feel like both a curse and a blessing, but it is the basis of our very humanity, our evolution as individual souls.
My own experiences of joy and connection followed by sorrow and seeming loss have over time shown me that it’s all in how you perceive it. And our perceptions are always changing. What remains unchanging is change. Kind of a paradox, but it will guide you to inner peace and acceptance at the deepest level if you allow it to. At least that’s what I am finding. It is what my passage through life has given me, and I am grateful. I am learning, gradually, to let go of attachment to outcomes of any kind. That is freedom; that is how your soul experiences your life.
The idea of impermanence can at first feel frightening, but over the space of a lifetime’s experiences, it begins to feel like the key to all wisdom. Let go of expectations, attachments, plans, wishes, wants, mental machinations and emotional grasping. Let go of everything and just BE in each precious moment, free of everything that holds you to one particular outcome. Experience what is unfolding before you with an open heart and soul. This is what it’s like to live limitless possibility, to “hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour” (William Blake). Many, like Blake, who have traveled this path before us have reached this moment of illumination that takes them beyond one lifetime into the timeless expanse of being, which is soul, which is God. We are here to do the same.
As I live my life, as I grow older year by year, I find that deepening awareness and wisdom rise from my soul like mist in an open field on a summer’s morning. And I see it happening to others all around me. I feel blessed to live at an extraordinary time of collective spiritual expansion and expression, foreseen for millennia. As we come to recognize that we ourselves are God in human form, we realize that we carry divine wisdom within us. When we see the transitory experiences of life as the gifts that they are and receive and release them without attachment, we begin to love each day and everyone in our lives completely and whole-heartedly. We are no longer held back by regret or fear. We are fully present, fully alive. We are living the wisdom of impermanence.
In grade school, I had two teachers who each embodied different qualities: one, Mrs. Logan, was pure loving-kindness, and the other, Mrs. Wyman, was filled with anger and a need to control.* Both of them taught me human lessons beyond the classroom and had an effect on my life that I’m beginning to see more clearly now after all these years.
Mrs. Logan was my fourth grade teacher, and she was sweetness personified, always giving us interesting games to play between lessons as well as free time to read on our own (my favorite). She was extremely patient and listened attentively to our day-to-day life stories. She also told us about her own life and her grown daughter. In many ways, she was like a second mother to each of us, and everyone loved her. I cried at the end of the year when I said good-bye and later told my mother, “There will never be another Mrs. Logan.” She was my all-time favorite teacher, and I’ve never forgotten how genuinely loving she was to me.
Mrs. Wyman, on the other hand, scared me to death. When I was a shy first-grader, she grabbed me harshly by the shoulders one day in the lunchroom and hissed, “Next time you throw away the crusts of your sandwich, I’m going to make you take them out of the garbage and eat them.” In sixth grade, when I entered the art room (yes, she was the art teacher) as the bell was ringing, she proclaimed me late and made me stay after school and write “I will never be late again” over and over for an hour. Quiet, good student that I was, those two incidents both frightened and embarrassed me. And at the sixth grade level, it also filled me with outrage at being unjustly accused. (My locker had stuck and I was “late” because of that.)
So, right there, my life path was laid out before me: a peaceful warrior for both justice and love. In my twenties I became first a hippie flower child and then a political activist, later a radical feminist. Love was at the core of everything I believed in, a love that was inclusive of all peoples and the Earth. I had no patience with authority or hierarchy of any kind (what a surprise). Over the years, I watched as the patriarchal paradigm that we all grew up with slowly start to be challenged and disrupted by women and men alike. New options, based in freedom and equality, rose out of the growing awareness of each successive generation.
The old top-down structures still hang on, but something else is being born. Something circular and flowing and filled with life. I see myself in the students now who are standing up against violence and power politics. The heart of love continues in them in spite of the forces waged against it, and the people who have been wounded reach out in compassion to others who are suffering. The deeper truth is that those doing the wounding were also wounded themselves. They too are suffering. It is time for the cycle to be broken.
Looking back I can see the loving-kindness in Mrs. Wyman that she was unable to express because of her own core wounding. I no longer feel anger toward her but only empathy. And also, interestingly, gratitude. She helped me find my voice in the world. She, along with Mrs. Logan, helped me become who I am today. Every single person in our lives plays a role, one taken on before birth. When we can see life the way God sees it, we understand that there is only evolving, expanding awareness, only love. So let go of your grievances, and embrace gratitude instead. That one opening will liberate your soul from the constraints of all your stories about the past.
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*Names changed
The next aspect is “I Am That,” in which we as humans identify completely with our physical forms, personality selves, or egos, and forget our divine connection. Forgetfulness is the common state for humanity at this time. In forgetfulness, we get caught up in all the polarities and dramas of human physical life on Earth. Our minds, emotions, and bodies are our primary experience, and the soul takes a backseat, often completely overlooked. This also is God, but it is God forgetting that it is God—something we all experience before we awaken again into the “I Am,” the love we came from.
In the collective awakening that is happening more and more on this planet, we reconnect with our souls, with the God within. This is the primary experiential focus for many of us who have incarnated at this time—to expand in awareness from “I Am That” to “I Am” and finally to “I.”
My own life has taken me through all three aspects at different times. Most of my early life was spent in “I Am That.” I dropped much of my socially created personality when I left my small-town home at 18 and went away to college to “find myself.” I spent years exploring “who am I?” and “why am I here?” I often felt lost and in despair during this self-exploration because I couldn’t really see beyond the Earth plane. I was on a spiritual quest, but I didn’t know it as such. I found meaning and a new kind of self-identification within the breakthrough experiences of my generation in the late 1960s and 1970s—flower-child consciousness and political activism. Belief in Love defined my life and informed all the experiences I had at that time. It was a period of awakening, but at a beginning level.
Many years later, I began a conscious spiritual journey, which eventually took me to “I Am,” experiencing God, or universal consciousness. This occurred in my own spiritual practices (meditation, yoga, programs with inspiring teachers), in Nature, and eventually I found that divine connection existed within me at all times. These were powerful moments of bliss and joy, when tears streamed down my face at the all-encompassing loving Godness that filled me. I began to live more and more from my soul (and my heart which is the entry point to the soul) instead of my personality or ego. My fears around infinity and death gradually began to be replaced by trust and surrender to something greater than my single human life. Yet, there was more.
I am only now beginning to touch into “I,” or the absolute. I experienced it once years ago at the very start of my work with Panache Desai, when in an individual session, he took me there. More accurately, he accessed that state within himself, which opened the door for me to access it within myself. It was a completely emotionless state of peace beyond peace. This was infinity, on the other side of any fears my mind could invent about it—because there was no mind, no me. There was nothing. I remained in that state for hours, with no desire to do anything but rest in the experience. It made a huge crack in my previous level of consciousness, and deeper awareness began to trickle, and then gradually stream, in. Because of this crack, I was able to experience God in ways I never had previously.
The door is opening wider now to that fathomless, directionless, experience of absolute potential, where God is not even a definable entity. In a recent immersion retreat with Panache, I found myself “lifting off” into that state, like a hummingbird spiraling upward into invisibility. Here there is no language, no recognizable signposts to point to, so when I “return” (actually, there is no return because it is ever-present, the source of everything), I can find no words to describe it. A woman at our retreat called it the place of “no God”—in other words, God before God is seen by us as God. And it’s not frightening because fear doesn’t exist. As I said, indescribable.
These are the states that great masters throughout time have spoken of and, seeing into the future, told us: “All this you will experience, and more.” I have no idea where I am going on this journey; every bit of it is beyond my human “understanding.” It’s a Great Mystery that I am here to experience in its eternal expansion through formlessness and form, emptiness and fullness, potential and presence. In all honesty, the “I Am That” in me at times still fears the nothingness of the “I” and wants only the loving comfort of the “I Am.” Yet my soul knows they are all God, all one unified ocean of energy and light within me and all around me. Separation and fear only exist in my mind.
These were former President Obama’s words last week after students across the U.S. walked out of their classes to attend demonstrations protesting guns and violence in this country. The Parkland, Florida, high school shootings on February 14, where 17 students and teachers were killed, was the most recent of over 200 other school shootings in the last six years. It appears to be the “last straw” for young people who have watched the escalation of lethal violence directed at their classmates and teachers.
Emma Gonzalez, senior at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, spoke fiercely and articulately at a gun control rally in Ft. Lauderdale: “The people in the government who were voted into power are lying to us….Politicians who sit in their gilded House and Senate seats funded by the NRA telling us nothing could have been done to prevent this….It’s time for victims to be the change that we need to see.” She speaks for countless others across this nation, of all ages, races, nationalities, and backgrounds. And she echoes Oprah Winfrey’s words, in a different context (sexual abuse) but also about the devaluing of human lives by those in power, “Their time is up!” We are reaching critical mass on so many fronts.
I had tears in my eyes when I listened to Oprah’s speech and Emma’s speech, and when I read Obama’s heartfelt reaction to the students taking a stand against the existence of guns and violence in their lives: “We’ve been waiting for you. And we’ve got your backs.” Those of us who have actively spoken out for nonviolence, peace, and the honoring of all human lives (“Black Lives Matter!”) for years see hope for the future in these angry but determined young faces. They are in great pain, but often great change comes from such pain. Pain that cuts through all the lies and gets to the heart of the matter: How do you want to live your one precious life? At war or at peace? In fear or in love?
We are at a crossroads in this country and on this planet. The culture of violence that is killing our children and breaking our hearts is also causing us to stand up and let our voices be heard for something different. Every single “ism” and “phobia”—racism, sexism, ageism, xenophobia, homophobia—that has dominated the collective consciousness for hundreds of years is starting to unravel and fall apart at the seams. It may look like hatred of all kinds is gaining strength, but what we are seeing is the desperation of those who sense “their time is up.” “Power over” is frantically trying to hang on, but “power together” (“Me too”) is gaining strength. The spirit of oneness is rising in people’s hearts, whether they are aware of it yet or not. The “otherness” and separation that we have been trained to believe in is losing its grip, and compassion and unity is coming to the fore.
That spirit is in those students whose courage and resolve inspire every one of us to stand with them, to “have their backs.” Because it’s not just about them. It’s about all of us. We are all immigrants on this Earth, and we came here for a purpose beyond our individual lifetimes: to embody peaceful coexistence and loving kindness on a planet that has never fully lived it. The waiting is over; our time is now. Each of us knows in our heart that love is stronger than fear and hatred, and global transformation occurs when we live that truth, shining it outward from the very core of our being so that it is reflected in the hearts of everyone, everywhere.
Spiritflower 
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