A Personal Path Through

These are upsetting times. We can enter the upset creatively, constructively. The breaking apart of accustomed systems and generational expectations offers opportunity for new growth, clearer vision, truer humanity. This does require discipline, or if that is too harsh a term, practise. Or, perhaps more palatably, changing some habits. The benefit is an inner comfort and unconquerable gladness. Here are some places to start.

Attention: What are we paying attention to? We can pay attention to, notice, what we are paying attention to. We can develop internal boundaries; choose to limit our informational input to that which keeps us motivated and energized.

Energy: We can notice where our energy is going, what it is doing. We can choose to gather it in where it is scattered, splattered or flailing, gather it in and focus it on something constructive, creative, helpful.

Clarity: We each have a unique path, a unique gift of who we are to participate in the solution. How do we get clear about what that is? Who we are needed to be?

Engagement: This is not a cerebral, abstract exercise. We need to engage, engage with a lightness that allows us to disengage if it starts feeling “off,” or even less than “on,” Gently probing to see where life is for us among the possibilities. Exploring. Paying attention, again. Again and all ways.

Community: Find or develop a community (if only one person) that uses compatible language and concepts. This work merges into the spiritual, and like all spiritual work, it requires community to support it. So we want language that supports our exploration and people to talk it over with.

Patience: This is a long haul. Incremental. It may be, for some of us, essentially a restructuring of our operational system. For all of us, it may be a firmer tuning of our capacities. We are, it seems, never “done.” The habits, practices, disciplines, require on-going exercise and development not to atrophy or backslide.

Gratitude: Every bit counts. Every bit of attention or engagement or energy we put into the process contributes to the overall solution. We are claiming our capacities, digging our roots into our true selves, resisting the mudslide toward denial, despair or hysteria. Stabilizing the territory around us, the terrain in which we are “planted.” Delight: We begin to get glimpses of the whole , recognizing our membership within a vast community, even an organism, that is developing toward deep and meaningful transformation. We belong. We are home.