The world is broken right now. The good news is that none of us can pretend it isn’t. Yes, the good news. Because we cannot heal until we recognize that we need to heal.
Until we are willing to break down the old, we will not see what we have forgotten. We can only be whole when we recognize that we are only Whole in Love.
We cannot create new ways of living until we stop choosing the old ways.
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All any of us want is to love and to be loved. And yet people die senselessly every day because of fear which turns into anger or hatred or -isms that kill.
When I say that living Love isn’t optional, this is what I mean. When I say that every day we need to choose Love instead of fear, this is what I mean. When I say that we all need to become heart-centered practitioners to change this deeply-ingrained habit of fear, this is what I mean.
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How have we come to this? How do we not understand that we’re in this together, and the only way we’re going to get out of this is together?
It immediately brought to mind the kind of sci fi story that most of us loved as kids. We’re all abandoned on a dangerous planet and we either have to band together and survive, or dissolve into hatred and enmity and die. We love those kinds of stories. Well, right now, we’re all living one.
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Worry is just about the most fruitless activity in the world. It is low-grade anxiety swirling around in our head with a backlog of tense what if’s — and doing nothing about it. Not taking action. Not praying. Not looking at things from other perspectives. That worry feels exactly like the water underneath me. It just puddles up and then gets deeper. It accumulates and rises. It creeps up the walls and slowly but surely our lives get waterlogged with worry.
So the only flood I really need to watch is in my thinking. Am I allowing my thoughts to get flooded with low-grade fears, or am I listening, leaning into, and learning from Love?
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When I was working with my wonderful editor, Robyn Karney, on my dad’s biography, she introduced me to a phrase I’d never heard before: In the event.
It means — as it turns (or turned) out.
Here are some uses: Bob was worried that he was going to lose his job. In the event, he ended up getting a promotion. Many possible solutions were put forward by the world’s most distinguished experts but, in the event, it was a little girl who solved the problem.
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This month I’m working on a heart-centered practice of wholeness. This month I’m looking at the ripple effect of those things that aren’t whole but that we just accept or avoid dealing with.
And this may be the biggest one of all: The That’s Just the Way It Is Syndrome.
Whenever something new is introduced to the world, initially there is often a huge resistance. Things are the way they are, we think. This is the way it’s always been. Except that that isn’t true. And it never has been.
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What’s the difference between judgment and discernment? Fear and Love. To discern is to recognize not only the heart-centered truth of a situation, but it is to led Love guide our actions and reactions. Discernment is an essential heart-centered practice of wholeness. Right now it may be more essential than ever!
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Acceptance doesn’t mean laying down in the middle of the highway and letting ourselves be run over by oncoming traffic. It means assessing a situation and showing up to it as it is, while keeping our own heart-centered values intact and in operation.
Resistance, on the other hand, immediately shifts us out of wholeness into us/them. And once that happens, we have invited fear to the party, where it proceeds to convince us that we are not all in this together.
Wholeness is heart-centered, because it sees everything as connected. So in each situation, we need to choose the nearest right, the most heart-centered choice we can make in each moment.
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We’re all trying to understand what’s happening any way we can. But these questions, this issues, these times can seem so big that they sometimes scare us. And that’s when we turn on the TV and hope that things will go back to the normal we see on the screen.
They can’t.
We’re way past that point in the race.
Here’s the bottom line:
Unless each of us find a way to live more holistically, none of us will.
Every single choice each of us makes has a larger consequence.
Period. The end.
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We have become so good at avoidance, that we no longer know we’re avoiding something.
You know how you can go up and down stairs without thinking. That’s what we do with stuff we don’t want to see. We pick up that corner of our consciousness and sweep unpleasantness away, all while having a conversation or cooking breakfast.
That’s why we have to clean house.
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I realized that my feelings were more like tiramisu than M&Ms. There wasn’t a hard coating of fear around the soft chocolate of my heart. Rather there were different flavors of fear mixed in with the Love. And there seemed to be two strains of fear: Old fear and new fear.
The old fear was irrational and not particularly relevant to the situation. But it felt the most real and the most urgent because it was the most familiar.
Then there was the new fear — which felt more rational but less anxiety provoking.
I was spending a lot of time talking to both strains of fear, even though neither of them held the answer.
Only Love held the answer. Only Love could.
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During this month, I will create this new heart-centered practice of wholeness by sharing the evolution of its process.
Heart-centered practice is a journey not a destination. I hope that by sharing in this way, you’ll see that each of us can create our own heart-centered practices that get us out of our fear-based problem-solving heads and into our Love-led hearts
Each day I will dive deep into an incident or feeling or experience that made me realize that a part of my life is not Whole. And I will work through the process of getting out of my divisive head and into my holistic heart.
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May’s heart-centered practice of presence is Wholeness.
One of my core heart-centered practices (it’s in my new book, Living Love: 12 Heart-Centered Practices to Transform Your Life, is witnessing. This is the process of learning to pay more attention to your thought patterns and all the actions and reactions they produce — without judging yourself or others.
Lately I’ve been witnessing certain things:
I sometimes have a much bigger physical or emotional reaction to something or someone than my mind is telling me I need to have.
I have a habit of avoiding certain kinds of interactions, situations, tasks, practices — and those avoidance patterns are often similar.
Fear can be both extreme and subtle — but it’s the subtle forms of fear’s suggestions that take the deepest root. . .and are the hardest to spot.
A lifetime of justifying certain behaviors and beliefs does NOT make those behaviors and beliefs okay for me or anyone.
The things we sweep under our mental or spiritual rugs need to get cleaned out — or pretty soon we start tripping on what’s under that rug every single day . . .and if we don’t pay attention pretty soon it takes over the whole house.
We all live as if the choices we make have no consequences, when in fact every single choice we make has consequences. Every single choice.