relationships | Ascension Lifestyle

20 Apr 2020
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The Great Unmasking

“Searchin’ the horizon

For what we can’t quite see

When all we’ve ever needed

Has been there all along

Inside of you and me…“

~ lyrics from A Little Soon to Say, by Jackson Browne

Here we sit, on the cusp of the Age of Aquarius: a true renaissance in spirit/mind/body for everyone on Earth.

Or is it the Age of the Virus, a plague that promises to be the end of the world as we know it? Theories abound:

Is the virus our body’s response to 5G technology?
Is it a bio-engineered plot to control the planet?
Has the magnitude of this event been “trumped up” for political gain?

Over the last few months, these and other questions about the origins of COVID-19 have been batted about ad nauseam. And while questioning authority is always a good idea, in this extraordinary time we need to question reality. So consider this:

Is the virus an out-picturing of endogenous fear — which is, itself, a virus?

Changing the World from Within

In the Gene Keys teachings, a powerful awakening tool that describes the shadow, gift and siddhi (enlightened mind) of 64 human consciousness codes, Richard Rudd writes, of Siddhi 49, Rebirth: “The first insight is that the world in its current form cannot be fixed, no matter how profound or far-reaching the revolution may be. The very bedrock of our modern society is founded upon a species that has always made decisions rooted in fear. The only way for a new future to be created is to begin from scratch — a rebirth.

“The rebirth is the organic flowering of the revolution. Just because we cannot fix the world as it is, does not mean we cannot make the world a better place. Our vision of the perfect future is precisely what creates the necessary frequency shift that will trigger the genetic forking of our species. It will happen because it must happen, but we must still create that happening. This is the paradox.”

If this coronavirus is the embodiment of our collective fear, is it causing the most severe symptoms in those whose DNA holds the greatest degree of ancestral terror? And if so, is this helping us accelerate towards what Rudd refers to as our “genetic escape velocity”?

Yet the genesis of the virus is still not our most powerful inquiry. The deeper conversation calling us is: what can we learn from what is transpiring?

This evolutionary moment heralds manifold gifts for humanity:

We’re healing ancient trauma. Mayan elder and cosmological historian Barbara Hand Clow has discussed paleoscientific research, which indicates “early humans showed no signs of being aware of the existence of the four seasons until 10,000 years ago.” The cataclysm that created Earth’s variable rotation, which gives rise to climatic changes, plunged us from unity consciousness into duality and survival mode, which is still encoded in our limbic brains. Our planet underwent a trauma and ever since, she “trembles,” bringing us the phenomenon of seasonal shifts. So our fear of the “end times” is actually a multi-traumatic memory, not a premonition. The virus is a memory trigger.
We’re giving the Earth a breather. In just 30 days, Himalayan peaks emerged from 30 years of pollution. In Venice, minus tourism, the canals run clear, prompting dolphins to frolic in the crystal waters. Perhaps most astonishing of all, the infamous Los Angeles smog is gone — a potent glimpse of what’s possible.
By staying home, we’re allowing wildlife to re-emerge in droves. Chimpanzee champion Jane Goodall says, “The world is only going to come right when every day is an Earth Day, because we’re part of the natural world; we depend on it.”
We’re connecting with “strangers”, having heartfelt conversations six feet apart, without artifice or agenda. While wearing facemasks, we’re becoming much more vulnerable, melting the masks of separation as never before.
We’re discovering what kindness means at a primal level. The ultimate key to coming home to ourselves as one people and one destiny may lie in what peaceable cultures have always known: from the pain that cracks our hearts wide open, compassion and kindness flower. Naomi Shihab-Nye’s poem, Kindness, eloquently expresses this “proper dose of poignancy”.

Clearly, this global time-out is a directive to be introspective. We’re being asked not just to isolate, but to innovate and co-create. As one ally put it, “It’s go time, Starseeds.” And we are.

Searching the Horizon

Viewing what’s taking place as a gift opens the quantum door to 5D, not 5G. It depends on how far we can allow our minds to s-t-r-e-t-c-h beyond the known. Everything is experimental, now. A Native American elder urges, “Let go of the known unreal, and throw yourself into the real unknown.”

As Thea Alexander writes in her wildly prescient 1976 novel, 2150 A.D.: “The measure of a mind’s evolution is its acceptance of the unacceptable.” Her Macro Society future is richly imagined, and I encourage you to read and share the book if you can get your hands on a copy.

A high frequency comedic French film, The Green Beautiful (La Belle Verte), explores similar themes: loving and respecting Nature, and loving ourselves as connected, whole beings at one with the natural world. The full movie is routinely removed from YouTube (hmmm…).

Love, not fear, is what needs to spread. Love is the key to our evolution. During my pneumonia gateway 27 years ago, I asked myself, if I died, what would I regret? The answer came quietly: “You haven’t loved.” This surprised me. Then I heard, “You haven’t served.” And I began to understand that loving, and serving, are one.

Now, we are all being asked to open our hearts to a greater degree than ever before. At the start of April, Venus, planet of Love, transited Alcyone, the central sun of the Pleiades, “activating a stream of powerful Divine Feminine energy that will be received on Earth to assist humanity to rise above the darkness and fear that is currently engulfing the planet.”

Growing to 20/20 and Beyond

We’re on a global vision quest in this year of perfect (in)sight.

Barbara Hand Clow writes, “Cosmic light reaches Earth in 2020. Miraculously, at the exact moment of the Winter Solstice, December 21, 2020, Jupiter conjoins Saturn in zero degrees Aquarius trine the Pleiades, the dawning of the Aquarian Age.”

Viewed from this Macro perspective, it is a true privilege to be alive at this nexus, ushering in the Shift of the Ages. We’re the sunrise of the kind of society 2150 A.D. and The Green Beautiful envision: peaceable, loving, healthy, and joyously co-existing with All That Is.

It’ll be a long road; we didn’t arrive where we are in an instant, and the changes won’t occur overnight. We can begin by adopting an eidetic suggestion from Kirstin Miller, executive director of Ecocity Builders: “Start thinking like a flower, not like a tailpipe.”

We are all cells in Mama Gaia, called to become perfusionists for the lifeblood of our planetary body. Out of the chrysalis, unmasking fear and denial to invite Love, respect and co-creation into our lives in a wholly new way.

All we’ve ever needed has been here all along, inside of you and me. Thank you for choosing to be embodied at this auspicious liminal threshold. Welcome Home.

About the Author:

Ascension Lifestyle Managing Editor Amara Rose is a “midwife” for our global rebirth. She offers life crafting, e-courses, business alchemy and content creation to accelerate your evolutionary journey. Learn more at LiveYourLight.com, where you can subscribe to her resource-rich enewsletter, What Shines.

23 Nov 2019
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Why Losing Your Mind Is A Gift

“The human mind is kind of like… a pinata.

When it breaks open, there’s a lot of surprises inside.

Once you get the pinata perspective, you see that

losing your mind can be a peak experience.”

~ Jane Wagner, playwright, “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe”

Though it may sound strange, “losing your mind” — living for a time empty, without a constantly chattering brain — can help you find yourself. When the brain takes a break, it’s easier to hear your heart, and to follow its guaranteed guidance.

But few of us go willingly. For me, the shift from a left-brain, Type A personality took the form of illness. “Losing my mind” catapulted me into my body and into present time in a way I’d never experienced. I couldn’t think, reason, or talk my way out of what was happening. With my brain on an extended vacation, I began to live by — and trust — my intuition.

The truth is, our heart and brain are in continuous dialogue. Rollin McCraty, PhD, co-founder of the Institute of HeartMath, says the heart has a special intelligence, and sends “far more signals to the brain than the brain is sending to the heart.”

Yet we idolize the brain and give the heart short shrift, except when it demands attention — via a heart attack, for example.

Hm.

The Longest Journey You’ll Ever Take

Americans come from diverse backgrounds and speak different languages, yet we can all become fluent in a common tongue: the language of the heart. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, author of The Little Prince, wrote, “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye.”

Seeing with our hearts creates kindness. In Jewel’s song Hands, the bridge brings tears to my eyes: “In the end, only kindness matters…” It touches something primal in me. Similarly, TV talk show host Ellen DeGeneres closes each broadcast with the invocation, “Be kind to one another.”

The greatest gift we can give each other and ourselves is moving from the brain to the heart. Traveling these 14 to 18 inches is both the shortest and the longest journey most of us will ever take. This nine-minute breath-heart-brain coherence meditation can help you get started.

Leaving Normal

A brain-break catapults you out of your comfort zone, notes feminist icon Gloria Steinem. It can be a conscious choice in lieu of a crisis. Profiled in Oprah Winfrey’s latest book, The Path Made Clear, Gloria maintains that a constant “on the road” mentality keeps her open to new experiences, because travel “brings people out of their heads and into their hearts.”

Living in the moment is the very definition of “flow,” agrees Oprah. This is how we enter what athletes call the zone: the place where it all comes together because you’re being your truth.

You can’t think your way into the zone. It’s a heart-centered space in which, says Gloria, you feel “boundaryless, spontaneous, at one with everything.”

So pry those mental fingers loose. In free-fall, trust that there’ll be an invisible cosmic trampoline beneath you — or you’ll grow wings in mid-flight.

What Competition Really Means

Kindness grows from this expansive feeling: knowing there is enough to go around, enough of whatever you feel you need: love, attention, money, etc. Yet our cultural paradigm fosters competition, and competition fuels an “either/or” mentality: either you win or I do; either I get what I want or you do.

It’s hard to live from your heart when you need to win — and when somebody else has to lose. It’s also intriguing to realize that “compete” actually means, “to seek together.” The prefix “com” means “with.” So when we compete, we’re really striving together towards a common goal.

We’re more likely to cooperate when we feel there is enough for everyone. Cooperation is about holding a “both/and” perspective. Holding the both/and, choosing collaboration rather than competition, is a refreshing way to dance with life — and the key to honor and respect.

A Politics of Love

Some people use the word “spirituality” to mean religion. But spirituality is not about religion. It’s broader than our 3D compartmentalizing. And the moment for an integrated spiritual perspective (heart and mind) has arrived.

Recognizing this beckoning opportunity, spiritual teacher and author Marianne Williamson threw her hat into the 2020 Democratic presidential race, courageously re-crafting her message to reach voters for whom a politics of inclusivity is a new concept. She speaks about the power of Love, with a capital L.

In the early days of her campaign, people laughed at her platform, even as the number of Google hits on her name soared. Then the New York Times Magazine ran a feature. Fewer people are laughing now.

Does Marianne stand a chance of securing the Democratic nomination? That’s beside the point. Her work is not about winning the White House, or even about government. She’s stirring the conversational cauldron, whetting the appetite of those stirring to consciousness with an amuse-bouche of pure essence.

Who we are at core (the etymology of heart!) matters so much more than what we think, so much more than any political party or ideology. Spiritual teachers such as Marianne know the mind must be in service to the heart in order to elevate humanity to our next level of evolution. The body politic is not separate from our bodies: as above, so below. As within, so without.

This is something our Founding Fathers understood. As our youthful country has grown, we’ve become lazy, relying on the government to solve the very problems it creates. Einstein said, “You cannot solve a problem with the same level of thinking that created it.”

Realizing heart and brain must not just co-exist, but co-create, is a giant step, and bringing this awareness to the world stage is a major mission. Marianne answered her own heart call to take the leap, as a gift to humanity’s unfolding.

Show Me the Money

A heart-centered culture will also radically alter how we exchange life energy, better known as money. In her pivotal book, Beyond Prophecies and Predictions: Everyone’s Guide to the Coming Changes (which I finished reading the night before 9-1-1), Moira Timms speaks of a “New Order of the Ages,” which many indigenous cultures had prophesied to begin between 2001 and 2012.

She writes, “The mind analyzes — the heart synthesizes. The turning point is where the heart is awakening. Historically speaking, we are at this juncture. America’s motto, inscribed on the banner in the beak of the eagle of the Great Seal [of the United States], reminds us that America was founded on the principle of ‘E Pluribus Unum’ — ‘Out of the Many, One.'”

Further, the inscription beneath the Great Pyramid (the centerpiece of the Great Seal on the back of a one dollar bill) says, “Novus Ordo Seclorum” — which translates, appropriately, as “A New Order of the Ages”! Isn’t this amusing? The answer is in money, but it’s not about who can become the richest at others’ expense.

If we insist on remaining on the fast track, consuming planetary resources and each other at the speed of greed, the money will not follow. True wealth/prosperity/abundance flows from alignment with purpose. It’s about tuning in to a higher frequency. The clues are everywhere. In my computer’s thesaurus, one synonym for prosperity is well being.

Our Highest Expression

I’ve long maintained that the Internet is our precursor to global telepathy. In recent times we’ve become seduced by technology, tethered to our phones, barely breathing life, let alone our fullness. Yet in a crisis, we respond from the heart.

California just experienced some of the worst wildfires and mass evacuations in the state’s history. As people flowed into safe locations, many businesses opened their doors to share desks and WiFi with displaced workers, fitness centers offered free showers (even supplying towels, soap, and shampoo), and grassroots organizers provided the essentials people would need after leaving home in a hurry.

I always marvel at this kind of outpouring, which typically ceases along with the emergency (“emerge and see”). If people and systems were as open and loving all the time as they are during a disaster, there would be no homelessness or hunger.

Reverence for the Real

When heart and mind align, it’s whole-brain change: we marry the dreamer and pragmatist within, and move ahead without selling out.

It’s radical. It’s possible. It’s the new world order, a different form of self-government we’re beginning to embrace as the planet awakens en masse. Idols may make useful teen heartthrobs, but in adulthood our hearts seek a deeper, lasting Love.

The heart calls. The brain responds. It’s incumbent on each of us to make the journey.

This is how everyone wins.

About the Author:

Amara Rose is Managing Editor of Ascension Lifestyle. Her work is widely published in health, business, lifestyle, and new thought magazines, both digital and print. Visit LiveYourLight.com, where you can also subscribe to her monthly e-newsletter, What Shines.

28 Feb 2018
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Life In the Middle Ages: Facing the Feisty Fifties

I see my folks are gettin’ on

And I watch their bodies change

I know they see the same in me

And it makes us both feel strange

No matter how you tell yourself

It’s what we all go through

Those lines are pretty hard to take

When they’re staring back at you.

~ Nick of Time by Bonnie Raitt

I got my period on Valentine’s Day. Talk about a literal red-letter day! Never have I been so unabashedly joy-filled at the sight of blood. For the first time, I truly appreciate a euphemism both girls and women have used for generations to refer to their Moontime: “my friend.”

Perhaps I should explain that I am not thirteen. I’m not 37. I’m 50, and this is my first cycle in five months. Menopause swooped in without warning last fall and I dried up like the Sahara. To suddenly bleed after a week in which I did, in fact, feel premenstrual is confirmation that my body’s still experimenting with this shift. It’s not a done deal. There’s yet time to adjust to the idea of being a Crone — and being eligible for membership in AARP (you’ve got to be kidding!)

Embracing the “F” Word

Now that the largest cohort in history is graying en masse, someone turns 50 approximately every eight seconds. Even this formidable fleet can’t stem the tide of aging jokes, however. At 50, the good-natured ribbing begins in earnest. My friend Faith, who celebrated her 50^th just weeks before me, recalled a card she received when she turned 40: “I’m going to have to say the ‘F’ word: forty! Forty! Forty!”

We lamented that the greeting card industry doesn’t seem to think we have a sense of humor a decade later. Why isn’t there a card for 50-year-olds that reads, “I’m at the age where I can freely use the ‘F’ word: fifty, fifty, fifty!!”

My parents, who do not perceive themselves as “old” in their eighties, sent me a hilarious Dr. Seuss parody of “Thing One” and “Thing Two” called, “It’s a Fifty Thing!” The birthday card included lines such as, “Thing Fifty can groove to the latest CD. (And with bifocal lenses, Thing Fifty can see!)”

Hm. It’s one “thing” to major in gerontology and enjoy working with elders in your twenties; quite a different matter when you’re on the cusp of joining a collective that’s marginalized in Western society and rendered virtually invisible.

I remember my mom telling me with pride about a man at the Department of Motor Vehicles flirting with her when she retook her driver’s test at age 65. I was 35 at the time, and even then, wondered aloud in my public speaking class “how much longer” men would continue to flirt with me.

From the vantage point of an additional fifteen years, I find my 30-something fear rather quaint.

Redefining Wrinkles and “Cool”

The fifties promise to be an intriguing balance of living in an aging body while possessing a certain ineffable wisdom and spirit we hadn’t accessed in our younger years. Although the twenty-somethings and teens I meet today often seem wise far beyond where my generation was at their age, due no doubt to the rapid evolution of humanity as a whole, there is much to be said for the joie de vivre that accrues with vintage.

Wrinkles signify ripeness. There’s a reason the honorific, “sage” is usually conferred on an elder.

I met an 83-year-old woman with close-cropped silver hair streaked fuchsia, wearing peace sign earrings. I commented that it was so cool to see “a woman of her maturity” thus attired, to which she replied, “Oh, I wasn’t cool when I was young!”

Reconciling body image with spiritual awareness is, paradoxically, only an issue if one chooses to focus on the physical. When the body becomes background — as it often is de facto in youth, with parts that are well oiled, shapely, firm, and thus, easier to “ignore” — our essence shines forth, and that’s what people see when they read the story in our eyes.

A Bountiful Harvest

Fifty is a time to harvest our joy — and acknowledge evidence of our mortality. While several of my contemporaries have already matched wits with serious illness, and a few have transitioned to the other side of life, I’ve also watched three dear friends meet and marry their life partners in their fifties. As I’ve been casting my soul mate net for a while now, this is heartening news.

Life in the Middle Ages can be bountiful, as Oprah Winfrey, our ultimate generational role model for accomplished aging, said of her 50^th birthday: “All these years I’ve been taking lessons from life experiences and feeling like I was growing into myself. Finally, I feel grown. More like myself than I’ve ever been. If it’s true what Maya Angelou says, that the fifties represent everything you were meant to be, all I can say is, watch out.”

Riley Mackenzie* embodies Angelou’s decree. In her fifties, she studied the subtleties of Argentine Tango, became a serious ceramics artist, and swung from a high trapeze. Now 68, she’s just back from a leisurely road trip around the periphery of the U.S. with her husband of almost, yes, 50 years. She’s also reinventing her marketing business with a partner, another vital woman in her late fifties. Mackenzie says emphatically, “It’s the most fun I could ever imagine having!”

Hot Flashes…of Inspiration

Age, like everything else in life, is a matter of perspective. Six months before my milestone birthday, I fell into conversation with a lively older gentleman as we waited to cross the street. He was searching his pockets for his eyeglasses, and, after I helped him find them, we walked together for a few minutes. He told me he was 100 years old, and regaled me with tales of his life. As we reached a parting of the ways, he turned to me and asked, quite seriously, “So tell me, young lady, have you graduated from college yet?”

Now, that’s the ultimate tonic for the “chronologically gifted”!

As I sit in a local teahouse, sipping rooibos and savoring my feminine cycle along with some exquisite chocolate mousse, I’m tickled by these words from The Reconnections website, on meeting the beloved: “I saw a license plate the other day, on a car belonging to a woman aged 50 plus: ‘Give me chocolate, and no one gets hurt.’ I thought that one was pretty neat until I saw a better one: ‘I’m over 50 and I’m still hot — except now, it comes in flashes.'”

How true. Flashes of insight. Flashes of inspiration. Flashes of unmitigated delight at just how extraordinary life on this beautiful blue-green planet can be. One author refers to the second half-century as “Jubilee Time.”

I’m ready to party. Considering how many playmates I’ll have in the galactic sandbox, it’s destined to be an unsurpassed blast. Bring it on: fifty! Fifty! Fifty!

* name changed to honor her privacy

About the Author:

Amara Rose can pluck a graying hair from her scalp at 25 mph; driving any faster, she waits for a red light. To see what she’s done with her first half-century, visit LiveYourLight.com. Offer her dark chocolate and you open the doorway to friendship.

06 Nov 2017
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Evolutionary Relationships: The Seven Requirements Of Love

An Excerpt From “Evolutionary Love Relationships: Passion, Authenticity,and Activism“

It is critical to remember that this crisis we are facing is a crisis in which the sacred powers of love in the human soul are being diverted by distraction, by greed, by ignorance, by the pursuit of power, so that they never irrigate the world and transform it. What is needed is a vision of evolutionary relationship as a relationship that helps us come into the real, take responsibility for it, and enact our sacred purpose with a partner, and for the world: when two lovers come together in this dynamic love consciousness, they create a transformative field of sacred energy, from which both can feed to inspire their work in reality.

There are seven requirements necessary, I believe, for this tremendously potent vision of evolutionary love to emerge in the world.

The first requirement is that both beings need to be plunged individually into a deep and passionate devotion of the Beloved, by whatever name they know the Beloved, because without both beings centering their life in God, the relationship will never be able to escape the private circle. From the very beginning it must be centered in the Divine. It must be a relationship that is undertaken in the conscious presence of the Divine for the Divine’s great work in the Universe. Only a relationship that is centered in God, and that has God as the prime actor in the relationship, will be able to bear the vicissitudes of authentic love, of dealing with the challenges of life and service in the world.

The second requirement for an evolutionary love is that both beings must develop a mastery of solitude. In his Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke wrote:

“Authentic love is where two solitudes border, protect, and salute each other.”

They “border” each other, they don’t infiltrate each other’s domain. They “protect” because they realize that the solitude that each one has is the source of inner wealth and inner revelation; they “salute” because they understand that the work of solitude, the work that goes into solitude, the heart work, the yearning, the longing, the deep contemplation of one’s gifts and one’s faults, is a sacred work that is the secret foundation of healthy relationship. In too many relationships in our current narcissistic model, what threatens the person most is the solitude of the other. In a true evolutionary relationship, what can exhilarate one person the most is the other’s solitude, because they know that solitude has the potential to make them a billionaire of generosity, of insight, and of creativity.

The third requirement is that in a true evolutionary relationship there is an equality of power, and that equality is born out of a profound experience of the sacredness and dignity of the other person’s soul. This new relationship that is trying to be given to us by the Mother is what I call the beloved-beloved relationship. One person isn’t the beloved and the other only the lover. Both partners recognize in each other the unique face that God is turning to them in order to bring them the essence of divine truth, which is embodied love. From that recognition of each other as the Beloved flows a natural movement of passionate honoring and service of the other’s life. This gives each person the freedom and the energy and the joy that they need to go out into the world and fulfill their destiny. This is crucial because in the past there has been a vision of inequality of power.

The male has often had the power and the female hasn’t. Dominant and submissive roles between two people have been seen as inevitable.

Now what’s emerging is the mutual recognition of holiness and sacredness expressed in tantric rapture, in an adoration and worship of the other in the core of life.

The fourth requirement follows on from the third: if you are going to have a beloved-beloved relationship, you have to center your whole being and work and evolution in God. You have to be a master of your own solitude so that you can work on what is necessary to deepen that sacred relationship of the Divine. You must also bring the sacred practice of prayer and meditation into the very core of your life, so that the whole relationship can be enfolded in a mutually shared sacred enterprise.

The fifth requirement is that both lovers completely abandon any Hollywood sentimentality about what relationships actually are. As love becomes more evolutionary and conscious, so does each lover’s understanding of each other’s shadow. One of the essential roles of this new love is to make each person in the relationship the safe-guarder of the other’s shadow—not the judge of the other’s shadow, not the denier of the other’s shadow, but someone who recognizes where the other has been wounded, and safeguards and protects them with unconditional compassion without allowing themselves to be mauled or manipulated by the other. This takes an immense effort, because it takes an immense effort to understand your own shadow, and an even greater effort to face and comprehend, without illusion, denial or repulsion, the shadow of the other.

The sixth requirement is that if you are going to enter into the evolutionary process, you have to accept that it never ends, never stops unfolding.

There is no end to transformation, because divine love is infinite.

Evolution is fundamentally a death/rebirth cycle that repeats itself in higher and higher dimensions, and any authentic evolutionary relationship must have the courage to go through the deaths that engender the rebirths. Marion Woodman, the great Jungian analyst and pioneer of the sacred feminine, said to me, “I have had four marriages with my husband, and at the end of each marriage there was a crisis that we had to make the commitment to go through, a projection that had to die. But we stuck at it and we went through it, and the love that we know now in our eighties is the greatest and deepest love we have experienced.”

The seventh principle requirement is that from the very beginning of this adventure into evolutionary love you must make the commitment for it not to be just a personal orgy, a cultivation of an oasis of private pleasure. You must engage consciously in this relationship to make you stronger, to serve the planet, to recognize that it is a relationship not only grounded in God, not only infused by sacred practice, but it is from the very beginning dedicated to making both people more powerful, more reflective, more passionately engaged with the only serious truth of our time: The world is dying, and we need a major revolution of the heart to empower everyone to step forward and start doing the work of reconstruction and re-creation that is now desperately needed.

About the author: Andrew Harvey

Andrew Harvey is an internationally acclaimed poet, novelist, translator, mystical scholar, and spiritual teacher. He has written and edited more than 30 books — including the best-selling titles The Hope and The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. He has won the Christmas Humphries Prize (A Journey in Ladakh), the Nautilus Prize twice (The Hope, Light the Flame), and appeared in two recent films (Dancing in the Flames, and Ethan Hawke’s Seymour: An Introduction). He was also the subject of the 1993 BBC film documentary The Making of a Modern Mystic. He has taught at Oxford University, Cornell University, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, The California Institute of Integral Studies, and the University of Creation Spirituality as well as at various spiritual centers throughout the United States. He is the founder and director of the Institute of Sacred Activism. He is a kind-hearted rascal with a penchant for red pashminas, Maria Callas, white lions and Chicago pizza.

19 Jan 2016
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Fire and Water: The Deeper Meaning Of What We Unleash

When I was deep into my spiritual awakening, I had startlingly prescient dreams; in one, the words, “violent emergency” reverberated through my mind. It was a violent emergence; birth is fierce. There is an ocean of difference, however, between Nature’s ferocity and that which is deliberately inflicted by human beings with their own agendas.

Theologian and author Thomas Moore writes, “Deep in the etymology of ‘violence’ is a strong Latin word, vis. It is the power in nature that we sense in the surging sea and the growth of grass. In our experiences of violence we witness the vain attempt of life to push itself into existence and visibility. This is a sexual power. Sex is not just about making bodies but making souls as well. The people of the world need every opportunity to be creative and visible. They need to enjoy life, not just survive. Without that opportunity, they will turn to violence, in spite of themselves.”

Life’s Novocaine

We tend to go through life anesthetized against our own yearning. The call to claim our power can be terrifying, because it means accepting our invitation to the Dance — and most of us have forgotten how to dance, if indeed we ever knew. We find it easier to lash out in anger: rage, the undiscovered country. If being “outrageous” means getting the rage out, Americans are black belts. Having lost touch with the wilderness within, we savage the Earth and each other in an effort to combat our loneliness.

War is the grand expression of this misdirected energy. It’s akin to our ability, or lack of it, to harness the power of the sun. Yoked to our solar egg, we could shine on in all our ecological radiance for millennia. Yoking means union, but we’re used to living the more limiting definition of bondage. Trussed to our desperation, we sigh, “That’s life!” Since interdependence — becoming what Kenny Ausubel christened “Bioneers,” or biological pioneers, co-creating with Nature — feels so foreign, we stay (un)comfortably in the familiar, pump up the volume, and wearily watch as the world turns.

There is a way out: it’s through. The trees are gods and goddesses who in their stillness keep the Earth’s counsel; the animals are our allies. We can commune with a snake or a sea lion as easily as with the people we call kin. The key lies in reclaiming our wildness — not as violence, but as an abiding, sensuous connection with Nature. Instead of experiencing everything at one remove, we can allow it to enter us.

My Inannic odyssey delivered me deeply into this truth. In illness and vulnerability, I threw my arms around trees and sobbed out my grief, feeling their loving embrace. I began talking to crows, paying tribute to their visceral wisdom in a poem that concluded, “A coded conversation/In guttural cries/Opens my eyes/And lifts me higher.” Stunned from exhaustion, I’d never lived in such clarity. With my brain on an extended vacation, I was forced to access a more primitive part of my being, to participate organically in the instinctual world, not merely watch.

How Peace Begins

This is how peace begins: by singing the wild symphony of Nature back into our cells, feeling the music of the spheres in our marrow, embodying the feminine creative principle. By raising our resonance, we become “the vessel which can contain all blessing,” as one ancient text describes peace. This is also how we heal our bodies, and the body of Gaia: “immune” means sacrosanct, inviolate, whole. In celebrating all life, we pulse a radiating joy that resurrects our daily dance. And you can’t wage war while dancing.

We’ve entered a new era. It is only in recent memory that strong antiwar sentiment (Iraq, Vietnam) has held sway. For much of human history, war has been an acceptable means of “protecting our interests,” “keeping the world safe for democracy,” or any number of other platitudes. If thousands, perhaps millions, of innocents had to die in the process, well, they were war heroes. And the villagers in other countries, slaughtered in the name of whatever deity one invoked, deserved death because they were “the enemy.”

Jeannette Rankin, the first woman elected to the US House of Representatives and the only member of Congress to vote against US entry into both World Wars, once declared, “You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.”

She makes an enduring point. Did anyone “win” the Indian or Chilean ‘quakes? Are we “winning” the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan?

What’s really going on here? What is the higher purpose of the impulse to violence we all harbor within, to a greater or lesser degree?

Fire and water are complements; harmonized, they elevate consciousness and catalyze healing. I sang these words often during my own dark night of the soul. Instead of the old, tired dominator matrix, using firepower in an “us” vs. “them” scenario, we can embrace the true fire within us, and discover the myriad ways to channel this potent energy for good.

Embracing the True Fire Within

Becoming a spiritual warrior is a profile in courage (which means heart.) Spirit asks, “Have you the conviction to stand by your heart? Are you willing to transmute war in the alchemical fire?” The fire within is the perfect peace of God/Goddess/Creator/Innate Intelligence, which expresses outwardly as enthusiasm (from the Greek, “possessed by God”), inwardly as a calm awareness.

We’ve mastered communicating from our wounds. Now we’re in a pivotal age, creating a context in which it’s safe to share who we are in love, in truth, in well-being. Our collective task is to marry scared and scarred with sacred, density with destiny, jaded with jubilant; to become inclusive not exclusive. Because none of us is truly free until all of us are.

This is one of the meta gifts of these disasters (which means, “against the stars”): they bring us face to face with The Other, in our psyches and out in the world, so we can see how they’re one and the same. All anyone can do is introduce you to yourself. So as you look in the mirror of your brother’s or sister’s face, be kind to your own confusion, criticism, sadness, or fear. Acknowledging your strand in the evolutionary web is, in itself, a giant step on the path to peace.

It’s time for each of us to create a personal crucible: a safe container for our energies. Envision your inner chalice. Then place this cup, brimming with fiery potential and the waters of life, into your heart, where it will become a perpetual font of inspiration and renewal — and, in time, of unconditional love.

As the Maya say, In Lakéch: I am another yourself.

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About the author:

Ascension Lifestyle author Amara Rose is a “midwife” for our global rebirth. Her services include transformational guidance, talks, e-courses, a digital download CD, and an inspirational monthly newsletter. She is widely published in health, business and new thought magazines, both digital and print. Learn more: http://www.liveyourlight.com