What Is The World You Live In?

“Words create worlds,” Jewish theologian Abraham Heschel tells us.

The election results in America hit us hard. They triggered various reactions and emotions for all of us, from grief, despair, fear, and anxiety to relief, satisfaction, and calm. For many, though obviously not all, not the majority, the world looks like a dark place. And many people are living in a dark place.

Everyone I know was deeply affected.

Now, more than ever, we want to experience our Sacred Listening to one another, to experience our connection, our oneness, even in the face of the seeming disconnection that is occurring, the different stories people are living in.

I saw a cartoon of two men standing across from each other in front of a number.  One pointed to the number and said, “nine.” The other pointed to say the same number and said, “six.”

The only thing is the person who saw the six thought that the person who saw the nine was wrong. Not just wrong; less than human. And, of course, they were “right.” The person who saw the nine thought that the person who saw the six was wrong and they were right. And less than human.

It has always been like this. Only now, our different perceptions of reality are profoundly affecting our world.

I ask myself many questions:  “What is the opportunity now? What is required for me to live from my awakened heart? For me to act from love? Who am I committed to being in the face of these circumstances?  Who am I for myself?  For others? For humanity? For the future? What is my access to creating Light? What is the world I am committed to living in?”

And I invite you to ask yourself the same questions.

The day after the election, I knew I had to stop.  I knew I had to sit. Maybe for a long time. I brought Gratefulness, a discipline I have been leaning into, as well as Faith and Compassion through Benedictine Brother David Steindl-Rast’s and Thich Nhat Hanh’s Teachings, with me, into my meditation, to calm me, to bring me to peace, to bring me to a place to stand that has light.  I could not find the light. I brought those spirits, those energies, those distinctions into the heart of my morning meditation.

I was shown a particular moment in my own personal history in which I approached my acupuncturist at the time with great fear, as I had been diagnosed with a large brain tumor at the beginning of that week in the Spring of 2003. After being diagnosed, I saw four separate brain surgeons who declared, in one way or another, that the surgery would “not be a walk in the park.”  They also said I would lose my senses of taste and smell.

I was anxious, fearful, and entertained by the many movies of worst-case scenarios that were marching like Gestapo soldiers through my brain.

When, after a week of consults with four different surgeons, Lois, my acupuncturist, heard the story of my symptomology, my diagnosis, and my saga of the consults, she stopped.  She went silent for quite a while.  When, finally, she spoke, she said something that opened me up to a new world.  She said, “You know?  Bodies have an intuitive wisdom. For your journey right now, this must be exactly what you need.”

For Lois, that was not simply a good idea, a firm belief, or positive thinking.  It was a declaration, a stand.  A stand is where you are speaking, and you are at one with your speaking.  You ARE what you speak. There is no separation between what you say and who you are.

When Martin Luther King said, “I have a dream,” that was a stand. King was that dream. He lived that dream.

When Gandhi said, “Free India before my death,” that was a stand. That stand is who Gandhi was.

The Declaration of Independence was a stand for “all men are created equal.” They thought they were going to the gallows when they signed that declaration. Their lives were at stake.

A stand becomes who you are, and when you take a stand, you are very powerful. You can shape or reshape the future.

Two things are mostly unknown about a stand: 1) you don’t need evidence for the stand to be valid, and 2) you don’t need to know how you are going to fulfill it before you take it. You can leap off a high dive and invent the water on your way down.

I repeat: “Bodies have an intuitive wisdom. For your journey right now, this must be exactly what you need,” Lois said.

I came to a full stop. Her words rang like a pure Tibetan temple bell in my heart. They resonated with my heart.

I have stood for, since the beginning of my work in personal and spiritual development, that nothing – no experience – comes into my life without it being a contribution to my evolution, to our evolution, including obstacles that cross my path, seemingly as a stop on my journey.

“All of life comes to us as a gift,” teaches Brother David.

As what Lois said to me was so resonant, it was easy for me to say to myself, “For my journey right now, this must be exactly what I need.”

In that moment, all anxiety and fear and their associated body sensations left my body.

Sometimes, we take that journey through obstacles provided by others and the world. The Hindu god Ganesh, the elephant god, is revered in India. He provides obstacles to our path.

In my meditation, I saw our collective humanity as a body. And, I was told, “For our journey, this must be exactly what we need,” on behalf of, ultimately, realizing and fulfilling our light. I was told to bring Gratefulness, Compassion, and Faith into my life, and that that was my Work, our Work, ever more called for during this passage

Sometimes, it is said, while I know it is a cliché, it is darkest before the dawn.

One more thing: some stands you take you take because they ARE you and are beyond your lifetime stands. I do not “expect” my stand that “awakening the consciousness, the awareness, of human beings everywhere is the source of peace on our planet” may be fulfilled in my lifetime. At the same moment, intention, not time, has always been at the source of creating new futures. And perhaps this moment of division on the planet is a gift, a radical invitation to create a whole new paradigm.  It is a time for creating and gathering ourselves as an aware and loving community.  It is time to create momentum. It is time for a radical awakening of consciousness.

I saw this so clearly as the universe’s invitation to us upon listening to an extraordinary podcast by Tara Brach, the link to which I am providing to you later in this post.

Did you know that the Chinese ideogram for “crisis” is the same ideogram as “opportunity?”

I also stand for accessing inner peace. This means that whenever emotions or fearful thoughts invade my mind and grab me to overtake or subsume me, I simply let them be. I am not out to avoid or push them away but to include, allow, and accept them. I find that after a while, after being with them without resistance, they lose their hold on me.

If I identify with any of those thoughts that are borne from fear, I have no light to give to others.

So, I am committed to compassion for myself, to accepting all the turmoil, thoughts, conclusions, worries, and feelings that attempt to dislocate me from peace, to see my breath as a great sea in which those fears, like little fish, are swimming, as Mark Nepo suggests in The Book of Awakening.

I stand for compassion for others, for being willing to embrace whatever is going on for another and to hear another, even if they hold a radically different point of view from mine. Each person has a personal history, cultural conditioning, a predilection to inhabit certain stories, and a certain reality that is theirs, out of which they developed their views and values.

Underneath it all, we are one.  It is so easy to forget that.

Now is the time for cultivating compassion, awakening our hearts, realizing our connection with others, listening with an open heart to the heart of another, and being there for one another. Now is the time for Sacred Listening, the kind of listening Piglet provides so generously to Pooh in the following story, a post that came across my way digitally through a dear friend, and first posted by David Attenborough.

Piglet?" said Pooh.

"Yes?" said Piglet.

"I'm scared," said Pooh.

For a moment, there was silence.

"Would you like to talk about it?" asked Piglet, when Pooh didn't appear to be saying anything further.

"I'm just so scared," blurted out Pooh.

"So anxious. Because I don't feel like things are getting any better. If anything, I feel like they might be getting worse. People are angry because they're so scared, and they're turning on one another, and there seems to be no clear plan out of here, and I worry about my friends and the people I love, and I wish SO much that I could give them all a hug, and oh, Piglet! I am so scared, and I cannot tell you how much I wish it wasn't so."

Piglet was thoughtful as he looked out at the blue of the skies, peeping between the branches of the trees in the Hundred Acre Wood, and listened to his friend.

"I'm here," he said, simply. "I hear you, Pooh. And I'm here."

For a moment, Pooh was perplexed.

"But... aren't you going to tell me not to be so silly? That I should stop getting myself into a state and pull myself together? That it's hard for everyone right now?"

"No," said Piglet, quite decisively. "No, I am very much not going to do any of those things."

“But - " said Pooh.

"I can't change the world right now," continued Piglet. "And I am not going to patronize you with platitudes about how everything will be okay because I don't know that.

"What I can do, though, Pooh, is that I can make sure that you know that I am here. And that I will always be here, to listen; and to support you; and for you to know that you are heard.

"I can't make those Anxious Feelings go away, not really.

"But I can promise you that, all the time I have breath left in my body...you won't ever need to feel those Anxious Feelings alone."

And it was a strange thing, because even as Piglet said that, Pooh could feel some of those Anxious Feelings start to loosen their grip on him and could feel one or two of them start to slither away into the forest, cowed by his friend, who sat there stolidly next to him.

Pooh thought he had never been more grateful to have Piglet in his life.

Let us each take a pause and rethink these times…rethink the opportunity of these times

Perhaps these times present us with a new opportunity to grow our capacity for love and compassion for ourselves and each other and to emerge spiritually stronger, individually and collectively. 

Let us insert a “stop” in our lives, a pause, and reflect. Let us give ourselves the space to tap into our Quiet, our Wisdom. It is only from there that we can heal ourselves and others. During that pause, you could write, meditate, take a walk in nature, or listen to music that inspires you. You could shift your paradigm from fear to love.

In reading

Andrea Gibson

’s amazing and beautiful Substack post today, I found an extraordinary post-election podcast by Tara Brach in the comment session and listened to the whole of it, even though it was 50 minutes long.  It was so well worth it.  Here is the link, in case you want to listen to it:

I invite you to listen to at least one person in your life this week as Piglet listened to Pooh.

I invite you to reflect upon

What is the world you are committed to living in?

What do you stand for – for the world?

What do you stand for – for yourself?

What do you stand for – for others?

What do you stand for – for your spirit, your aliveness, your relationship with the Tao, with God, with Source, with being responsible for your own spirit soaring?

When you take a stand, you move the world.

“Give me a lever long enough, and I can move the world,” Archimedes said.

Last, may I share with you, from my heart to yours, that I am blessed and privileged to have the opportunity to contribute to you in your life. I am profoundly thankful for your presence in my life, our shared energy,  and our partnership in awakening the loving hearts of us all. May you have a Thanksgiving  filled with True Gratefulness.

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