Virtually all my close relatives and women friends joined the Women’s March and were encouraged and fired up to keep on acting. With all the nightmare actions coming out of Washington, clearly meditating is not enough. And yet, as a spiritual seeker, my question remains, what energy do I want to fuel my actions, and how do I maintain that?
As an energy healer and shamanic practitioner, I’ve learned (the hard way, at times) that I don’t want to do battle with dark forces. For one thing, that acknowledges their reality, their substance—and even though they are real enough on the earthly dimension, when we get to the quantum level, all is light. And, I’m not interested in using the same energy as the one I’m trying to rise above. Einstein pointed out that is not practical.
So that leaves love. When I allow myself to feel my grief at the state of the world, and look beneath that grief, I see that it comes from love. If we didn’t love the world, if we didn’t long for peace and a higher way of being, we wouldn’t care. So we wouldn’t grieve. So what I’m really feeling beneath the grief and rage is love.
Energy healing is based on working with the source, not the symptom. Grief and rage are symptoms of suffering—but love is at their source. So my job is to keep trying to return to, and actually become, love.
In deep meditation, when you can “see” behind the physical, you perceive that all is light. And when you go into that light, you experience so much love that it is overpowering, humbling, almost bigger than a heart can hold. This is the face of God, I think. And also it is who we actually are.
In those moments where I can remember that I am love, and can act from that place, I have much more power than I have using my strategic mind or community organization—though I may choose to do those as well.
Love has many facets, since all creation is made of it. And so, it can be fierce. It can take a stand.
I want to be an activist who moves forward, who acts out of being for something, rather than resisting or being against. If I make myself a wall, I can be destroyed. But if love is like water, it can flow around, over or under rocks and bust through dams. It does not resist, but flows forward.
This does not mean I cannot say “No.” But my “no” will be based on having said “Yes” to something greater. I think the difference in energy is enormous and important.
Indigenous wisdom tells us our job is to dream a new dream. The Women’s March all over the world gave form to that dream. The signs described some of the features of the dream. We are filling in the details. What does not belong in the dream, we cast aside. We keep moving toward what we want, relentless as a river.
“Sourcing” in this way is sustainable, while my long life experience teaches me that sourcing from the mind and from emotions of fear and anger is a recipe for burnout. Let us remember that love—though our English word for it is severely limited—is limitless and comes from a divine, indestructible source. It is a fuel that can never be restricted or taken from us, a source that wants to be used.
Did you feel the love at the march? It was palpable. It is real. Let’s drink from that river, swim in it, splash each other with it, and use it to fashion all our strategies for a world that can live and last.
