Please, help me continuously to refine and amplify and hone my “Yes!” and my positive “No.”
Let’s commence Week 8 of The Presence Project:
WEEK 8
(Activate with Second Water Session)
Our Conscious Response for the Next Seven Days is:
“I FORGIVE MYSELF”
PEACE IS A VIBRATION WE FEEL
[Oooh, this section is on conflict and peace… And it’s very ACIMy too.]
‘Our leaders also insist on approaches such as “peace talks,” in which governments and peace organizations present treaties, make compromises with each other, and declare after long discussion and debate that peace has been agreed. This approach mistakenly believes peace is something mental. It too has never realized authentic peace, and any appearance of peace gained from mental discussion and debate, leading to agreement between opposing parties, is always short-lived because it also is born of control and sedation. Just as peace isn’t a physical circumstance, it’s also not a mental agreement. Peace is a vibration that’s recognized through felt-perception. We don’t “do peace” or “think peace.” We feel peace. Peace is. It doesn’t need to be manufactured. Peace is everywhere, whether we are aware of it or not. The entire planet is blanketed in peace. In fact, it’s easy to realize this experientially. If we enter any wartorn environment – any experience of conflict – and remove all human beings, what becomes immediately self-evident is the resonance of peace. Peace is in the midst of all chaos and conflict. Nothing we do or think adds or takes away from this actuality. …. Peace is available to us right now through a decision to feel peaceful. Once we truly feel the vibrational resonance called peace, this resonance automatically radiates into our mentality and physicality. Peace therefore begins within us, individually. Realizing peace individually is a prerequisite to realizing it collectively. Hence the saying, “Peace be with you.”’ (TPP pp199-200)
I love this: ‘Peace is available to us right now through a decision to feel peaceful.’
Help me apply this. Help me intertwine this into my Yes/No work, and into my workdays, and into my response to this pandemic.
Today we emerge from a month of national lockdown, in to a 3 Tier restriction system that even the Tories have rebelled against in droves. Yesterday, behemoth retailers Arcadia (Top Shop etc) and Debenhams collapsed.
Can you make the decision to feel peaceful about all of this right now?
I can… It’s just that doing so sometimes leaves me feeling numb, or like I’m cut off to the people suffering through this. So many businesses collapsing…
What if it were suggested that no one is actually suffering?
Yes. I could find a place in my consciousness for that. I’ve learnt from experience that distress, loss and grief do eventually pass, and leave us stronger, clearer, more able to contribute… I’ve come to believe over the last 2.5 decades that even death is but a doorway, not a finality or a punishment. I understand that collapse gives way to rebirth. I know we need awakening by shocks, in order to make changes, as a human collective.
If I chose ongoing peacefulness, with self-forgiveness, would I be better at saying Yes/No?
What a sweet question. Your notions of improvement are quaint, but also a little disjointed. Let’s put the horse before the cart. The horse is your will; the cart is all you carry forward. What is your will? Let that give impetus to your decisions as to the direction of travel, the pace of movement, the weight of the load you are prepared to carry.
My will is… ‘reach peace, teach peace’.
Well you might want to take some crates off your cart, dear soul.
How?
Your new strategy. Don’t wait! Pursue it TODAY. You are the driver (mind) of the horse and cart. The horse (your will, your momentum, your power) will carry whatever you put on the cart. Choose carefully (with your mind) what you are asking your horse to drag forward.
I want it to pull forward my project.
Then pour confidence and power into your strategy. Timeline it! Five years. 12 months. Everything is coming together perfectly, as you wish for it to be. You are doing beautifully. You shall have your own sweet peaceful empire, where you can unfold your ideas and creativity. Let it flow through you. And to do that, cultivate your peacefulness. In peace, as the Tao says, your voice of wisdom can be heard.
Like here.
Like here.
The SoD is ALIVE. It’s a house ready for you to inhabit. You designed it, and built it with your imagination. Move in! (That clever metal drumming IFA will help you. Have faith.)
Ok. I’ve just reached out for a new accountant too….. Let’s do this.
I suddenly feel like that guy in Goliath who sits in his darkened office with his clicker, watching, plotting, strategising, intervening lightly…
That’s the ticket. Watch and wait a little more than run and trip. Let these things come to you, attracted by the depth and quality of the PEACEFULNESS in you. You are merely tapping into the most natural quality of the universe: peace. The Tao is as it is. It needs no effort, no chasing down, no containing. It watches and waits in a state of complete confidence.
Ah that balance between action and inaction…
Let action start with inaction.
As Gandhi started his days…
When yin precedes yang, all flows well.
Ah. Get into the receptive mode, and then follow the impulses.
That’s it. So return to peace, again and again and again across your day. Then, the Yes/No will speak to you clearly of its own accord, via felt-perception, navigating straight past your ‘confused’ mind.
I am returning to peace #PeaceBeWithYou
______
How comforting and settling is the gentle mantra of “Peace be with you” and “Peace be with me.” How releasing, how abundant and how generous of heart. How natural. How easily might we return to love if returning to peace was all we asked of ourselves.
I am blown away by this TPP passage I read this morning:
‘We fail in each attempt to obtain the unconditional attention we seek because unconditional love isn’t like money – isn’t something we earn. Love isn’t something achieved through merit. We don’t qualify for love. Love just is. Love is our birthright. Love is what we already are.
During childhood, the example of love set by our parents’ interaction with us, with each other, and with others becomes our primary definition of love. This is the automatic consequence of emotional imprinting. For this reason, whenever we seek to manifest an experience of love for ourselves as adults, we unconsciously manufacture a physical, mental, and emotional scenario designed to recreate the emotional resonance we experienced during our childhood interactions with our parents. This resonance doesn’t have to be comfortable or in any way pleasant, only similar and hence familiar.
For example, if as a child we received abuse when we required love, then the felt-resonance associated with abuse became part of our childhood definition of love. Consequently, whenever we feel a need for love as adults, we manifest an experience that unfolds in such a manner as to at some point include this abusive felt-resonance. This happens unconsciously, automatically. Why? Because this is the only way we know how to get what our imprinted condition leads us to assume love is. However, because of its conditions, the love we end up receiving hurts.
On a conscious level, we may then ask, “Why does this keep happening to me?” The reason we keep manifesting the same hurtful experiences is that we don’t know any better. This is the predicament emotional imprinting perpetuates. This is the open wound in the collective heart of humanity. This is why many of us assume love hurts. But hurting is a condition, whereas love isn’t – it’s a state.
Throughout The Presence Process, we are gradually taught how to perceive beyond the limitations of our imprint-driven interpretations. We are taught how to grow up emotionally. The consequence of this emotional development is that we begin lifting the conditions set in place by our childhood experience. As these conditions lift, we entertain a different perception of our experience. This different perception isn’t fueled by our unintegrated emotional charge, but is accessed through present moment awareness.
Confirmation we are awakening into present moment awareness comes in the insights we receive about the predicament of our shared human condition. One of these is that without exception, everyone we encounter, no matter what their behavior, is seeking the experience of unconditional love. Even if they are being hateful, what we are witnessing is a misguided cry for love.’ (The Presence Process 202-3)
Meanwhile, as I unpick my own inner child’s emotional imprinting, I am inspired, guided, mentored in LOVE by my children.
LV: showering me and the family with loving support and generosity of spirit. Handling her career like a boss, as she blends and shares her talents, creativity and genius, ever on her terms. Her current creative project is blowing me away!
ASV: yesterday, I attended an online panel discussion that she hosted for Disability History Month, on Disability and Academia. She has INSPIRED me. The panel (of disabled professors and students) was a collective that harnessed and celebrated all I know to be true about disability and neurodiversity – that the gifts inherent are exceptional. How about a Neurodiverse Mediators’ network? To include mental health too. It would allow me to Be Myself…. and then all the other ideas and projects I have will feel they can flow out… not trying to hide behind a 2D neurotypical fitting in mask….
Your thoughts?
Preach it. Sing it. Sizzle it. Love it. The Dyslexic Professor said: ‘We’re trying to get the R number down in the pandemic. We need to get the R number of disabled people UP in academia – we need to go viral to make the contribution we are here to make!’ You can do the same with neurodiversity – welcoming people in and out into society, loud and proud, offering the new style of thinking and being this world so needs: empathetic, empathic, creative, focussed, heartfelt. Go, sister! <3
***nearlycrieswithlove***