A Healing Perspective for the New Year

At the beginning of a new year, it is good to broaden our perspectives.  So I have a couple of armchairs up on the moon and I invite you to come sit there with me for the next few minutes. As we settle in to our comfortable armchairs, there before us is our home—a beautiful blue-green jewel of a planet that is dancing through oceans of space.  Now let’s zoom our attention in for a closer look so we can see the depth of her exquisite creativity—mountain meadows full of wild flowers, majestic icebergs, eagles soaring, raging storms, cascading waterfalls that can take your breath away, jungles full of colorful parrots, and all kinds of baby creatures playing.

If we look really closely, we will see that most human beings are walking around with cloud banks of thoughts surrounding their heads.  Rather than being here for the amazing creativity and beauty of Life, they are totally absorbed in their thoughts.  They are living ‘mind’ rather than living ‘Life.’ And if you could hear their thoughts, you would see that they are usually struggling with Life.

Now, with your attention, zoom into exactly where you are on this planet.  As you look down upon yourself reading this newsletter, you can see and acknowledge that sometimes you too have a cloud bank around your head.  This addiction to struggle was conditioned inside of you when you were very young, but you don’t have to live your Life being run by this conditioning. Imagine your cloud bank thinning. See yourself recognizing that you are not the struggle that fills your head all day long!  And see the joy begin to dance through your whole being as you open again to Life.

Now imagine the possibility that more and more people will see through their cloud banks and connect with Life again.  This is not only possible, but absolutely necessary. If we look closely at the Earth from our moon perspective, we can also recognize the suffering on this planet—people killing other people, children dying of starvation, human beings doing unspeakable acts to themselves and others in the name of self-hatred and others drowning in a sea of despair.  This all comes from people lost in the greed, shame, hatred, entitlement, anger and fear of the cloud bank of struggle.

Nelson Mandela has been one of the most important way-showers of this new stage of evolution.  Even though he experienced great suffering, he lived the truth that nothing except the heart will heal our beleaguered planet —nothing except inclusion rather than exclusion, compassion rather than judgment, connection rather than disconnection, kindness rather than indifference. As we begin to see through our own cloud banks, we can become a healing presence in the world, even when we are at the grocery store! How do we do that? Through our hearts. The only power that is greater than the chaos of the cloud bank is the heart.

This is the time of the heart, and the most important person to touch with your heart is you!  You are a unique and exquisite creation of Life.  There has never been anyone like you and there never will be again.  And you not only have many wonderful qualities, but you are also nutty as a fruitcake! There is a wonderful Zen quote in my book, Belonging to Life:  “Freedom comes when you are without anxiety about non-perfection.”  Take a moment and let that in. Nothing less than freedom comes when you can let go of being somebody that needs to be different in order to be okay.  There is no such thing as ‘getting it all together.’  We are all works in progress until our last breath.

What would it be like for this year if your intention were to meet yourself in your own heart rather than setting an intention to change something about your life? This means letting go of resisting, judging, hating and fearing all the parts of you that you don’t like. This could include your anxiety, your meanness, your shame, your physical pain, your insecurity, your aging, your greed, your compulsion (or maybe all of them!). One of the most startling realizations I came across on the path back to myself and back to Life is that there is absolutely nothing inside of me to be ashamed of or afraid of.  And this is true for you, too.  Or as Jeff Foster, author of Life Without a Center, once said, “Fall in love with this perfectly divine, very human mess that you are!”

If you are willing to let go of being at war with your experience and instead meet it with your heart, know that this will not only bring forth the greatest healing you have ever known, but this healing will also touch your family, the people at work, your fellow shoppers, and even the people driving down the freeway with you. For everyone who discovers how to be guided by the healing presence of the heart becomes a healing force on this planet, helping others to see through their cloud banks so they, too, can join the exquisite dance of Life.

Be light, Mary