WHY WE CREATE WAR WITH EVERYTHING!
Last night, at the full moon, I gave to the fire ‘enemy consciousness’ because I have come to believe that this kind of thinking is at the heart of the situation we are finding ourselves in right now. Why do we need enemies? Why do we make war? We have had enemies for eons.. when I was a child it was the Russians who were coming, before that the Germans, the Japanese, the Communists, in recent times it’s the terrorists, even now it’s the governments, or the politics, or even governments behind the governments. Whatever we label ‘enemy’ it seems we have given ourselves the right to kill, to vanquish, to be the winner… and the ‘opposition’ , the ‘enemy’, the loser.
This is a fight for power over.. and we seem not to have understood yet that when we fight the enemy we end up becoming the very thing we are fighting. And in truth it really doesn’t matter which side you are on.. the end result is the same… we can claim victory over… but the war is never ever finished.. another enemy shows up and we either see ourselves as the winners or the losers, but I believe that with this kind of thinking everyone loses because we are becoming afraid of our own shadow! And the only winner is the ego, but the ego is never satisfied, and seeks more enemies to vanquish, in a vain attempt to prove it’s worth.
It seems the same with these pandemic diseases… polio, smallpox, cholera, Spanish flu, aids, sars, swine flu, bird flu, Ebola.. etc. etc. These are pandemic viruses that get ever more virulent as time goes on and even now with this latest virus we find ourselves fighting for breath… which actually means fighting for life.
Could it be that this invisible ‘enemy’ like all ‘enemies’ is here to teach us something about where we are right now in the realm of things, what we have become, and if we aren’t awake now its teaching us where we might be heading?
When we make enemies it’s because we are afraid. Instead of realizing that the fear is teaching us something about ourselves, we put our fear onto something that we can ‘vanquish’ , and when we win we can feel good about ourselves, satisfied that we are the winners. However if we understood the true interconnectedness of all life, we would know that what we are fighting is ourselves.. it just looks like someone else, or something else. Whatever we imagine that we have vanquished simply shows up again and again until we finally get the message. Will we ever get the message?
This invisible enemy called corona virus is a great leveler… what it’s telling us that we cannot control it… it has spread across our world in a way that we have never seen before. We are in the grip of fearful thinking that is spreading like wild fire, even quicker than the virus itself.
Our current human response is to kill it before it kills us.. we have made it the enemy that we must fight… rather than seeing the gift that is staring us in the face right now.
AND YET…..
Have you noticed how beautiful the world is becoming, look outside your window, even open your window and listen to the stillness, the quiet. If you’re fortunate you might even hear the bird song begin to seep into your awareness. In the throes of death and destruction, life is still happening in the natural world that we all belong to, that is our home. The trees are in full blossom, spring is happening, and for this life I am deeply grateful. What a blessing is this time. Home.. home with yourself, or with your family. Mother Earth is healing herself from our propensity to think we can control her. Something else has taken over.. and I wonder what it will look like in the time to come.
Today I believe it will come from understanding that the world is benign, and that we are the creators of our world. Every thought we have, becomes our reality. Every belief we hold will create our world. We have a real opportunity now, more than ever, as the world finally comes to a stand still… to decide what we want to create, not from a place of desire, or not enoughness, but from our sense of interconnectedness with all life… and with our deepest needs and values as a human species at the heart of our creations.
We are really being tested with this virus right now: we are being bombarded with fear inducing images, that feed our fearful thoughts, and infect our ability to think straight..this isn’t helpful to our health and our immune systems. We are being tested to let go of fear and come home to our true nature which is love… trust.. joy.. and beyond all of that is grace. The grace that comes from knowing that we are safe.. and that we are part of an infinite cosmos that we may not understand but from which we cannot fall or fail.
SECOND CHAKRA
I want to focus here on the second chakra which is where I believe that the survival instinct lives, and how we can learn from this, and come into balance so that we will have no need of enemies in this world, or any other. It’s the abode of Jaguar in this tradition.. and instinct belongs to the realm of jaguar.. as does intuition. But we can often confuse instinct and intuition.. so I’m looking at both here
INSTINCT
Instinct is a survival mechanism that has been very useful to us as a species. But can we really trust our instincts? Because they can also be ‘off’… especially in places where we are not healed, where we have experienced a trauma… then our instincts may be true only to the extent that they are related to our survival. Our instincts can be useful when we are in a life/death situation and have a need to protect ourselves… its a knee jerk reaction that sends us into fight/flight/freeze/faint.. but we do need to do a reality check before we make any decisions based on those survival instincts.
When our second chakra is out of balance we head straight for the drama triangle, we see the world through the eyes of prey or predator… we become the victims of circumstances, prey to to anything we see as a threat to our survival. We become prey to those who would seek to gain power over us. Our personal power ebbs away leaving us diminished, and we are in danger of giving our power over to those who we believe are more able than we. Our ability to make rational decisions leaves us and we use old habits that might have helped us to survive in the past… and so we keep repeating old patterns.
When we are fearful, our world seems chaotic and one of the strategies we use to regain some order is to seek to control everything. This is where we are today. Fear has taken over our world, and rules are being imposed upon us… rules that give us the illusion of safety in an uncertain world. We are human beings and our deepest need is to connect, but we are being asked to stay separate which is creating more fear. These rules are making us afraid of each other, so that we don’t know who or what we can trust; this is very dangerous for our world.
Fear can drive people to addictions of all kinds. Addictions are strategies that we use to tranquilise our painful feelings, but more than that they come from a sense of not belonging. And at the deepest level, we have stopped belonging to Mother Earth. We have come so far from our connection to our natural world, the nature of us, from our interdependence of all life. We left behind Mother Earth in search of more, and quicker, and better. We stopped belonging to anything significant. We stepped away from our sense of tribe, or family and we began to compete with each other, and fight for resources that we thought we lacked. Even our personal relationships have become power struggles, a desire to get rather than to give what we feel we are missing in our lives. Trying to fill the void with things was never going to satisfy that longing for connection.
What are we missing? We are missing our connection to the earth, and to the cycles of time, and the rhythms of nature. We have let ourselves be allured by the ego desires and wants, and we forgot that we all inhabit this same garden, and that there is enough for all if we all cared enough for each other, rather than for the self.
When our second chakra is out of balance we experience the world as predatory, and we end up with adversarial relationships based on fear. Enemy consciousness takes over. What we fear we must fight. When we believe that we can control all of life, Jaguar lets us know categorically that we are not in control… and even from this thought of not being in control, we can dive into chaos.
We have resisted for so long sliding into the worldwide chaos that we have created. We have shored up our world over and over, keeping things the same, not changing even how we change. How we keep control is by more controls, more rules, more health and safety, so much so that we have forgotten what is real and true. That we are not in control… that we are of the earth, that we were put here to care take this planet… that we are participating in creation every moment with our thoughts, our beliefs and our actions.
All this is a reaction to fear based thinking that has driven us to the brink…. the edge of the world as we know it… now we are being asked to come back home… to recallibrate… to reflect on how we got here… and maybe we will start to use our intuition instead of instinct.. because in the quiet, still place beyond fearful thinking, our intuition will speak to us. Dropping the story that says we are victims will be paramount now.
When the indigenous peoples prophesied these times, they had no concept of 5G, or politics, or technology, or any of the things we are ‘blaming’ this virus on.. they all simply saw a time when the world would turn the right way up. There would be turmoil.. yes, but this turmoil heralds a great change that will bring our world into balance once more. I have faith in this prophecy, but i also know that healing the old wounds that created this separation is vital to our wellbeing as a species… and the second chakra holds the key… we can become the war monger or the warrior of the rainbow… it’s a choice we are all facing right now. Cleaning out the accumulation of trauma, personal and collective from the second chakra is the key to this. We were meant to go through this, and it’s our faith and trust in something greater than our ego that will help us to navigate these stormy seas.
INTUITION, FAITH, TRUST AND A NEW MAP
When the second chakra is clear and in balance, we can connect clearly with our intuition, an inner knowing that tells us the time is right to act, the time is right to move, the time to plant new seeds, the time to harvest, the time to rest… all these come from our intuition which speaks to us not from a fearful place but from deep within. When our second chakra is in balance our intuition is true, and based not on moving away from fear, but on edging our way towards our destiny.
When we trust our intuition we have no need to control anything because it’s an inner knowing that is deep and unshakeable. This is our true power. This intuition has nothing to do with will, or force.. or overpowering another to get your own way , it’s a conviction within that we are exactly where we need to be, doing what comes naturally… without a need to impress, or acting out, or reacting from any other unmet need. It’s a deep and unshakeable wisdom within that compels us in the direction of our dreams.
When our second chakra is in balance we have no need to create enemies that we can fight. When we perceive something or someone as an enemy we are simply being shown the unhealed place within us. It’s an opportunity to heal, to grow and to come back to our centre, return to balance and harmony within.
When we know and accept our humanness in all its guises from the worst to the best of us, we accept others with compassion, and see that the outside world always reflects back to us the condition of our love.
When we seek to destroy another, we come to understand that it is the part of ourselves that we don’t accept that we want to annihilate. We fear difference, we fear what we don’t know, we fear what we don’t understand, we fear the inevitability of death itself… the biggest unknown journey that we will ever undertake.
And yet, when we have looked death in the face, when we know our own shadow aspects, then there is nothing left to defend… nothing to hide, nothing to lose.. death is the ultimate loss and yetwe understand that it is an intrinsic part of life.
Every day we can ask ourselves ‘what needs to die in order that I might live?’ . What old pattern, what old belief that i’m attached to, what thoughts am i thinking that aren’t serving me, what feelings am i hanging on to that i could change in an instant if I chose? This is a really useful practice, particularly for the second chakra to be cleared. Thoughts/feelings/images of the past.. are rarely helpful for the future of our lives. These are the enemies within… that we project outwards in order to heal.. but instead of healing we make them our enemy and then we fear them… creating a continuous cycle … a vicious cycle that keeps us victim of the past, and caught in the consciousness that says that there is an enemy… that we must win at all costs. This is survival of the ego.. that Edges Out God.
The animals and the birds don’t make enemies of each other, they co exist and without intervention from us they co create perfect balance and harmony with all life. The birds don’t compete with who can sing the loudest, or the best! The cherry blossom doesn’t push to become the first to bloom! Nature has its own rhythm and there’s no competition, or need to have power over. Mother Nature is her own power just by being.
When our second chakra is balanced, we have a deep trust in the cycles of life, death and rebirth. We understand that everything that lives will inevitably die, this is the one true certainty that we know! We cannot avoid death… any more than we can control life.
When our second chakra is clear and in balance we are, as the jaguar, fearless. We know instinctively that we belong to Mother Earth… we trust that we are part of the great cycles of life and that she will provide as long as we take care of her. Reciprocity is our guiding principle at this place: what we send out into the world, we will also receive back, what we sow we will harvest. Gratitude is the key: gratitude and appreciation for all the gifts and abundance that is available to us once we step out of the place of victim.
When we see what we are harvesting right now, we understand that we have sown this into our world, we can even then be grateful for the opportunity to see what has not yet been healed, and look to heal the part that we are playing in the drama that is unfolding.
When our second chakra is in balance we understand the interdependence of all life… and when we know we are interdependent we have no need to take more than we need. We know that our interconnectedness means that our every action creates a chain reaction…that ripples out into our world.
Intuition is our ‘inner teacher’ and comes from our inner sense..our innocence. Not touched by our wounded self, our intuition comes through clean and clearest when we are still and quiet, when we are meditating, or when we are out in nature, at a sit spot, or walking in the forest.
Right now it’s our challenge to listen to our intuition .. .even as our instincts are on red alert.
Here’s our opportunity then to do our personal work…. there is a quiet all over our world… a deep stillness which gives us a chance to recallibrate ourselves back to the slower vibrations of Mother Earth. We might ask ourselves how can I respond to what’s happening now, what is being asked of me right now? What needs healing? What can old story can I drop right now? And let our intuition speak to us in the quiet space between the notes.
Our intuition is a response to what’s happening (rather than instinct which is a reaction) Our intuition can offer us a deeper perspective… opening to our intuition allows our imagination to flow in the direction of our dreams, of what’s possible for us as humans, rather than what’s probable, or even inevitable.
So our second chakra needs to be clear in order for us to function from this balanced place. To drop this enemy consciousness, to stop fighting, or defending, and begin to dream something new, we need to be able to stand in our power… and by that i don’t mean force, or will.. both of which are violence; but the kind of power that comes from knowing we are held by Mother Earth.. and to seek to reconnect at that level… to the cycles of life and death and rebirth and not be afraid of either one.
The mayan calendar, which is a map of human consciousness, was very clear.. we always get what we need before we need it. We discovered fire just before the ice age.. what a relief it was to know this simple fact! I’m looking at what we needed to know before the time we are in right now.. and i see that permaculture came into being just in time for us to re-design the ways that we work with the earth. By listening to the land, by learning how nature herself works, we can learn so much more, with faith and trust, about beauty and the sacred way of being. We are learning to develop a mutually beneficial approach to Mother Earth, to honor her and re-think how we work with her. We are beginning to realize that we are not in control .. and that our fear and control issues have led us to the brink of disaster. Sustainability, respect and reciprocity are the keys to our future well being as a species. and we have already been given the tools to make this a reality. Our imagination now is really important going forward.. imagine the kind of world we want to live in, imagine the ind of world we want to leave behind us… imagine it in detail.. and make sure it meets all our needs as brothers and sisters united as one family called ‘the people of the earth’ , imagine that going forward in time…. what will that world look like.. I wonder!
