It is very tumultuous times in the US. We are facing the most important election in our history. One that will determine if we stop being a democracy and become an oligarchy instead. It is very unclear what will happen, and this is happening in the midst of a global pandemic uncontrolled in the US due to lack of leadership.
I feel like I have been distracted from my professional life as a psychotherapist, distracted from my clients. So today in Meeting I was praying for my clients. For me what this meant was to hold each of them one by one in my attention and imagine them whole. There were some clear themes that emerged of what seemed need to be and feel whole: To know that one is loveable and loved, to be able to lay down the injuries of that past to come fully into the present, to be able to self sooth and come into the peace of our universe, to be able to set boundaries so no harm comes and to be able to not have to try to hard, to relax into the universe as it is.
This made me think of quote (misattributed to Nelson Mandela but actually from Marianne Williamson) that has long been on my bulletin board:
"You're a child of God. Your playing small doesn't serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insurece.around you. We were born to manifest the gory of God that is with us; it's in everyone. As we let our Light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our fear, our presence automatically liberates others."
That quote for me is about living into the bigness of who are as a Child of God. Who we really are before and after injury.
Recently when Trump was admitted to the hospital for Covid, I noticed a wonderful space opened up for me. It is was not the space created by rejoicing in his illness or potential death, but it was a space in which I was able to imagine for the first time in a long time my country not controlled or diminished or manipulated by him. It was a space where he is no longer President and no longer can create havoc. There was much relief and peace and possibility in that space. What I quickly came to realize was that whether he left the hospital, alive or dead, that it was I who was in charge of that space. It was a space I could choose to stay in and or to dwell with, or I could in fear return to a universe controlled by Trump.
This makes me think of the words in the Peace Testimony: "We utterly deny outward strife and tumult. We live in the Life and Power that takes away the occasion for all wars". Think of that it is a space, an energy that is not war, the opposite of war, a place without outward strife and tumult. And we live into that space. It too is a choice as one could live in the space where there is war and tumult.
I am not talking here about some Pollyanna world where we close our eyes and do not see or feel war, or Trump, or the injuries my clients have suffered. I am simply saying that in the God space there is another set of possibilities. Ones with more wholeness, more peace, more possibilities for growth, healing and justice.
