Personal Reflections on "12 Years a Slave" - It's Horrors and It's Gifts

 Just Imagine

Friday night Ron and son Matt and I saw "12 Years a Slave." I resisted going for some time to see this film because I knew it would be heart wrenching. And it was.

Just imagine if we all had the courage to go to the darkest places inside ourselves and our families and our histories and our culture and the world. Just imagine if we each set an intention to look more deeply, to explore our part in the sorrows, horrors, cruelties, injustices, and inhumane belief systems, judgments, betrayals, oppressions, projections, prejudices within ourselves and each other and this beautiful planet we all share. Imagine if we each committed and renewed each day the intention to be in this world with our eyes and minds and hearts open... open to both our wounds and to the profound wisdom, joy, beauty, love and compassion which the doorway of our wounds offers us?

We live in a world and a culture which often gives the message to turn away from our pain and suffering and that of others, which then serves to feed our individual and collective despair,  depression, denial, and delusions. Keep busy, be happy, go shopping, pick up a drink or pop a pill, blame someone, fix someone, join the cult of powerlessness, look away, look away, look away.

Just imagine if instead we heard and spread messages which nourished mindfulness rather than ignorance within ourselves, one another, and all beings. Just imagine if we committed to a practice of recognizing, embracing, healing, and transforming our fears and judgments and the many faces of our suffering and that of other beings. Just imagine how our  own hearts and the heart of the world would expand rather than contract if we each chose to become mindful of our own wounds and if we consciously chose to touch our sorrows and fears and the ways in which we have harmed ourselves and others with a great heart of compassion. Separation from our pain and our joy and that of other beings would be transformed into a deep sense of awareness, connectedness, compassion. We would awaken.

I fully recognize that this path is difficult. Yet, my experience has also taught me that it takes just as much energy to stay asleep as it does to wake up. And without the intention to awaken, we remain ignorant of our part in the suffering in the world. We also remain blind to the suffering within our own hearts. We cannot open to our pain and our joy without opening to that of other beings. It has been a miraculous journey for me to move over the past 30 years from the delusion of feeling deeply separate and alone to the experience of our interconnectedness. Thích Nhất Hạnh refers to this as Interbeing. I love that word and how deeply it touches my heart and soul.

I am profoundly grateful for 12 Years a Slave and all that has the potential to break our hearts wide open. This is the gift that I have discovered within my own personal tragedies and those of the world. And without the courage to move toward that which horrifies us, without doing our own individual and collective shadow work, racism will continue, as will all forms of prejudice and oppression and the illusion of "us" versus an "Other" to be judged and condemned... or not even noticed. How many of us are even mindful of what we eat each day and the suffering of other beings? Can we learn to care, or to care more deeply? Can we increase our commitment to be brave? And aware? My belief is that if we are alive and breathing air, there is more work we each can do to grow in consciousness.

Without the courage and commitment to embrace our blind spots, fears, delusions, cultural conditioning, and the many split off parts of ourselves, the pain and ignorance that manifests in so many ways will continue unabated. Wars will continue as will cutting down rainforests, factory farms, nuclear power plants, rape, domestic violence, denial of global warming, child abuse and neglect, addictions of all forms, insatiable greed, human trafficking, 25,000+ children dying daily of preventable poverty related causes, the daily suicide of 22 American veterans, the obscene upward redistribution of wealth, institutional poverty, sweat shops and other forms of exported slavery, and all forms of violence toward humans and other beings and our Sacred Earth Mother. Etc., etc., etc.

Another world is possible. Just imagine if we each could be inspired by the breathtaking courage of Lupita Nyong and Chiwetel Ejiofor and all those who brought 12 Years a Slave to life. Just imagine how different our world would be if we each made a vow to go inward and become mindful... mindful of what we each carry inside and how our wounds, our pain and suffering, our Sacred being connects us with the wounds and suffering and with the amazing strength and wisdom and breathtaking beauty and love that is threaded through us all? It is my belief that we each hold the seeds of consciousness and compassion within ourselves. This is the beauty of our true nature. We each have the capacity to awaken, to remember and recognize the Sacred within our precious selves and that of all of life.

And in seeing the Sacred within all a sense of profound caring  and compassion would grow and grow within each and every one of us. And that would be what we spread in the world.

Please, if you already haven't, go see 12 Years a Slave or whatever it is that may break your heart wide open again and again and again. Courage is contagious. As is remembering what we have forgotten. We are all connected, we are all in this together. Another world is possible.

Namaste,

Molly

Lupita Nyong'o celebrates winning Best Performance by 
an Actress in a Supporting Role award for '12 Years a Slave' in the 

press room during the 86th Academy Awards on March 2nd, 2014 

in Hollywood, California (AFP, Joe Klamar)