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| All photos are by Molly |
How Do We Keep Our Hearts Open
In Traumatic Times?
So many of us are struggling right now. We struggle with trying to make sense of the ever growing and chronic extreme chaos and violence, with keeping our minds and our hearts open, with understanding and not severing connections with loved ones who have such different perceptions and beliefs from our own, and with holding with compassion the enormity of the suffering in our nation, in our world, and in our own hearts and those we love and care about.
These are truly extraordinary times. I could not have imagined — at least not before installing a malignant narcissist in the White House — any President who would be openly threatening a whole nation with total and complete annihilation. Millions of us worldwide are horrified!
And I deeply resonate with these words of a longtime activist immigrant friend of mine in response to Trump's horrific and truly insane threats to Iran. My friend wrote: “This should be a day of self-reflection for the entire country. The fact that this nation produced someone who is willing to casually threaten genocide and that there are no institutional checks to this should be an indictment of the entire power structure. All of it. I feel a sense of contact shame for even being associated with the US right now.”
* * * * *
We Need to Embody Fierce Love
The one thing I know in my deepest being is that we need each other. We cannot live through these traumatic times in isolation and hope to sustain the strong connection with the wisdom of our hearts needed to not lose ourselves. We need the human support of those around and beyond us who truly get the horrors we are enduring and witnessing and who are courageously responding with wisdom and integrity rather than blindly adding to the harm. We need to be firmly rooted in our spiritual paths. We need to embody fierce love.
And this can be especially hard — and especially when the pull can be strong to return damning judgment, dehumanization, and hatred with more of the same. Millions are wrestling with this — how to respond and not react, how to embody wise speech and wise actions, and how to not be pulled into adding to the dangerous delusions and divisions which are so incredibly prolific in America today.
Pervasive violence and the delusions that they are rooted in is also not something new to our nation. What comes to me are the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. that he made in 1967 exactly one year to the day before he was assassinated: "The greatest purveyor of violence in the world: My own Government, I can not be Silent."
How do we not be silent while also not adding to the violence, both subtle or blatant, in our relationships, our communities, our nation, and beyond? How do we not hate and dehumanize those who inflict hatred and suffering onto others?
I've been asking these questions for a long time now. And one thing that comes to me is how vitally important it is to understand the perpetrators of violence. This has certainly been true for me beginning with understanding the violence of my once malignantly narcissistic mother whose mental illness played such a large role in the suicide of my twin brother many years ago. I needed to understand, not condone, but understand the roots of my mother's illness in order to free myself from the poisons of bitterness, rage, hatred, and delusion.
* * * * *
May
Our Light Be What We Bring
To
Our World
Many
years ago I was part of a women’s group who visited a newly opened
facility in Portland whose commitment was to empowering women who’d
been street workers to get off the streets. And Sister Cathy’s
words will always stay with me. She spoke of the one thing that was
needed more than anything else: “To be a heart with ears.”
And
that is what is so deeply needed — to be hearts with ears, to be
connected with the wisdom of our hearts, to increasingly live with
undefended hearts.
Anyone
who has absorbed a great deal of ancestral and cultural trauma, and
who isn't embracing and healing and unburdening those legacy burdens
in an ongoing way, will have a very difficult time opening to truly
seeing the pain and suffering of others. Our inner resistance
is mirrored in our outer resistance.
Creating
safe spaces to heal our individual and collective trauma is so deeply
needed. And this healing and growing consciousness begins with each
and every one of us. I need to emphasize that without understanding
our own deeper painful beliefs and experiences and wounding, and
holding ourselves with compassion, we cannot be available to
understand others and the pain they are often tragically stuck in.
And without that awareness, we are much more vulnerable and likely to
return the disconnection we witness in others with their own hearts
with a disconnection with our own.
So
many are asking "how can they keep
supporting ___________ (fill in the blank)?" To
countless humans, it is abundantly clear that great harm and trauma
and violence is being inflicted on our human sisters and brothers and
nonhuman planetary relatives and the Earth herself. We ask ourselves
how anyone can still not see the genocide in Gaza, the brutality of
ICE and immigration practices and policies, the insanity of the Iran
war, the Epstein files and the epidemics of misogyny, the continuous
and catastrophic climate crises, and on and on.
The
answers that I have found in this devastating individual and
collective blindness were first discovered in the depths of my own
ignorance, indoctrination, and illusions. So humbling, so humbling...
And
out of this recognition and taking ownership and responsibility to
passionately seek what needs healing within myself, I've come to
compassionately understand both the obstacles to our awakening and
also a sacred path of heart. Because haven't we all been
impacted by the imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy
that has been with us since the earliest days of colonialism,
slavery, and the genocide of the Indigenous Peoples? We have.
For
those of us who have been profoundly blessed with rooting into a path
of awakening from our illusions, it is the consciousness and the
fierce love embodied in our Light that is so vital to the well-being
of us all. May this compassion and kindness, this Love, this Light be
what we offer to each other and our world.
Bless
us all, no exceptions,
🙏💜
Molly
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