Dear fellow travelers,
Last week I received several nudges from Spirit indicating that taking out an online subscription to the New York Times was in order. This was quite a departure from my
customary preferences in several ways. Firstly, I prefer reading the printed page, and secondly, for a number of years I have rarely read newspapers or listened to the news on radio or TV. A bit of serendipity was that last month Bonnie and I enrolled as senior scholars at the local Ivy Tech Community College which allowed us to sign up to take Introductory American Sign Language tuition free. My student ID allowed me to subscribe to the NYT for $1/week.
I am well aware that I give energy to where I focus my attention, so from the start I recognized that it would be a challenge to read every day about the the injustices, death and destruction that humans visit upon each other and Mother Earth in a way that would not reinforce the underlying energies. It's been an interesting and not entirely easy journey that I would like to share. I now see the experience as
building on the personal energetic shift I described in Great Shift Blog #33 (On Living in the Moment and Unity Consciousness).
Since the presidential election last year I have become well-practiced in observing the news, when I did encounter it, with an open heart while maintaining a sense of Divine neutrality. At the same time it has been heart-breaking to see the dismantling of environmental protections and programs that serve the less-well-off, and the effects of violence in many forms. Now that I
am reading the news daily, with the attendant daily feeling of heart-break, I realize that this is integral to my own experience of unity consciousness, a way of reaffirming my own humanness and my connection with all of humanity. As I began to read horrific reports of Buddhists killing Muslims in Myanmar and seemingly infinite shades of insanity and hard-heartedness by prominent political, business, religious, and media figures I found that simply keeping an open heart and a
viewpoint of Divine neutrality wasn't enough. It took me a while to figure out that there was a missing ingredient, and that was to consciously add the energy of love to the mix. This seemed a challenge to sustain, story after story, until I realized that there was another missing ingredient. In my last blog I described an energetic shift that I experienced:
The shift I felt on
August 14 was so startling that I am still finding words to describe what it feels like. I no longer feel any sense of boundaries between my energy field and everything around me, while at the same time I feel strongly grounded in the physical plane...This feeling of expansiveness/lack of boundaries extends to the farthest distance I am able to sense.
When I described the feeling of expansiveness as extending to the
farthest distance I am able to sense, until i started a practice of reading the New York Times daily, the sense of expansiveness extended to a distance that I could sense in my immediate geographic vicinity. Today I realized that the stories of people around the world who are suffering (and there are inspiring stories as well) give me a lens through which the lack of boundaries between my own energy field and everything around me spans the geographic distance and creates an
immediate connection anywhere in the world. With that feeling of connection it becomes easier to add the energy of love in my heart that encompasses everyone involved, the victim and the victimizer.
