How Do We Make Change?

BLOG 3.1.11

Photo from Chapter 8 of Anodea Judith's Waking the Global Heart

How Do We Make Change?

One way that change happens – and certainly not the fun way -- is the path of adversity. That’s when we get beaten so far down that we surrender. An alcoholic hits bottom; we run out of money; the sea level rises, oil sources dry up, the economy tanks, or civilization collapses. There’s lots of  “doomers” out there who say that’s how it’s going to happen, that humans don’t change anything until they absolutely have to. From this perspective, humanity is headed straight toward its collective dark night of the soul.

Such dark nights are a time of deep listening. So many people I meet these days are in a state of confusion, not knowing quite what to do right now. The “I don’t know” means we are open to ideas, instruction, guidance. A collective “We don’t know” would mean we have to listen to each other, to the earth, and to the divine intelligence that is actually running the place. Dark nights lead to deep systemic change.

There’s another way change happens that’s a lot brighter and easier. It’s simply having a better idea. We didn’t need a failure of the typewriter industry to switch to desktop computers. Nor did main frame computers have to self-destruct for us to buy laptops or smartphones. We just self-selected for superior performance. When small groups of people get together and start doing things differently -- and are successful at it --  people around them start taking notice. They look over and say: “I want what she’s having!”

The yoga movement that’s sweeping the world is a case in point. You go to a party and run into a friend you haven’t seen in five years. She looks great, fit and shining with light. You ask: “Wow, you look good. What have you been doing?” It might be yoga, or it might be a good diet, meditation, or a new kind of snake oil, but it’s the success that makes you want to try it. As new ideas form on the edge and people find benefit, these ideas grow into movements. What works expands and evolves. People want to join. 

In Tapscott and William’s book Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything they show how companies that collaborate are making more money than those that have full time R & D personnel. Wikipedia out-performs the old encyclopedia sets. Countries like Germany are shifting their taxes from income to ecotax and have created a green industry with 250,000 new jobs. 

What if there were a subset of the UN called the Union of Peace Nations?  If a nation was willing to get rid of nuclear weapons, keep their military down to a small fraction of their national budget, agree to human rights principles, and other such things, they could have protection from other countries. Meanwhile these countries could balance their budget, rebuild their schools, give their citizens healthcare, develop green technologies. They could prosper and be a model for others who would then want to “get in on the club.”

What it takes is showing that something works better, then getting more people involved. As it grows, we get better at what we’re doing. We get more visible. We’re not knocking anything down, we’re simply galloping beyond it.

Photo/Artwork by Will Zero

As Mark Gafni said at the World Spirituality Center opening, we’re transcending, which is ending the trance.

Anodea Judith
April 8, 2011

FROM YANGXIETY TO YINSIGHT: THE BALANCE OF THE EQUINOX

BLOG 3.3


FROM YANGXIETY TO YINSIGHT:
THE BALANCE OF THE EQUINOX

Well, friends, here it is. The long-awaited beginning of spring and the point of sacred balance between the dark and the light. As Uranus leaves Pisces, where it’s been lurking for the last seven years in Neptunian formlessness, it now moves into Aries, the start of the zodiac, signifying the start of a whole new cycle, with new fire and focus. No wonder we’re getting earthquakes and threats of meltdowns. The fires of transformation are upon us. But how do we ride all this energy with balance and equanimity?

Too much fire can be too much yang, and with all the radiation panic, it seems the whole culture is suffering from yangxiety. Most people are yanged out – too much to do, too much stimulation, moving too fast, and face it, too much masculine paradigm superimposing itself on the natural world.

Isn’t the threat of nuclear radiation pouring into the air, water, and earth near one of the largest and most productive cities in the world enough cause to make us all stop and think about what we are doing and where we are going? (as if we didn’t already have enough reasons). If this doesn’t do it, what will it take?

What we need for balance is a little yin-sight. Slow down, take some quiet time to reflect, have a nice long bath and think things through. Emptiness softens, informs, allows new things to come into being, and creates ease. And who couldn’t use just a little more ease in their life as we head round the bend into the future? If Springtime signifies rebirth as well as balance, it may be that balance is necessary for rebirth.

There are many things out of balance in our world, but none quite so long-standing and globally pervasive as the imbalance between masculine and feminine. Here at the Spring Equinox, the Greek Goddess of the Underworld, Persephone, returns to the light and brings back the flowers and greenery—and with them, food for the people and hope for the future. She’s had a long hard winter, birthing the souls of the dead back to life again and living under Hades rules.

So let’s give Her some room to distribute her magnificence. Let’s take time to smell the flowers and remember the miracle of spring. Let’s combat global warming with some chill space – less driving, less doing, less stuff. Let the feminine lead a little more in your life – your own feminine side, or the women in your life. You may be surprised that your life gets a little easier as corners turn to curves, hard edges to softness, and that dry job gets a little juicier.

If this yang civilization collapses, we won’t be able to go anywhere or do much of anything. The yin will then predominate, and we’ll be out of balance again in a different direction. So we may as well do it now, while the Divine Partnership that gives birth to all possibilities is still possible.

At birth all people are soft and yielding.

At death they are hard and stiff.

All green plants are tender and yielding.

At death they are brittle and dry.

When hard and rigid

We consort with death.

When soft and flexible,We affirm greater life.

Lao Tzu

Anodea Judith

March 24, 2011

Grounding and Manifesting

The liberating current, ever moving toward higher consciousness, is the pathway most commonly associated with the Chakra System. Until recently there has been less said about sending our energy downward, into the Earth, along the current of Manifestation. This is often seen as less spiritual and, therefore, less worthy of our time and attention. Too many spiritual paths ignore the importance of grounding, at their own peril.

Imagine if you went out into your garden and examined the little plants reaching for the sun. Would you help those plants grow to the sky faster by pulling them up from their roots? No, this would best occur by encouraging the plant to have deep roots, well watered, with nourishing soil.

So, too, our spiritual growth is nourished by a healthy ground.

Grounding is a process of dynamic contact with the Earth, with its edge, boundaries, and limitations. It allows us to become solidly real—present in the here and now—and dynamically alive with the vitality that comes from the ground of all being. While mechanically our feet may touch the ground with every step, this contact is empty if we are cut off from the feelings in our legs and feet. Grounding involves opening the lower chakras, merging with gravity, and descending deeply into the vehicle of the body.

Without grounding, we are unstable; we lose our center, fly off the handle, get swept off our feet, or daydream in a fantasy world. We lost our ability to contain, to have, or to hold. Natural excitement, charge, or prana, becomes dissipated, diluted, and ineffectual. When we lose our ground, we threaten our health, and appear to be not all the way “here.”

The name of the first chakra, Muladhara, means root support. Our ground anchors the very roots for which this chakra is named. Through our roots, we gain nourishment, power, stability, and growth. Without this connection we are separated from nature, separated from our biological source. Cut off from our source, we lose our path. Many people who cannot find their true path in life have simply not yet found their ground – the place where the feet meet the path. They need to look down and see where they are walking, rather than up in the clouds.

Our roots extend downward from our guts—and relate to the instinctual feelings hard-wired into the nervous system through millions of years of evolution. These instincts were designed to keep us alive and healthy. They inform us when we need to rest, eat or stop eating, exercise, or run from danger.

In today’s urban world, there are few people who are naturally grounded. Our language and cultural values reflect the superiority of the high at the expense of the low. Yet we say we get Up-tight, Up-set, and messed-Up. Maybe it’s time we let down a little!

In an alienated and ungrounded culture where most values do not favor the body or its pleasures, we develop pain. Our bodies hurt after a day at the computer or a day of driving. The stress of competition and fast living do not give us a chance to rest and renew, or to process that hurt, to release it. As we develop pain, we become, ironically, more resistant to grounding, for it puts us initially, in touch with our pain. Eventually that pain becomes disease. No wonder we have a health care crisis, when we have been taught to ignore our bodies!

Yoga is a way to connect with the body in a profound manner. Yet some yogis are still ungrounded, instead, responding as we often do in a mechanical society, to mechanical commands from an instructor to move this way or place your body that way. If a student listens more to the mechanical instructions than to the inner prana of their own body and its limitations, they can get hurt, by stretching too far, or moving improperly for their level of skill.

To ground means that the first chakra at the base of the spine must connect to the Earth through the channels of the two legs. Grounding involves opening these channels so that they can carry the excess charge (stress) from the torso down to the earth, and can carry earth energy upward into the body. Pushing into the ground gets the whole process started. In this way the first chakra paradox is that “we must move downward in order to wake up.”

Coming down from the crown chakra, the manifesting current takes our ideas, which begin in consciousness, down into our vision, then through communication into relationship, fueling our will with passion and purpose and bringing the idea into the density and completion at the earth plane, where we experience our dreams as reality. We must open the downward current to effectively manifest.

We need to get back down to the Earth as a sacred ground of being in all our spiritual practices. Honoring the body and our first chakra ground is a good place to start.

Anodea Judith
September 2009