Conscious Politics: It's What's Next

Issue 125

Some time ago I was going through a pretty rough patch. It was triggered by a perfect storm of financial ruin, which rendered me without a home, without a community, without any money, and all that goes with all of that at precisely the moment I was launching my work from test market mode into the world. Whatever…because I was OK, too. Really. It was a blow, to be sure, my life had been fractured, but as far as I was concerned, as ridiculous and as poorly-timed as all of that was, it was “my journey” and would ultimately be nothing more than a blip on the screen of my life. A few weeks or so and I’d be back on track because after everything I’d lost and given up, I still had all the tools I needed — what we call here conscious practice — to emerge from the experience stronger than ever. The way of things.

Yet I was now about six months into that journey and starting to wonder. I was doing everything right. I was working hard and playing by all the rules of conscious practice because I’m that guy. Yet, was I? Because I was also dogged by urgency. I wanted desperately to move out of survival mode and back into a semblance of normal life including having a place to live, a modicum of income and, yeah, thanks, maybe health insurance, too, to say nothing of room and space for the only thing that really mattered: getting my carefully cultivated, market-tested social enterprise into the world because the world needed it and I had no interest in anything else. I didn’t want to wait another minute.

While feeling flummoxed and uncertain about what I could possibly be missing such that I was not progressing — in spite of having always progressed in every other endeavor I’d ever set out to succeed in at that point in my life — I scored a session with a very trusted, multi-modal, energy healer practitioner sisterfriend. My sessions with her had always included messages from Spirit and, over time, I’d had several. Each and every one was resonant, uplifting, meaningful, and helpful. Given my degree of resourcelessness at that moment in time, I was humbled and deeply grateful to be able to receive the session and was stunned, dismayed, and crestfallen to experience leaving it in a far worse state than the really awful state I was in when it began. Afterward, I remember unloading — on a brand new, lined legal yellow pad — page after page after page of anger and vitriol and resentment directed straight at Spirit for failing to see me, for failing to know anything about me, who I was, and what I needed.

Turns out I didn’t actually have to give it up, I just had to be more pure about it. That’s what was next. That’s what would create a more fulsome healing of my fractured life.

A few days after that, I hit Rock Bottom. Truly, the darkest of what had been many dark nights of the soul. It’s an entire chapter unto itself but the relevant point here is that, some months later, when I had occasion to talk with my healer sisterfriend, I told her about how truly awful I’d felt after that last session. She knew. And she knew not to follow up with me at the time. She knew I was in a process and her role, that day, was to be a conduit, a transmitter of messages of healing that did not then register as messages of healing, not even a little bit. She offered me, in that later conversation, with the Lightness and Love of an angel, an analogy that sometimes when a human bone is fractured, the path to healing it is to break it more, all the way, as it were — first. From that place of being “fully broken,” a more fulsome healing ensues. My life had been fractured when I limped into her space and then it was broken. And what came next was, for me, the only thing that could come next.

I thought that “broken” meant I was being asked to give up the one thing I still had in the world, my practice — this practice — the thing that would not only get me out of the predicament I was in but also the thing I was endeavoring to make into the work I do in the world. Turns out I didn’t actually have to give it up, I just had to be more pure about it. That’s what was next. That’s what would create a more fulsome healing of my fractured life. I had to lose that sense of urgency, which was smothering everything. Let go of when. I had to recommit to not trying to micro-manage my Self back onto a track of normalcy. Let go of how. I had to accept, not dance around, the staggeringly uncomfortable life of being home- and income-free. No resistance. I had to decide that I wouldn’t make another move until and unless I was as sure as I could be that I was being guided by my heart, not my head. Listen to inspiration. Of course, I didn’t have to do any of that, but I certainly felt inspired to and I was willing. Choices abound and I chose to do those things on purpose because the answer to my question about what it was I was missing was clear: an even deeper conscious practice. Great.

In the context of modern presidential campaigns, I have no qualms about how the Vice President ran hers. As a non-affiliated voter, it was easy for me to choose to enthusiastically support her and Governor Walz’s campaign because as one who advocates for an American society that works for everyone, it seemed clear that they would endeavor to make that a reality while their opponents would actively work against it. Everything means what we make it mean and when we are living consciously, we make meaning on purpose, by conscious choice. So before listening to a drop of what meaning anyone else is/has been making of this election, I’ve been in a cone of silence since Tuesday night, wanting to to investigate it on my own. Broken record, I do so from the place of one who believes an old, dying consciousness is giving way to a new one, from the place of one who advocates passionately for that highly-functional, multi-racial, multi-cultural American (and global) society that works for and welcomes everyone, and I do so as one who was an enthusiastic Harris-Walz supporter.

Until further notice, the meaning I’m choosing to make of this election result is that the collective fractured society we took into the election for healing that we thought Harris-Walz would deliver by winning was, by losing, just broken all the way instead. I believe we are thus poised for an even more profound, a more fulsome, far more holistic collective healing than perhaps we’d have experienced had she won.

For anyone who finds the beliefs, ideas, and proposals of the victors of this election to be abhorrent, what’s next for us is nothing short of a gargantuan opportunity to create what we’d prefer.

To be sure and off the top of my head, such healing will necessarily include letting go of beliefs like “when we fight, we win” because maybe now we’ll see, once and for all, that fighting a dying, compassion-free consciousness is always futile. We’ll have to grok that we cannot ever cultivate a society that works for everyone from a posture of defense, which is what fighting is. Perhaps we will not, now, move with conviction into a stance of (political) resistance as resistance is the very thing we endeavor in everyday conscious practice to continually release. Perhaps now we will continue to get better and better not only at articulating the kind of society in which we want to live, but also better and better at shining our lights on examples of it wherever and whenever we see them. Perhaps we will break our habit of making our lives much harder than they need to be with judgments like tragic and devastating and hopeless. Perhaps we will see that fear and anxiety and “bedwetting” actually hamper the work we do. Perhaps we will understand more fully what unity consciousness means and break free, once and for all, from us-vs.-them postures. Perhaps we will finally grasp that we can never, ever create peace on Earth while conducting war — and work our way through that. Perhaps we’ll stop looking into the past for recipes for success. And perhaps most importantly, given our knowing that we are here for a reason, that there are zero accidents, we will ask ourselves just who we have to be or what muscles might need to grow or develop — individually and collectively — in order to navigate from where we are to where we want to be.

For anyone who finds the beliefs, ideas, and proposals of the victors of this election to be abhorrent, what’s next for us is nothing short of a gargantuan opportunity to create with conscious practice as, perhaps, we’ve never practiced it before, exactly what we’d prefer to experience. The good news is that Conscious Politics — as practiced in these pages, at our Free Monthly Trainings and, hopefully, far more broadly as the weeks, months, and years unfold — stands ready to help us capitalize on this opportunity. It’s what we do and it’s what’s next.

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NOTE: Enough about me and what I think about things. We have one more opportunity in 2024 for us to discuss what YOU think about things at our next Conscious Politics Free Monthly Training on Tuesday, November 19.

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