I received a number of responses to my March posting - When Disaster Strikes. Many people wrote to share they too have reached the conclusion that exposing oneself indiscriminately to images and messages of disaster, destruction and suffering does not serve us well. I also received responses from individuals who chastised me for "sticking my head in the sand" and not caring about others.

I want to clarify that I am not advocating a strategy that ignores the challenges we face in the world today. These challenges are significant and need our attention. What I am advocating for is that we respond to these challenges in ways that enable us to move through these challenges and emerge out the other side rather than be defeated by them.

I witness many people being defeated by the challenges we face. This week I received a phone call from a mother who was in deep despair after viewing the news broadcasts of the difficult circumstances in Japan. The woman was despondent and discouraged. She was imagining a world with high levels of radiation and people dying in great numbers. And while this still exists as a possibility in the future she was experiencing intense suffering now, even though this outcome currently exists only in the realm of possibility and not actuality. In other words her suffering was due to her imagination rather than the present reality.

In my experience these significant life challenges offer us a choice. We can move into these challenges with the idea of seeing them as evidence of despair and destruction, or we can see them as tremendous opportunities. Barbara Marx Hubbard, author of the book Conscious Evolution is of the perspective that a crisis is a 'birthing'. Hubbard invites us to experience a crisis as an opportunity to transform and to engage life in a larger and more meaningful way than lived previously.

In my journey with my son Joshua I experienced his crises in both of these ways.  Initially I was devastated by the loss of my son's health and well-being. After a period of time I came to recognize the gift in this experience. My journey with my son was a catalyst in deepening my understanding of patience, acceptance, forgiveness, compassion, love and peace. My suffering lifted me into a more meaningful and higher quality of life. I now consider these kinds of difficult experiences as "gifts of darkness". I now consider suffering as a gateway to wisdom.

I believe that to make peace with these powerful events we need to accept that there is more to us than our physical bodies; that we exist beyond this physical garment and this current incarnation; that we are more than what is contained between our head and our toes. Eckhart Tolle teaches that what arises from our suffering is a new consciousness; that we are in the process of becoming a new species. Tolle says we ought to be more interested in our inner state than the state of the outside world.

Barbara Marx Hubbard invites us to see the crisis as a birthing and to use these events as opportunities to "evolve by choice not by chance". Gregg Braden in his book Walking Between The Worlds - The Science of Compassion shares research that confirms that human emotion determines the actual patterning of DNA within our body. He states that shifting our body chemistry by shifting our viewpoint is perhaps the single most powerful tool we have available to us.

To some these ideas may seem like nonsense. What I know for certain is that we cannot solve the complex challenges we face from a place of fear and despair, and thus anything that simply adds to our fear and despair is not helpful. We need to transcend our primitive brain structure that is only concerned with "fight or flight" and engage our higher brain that has the capacity to be creative, collaborative, innovative and intuitive and access a universal wisdom.  

Let us accept the circumstances we find ourselves in at this moment in our evolution as a species and engage fully in finding solutions. These solutions will require us to live in completely different ways than we are now.  And this is a blessing we should all welcome.

Namaste

Ted