Patience, Pachacuti, and Paradigm-Shifting
Greetings!
"Mesmerize visitors with your metaphorical
garden!"-- Rob Brezhny
Every few days I harvest some onions, a
handful of chard, or a few squash blossoms
from my garden. It is an honor to receive
such bounty from the earth and my tending.
Yet I'm impatient: corn has barely sprouted,
tomatoes and eggplant are agonizingly slow to
ripen, and it is not hot enough for bean
flowers to transform into beans.
This impatience with flowering and fruiting
in the physical garden mirrors an impatience
in our metaphorical gardens of shifting
consciousness. We are given gifts of insight,
and it takes months and months to embody
them. We make a plan for feeding our spirit
daily, follow it for a week, then slack off.
We figure out a way to harmonize a difficult
relationship, then do not honor our
intentions.
We know everything has to take root; needs
fertilizing with practice; grows slowly. The
flowering may take months, the fruiting and
ripening may take years. So why is it so hard
to be patient?
Pachacuti, The Great Turning
We are challenged in this "time of meeting
ourselves again." In the Andes these years
leading up to 2012 are called "Pachacuti;"
Joanna Macy terms it "the great turning."
Beset by horrendous disaster the world over,
a feeling of everything speeding up, and by
economic stress and social dislocation, we
want to meet our challenges with equanimity.
We want to be open-hearted. We want to create
and live by positive visions that help us
manifest a harmonious world. When we see
ourselves backsliding, unable to maintain
even "simple" changes in our personal lives,
we wonder how we will manage the bigger changes.
Working for Change, Shifting Consciousness
Making change for most of us involves an idea
of the change, its implementation, repeated
practice, and eventual embodiment---when the
change has entered our bones, rooted in our
beings, and become automatic.
Change on the inner leads to change on the
outer. While we know everything is
interrelated, it helps me to divide the kinds
of change I work for into three arenas. This
helps me focus better on discovering the
underlying patterns that get in my way:
Personal change: Whether it is
meaningful work, relationship, or habit we
are trying to shift, the personal parts
involve transmuting the inner toxic thoughts
and stories that keep us stuck. If I can find
a specific belief that gets in my way, I can
use any number of methods to deconstruct and
let go of the belief (see links for
more).
World change: We all have issues we
care about, from whales to peak oil to water
scarcity, from women's rights to economic
empowerment of disadvantaged peoples. But if
I believe, for example, that we cannot change
corporations, or that we humans do not have a
right to natural resources, I'll be unable to
confront the issue of water scarcity. Again,
identifying and changing underlying belief is
key to empowering ourselves to make change.
These underlying beliefs are shadows that
hover in our minds, feeding doubt,
frustration, and powerlessness. When we bring
the shadows to light, we begin to bring forth
equanimity and clarity of vision.
Mystical change: Knowing that what
happens in parallel realities and
non-ordinary dimensions affects this world,
some of us spend time repairing the web of
light that surrounds us, coming into balance
ourselves, transfiguring, and visioning a
different world. If we do not believe in the
power of intention, or if we believe we
cannot really affect the physical world
through the other dimensions, we will
sabotage our own efforts. When we shift our
limiting beliefs, we will discover the
mystery that guides us into paradigm-shifting
moments like the one that follows.
A Spontaneous Paradigm-Shifting Idea
One of our readers recently attended the
Chevron Oil Annual Shareholders meeting.
Indigenous representatives from Ecuador,
Burma, and Nigeria came to address
shareholder resolutions regarding human
rights and pollution. In the Equadorian
Amazon, a vast, polluted extraction area is
under litigation: a company now owned by
Chevron (Texaco) produced oil there, and up
to $16 billion is at stake for remediation
costs.
The corporate response was to present a story
denying any responsibility for pollution of
the Amazon; the Chairman promised repeatedly
to fight the court case to the end, and to
prevail.
When it was our reader's turn to address the
meeting, she said, "Years ago I helped build
the Chevron campus. How nice it is to see how
beautifully it turned out. I am glad that
Chairman O'Reilly is concerned about
Chevron's footprint, as I am also. My
question: is Chevron setting aside the $16
billion for clean up in case the Equador
verdict is against the company? Do you think
that Chevron's denial of any responsibility
might be affecting the company's image and
reputation negatively?" And then (she swears
she had no idea this was going to come out of
her mouth and believes it was spirit talking
through her): "I wondered if it might be
STRATEGIC to go ahead and DO the remediation
work, even if you do not think "we" are
responsible, as a good faith gesture to the
Earth!"
She reports, "It felt like the whole room
full of people got spun, stunned, like it was
such a re-frame their jaws dropped. Some
people actually clapped. It was quite
remarkable. I of course was shaking with
emotion, rather in shock that I had said
that, and thrilled, too. Quite a few people
came up at the end of the meeting and thanked
me for my words. One woman said she had felt
tears welling up..."
The tone and style of her
words---acknowledgment, praise, and stating
common ground before raising her
questions---model a way of creating space for
possibilities and shifts. This story is a
good example of a paradigm shift: a change
from one way of thinking to another. By
focusing on strategy, vision, and the larger
good, our reader offered Chevron a way out of
stuckness and defendedness. When we tap into
the collective unconscious, and the
multi-dimensional world of spirit like this,
we can potentially leap out of old ways of
thinking entirely.
An invitation: Send your paradigm-shifting,
inspiring stories to us. We'd like to include
your experiences in the newsletter!
No Matter What
So: we may feel impatient. But, like the
waxing and waning of the moon and the
seasons, our lives and energies follow larger
rhythms. Trusting in those rhythms and our
open-hearted intentions, like waiting for the
beans in the garden, will keep us moving
towards the world we want to create for all
those who follow us. As my Q'ero teacher
says, over and over, "We keep doing our work
no matter what."
May the long, full light of solstice days fill your heart with joy and patience,
