Dear Planet Waves Readers,
It’s that time of year again. The holiday carols are playing and shoppers are getting pepper-sprayed at the mall. The level of mass psychosis hitches up a few notches, and, as I said to my analyst the other day, it’s impossible to know at any given moment if things are just about to come together, or just about to fall apart.
Cancer. Painting by Carlos Cedillo.
We’re helped along in the chaos by our proximity to the Great Attractor, and some of the most exciting and challenging astrology the world has ever seen. And all the true leaders have taken their marbles and gone home.
So what’s an evolving, self-searching soul to do?
There are two phrases that have really stayed with me this year, words that have resonated throughout the events of these past 12 months and that I intend to take with me into 2012. These are “adaptive grace” and “applied awareness.” For the first, I have to thank a woman named Pat Fields, a brilliant psychologist-turned-energetic healer, and for the second, our own brilliant, Eric Francis.
Let’s talk about what I think is so important about these two concepts, and why I will be keeping them in my coping toolbox for the foreseeable future. Adaptive grace really captures what we are trying to accomplish when we surf the tsunamis that daily life seems to be serving up on a regular basis. Adaptive in that we really have to adjust; there is no ‘balance’ to be had, as many parts of our previously self-regulating systems – the economy, the environment, our government – have reached their tipping points and beyond. And ‘grace’ in our commitment to continuing to look for the beauty, the joy, the ‘random acts of kindness’, the synchronicities that continue to visit us with their mystery and magic. Adaptive grace is what I experience when I see communities coming together to save their neighbors’ homes from foreclosure, when I see students silently shaming a Chancellor of Schools for authorizing the use of violence on a school campus, or when I listen to the words of a mother whose son has died – murdered – as a result of the entrenched hazing practices of a college marching band, saying just days after his death “we must not let this happen to any other students, anymore.”
Adaptive grace is what I choose to continue to practice in the face of my own fury at the events that caused these incidents, and as I seek to find the ways to turn feelings of helplessness into action. And adaptive grace is what I see when I see the world rising up, finally, to take back our freedoms. We won’t win all of the battles, but we will keep coming back to the fight. And when I see the linked arms of students and protesters in the new revolution, I remember the adaptive grace of the civil rights heroes that came before, and it lets me know that change is a process that has been fought for and won before, regardless of the cost, and the best of our humanity shone through.
Applied awareness is awareness in action. It’s the ‘second wheel of the bicycle’ that I talk with my patients about as they are struggling to turn insight into change. It’s the commitment to take what we know, what we discover, about the best and the worst of ourselves, and do something about it. It requires great courage, a willingness to look at the thing itself, as it is, not as we would wish it to be, and then to act (or to stop acting, as is so often what is necessary.) When we show up every day, present and awake to our lives, asking the question of what this day’s lessons will teach us about ourselves, and how we will apply that learning going forward to make ourselves – and as a result, our planet – a better place, that is applied awareness at its best. It is a process that I have practiced most of my life, and one that has opened doors to miracles and wonders as seemingly insurmountable challenges are resolved the way the tangled strands of a knot suddenly fall into place. I have seen people change their lives forever and for the better, simply by using applied awareness.
Applied awareness got me through the death of my first husband and the reconstruction required to get through the wreckage of that time, and allow the phoenix to rise. Applied awareness is what climate change activists and Occupy movements are working and sacrificing for. And finally, as Eric Francis writes about every day at Planet Waves, applied awareness is what we do with all the information the universe holds for us, it’s the other side of the handshake. It is the proper thing to do with the incredible gift of awareness supported by our partnership with the unseen.
So, this holiday season, as you’re fighting off one more tragic news item or one more egregious sound byte, or when your cup of blessings and challenges is simply too full, I offer you the gift of these two mantras: adaptive grace and applied awareness. Let’s hold them close like the treasures they are, and polish them to a fine shine over the next weeks and months, for we will certainly need them. I wish all the Planet Waves community a beautiful and blessed holiday season, and I look forward to sharing the ride in 2012!
Jan
