9:26 pm: I begin a blog post, writing this sentence:
“What if you decide that what you really want is to retire to New England, garden, meditate, and be left alone to play your musical instruments (at last), but you’re stuck in hot, insane Texas with 3 months of work to accomplish in three weeks, and retirement is at least 15 years away?”
9:28 pm: I pause to re-read it, and one of my students texts me: “Have you seen this moon?”
9:29 pm: I walk out my front door; big fat yellow moon, the kind you only see either in vast flat places, or over the ocean.
Thank you, Grasshopper.
Friday, June 25, 2010
Friday, June 18, 2010
Visualize Recovery
Fellow Humans:
I am a strong believer in the power of collective thought and collective energy.
The spill in the Gulf is an eco-disaster the likes of which we have never faced. It is easy to feel overwhelming despair when seeing the horrific photos of birds and animals and the relentless TV coverage showing the constant gushing of the well, and reading about the livelihoods ruined, the men who died and were injured in the blast, the irresponsibility of the corporate giants whose negligence caused this. For the average person who has little or no control over this, it is easy to feel almost panic-stricken. Panic, fear and despair are natural reactions to this situation, but those emotions are also the media’s stock in trade. Bombarded by the sight of these oily creatures and that hideous, constant Fox and CNN image of the oil jetting into the ocean magnifies the collective sense of powerlessness.
I am going to suggest an exercise in collective consciousness. We cannot plug the hole with our thoughts, of course, but I strongly believe that positive energy can affect healing processes and the efficacy of our actions and ideas. I do not mean that we should ignore what is happening – we cannot ignore it, and it demands our intense attention. We do not have individual control over the event, but we do have control over the type of attention we give to it.
I truly believe that a mass collective visualization of solution and recovery can affect the process, just as a mass collective panic and mental tailspin can affect the process negatively. So this is what I propose. Every day until this hole is plugged, at Noon ET, wherever you are, take three minutes of your lunch break to create a large mass of collective positive energy to counteract the media fear and panic. Sit quietly and visualize the cessation of the gushing mass of oil. It doesn’t matter that we haven’t figured out how to do it yet. Visualize that it stops. Send positive energy to those engineers who are coming up with solutions, to the people who are saving as many creatures as they can, to the people who are cleaning up the coast. Send healing energy to the Earth, to the creatures being harmed and killed, to the people whose livelihoods are being ruined, and imagine the cessation of damage, harm, and killing.
Please join me in this. If you want to do this in groups, all the better. If you want to do it more than once a day, great. And it goes without saying that if the opportunity for any kind of remedial action is placed before us as individuals, even if it’s just bringing bottles of Dawn detergent down to a local charity that’s helping with the bird cleanup, then add your actions to your thoughts.
Please share this with all of your friends.
--Angela
"What counts is not the enormity of the task, but the size of the courage." (Matthieu Ricard)
I am a strong believer in the power of collective thought and collective energy.
The spill in the Gulf is an eco-disaster the likes of which we have never faced. It is easy to feel overwhelming despair when seeing the horrific photos of birds and animals and the relentless TV coverage showing the constant gushing of the well, and reading about the livelihoods ruined, the men who died and were injured in the blast, the irresponsibility of the corporate giants whose negligence caused this. For the average person who has little or no control over this, it is easy to feel almost panic-stricken. Panic, fear and despair are natural reactions to this situation, but those emotions are also the media’s stock in trade. Bombarded by the sight of these oily creatures and that hideous, constant Fox and CNN image of the oil jetting into the ocean magnifies the collective sense of powerlessness.
I am going to suggest an exercise in collective consciousness. We cannot plug the hole with our thoughts, of course, but I strongly believe that positive energy can affect healing processes and the efficacy of our actions and ideas. I do not mean that we should ignore what is happening – we cannot ignore it, and it demands our intense attention. We do not have individual control over the event, but we do have control over the type of attention we give to it.
I truly believe that a mass collective visualization of solution and recovery can affect the process, just as a mass collective panic and mental tailspin can affect the process negatively. So this is what I propose. Every day until this hole is plugged, at Noon ET, wherever you are, take three minutes of your lunch break to create a large mass of collective positive energy to counteract the media fear and panic. Sit quietly and visualize the cessation of the gushing mass of oil. It doesn’t matter that we haven’t figured out how to do it yet. Visualize that it stops. Send positive energy to those engineers who are coming up with solutions, to the people who are saving as many creatures as they can, to the people who are cleaning up the coast. Send healing energy to the Earth, to the creatures being harmed and killed, to the people whose livelihoods are being ruined, and imagine the cessation of damage, harm, and killing.
Please join me in this. If you want to do this in groups, all the better. If you want to do it more than once a day, great. And it goes without saying that if the opportunity for any kind of remedial action is placed before us as individuals, even if it’s just bringing bottles of Dawn detergent down to a local charity that’s helping with the bird cleanup, then add your actions to your thoughts.
Please share this with all of your friends.
--Angela
"What counts is not the enormity of the task, but the size of the courage." (Matthieu Ricard)
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