Polishing the thin blue line

When is the bleakness the very substance from which we have the potential to brighten our expressions? Ultimately we are already full and bright within, imbued by grace as it were, since we come from the One expressing itself as the many.

When do we hold on to the raw ingredients as if they themselves were the final outcome? In my case, perhaps mistaking longing for love for the fullness of love itself.

As we notice places in the body where feelings have not been fully digested we cannot help but affect them, changing them by the mere act of witnessing, bringing consciousness to patterns of energy that may be on automatic pilot.

This morning as my kalyana mitra (spiritual friend) was extending the wisdom in her hands to such places in my body, I said that I had noticed how grief/loss of love was lodged in my ribs causing the pinch I feel there. She said I was holding on to it. Silently I first felt myself resist this responsibility. I thought of situations in which trauma embeds itself in the body as though we had no choice about it. At the same time as I was resisting I was questioning my resistance and she and I spoke about it and it shifted for me. Well, yes I course there is a way in which we hold on to our traumas like trophies or badges of honor and courage, but sometimes to our detriment. Sometimes it takes letting go of layers for a pattern to release. And yet there are times when something can make a major shift, like a whole paradigm change. Like a chutes and ladders transition on the board game of life.

Before class I had an instinct to turn on NPR. There was a story about a Native American tribe in Southern California who have a wind farm which they have established on leased land. There are complications with tax incentives and levies that prevent the native people from benefitting as fully from this green energy production as they otherwise might. There is a bill or some form of amendment before congress which could potentially change the fate of this whole tribe (just over 300 living members)while at the same time clearly help improve energy efficiency for everyone. I think it is absolutely appropriate for native tribes to take a lead in bringing us into a greener future and I notice how even the resistance they are facing could become the grit from which we polish ourselves into a brighter nation. The Obama administration has made promises to help pave the way for this eventuality.

And then I dig deeper into my own psyche. I had work done on the very spots my friend was working on this morning by a healer in Colorado who, among other things studies with a Choctaw medicine man. He told me that there was a native representative who attended a meeting at the U.N. wherein he refused a suggestion for financial compensation calling it blood money. He said we were all responsible for the the way things turned out and even said that they had to turn out this way. My point about this was that I have long held the circumstances of Native Americans in this country as one of the greatest injustices of our time. I am not necessarily or at least not entirely changing my mind about this, but...

Let me put it this way: that which is at hand is what life is offering us. What we get to choose is how to engage with what is. (Full credit for that statement goes to my teacher Douglas Brooks.) The Native elder was calling us higher in terms of honoring all of life and learning to integrate the wisdom teachings of his ancestors. So what if we let go of an angry shout of injustice and choose instead love, and choose instead to recognize the value of what was passed over and how martyrdom has made so many wisdom teachings more evident, clarified for posterity.

And what if we look into the very patterns in our own bodies, hearts and minds as vehicles for the transformation of the human psyche, the collective consciousness.

Let us welcome in a paradigm shift toward the greatest expression of the gifts of all of the bright beings within the earth's atmosphere. Now wouldn't that be something to behold? Would the thin blue line burn brighter? I wonder.