Musings: Where Do We Go From Here?

As I learned from His Holiness The Dalai Lama, all emotions have a frequency. Some have low frequencies while others have high frequencies. Judgment, greed, avarice, jealousy, anger, resentment, gossip, lies and despair have very low frequencies, with judgment being one of the lowest. As Lord Jesus Christ taught us, “First take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.” We as a culture are conditioned to quickly judge on a plethora of “isms” – racism, sexism, atheism, capitalism, socialism, theism. As a teacher of forgiveness my own view is that the biggest impediment to forgiveness is judgment. Most all faiths teach that judgment is best left to the higher power (“The Day of Judgment”). There is no escaping wrongdoing as karma always balances.

It is a choice to consciously live in high vibratory emotions like goodwill, friendship, understanding, non-judgment, trust, faith, gratitude, empathy, compassion, forgiveness and love. Why? Because happiness and peace lives in the high vibratory emotions and not in the low vibratory emotions discussed above.

Many Americans are currently feeling trapped in the low vibratory emotions. On my airline flight yesterday (the Sunday after elections) a passenger seated next to me made the comment, “I have not slept since Tuesday and am still in a state of despair.” It is not complicated to be aware of where you are vibrating – in the low vibratory or the high vibratory emotion? I can tell you that having done the forgiveness work for over 20 years I do spend more time in the high vibratory emotions, and as such, enjoy a deeper quality of peace, happiness and more time in the “flow!”

When I do occasionally fall off the wagon and get angry – as we all mortals do – I add an extra half hour to my daily meditation practice and pray myself back to the higher frequency emotions. Sometimes it can take more than a couple of days based on the gravitas of the experience.

Processing grief and disappointment is a healthy thing to do. There are healthy ways to process these emotions and unhealthy ways to process these emotions.

Healthy ways include meditation, prayer, reading inspirational material, spending time with nature, exercise, yoga, journaling and seeking helpful and healthy conversations. Unhealthy ways are to resort to violent behavior, staying angry, blaming, shaming, alcohol, drugs, illegal activity, rioting, looting. All this does is hold you in to a high level of resentment.  As Mandela taught us: “Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for your enemy to die.”

The main lesson here is: yes by all means process your grief and disappointment, but do not remain there. Staying there would be accepting a victim mentality, which is grossly unhealthy. Besides there is no quality of life living as a victim; it is important to transmute that grief and disappointment into something positive. As I said before, I have ultimate faith in the resilience my American brothers and sisters. Look what we have created in a short 240 years, and look at how we have survived and thrived despite some tough challenges like: civil war, Pearl Harbor, two world wars, the economic crises, droughts, floods and 9/11.

So, we can look at this as an opportunity to indeed create a better society for our world.  The main thing is how are you going to engage in light during this “strong message from the Universe.” It is not time to go back home to status quo and business as usual. Get proactive, support and create more partnerships and collaborations with people and organizations (like the Tariq Khamisa Foundation and many others), leading and promoting peaceful, nonviolent and compassionate solutions that can indeed create a better world for us, our children and grandchildren. Many such individuals, groups and organizations – thank God – exist in our beloved country. The timing is excellent now to get engaged and substantially increase the volume of these worthwhile efforts!

As I said before, it is important to develop empathy and respect for opposing views. We are not all always right. Without listening to opposing views you cannot grow. You get bogged down in your own myopic views and values. Because we are all humans and as such fallible, we must learn from our own mistakes and the mistakes of our immediate family members, coworkers, fellow Americans and our brothers and sisters in the rest of the world. When we are able to listen with our hearts and soul, and we can look through the eyes of empathy and compassion there is a deeper understanding of the people who have opposing views. This makes forgiveness possible, which in turn helps build bridges instead of walls, and helps manifest love and unity.

In closing let us remember that this is our country that we love and respect. The questions we must ask are “How did we get here?” and “Where do we go from here?”

This state-of-affairs we find ourselves in today is not exemplary of our founding leaders! What is our individual and collective responsibility in creating a society that we live in with all its malaise? To name a few we are seeing: children killing children, global warming, a highly divided and polarized society, campaign costs, electoral college questions, racial unrest, immigration tension, poor economy, lack of jobs, a weak infrastructure … while we waste trillions on wars that provide no results and benefit, but rather rob us of using these funds to address the real issues.