January 2023 Newsletter
Awakening to the Miraculous
There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle.
The other is as though everything is a miracle.
Albert Einstein
There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle.
The other is as though everything is a miracle.
Albert Einstein
2023! May it be a year of miracles… God knows we could use a few given the challenges humanity is facing! But, maybe they’re all around us and we have been looking in the wrong places. If we were to transcend our negativity bias, the tendency to see things in a negative perspective, in contrast to seeing the positive events that surround us every day. Perhaps we could start a movement towards positivity bias, or maybe even miracle bias.
Forty years ago my wife was murdered in Carmel, California. The suspect got off in a jury trial for lack of evidence. My daughter was four years old at the time. I personally have dealt with suspicion, slander, outright lies, and betrayal around this issue. I’ve been accused of not only murder but child molestation and abuse towards women, none of which ever happened. For years I felt shame, guilt, and the need to defend myself. Six months ago I received a call from the Carmel police department and was told that they were reopening the case and were arresting the original suspect. That was an unexpected miracle! They subsequently arrested him and got two separate DNA matches. He is currently out on a million-dollar bail. The new trial starts on the 23rd of this month. The defense attorneys have said that if the DA does take a plea bargain they will attempt to destroy me.
Not all storms come to disrupt your life. Some come to clear your path!
Paul Coelho
Paul Coelho
We turned down the plea bargain and the defense is trying to turn the court's attention towards me, the victim, and away from the actual killer. They have a private detective calling people all around my hometown stating , “I’m an investigator for the law firm investigating a criminal case involving Michael Stone.” Fortunately the responses they are receiving are very positive based on my many decades as a community activist and commitment to being of service. I felt myself being thrown back into shame, fear, and defensiveness. But, I had a huge release and awakening the other day during meditation. I don’t have anything to defend. I know who I am and what I have and haven’t done. I realized that all the emotions coming up were not from the loss of my wife, or even all the challenges my daughter and I faced. They came from my early childhood traumas and the unintegrated fear, self-doubt, and feelings of unworthiness I carried around the loss of my mother. In an instant, I felt a spacious awareness and sense of peace I had never felt before.
Finally, after forty years I dropped the inner storm that was shaping my reactions and realized the miracle of this case coming to trial. It wasn’t here to disrupt my life, it came to clear my path for what I can contribute in my work with trauma integration and healing the wounds that alienate, separate, and marginalize us from others and the natural world. When we have the courage to look and feel deeply into the narrative or stories we carry about ourselves, we complete and digest the past and it loses its hold over us. How did this happen? It was a product of many years of learning to feel my body and the emotions that my intelligent nervous system has suppressed and dissociated in the face of much earlier overwhelming fear, grief, and trauma. I now see that miracles are a product of awareness or what I have come to call “presencing”.
“Presencing, the blending of sensing and presence, means to connect from the Source of the highest future possibility and to bring it into the now. Presencing happens when our perception begins to happen from
the source of our emerging future.
Otto Scharmer
the source of our emerging future.
Otto Scharmer
The work of the Presencing Institute that Otto Scharmer from MIT founded is a profound reimagination of our place in time and space. Presence is always here, but mostly we are not. We traffic in our remembered past or imagined future for the most part. These ways of communicating are non-emergent and keep us from experiencing the fullness of the moment as well as the potential for the miraculous. Scharmer postulates that the future is not a place out there, but a deepening connection with the present moment. When we explore ourselves in relationship to the larger systems of which we are a part we can both sense the system and the system senses us. This whole systems process takes deep outer and inner listening to what is emergent and immediate. In other words, we need to transcend what we know, for what could be, by combining deep presence and possibility in the moment. We call this futuring. We shift from life happening to us to being creative partners in manifesting the future from the present moment.
Perhaps this sounds a bit heady, but this is the pathway to the miraculous. As Einstein said, either everything is a miracle or nothing is. When we deepen our inner connection and felt sense with the larger systems of which we are an integral part, we gain the capacity to have miracles become the air we breathe. When I look deeply into my own life I see a moving and intelligent energy that is sourced from the same power that activates and animates the entire universe. I realized that we are all miracle workers and we are all connected. Part of the challenge is the ability to see one’s self beyond our own narrative. To do this we must be witnessed. All miracles are relational. When we allow ourselves to be seen beyond the limits of our own story, we create space for the unfolding of the miraculous.
People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child — our own two eyes. All is a miracle.
Thich Nhat Hanh
Thich Nhat Hanh
It is so important to know that in every moment we have access to realize, create and experience the miraculous. I hope you will join me in making 2023 a year of the miraculous and recognize that we all have the capacity to be miracle workers. Perhaps, you can send some miracle prayers towards the proceeding and outcome of the trial that starts on January 23rd. It is already nothing short of miraculous. For me it is an absolute miracle that there will finally be honorable closure on this darkness that has overshadowed decades of pain and grief for my daughter and I.
For those of you who have missed my online programs and offerings I will be back after the trial. It feels so good to be doing live programs again. I will continue doing interviews for WE Earth Radio, not weekly, but several times a month. Writing has become a priority as I am currently working on a new book on trauma and my life. Also I will be developing other new transformational awakening programs online.
It is so important to know that in every moment we have access to realize, create and experience the miraculous. I hope you will join me in making 2023 a year of the miraculous and recognize that we all have the capacity to be miracle workers. Perhaps, you can send some miracle prayers towards the proceeding and outcome of the trial that starts on January 23rd. It is already nothing short of miraculous. For me it is an absolute miracle that there will finally be honorable closure on this darkness that has overshadowed decades of pain and grief for my daughter and I.
For those of you who have missed my online programs and offerings I will be back after the trial. It feels so good to be doing live programs again. I will continue doing interviews for WE Earth Radio, not weekly, but several times a month. Writing has become a priority as I am currently working on a new book on trauma and my life. Also I will be developing other new transformational awakening programs online.
Thank you for your ongoing participation, love and support…With love and gratitude from me and the Well of Light Team.
Michael
Michael
The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
