Well of Light
The Gift of Climate Change (part one)
I invite you to see climate change, not as an environmental problem that is out there, but as a relationship problem that is about us. It’s about the way we relate to ourselves, to each other,
to the environment and nature, to the entire world and to the future.
Once we switch the way we see climate change we start to see different solutions.
Karen O’Brien
Dear Ones,
When first I heard Climate Scientist, Karen O’Brien, say that “Climate Change is a Relationship Issue”, something deep inside me resonated with a full body, Yes! For years, decades, I have tried to get people to understand the issue by presenting scientific facts, data and pointing to the severity of the human induced climate crisis that we are experiencing. I’m not trying to sugar coat the problem. We will continue to face escalating challenges, such as fires, floods, displacements and social, political, cultural, and economic disruption. But, there’s a big difference between a 1.5 and a 4 degree temperature rise. With this new lens to view the problem, we create the possibility of an evolutionary jump in what it means for humanity to recognize it’s relatedness! This leap would help us to mitigate and lessen the damage that has already been set in motion over the past century. For the most part we look at climate change as an external environmental problem “out there”. The system, “they, them, it” needs to change. I suggest that as a relationship issue, transformation starts “in here” doing our own inner healing and transformational work.
When first I heard Climate Scientist, Karen O’Brien, say that “Climate Change is a Relationship Issue”, something deep inside me resonated with a full body, Yes! For years, decades, I have tried to get people to understand the issue by presenting scientific facts, data and pointing to the severity of the human induced climate crisis that we are experiencing. I’m not trying to sugar coat the problem. We will continue to face escalating challenges, such as fires, floods, displacements and social, political, cultural, and economic disruption. But, there’s a big difference between a 1.5 and a 4 degree temperature rise. With this new lens to view the problem, we create the possibility of an evolutionary jump in what it means for humanity to recognize it’s relatedness! This leap would help us to mitigate and lessen the damage that has already been set in motion over the past century. For the most part we look at climate change as an external environmental problem “out there”. The system, “they, them, it” needs to change. I suggest that as a relationship issue, transformation starts “in here” doing our own inner healing and transformational work.
By exploring the personal, interior dimensions of climate change, we have direct access to the common source of the issue. This provides us with the power and capacity to transform our personal narrative by exploring our own unexamined beliefs and assumptions. Such an inquiry deepens our connection with the truth of who we really are at our core, our essence, our soul. Inner exploration takes a willingness to recognize and let go of our old stories and habitual ways of being which have been handed down through generations. Our current global crisis calls for us to release the cultivated behavior from the past that keeps us stuck in patterns of fear, doubt and repetitive behavior. When things are falling apart around us, we have the opportunity to deepen our awareness and become more present… From a place of deep presence we act with more clarity, focus and openness to new possibilities. We don’t have to change the world, we just have to change the way we relate to it and ourselves!
Chaos should be regarded as extremely good news.
Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche
Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche
When we look through the lens of the global media we see pain, misery, confusion, destruction, and darkness everywhere. The chaos and suffering around the globe is so vivid and real, it is undeniable. We cannot avoid, dispute or argue with the reality of our times. It’s as if we are living in a bad dream. By directly facing our own interior chaos, disruption and confusion we can awaken to our innate sense(s) and sensibility. Our inner world is a fractal, a hologram, a replica of our outer world. This awareness can reveal the inner healing and attention that is needed to experience wholeness, coherence and interconnection with ourselves and the world. The fragmentation that we are experiencing can help us to reveal our own deep wounding and separation from ourselves, each other and the natural world.
We live in a world of distraction, deflection, dissociation and terminal busyness, which keeps us from experiencing the inner turmoil that can become a cauldron for transformation. Without stopping to explore the nature of our own pain and suffering, we will continue to be battered by the torrential winds of chaos and change. By accepting, allowing and embracing our pain, it becomes our teacher, we become bigger than it and our past based story which feeds it. We are not our story, we are the space in which it is being played out! By becoming a witness to it, we realize that we can’t really fall apart, only our story can. If we don’t distract ourselves from our grief, our suffering, our pain, and just sit with it, allow it and embrace it, our sense of separation from the outer world will dissolve. Meditation is an access to the greater awareness and consciousness that our quiet soul is needing and calling forth from beneath the pandemonium of our frenetic world.
Life is the proving ground of an evolving soul.
Will Craig
Will Craig
By seeing climate change as a relationship issue we have direct access to doing something about it. It is no longer something “out there” that is bigger than who we are, in a sense, it is who we are! Whatever internal feelings, sensations and thoughts we have become portals for healing that part of us that is climate change. Our current beliefs, emotions, assumptions and stories can be questioned, challenged and transformed with unconditional love and acceptance. We can quit populating our future with anger, doom, negativity and blame and start to love, embrace and honor our own thoughts, feelings and sensations. In this way we embrace the wisdom of not knowing, and enter a field of quantum possibility. If we quit challenging, blaming, and pointing at others, we become the change that our soul is calling us to be. Our personal transformation creates the space for real change to emerge for ourselves, each other, our community and the world.
This is hard to grasp as an idea that fits into what we already know. It cannot be understood from a linear mindset, because our thoughts and worldview come from, and are contained within our past based experiences, and cultural worldview. This restricted view shapes our perceptions, beliefs and actions. To think of a future unfolding forward in time is a mistake of an outdated worldview that is shaping the chaos, destruction and separation that is unfolding in our present. The future is always contained in the present. Think of Michelangelo’s David, he had to see that statue in the present, to be able to chip away all the excess marble that wasn’t the finished piece. Likewise, as we raise our awareness we dissolve all that is not our soul.
Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth.
Pema Chodron
If we continue to deny our fears by going into our habitual avoidance behavior, addictive distractions and whatever we think will help us escape the pain we feel, we actually reinforce our fears and call them towards us. By denying how frightened we are we colonize our future with the very events we fear. When we lovingly lean into our fear, grief and sorrow we discover that the very things we are running from are our greatest teachers. They are pointing the way forward to wholeness, connection and healing. Radical acceptance of ourselves and our fear moves us from the things we fear, to being the space in which they exist. It frees us from the tyranny of our own thoughts, beliefs and dis-ease.
To actually experience this sense of wholeness it needs to be fully felt in the body, emotions and nervous system. Unfortunately, many of us have numbed ourselves from our pain for so long, that we need to be especially vigilant to access the miracle of our body, mind and emotional interconnectedness. This is where meditation and stillness comes in. When we more towards that which we fear, we discover and experience the barriers to being with things “as they are”, rather than how we think they “should be”. Paradoxically, it is by loving and allowing those limiting patterns and our judgements about them, which allows them to release their hold on us and dissolve into the spacious awareness that we give to them. Our non judgemental awe, wonder and curiosity gives us an opportunity to let go of these old patterns and create from a far greater field of possibility. If even a small percentage of our planet did this we could solve the climate crisis and create a world that works for all life with no one and nothing left behind...
In the second part of this newsletter we will be exploring the field of quantum social change and new ideas and thoughts about quantum transformation. In the meantime we invite you to explore and discover your own internal responses to climate change and the deterioration of our natural habitat.
With great love and gratitude,
Michael & Meriel
Michael & Meriel
We are consciousness examining and expressing itself so that it can become increasingly aware
of its infinite capacity for being and evolving.
Jay Woodman
of its infinite capacity for being and evolving.
Jay Woodman
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