On Creating A Circle Of Grace
HEALING IS CAROLINE MYSS’ life work. She teaches, she writes, she speaks, and she’s emphatic about it. Her bestsellers include Anatomy of the Spirit, Why People Don’t Heal and How They Can, Sacred Contacts and Entering the Castle. Her upcoming book, Beyond Reason: Healing Through Mystical Wisdom and Common Sense, will be published in October, 2009. In the interest of looking at finding rhythm to how we can heal the world today. LA YOGA talked to Myss about how to heal the planet and all of our relationships. The first part of this interview was featured in the April, Earth Day issue. (If you missed it, check out the full text on our website: layogamagazine.com). Last month, we spoke about how we have reached the end of the Age of Reason. What’s next? The Age of Community and the need to create Circles of Grace.
Felicia M. Tomasko: We have to mend ourselves and our internal environment and each one of our relationships in order to mend anything outside of ourselves.
Caroline Myss: But you also have to have the kind of interior equipment to do that. I look at the way kids are educated today and I realize that their education completely lacks some of the most essential tools young minds need to learn, such as situation ethics and how to navigate through personal and moral crises. In fact, when they go to school, they’re encouraged to leave their souls at the door; that is, if you ban the vocabulary of the soul because of some nonsensical “political correctness” that some people define as the right to ban words that imply Christianity or Buddhism or Islam, you are actually shutting down access to your intuitive system. Another way to say this is that if you ban the use of a language essential to a basic instinct, such as the language necessary to animate and maintain that connection with your spiritual instincts, you will eventually lose that natural rapport with your spiritual senses.
We took out words like blasphemy and sacrilege, sin and evil, in the 1960s. No doubt these terms and a few others felt far too conventional, traditional or too Catholic. The New Age culture was just emerging in the early 60s and that consciousness leaned heavily in favor of love, drugs and peace. They took out devil and kept angel, they kept good and dismantled evil, so evil was free to roam because we decided we didn’t want to look at it. We unconsciously decided we were too sophisticated, too intellectual to believe in something as medieval as evil and demons.
We declared that we only wanted good news and that evil didn’t exist. Thus, evil was free to create a constant blanket of psychic free radicals that feed the creation of negative, harmful, destructive physical events while we live in a climate of a spirituality of denial that an independent force of evil is real. At the same time, we are dealing with moral, physical, political and financial crises that destroy lives. I don’t think calling these destructive events “crimes” is a term that suffices the consequences of the actions that were committed. What Bernie Madoff has done to 5,000 people is evil and it is malicious; it is also a sin against humanity. There are people who will long suffer because of the conscious actions of this man, emphasis on the word, “conscious.” But you take words such as “sin” and “social sacrilege” out of the vocabulary and what do you have left? A vocabulary incapable of acknowledging the spiritual leaves you incapable of discerning the presence of a spiritual crisis, either within you or within the society at large.
It reminds me of when I went to Russia in the days before perestroika. The Russians couldn’t display their religious icons even in their homes, that is, if they had such icons. So what did many of them do? They went to psychics because a psychic represented a kind of middle person indicating that there was something other than bread and water and matter and flesh and bone in the world. They represented a type of cosmic power, a substitute for divine power that could be openly accessed. The psychic comes with mystery and awe. Human nature craves access to the cosmic domain. We want to be drenched in awe. And we took out all many of our ways of getting to the sacred when we removed the vocabulary of the soul from our vocabulary, replacing the words with generic terms such as “energy” and “consciousness” for soul and grace.
Assess what’s going on in your own life. And whatever changes are taking place, don’t fear them, walk into them.
FMT: It’s interesting to think that we’ve lost all of the words for it. This reflects in many of the young people I know, I look at them and see that there’s this spiritual void.
CM: Yes, total void; we gave them sacred lobotomies. I went to the grocery store late at night a few years ago to get an iced tea and inside I ran into a few teenagers with tattoos and piercings. Outside there’s a group of kids, also all tattooed and pierced, gathered in the parking lot, none of them are old enough to drive, which is why they’re hanging out in the parking lot at 11 o’clock at night. So I approached them saying, “I really want to understand why you guys tattoo and pierce.” At first they looked at me as if I was crazy and so we had to go through this little ritual of sarcastic remarks, but eventually they realized I was serious. Then the leader of the group said, “I got pierced because of the duck in my bathroom.” Now I know that sounds like a ridiculous answer, but what he was really saying was a much deeper statement. He wanted to be initiated into manhood and had to do this himself. His own father had left home and thus getting pierced was a way of saying he had reached manhood on his own. I said that his decision made complete sense to me and then I said, “You know, there are tribes that do piercing as a way of initiation in their religion. It’s a ritual, and they do the rituals when the boys are about your age to indicate power. It’s an indication of coming into power. I’m not talking about religion. I’m talking about a spiritual force, a force that comes in from you. Believe it or not, that force that says who you are that you feel safe in the world.”
“Would you teach us that?” And I looked at them, and said, “I wish I could.” And I gave them all hugs and I went home and my eyes were filled with tears. That is the statement of the soulless teenager in search of rituals of passage that are absent in so many ways in our society. And so the young people are self-initiating themselves.
FMT: In some ways, they’re the proverbial canary in the coal mine. But what about the rest of us who haven’t taught them? What about those of us who were complicit? What about those of us who thought we were conscious?
CM: And defined ourselves as conscious because of recycling and eating granola and thinking that reading books on self-help represented your consciousness. And yet, so many lacked action where it really counted, such as challenging the demons that took over the country during the Bush administration. Admittedly, I hit hard when it comes to the Bush years but those years represent the decline of the American soul more than any previous time in America. And we are paying for the blindness of those years now. The attitude of, “I don’t watch the news because it’s so negative,” which was so typical of those years, stood in absolute contradiction to the belief that people were on a path to becoming conscious. Conscious of what? The environment, by definition, has to include the political environment of your nation and your planet because the end result is the crisis we are now in.
FMT: People can avoid taking action because change is not safe.
CM: Right. And not watching the news because you didn’t like it, now what are you going to do? Now you are really not going to like it out there. Because out there has come inside to call, so to speak. Out there is now taking your house away, out there is now wiping out your bank account. Because when you had an opportunity to interact with the negative changes taking place in our country, most people didn’t rise to the occasion.
FMT: Where do we even begin?
CM: We begin, first of all, by learning everything we can now. Never go dark or off the radar of change again. Two, assess what’s going on in your own life. And whatever changes are taking place, don’t fear them, walk into them. Number three, don’t look backwards in the sense of who you were and what you used to do. This is not where you look if your life is changing. What’s been taken away from you, you have to let go. If you’ve been a teacher or you’ve always been an accountant, that doesn’t mean that you’re ever going to do that again. It may mean that, but don’t look to what you’ve always done as what you’re going to do next. Four, get involved with your country and its politics and the decisions that are being made in Washington and locally. This is your country. Complaining after the fact is useless. Participate in the decisions of your nation. Never again let Washington create a climate of fear that controls the collective psyche of the nation, deliberately breeding hatred among Americans to Americans.
This is where the grace of humility is such a potent grace. It allows you to look in places that pride will keep closed to you. If you say, “I’ve always earned this much and I’ve always done this and I’ve always done that,” you will lock yourself into a place of great danger. Whereas the humble person says, “I’ve always done this, and I’ve earned this much, well, it’s over with. And I will look with new eyes, and now I will start again.” And you start with the idea that you can do other things. You have endless resources to be of service to others but not if you only think of yourself in terms of income and what others think about what you do. And you start talking to yourself and others in the language of service, instead of how can this serve me, think how can this serve others?
Gather with others and share your creativity. This is what the wondrous Teresa of Avila calls creating a circle of grace with your friends. Start with three people and gather around a potluck dinner. Invite everyone to bring something, a dessert, or dinner to share. Bring in strangers and new friends, and whether you gather once a week or once every two weeks, the object is to make this gathering something to look forward to and make it a routine where you have a wonderful meal and read something inspirational that lifts consciousness, whether it’s a poem, a prayer or writing that gives hope. Become companions and share networks of information, what’s working and not working. Go around and see how everyone is doing and share creative ideas with each other. But keep it positive. Do not let this slip into a wound support group. Such gatherings are not about talking about the past. They are about nurturing each other and supporting each other’s spirits as well as sharing ideas. This is about making everyone feel positive on their life’s journey and about helping people network, and saying, “I know someone who could help you: I know this contact, I know that contact.” This is about becoming a soul resource: a body, soul, mind and intellectual resource, nurturing the stomach, the heart and the soul.
Caroline Myss is the closing keynote speaker at the Hay House-sponsored event I Can Do It! held at the San Diego Convention Center in San Diego, CA. April 30 – May 3. Visit:hayhouse.com.
The Caroline Myss Education Institute, CMED, offers online educational material including video and audio programs and well as in-person intensive workshops and retreats nationally and internationally along with online educational material. For more information, visit: myss.com.
By Felicia M. Tomasko, RN
Felicia Tomasko has spent more of her life practicing Yoga and Ayurveda than not. She first became introduced to the teachings through the writings of the Transcendentalists, through meditation, and using asana to cross-train for her practice of cross-country running. Between beginning her commitment to Yoga and Ayurveda and today, she earned degrees in environmental biology and anthropology and nursing, and certifications in the practice and teaching of yoga, yoga therapy, and Ayurveda while working in fields including cognitive neuroscience and plant biochemistry. Her commitment to writing is at least as long as her commitment to yoga. Working on everything related to the written word from newspapers to magazines to websites to books, Felicia has been writing and editing professionally since college. In order to feel like a teenager again, Felicia has pulled out her running shoes for regular interval sessions throughout Southern California. Since the very first issue of LA YOGA, Felicia has been part of the team and the growth and development of the Bliss Network.