You would probably agree that life in our world right now is feeling especially disrupted and dangerous, difficult and scary.

We are feeling turbulence in politics, in deep personal shifts and in relationships.

We feel vulnerable as we watch the news.

Many of us are experiencing emotional or physical violence where we live.

We need new images, creative strategies, and heartful new behaviors to keep bringing us back to what we know is true inside.

I got an email with this interesting question:  

I’m a big believer in our abilities to manifest our realities.  I also believe in the exponential power of a group… and so I wonder what we are creating every time we “all” come into agreement that we are navigating “tough” or “turbulent” times.  This could simply be my being nit-picky about language, and it is something I wonder about frequently.  Is it possible we continue to manifest the struggle and strife that’s being experienced because we continue to agree that it IS this way?

Some of my thoughts in response:

I do think that there is tendency in people to tough it out and soldier on. We think, kind of unconsciously, that “this is just how it is,” or “this is just how I am…and nothing will change.”  And then change does slow down.

And I believe that there is a kind of mass consciousness that is being generated by many sources, the media, some of our religious institutions, by all of our institutions, really.  Humans have been a tribal people for a long long time.

But now I notice that there is a change happening.  We are being asked as a whole humanity to learn to stand in our own individual presence in a way that still honors the group consciousness.  It is hard to do this!  And there are many forces in the world that strongly, even violently, resist this kind of freedom and independence.

People will give up a lot to feel safe, so fear is an ancient tool in the hands of those who would control others.  Humans are facing this throughout the world.  The current struggle with fear is the great struggle of our time…maybe of all times.

But I believe that what looks to us in the moment like terrible disorganization and trauma is also, underneath it all, change happening.  It is the dramatic meeting of the forces of change clashing with the forces of stasis.

Flexibility and rigidity, expansion and constriction, moving and solid…these are the two essential forces in the universe. Everything is made of some balance of these two forces.  There is never a final completion;  the movement is always in an apparent disarray.

Think of a tightrope walker.  You never see a tightrope walker stop, way up there on the line.  They are always finding themselves out of balance. They are continually throwing themselves toward balance, always moving forward.

There are times in the world when there is more, or less disarray.  Right now is a time of exceptional disarray.  I believe this means that we are in a time of powerful change.  The old, more rigid systems are falling away… unwillingly. There is a life force in these rigid systems that wants to maintain itself, to survive. But it is the way of the universe that movement always emerges out of being stuck in imbalance.

The best thing any of us can do is to find individual personal practices that help to hold a quieter space for this unfolding drama.  We can create quiet miracles. We can do things that will give us strength, give us joy, give us inner and outer nourishment. We can touch the heart of the person in front of us.  We can touch the heart of the land we are standing on.

The true deep soul essence of the human spirit is joy, and creativity, flexibility, and freedom.  The human spirit will always emerge over time. Movement toward creativity and fluidity is what actually creates chaos.

The more we can agree on this, and hold a steady space inside ourselves, the more smoothly the flow through chaos toward harmony can emerge.  Our agreement is always powerful.