Time for a Major Love Offensive!
November 15th, 2016 By Lissa Rankin Guest writer for Wake Up World I’m in Bali leading a writing retreat right now, so it’s been strange to navigate this polarizing election from another country, where I am surrounded by not only native Indonesians but by ex-pats from all over the world. Given that the U.S. is supposedly the most powerful country on the planet, this election is not just about the United States. It touches everyone, and the shock waves of this divisive election are rippling all the way over here to Bali. Last week, as I was processing my emotions about the election, I was emailing with my friend and love revolution ally Charles Eisenstein. Charles wrote back with an email that I found so hopeful. “Things are going to speed up … time for a major love offensive!” I felt my whole body relax. YES! Things are going to speed up! Time for a major love offensive!
After the most polarizing presidential election of my lifetime, we are being called to unity. Now is the time for us to come together — one country, one planet, one heart, One. Donald Trump’s election as President of the most powerful country on the planet has sent shock waves around the globe. Yet this is not a time for division. We are all responsible for this outcome. The U.S. collective has sent a message to the world that, as individuals and as a collective, we have gone too long without paying attention to the pain in the hearts of so many — the inequality, the injustice, the untended rage — and it has presented itself with a mighty roar that says with its vote, “HELL NO.” This is not a time to separate into “us” and “them.” We are all equal cells in the human body. We are all motes of consciousness joining together as drops into an ocean on this Planet Earth. I see this election result as a desperate collective plea for truth and reconciliation. Rather than dividing and hating on one another, we must humble ourselves before each other and ask, “Tell me what hurts.” We must generously listen, heart to heart, soul to soul. We must be willing to apologize and make amends. We must create a world where both sides can be heard and creative solutions can be intuited, from the heart. This doesn’t mean we should employ some spiritual bypass, skipping the painful emotions elicited by this divisive election campaign. It hurts to think that we may be entering an era of backwards movement around civil rights for women, minorities, and the LGBT community. It hurts to think about the plight of the indigenous people in my country. It hurts to feel into my immigrant brothers and sisters, who share my country or who yearn to share it because they are fleeing terror. I realized this as I walked with my feet in the sea in Canggu — I felt grief and terror and rage and panic. Lying on the sand, I let my emotions wash through me as the ocean washed over me, allowing my body to move, giving myself permission to release the charge I felt. After that purification process, I felt my heart open. I still feel very tender, but I feel more at peace. We cannot skip this process of acknowledging and releasing our feelings. So, feel what you feel, but don’t let your feelings separate you from your fellow global citizens. Don’t give up on love, dear ones. It’s so easy to get righteous in times like this, to claim that we know better than someone else or that someone else is more ignorant, but righteousness is just another tool of separation. Let us instead be curious about one another. Let’s ask each other, “What hurts?” and be genuinely curious. All over the world, people are hurting, and this pain is causing people to flock into the story of separation. Hurting people are fleeing into gangs, terrorist organizations, and other polarizing “us” versus “them” tribes. We so deeply yearn to belong that we will do ANYTHING to feel safe, comforted, and accepted in a community. Can we blame them? When you feel helpless, disempowered and ignored, isn’t it natural to crave belonging? As I said in my latest TEDx talk about loneliness as a public health issue, our yearning to belong is not only creating health crises, it is a global crisis that affects all people and all of Gaia. Let us break our hearts open, beloveds. If we participate in the story of separation, we only make it worse. Now is the time for a major love offensive, and it starts with you. We need to come together now. This is when the revolution of love ramps up tenfold and those who are here on this planet to serve love need to step into their callings without hesitation or reservation. You are being called, and it’s time to say YES. The time of polarity, the time for the story of separation, ends now. We must come together, to be allies, to serve peace. We don’t know how to do this. We have just been thrust globally into what Charles Eisenstein calls “the space between stories. In his book A More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible, he writes:
Yes. We are in the space between stories, so let us be here together, with love. When we don’t know what to do, let us sit with the discomfort we feel rather than rushing to just do something. Let us hold each other lovingly through the discomfort. We don’t know how to launch this major love offensive, so let us humble ourselves in the face of our not-knowing and pray for help. Let us surrender our fear, grief, anger, and resistance to Divine Will and know that whatever is in the highest good shall come into being with ease and grace. Let us surrender our desire for unity and admit that we don’t know how to get there. Let us be humble in the face of the mystery of Divine Will. We cannot ever know for sure what this is, so we can only open our hearts and ask “What would love do?” — one present moment at a time. We can trust that we will be shown and that the movement of love will guide us, one heartbeat at a time. Let us never lose hope. Let us breathe in the words of Vaclav as we enter a new world today.
May we all come together in this time of uncertainty — uniting our collective heartbeat into one great Om … Om shanti shanti shanti. Peace peace peace. About the author:Lissa Rankin, MD is a mind-body medicine physician on a grass roots mission to heal healthcare, while empowering you to heal yourself. She is the founder of the Whole Health Medicine Institute training program for physicians and healthcare providers, and the New York Times bestselling author of the books Mind Over Medicine: Scientific Proof That You Can Heal Yourself (2013), The Fear Cure (2014), and The Anatomy of a Calling (2015). Copyright © 2016 Wake Up World. http://wakeup-world.com/2016/11/16/time-for-a-major-love-offensive |