Dear Qoya Community,
I offer my heart to you in these tender times. I invite you to breathe deeply to offer compassion to all suffering in this time. While the intensity of immense grief can feel overwhelming, the gift is that it just might return us to the heart of our heart.
From a nervous system perspective, it is essential to find things we can lean into during times of growth and change. Just like a baby being held in their parent's arms, their parents are bigger, so the child feels held. What can we as adults lean into to be held and supported? I went outside to do my morning prayer. I put my feet on the cold earth, looking up at the full moon in the sky. I felt the solidity of the earth to hold me, and I looked up to the stars to contemplate the cosmos. I saw Jupiter so close to the full moon, Venus shining nearby, and Orion's belt above me.
I researched to discover that Orion's Belt consists of the three stars: Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka. These three supergiant stars are more massive than our sun and tens of thousands of times brighter. Two of the stars in Orion's Belt, Mintaka and Alnitak, are actually star systems, meaning they consist of multiple stars located close to one another. From our perspective, however, they appear as a single bright light.
I remember someone saying to me, "same light, different lamps." It's the idea that we (all beings) shine the same source of light through different forms. At the heart of so many spiritual practices, this is the invitation ~ to remember our interconnected destiny.
And how does that idea, that visceral felt sense, land when we translate it into the world we live in now, with rampant violence rooted in fear and hatred of the other? How do we balance our own inner life of personal reflection and inquiry with supporting healing the collective anguish? How many times must we witness this age-old war, this default setting of domination and violence that has been proved a failed experiment in people's individual hearts and societies over and over again?
The echoes of war
When the Ukraine war started, we hosted a collective feeling circle, where everyone was invited to notice how they were feeling and what arose from that place. My attention started to bring flashbacks of my childhood. I spent a lot of time at the VFW, which stands for Veterans of Foreign Wars. As a young child, I would walk around a loud bar with a lot of lost souls drinking and drinking and drinking. Sometimes they were kind and funny and playful with me. Sometimes they were short-tempered, angry, and dismissive of me. Sometimes they were wildly inappropriate, and I felt uncomfortable and didn't want to be there. When I go back to those memories now, what I see is all the soul loss.
My grandmother had three brothers, all of whom served in the wars; one was killed, one was a prisoner of war, and one returned home. My grandfather fought in the war, and my sister's father did as well. While the wartime stories might praise them as heroes who showed up to defend the "good," they all had extreme trauma that resulted in alcoholism and domestic violence, which has rippled through our family. Today, I can see even more deeply the echoes of war as the unresolved pain and grief that saturated my entire family.
In my career of leading healing spaces, I have been with grown men weeping in regret for their actions as a 20-something soldier, being put in a situation where they felt they needed to kill or be killed and then struggling to reconcile how to move forward with their lives.
The Q'ero, the Indigenous Elders of the Andes in Peru, often talk about the primary guidance for their society is the idea of Ayni, which can be translated as right relationship, reciprocity, harmony, or a win-win, where all beings in the relational dynamic are honored. I share this perspective from my own family on how the acts of war cause pain for everyone involved.
GET YOUR FEET ON THE GROUND AND GET YOUR INSTRUCTIONS
In the midst of all that's been happening, I was looking forward to sitting with the Q'ero elders to hear their perspectives. Synchronistically, the topic of our class was the Inka Prophecy and our role in it. Their prophecy has been that around this time, humanity would come out of right relationship with the earth and because of this, there would be war, climate catastrophes, and a loss of leadership. That during this time, each person would feel as if they need to find their own way.
I do feel that this disconnection with the earth, the feminine, and reverence for life is a root cause of so much pain.
The Q'ero enthusiastically share that for every question we hold in our hearts, there is a master teacher on our right, our left, under our feet, and above our heads. That teacher is Mother Nature, alongside the Cosmos. Ask anything! And then remember how to listen for your answer.
In the senseless killing and destruction of life, motivated by capitalistic short term profits and power hungry egoic forces of a few, how do we come together to support one another to look our lives in the eye with love? How in the world do we move the intensity of this energy through our bodies? How do we clear our minds to be able to truly see? How do we expand the capacity of our hearts to break so they may open? How do we align with the cycle of time we are in? How do we rise up to resolve conflict inside ourselves and our relationships as we ask the world to? How do we make love and not war?
These are existential questions, and nature offers us answers filled with life force and the beauty in existence.
In my own heartbreak during this war, I have felt myself begin to forgive. The people who I felt have betrayed me, crossed an uncrossable line, or those I have exiled from my life, somehow my heart has softened towards them again. When we named our son, Desmond, I wanted to invoke Desmond Tutu. His book, "No Future without Forgiveness," and the book he wrote with the Dalai Lama, "The Book of Joy," are about how in the midst of so much individual and collective suffering, apartheid, exile, murder, there are spiritual teachings to meet our hearts with compassion and practicality so that we may continue to act in service to life. What I remember most from those books are the teachings of interconnection.
When we are hurting, how can we compassionately meet ourselves tenderly and call on that suffering to bring compassion to others and bring our wisdom, love, and action to help heal what is for our hands?
Over the last two weeks, my son had these mystery stomach pains that made me have to cancel traveling and teaching in Minneapolis. His dad is out of town for three weeks, his babysitter got Covid, and then I got sick and had to cancel teaching today. These are minor inconveniences as the simple gift of being alive is amplified today. I placed my bare feet on the earth this morning and said sincerely, "Thank you for my life." Thank you for the opportunity to share my life with the people I love. Thank you to my parents for my life. Thank you to my grandparents. Thank you to all my ancestors, past, present, and future, who have the courage to live. Thank you to the mother water, mother earth, father sun, mother father wind, grandmother moon, star brothers and star sisters, and to our cosmic family.
My heart breaks with the perpetuation of pain.
And I pray for a ceasefire.
Dear God, Goddess, All Relations guiding all of us, please awaken the heart that remembers how to heal by tending grief and seeding love. May we embody the values of the world we want to live in.
From my heart to yours,
Rochelle