Turn on the Light
Open a newspaper, go on FB or read your Yahoo News Feed and it's easy to feel overwhelmed by the frightening stories that appear. Beheadings, mass murders, water droughts, factory farming, starving children, people burning down churches and arguing over flags! Yikes! It's enough to make you feel like we're moving backwards and living in crazy dark times.
So when students and mentoring clients ask me, "I'm just one person, what kind of difference can I make? What can I really do to change the world?" I often tell them what my teacher Marianne Williamson once told me, "We are the lamps, God/Spirit is the electricity - but the light only works if you plug it in first."
What she was passing on to me, is what both Yoga and A Course In Miracles also teach in their own way - that our job is not to fight the darkness, our job is to simply TURN ON THE LIGHT. In order to be a force for good in the world - you have to first learn how to be a receptive conduit to the Divine.
One of the ways that you can do that is first thing, every morning (before you go out an inflict yourself on other unsuspecting people) - take some time to do your spiritual work and consciously connect to Source.
Just like we train and work out our physical muscles, we also have to take time each day to build our spiritual muscles too. It's this daily discipline of yoga, sitting for meditation, doing the Lessons of ACIM, forgiving, reading the great books of the faith traditions, chanting mantra, praying, counting your rosary (or whatever YOUR pathway to the Divine is) that will teach you how, in times of darkness, to turn on your own inner light.
It won't be easy and nobody else can do the work for you - but if you want to be the light, if you want to be liberated - from your suffering, from your fear, from the tyranny of your own ego mind - if you want to be an instrument of peace, then you must show up consistently for your LOVE practice. You have to be fiercely determined, disciplined, dedicated and and devoted to shifting your mind from Fear to Love.
No more playing small, no more blaming everyone else, no more waiting for the other guys to fix things. This changing the "outer world" is actually an "inside job". We do not fight the darkness OUT THERE - we simply turn on the light IN HERE!
As Swami Kripalu gently tells us:
"My beloved child, break your heart no longer. Every time you judge yourself you break your own heart. You stop feeding on the love which is the wellspring of your vitality. The time has come. Your time. To live, to celebrate, and to see the goodness that you are. You, my child, are divine. You are pure. You are sublimely free. You are God in disguise, and you are always perfectly safe. Do not fight the dark, just turn on the light, and breathe into the goodness that you are.”
Keep turning on your light and shining bright!
