The appropriate action to take to violence is to be broken-hearted.
- May you be broken-hearted;
- so broken-hearted that you are willing to surrender.
- May you be so broken-hearted that the protective layer around your life is cracked open.
- So broken-hearted that your heart is open and the only choice you have is to let love pour in.
- So broken-hearted that you are ready to ask, what can I do, what is mine to do?
- So broken-hearted that you let go, allow change, and connect to others.
I am sure that this sounds cruel. My heart hurts from how many heart-breaking things are happening in the world right now. But I speak from experience that the things that have broken my heart are the things that have pushed me to change, to open up to love and to others. It isn’t that I actually believe the saying that God does not give us more than we can handle, sometimes life does indeed give us more.
As horrible as the mass shootings are I hope that they make you feel broken-hearted. There is no better reaction than that. It is broken-heartedness that led me to begin to take action. To begin to realize that there was something that I could do to make it better. My broken-heartedness opened me up to a life that was richer, more vulnerable and less passive.
We are in a time of great change. We are experiencing the results of operating in a human-made system that is deeply flawed and self-destructing. You might wish that our old paradigm thinking that we can control what is happening would actually work-but it will not. The thinking that we can control anything is one of the main flawed ideas that has gotten us to this place. We don’t control anything.
We are already past the point of no return.
I know that might sound defeatist, or that all hope is lost. But I think we are being given the greatest opportunity. And that opportunity is coming to us through great pain and suffering.
The opportunity here is that our world is an unsustainable system. We operate as humans in a human-made system. Our human system is totally out of alignment with how our universe operates. Many of us feel the energy of things falling apart. Our human made systems are past the critical point and are disintegrating. What we are seeing is the violence, the polarity, the disconnection of our social fabric.
It is our experience of broken-heartedness that will help us let go of all the things that aren’t working. Our belief that we can and should control things.
Haven’t you ever had the experience where something in your left fell apart, and because it fell apart you were able to let go and do something new?
It is the events in my own life that were heart-breaking that my life transformed. Where I learned what it is to be in what I call ‘the flow of god’. May you find an easy way into that flow.