Blessings for the New Year!
Greetings Beloved Reader,
With credit to Charles Eisenstein’s book, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible:
May 2023 be a year of
Dreaming into Being
The More Beautiful World our Hearts Know is Possible ✨🌟💖🙏🕊️
I’m writing to you from Bulahdelah, NSW, Australia, in my sister’s new-to-her home but built in the 1920s, that she is now renovating. I cannot resist sharing with you a couple of photos of her now complete bathroom, as I love its beauty and simplicity.
I’m truly grateful to have this time with my 85-year-old mother and 49-year-old sister who is now somewhat in the role of caregiver for my mother, and is building a “granny flat” for her right next door.
Because our mother has done so much inner work that her old age is graced by a state of Being in the present moment, my sister says that she feels especially privileged to care for her now.
This makes me think of how at TreeTops—Jamie’s and my decades-old log cabin home in Temple, New Hampshire—our Thai Forest Buddhist monk neighbors have a role in their tradition called an Upatakh, which is a junior attendant to a senior monk.
When a person does the inner work that the Buddhist monks are wont to do—and that our mother has done—they dissolve what Eckhart Tolle refers to as a “pain body,” meaning that any old, unresolved trauma is healed and resolved. Which then results in this state of Being in the present moment.
And I want more people to know how this experience of old age is possible.
And how we now have the opportunity to dream into being this experience of old age.
And we can dream it into being by each of us doing our own inner work.
My 49-year-old sister and I both value this kind of inner work. Knowing that when I have a reaction to someone else—or what is sometimes called being ‘triggered’—it’s because of my own pain body, which is any old, unhealed wounds, or unresolved trauma within me. The “other” person is simply giving me an opportunity to heal my own pain body. And of course family often triggers our pain body more than anyone, as family is often where our wounds were first created. So family is a crucible for doing this kind of inner work and becoming aware of unconscious behavior.
~
With this first Substack of this new year, I am inviting you to join with me in Dreaming Into Being This More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible.
I want more people to know how it is possible to live in harmony with each other when we recognize our own “muck” and we do the inner work to heal our old wounds, so that we’re not blaming anyone else for how we feel, nor are we complaining about anyone else.
As I’ve learned from Eckhart Tolle: when I complain about another person, on an unconscious level I’m saying that I’m superior to that person, which is simply an aspect of ego.
And whenever I feel superior or inferior to another, that’s my unconscious identification with ego.
When I’m aware of my ego—and ego can also be incredibly useful—but when I’m aware of it, I’m not identified with it, so it doesn’t cause me suffering, nor does it cause suffering to anyone else in my life.
And I’m not saying this is easy!
But it is truly the most meaningful work that can be done in a human lifetime.
~
Yesterday I took a walk on the sacred Aboriginal land around this area including a climb up Bulahdelah Mountain. Before I went walking, I read online about the Worimi Aboriginal tribe who have historically lived in this area.
“The Worimi have been on ‘Country’ since time immemorial.”
My most significant takeaway from reading this article, is how the Aboriginal people recognize the inextricable link between the land and our spiritual natures:
The land (barray) held the key to life’s secrets. Man (guri) was given the knowledge to read the land, and for every rock (bakan), tree (wati) and creek (dungang), he found an explanation for existence. He did not own the land, the land owned him. To know the land was to know life.
Land is the lifeline of existence as we know it. Without it no community will survive. In the Goori way, it is a mother; We come from the earth, we return to the earth, we live off the earth, we seek solitude in her, we are protected by her, we dare not desecrate her, our law is enshrined in her and we carry out our rituals accordingly. Land is the starting point to where it all began, it’s like picking up a piece of dirt and saying this is where I started and this is where I will go.
…
To Aboriginal people land is not just something that they can own or trade, it is the core of their spirituality, identity and purpose; Aboriginal people are connected to this land and always will be. The land has never just been about soil, rocks or minerals, but a whole environment that sustained Aboriginal people, their culture and practices in a traditional past and now in an ever evolving modern present.
The spiritual relationship Aboriginal people have to the land has been and continues to be deeply misunderstood by many Europeans. When European colonisers first arrived in Australia they encountered an unfamiliar land occupied by people they had no understanding of, particularly their social structures and their land ‘ownership’ system. As a result, Australia was mistakenly deemed to be ‘terra nullius’ and the land was claimed by the British.
I’m also grateful to the astrologer Rob Brezsny for bringing this to my attention:
In the early 17th century, Galileo Galilei was still proclaiming, incorrectly, that the moon had nothing to do with tides.
Meanwhile, the Yolngu Indigenous people in what we now call Australia had long before that understood how the tides are linked to phases of the moon. They had figured out how eclipses work, and knew how the planets moved differently from the stars.
They used this knowledge to regulate the cycles of travel from one place to another, maximizing the availability of seasonal foods.
And yet, just one generation ago, Australian school kids were taught that Indigenous people couldn’t count beyond five, wandered the desert scavenging for food, had no civilization, couldn’t navigate and peacefully acquiesced when Western civilization "rescued" them in 1788.
This information and some of the language comes from a publication called "Our World."
Art: "Women's Dreaming" by Michelle Possum Nungurrayi, Indigenous Anmatyerre artist
And in the English astrologer Pam Gregory’s words:
Let us welcome in an expanded consciousness of love.
Stay in nature, stay in your breath, and stay in your heart.✨🌟💖🙏🕊️