The Role You Choose
Taking A Breath...
And using this moment to get pass my busyness, I want to ask you, how are your Holidays going? How is your weather or season affecting you? Are things going great, or not so much? Are you traveling “in motion”, or reclined “at rest”? Sitting down while finishing up projects, trying to close out the year? Or are you sitting at home trying to gather yourself and make sense of all that you have read, heard, experienced, and or felt over the last few months?
Especially if your answer is the latter, here is a quote by Thich Nhat Hanh that you might need to hear: “Go back and take care of yourself. Your body needs you; your feelings need you, your perceptions need you. Your suffering needs you to acknowledge it. Go home and be there for all these things.”
In my ruminations around that quote and the times we find ourselves in, I would like to unpack some insights I’ve come to…but before we do that, let’s take a breath, be aware and conscious of how that breath feels, so breathe… Now let’s talk about making a choice. Choice means options to choose from all that is available to us. let us be mindful now of all those things within us. If you can think about a subject, then it is in some way a part of you. Whatever grabs your attention is part of your consciousness, that includes all the goodness that surrounds you. let’s choose to capture in , getting in this moment all the love, the joy, and the connection you feel available. Be there in that consciousness for all of it, because consciousness has room for all of it. Like a conscious Breath, when we are consciously living, it becomes a deeply meaningful life.
I want you to know that today, you are a part of all life, regardless of whether this moment is going well or not. Segmented isolated pieces of daily life is not the only choice we have to live; You can choose to know your whole being, which is not alone, for as you read this, I too am here now, part of the conscious whole of humanity and in your thoughts.
Think of Today as a new day of options and choices for you to choose from. A new season that’s begun, and you, my friend, can choose how that will be! Maybe choose not to be the same person you were yesterday, now that is a thought, and there is no telling who you could choose to consciously be tomorrow!
Now to move consciously towards that new you, may feel different, or uncomfortable at first. This movement for some, may be an experience that feels like you are giving birth. These contradictory contractions of feeling arising from your decision to be the new you, may come from your perceived reactions or notions of who you should keep on being, or they may be related to others opinions and the distress in their lives, or in the country or and in the world which is also reacting from a place of painful labor and birth pangs. Now the result of all of this, may well be found in the decision you make following the question “Are you ready to give birth to a new sense of self, the world, of love, or hope?
The world is changing, and this is a fact for all of us. You may be aware that with each decade of life, we have had to bear change. Funny how within many of those decades you had to wonder how you’d do it, or fit in, knowing that things would be different from how you did it, saw it, or understood it, or even liked it….but you did it!
Consciously the first steps are the hardest, but as we put things in conscious motion, they get easier. This is by staying consciously open and operating in an awareness to give ourselves and others empathy, kindness, and laughter that is essential to getting us through change intact.
This concept of “birthing” recently came to me through serendipitous circumstances. An extended family members mentioned they were about to conceive a new child within days of the death of a sibling. Around the same time, I was asked to be an Elder for a fledgling responsible environmental and AI Company. I found that concept of giving birth coming into my conscious meditations. When taking the concept into a form of meditation I call Metonymy Translation®, what started as a personal metaphor for self-growth morphed and changed. It became apparent it was also about the Community and World changing events that included an election year… yes it was much larger than the concept of me in birthing labor.
In my Metonymy Translation® (meditation), the concepts of understanding myself as a birthing “vessel of love, hope, and transformation in a world yearning for change,” bought me to thoughts of myself, as a mentor strengthening my service in lay counseling, through the avenue of the Prospersos School of Ontology. Thoughts as to Mentorship, as in a role, working with initiates taking their first steps towards mentorship. Thoughts of a new sense of purpose.
Honestly, I feel it is important to help support the growth of students academically, socially and emotionally. In a way, my thoughts of work with Students was seen as a continuation of my own conversations above the chaos. Th using Metonymy Translation® with a higher sense of self.
My thoughts moved to my exploring who I am birthing now. Understanding how choice leads to an outcome of helping students and families learn to communicate, create and collaborate. As I come out of my contemplations, I find myself grateful to start my 80th decade, I am grateful to have the opportunity to interact with my students, families and colleagues. Yet I am shocked at the amount of learning and unlearning is involved in this birthing process as it is ongoing... LOL …who knew?
My friends, I feel something big is indeed asking to be born— in each of us, our communities, and in our country. The old is dying, but not without a fight. The new is struggling to come to the forefront. In fact, consciously or unconsciously I believe each of us are being called to act in a new way, live in a new way, and care for one another and our world in as we have not done before. I believe everything that used to be is now being transformed before our very eyes… Our language, Our sources of information, our institutions, and our politics. We see change is occurring in the way the genders interact. We see this in the way in which generations view each other. It’s all in a process of transformation, and It’s happening no matter whether we choose to help the process; no matter whether we like the process or not…it’s happening.
To choose, is very empowering, What to choose is a question each of us gets to answer for ourselves. For me, it starts within my Beingness—listening to that primal essence and being in conversation with the Divine. Thus, I sit, sometimes in the morning, sometimes in the evenings, sometimes as I awake going into Metonymy Translation® as a dialogue, many times a thought as a question arise: Who am I to become today? Where is my work leading me? What am I drawn to see? Where should I focus my seeing on? Am I in the process of rebirth? What is my choice?
Chuckling to myself, in the knowledge that while I may be in this world, I’m not really of it. Neither are you by the way. We are all simply passing through. So how do we make use of our time while we are here? This much I am certain: I’m here to be of service—no question about it. I’m here because of Aloha…Agape…has brought me here, stated simply to love and be loved.
I’m here to help or at least point the way to alleviate suffering and heartache and offer hope. There are so many ways each of us can alleviate suffering—on a granular level and on a global level.
I’ve come to know that faulty perception is behind so much suffering needlessly. We suffer emotionally, physically, mentally, spiritually, and financially. The causes of heartache, heartbreak, longing, and loneliness. I’ve come to realize that suffering can be alleviated to some degree by simply helping another person see themselves and their choices in a different light, which eases suffering. Your choice to really listen to another person beyond just their words, eases suffering. Feeding another in any capacity eases suffering and the burden that another person carries. In being of service to others, we create wholeness within ourselves. And that is an open secret to sacred truth.
Several years ago, I began a class called Mentors Workshop. I wanted to be a part of creating something new. I feel the same about the Business of Truth Study, which is why I’m so grateful to the many of you who support this type of work. You allow for a voice of reason, sense-making, and truth to present itself! The Prosperos School was built by people for those seeking to live meaningful lives—those seeking to live lives of passion and purpose. We have begun a new chapter of birthing and together we can reach a new plateau of realization.
I am a teacher who promotes, an ontological vision that goes beyond race or genders, or economic status, or political divide, to bring us together beyond that place of fear and hate of one another, to a place of wholeness and self-remembering.
So, no matter how your holiday is going or not going, remember that today you can birth a new attitude, a new take, a new vision. You can drop the I-it version of dialogue, by first acknowledging your anger, your grief, and your confusion, and then flip that to acknowledge your hopes, your desires, and your vision for something new in consciousness...
The Prosperos School offers Tools to helps for reunification of the I-thou dialogue within oneself, one’s family, community, country, world by bringing it back into the substance of mind, of consciousness. Martin Buber, an Austrian Israeli philosopher, known for his wisdom of the I-thou wrote: “To look away from the world, or to stare at it, does not help a man to reach God; but he who sees the world in Him stands in His presence.” Buber’s concept of the I–Thou relationship is characterized by mutuality, directness, presentness, intensity and ineffability. Buber described the between as a bold leap into the experience of the other while simultaneously being transparent, present and accessible.
The past is dying. Something new is asking to be born. We can pretend we don’t see it, feel it, sense it. Or we can choose to be a part of the change. We can play a role—any role we choose to be a force for unpredictable good… Just imagine that.
Yours in service,
Calvin