ST Healing Love-IntoBalance October2022 - Flipbook - Page 37
Times are urgent; let us slow down.
What we need is beyond what we can see. Rather than trying to fix where
we are by projecting or worrying into the future, let it unfold from where we are at by being wholly
present. We can’t bypass our inner work and go straight to the systemic as “the work.”
Let us stay here a little longer and do “the work.”
Balance and Equanimity
Before contact with European invaders and colonizers, many indigenous cultures practiced and
embraced balance and equanimity to how they lived on the land, with nature, and within their
communities. The first task for us is to break the binary: we are either good or bad, racists or anti-racists,
queer or hetero, femme or homme, pure or unpure. We are free to be two-spirited, somewhere along
the gender identity and all other spectrums to bring more balance and equanimity.
Physiologically, our bodies are hardwired to react in a flight or fight mode as a survival response. Under
the colonized educational system, we have learned to shrink complexities down to this or that. But we
must remember that we are divinely capable of so much more.
We are capable of inspiring vicious desire. We are capable of forgiving and cleansing. We can recycle
and compost failures, mistakes, trespasses into life force energy for collective wellbeing and harmony.
We are capable of loving ourselves rigorously through all that are trying to disconnect us from
ourselves, each other and the earth. We are capable of both, simultaneously; it’s an intention and choice
to steer away from the gravity of status quo “normative” expectations.
Love connects and creates connections. Fear, on the other hand, is protection, and reinforces
disconnection. The opposite of love is not hate, it’s apathy. Apathy is the sense “I don’t care…” and it
comes from fear. Fear of rejection, helplessness, and disappointment.
Both love and fear are fundamentally motivating emotions. Everything we do (or don’t do) is motivated
either by fear or love. If we allow fear to run rampant in our psyches, we ally ourselves with the status
quo. The secret to growth is not shutting out fear because fear is part of us. We must lean into and move
through fear if we are to evolve beyond
the status quo. The source of creativity and
transformation is uncertainty. A caterpillar
enters a cocoon not knowing what is to
become of it. The greatest artists and
thinkers our planet has seen embrace the
unknown to create things the world has
never seen before.
What would it look like at the organizational
and community levels to embrace
uncertainty? In the ancestral language of
Sanskrit (from the region now known as
India and Pakistan) the word Shraddha has
been described as, “love for the unknown.”
It is often translated as faith, but it isn’t
Healing Love: Into Balance | A Brown Paper
37