Out with the OLD — In with the NEW
“The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to become.”
As 2021 draws to a close, you’re probably as ready as I am to wave goodbye to planetary pandemics, partisan politics, pervasive pollution, and other pressing problems.
And those are just our global concerns.
There are other concerns that impact fewer people, but they’re still of enormous concern to those they do impact and to the people who love them — from food insecurity to justice equity to individual health, career, and relationship challenges.
All Challenges Require the Same Response: Intentional, Unconditional LOVE and ACTIVE HOPE!
According to A COURSE IN MIRACLES, a monumental miracle like healing the planet is no harder to accomplish than any so-called lesser miracle.
To quote: “There is no order of difficulty in miracles. One is not “harder” or “bigger” than another. They are all the same. All expressions of love are maximal.”
I hope this news encourages you to love it and embrace it all, the big and the small, because intentional, proactive love and hope are what it will take to heal ourselves and the planet.
Sometimes the challenges can seem so huge that nothing you or I do might seem to matter.
But of course, it does. We matter. We materialized to matter!
You’re not here right now by accident. And neither is anyone else. Nothing that has happened to, or for, you happened by accident. There is a plan.
The plan is Learn to Love! True justice (legal, civil, and planetary) is love out loud. Some people learn it faster than others; some have lived numerous lives (unwillingly) simply because they haven’t yet learned to love, so their lives expose and showcase how the lack of love cripples people and our planet. Others reincarnate time and again out of lovingkindness to help show people what love is and what we can attain, given sufficient intention.
Here’s what I intend for 2022, here and with my podcast EVER NEW (which will debut on January 15th 2022 at 10:30): to embody the light with you, to transcend the things that divide us and embrace the truth that unites us.
To do this, we need to revisit the pain, forgive ourselves and others, and begin again with a new agenda —an agenda not to allow whatever we allowed before which caused us to fall into a trap of discontent, dislike/distrust, dysfunction and/or willful amnesia.
Deciding to ignore the dysfunction that is happening is inviting more of it into our lives. We need to address the cancer, proverbial and actual, to obliterate it. We must love ourselves enough, and the planet enough, and each other enough, to say “Enough is enough!” We need to figure this out and start anew in ’22.
Love isn’t looking the other way when a psychopath hurts you or someone else.
Love isn’t saying, “Not my circus, not my monkeys.”
Love is a commitment to acting in love no matter what life hands you. It’s Nelson Mandela saying that he knew that if he didn’t forgive his jailers for imprisoning him for 27 years, he would never really be free again. As a result of his generosity of spirit, he became the first elected President of South Africa.
Love is Jesus washing Judas’s feet and sharing his last supper with him. True love is unconditional.
And so, I want us to leave 2021’s imperfect love behind and embark on a new year in which we practice unconditional love with every step we take in 2022.
Just imagine, as vividly and viscerally as you can, what a full 365 days of extending unconditional love and hope can do, given our present challenges:
Your relatives and associates — even the ones who are in opposite political, spiritual, or philosophical camps from yours — might become people to feel sorry for, more patient with, and to show more compassion to by way of listening between the lines to the very real (to them!) fears that are driving their decisions. They may be in an earlier or later incarnation than yours, or on a lower or higher vibrational level.
Are their fears valid? Are there historical precedents to validate their concerns? For example, when a Holocaust survivor or historians raise red flags about the reemergence of the political and societal behaviors that gave rise to the Third Reich, maybe it’s time to look into that and not merely shrug the warning off as delusional or paranoid. The Third Reich was about as far away from where we want to end up as it’s possible to get, right?
If you surmise that fears are driving their choices and decisions, triple your compassion, double your patience quotient, and then try to find out where they developed them.
They weren’t born with those fears. The only two fears human infants are born with are the fear of falling and the fear of loud noises. All other fears are trained into us either by direct experiences or by significant others who teach us about life while we’re too young to discern whether they’re telling us the truth or just passing along prejudices or fears that were trained into them. Those saddled with unexamined and unjustified fears at a young age frequently go on to hang with the tribes who push the narrative that only they know what’s really going on, and that whatever is going on is verging on catastrophic.
Try to find out who’s responsible for the indoctrination that caused the fear. Was it a parent, an actual incident in their lives, or did it happen later during the advent of 24/7 cable news circulated by talking heads with an agenda frequently devoid of facts but crammed with fearful predictions of impending doom?
Most fears are instilled not due to actual incidents that happen personally to individuals, but to hearsay. “If we allow this, this will inevitably be the result. (Add horrific conclusion here.)” You’ve heard it yourself a hundred times, haven’t you?
Encourage those you feel at odds with to revisit their conclusions. Remind them that very few things end in catastrophe unless they are arrived at using insufficient evidence, facts, and truth and driven by paranoid dog whistles about “us versus them.”
I’m not pointing fingers here. There are malefactors on all sides of ideological spectrums. They’re easy to identify: they’re the ones promoting fear as opposed to facts. They’re astute amygdala ringers. They’re fully aware that the two most powerful forces in the universe are love and fear. They want you to feel more of the latter than the former. That’s where they go off the rails. Fear will get us all killed. Love and active hope will restore us.
How will your personal and professional life be transformed by this time next year if your intention is to exhibit unconditional lovingkindness and active hope? Think about that.
ACTIVE HOPE
Hope isn’t mere wishful thinking. Real hope is an activator. Real hope causes us to grow up, stand up, show up, and put some elbow grease into getting the result we’re wanting.
We’re wired with active hope. So are your house pets and other animals. You’ve watched your pets eagerly anticipate the next thing you pull out the cupboard or the fridge that contains their food or treats, haven’t you? That’s active hope. That’s exactly what it looks like and feels like inside. But only we humans have the ability to manifest our pets’ hope into an actual result if we’ve tucked their treats away – hence their reliance on us to deliver the goods! But don’t turn your back. Your pets are fully capable of acting as their own agents if you fail to deliver what they’re so eagerly anticipating! How many steaks have disappeared off plates, or pet food bags been torn into when our backs were turned? Hope that succeeds requires either a response from a benefactor or a unilateral action. Our pets have this down pat!
In her new book, “The Book of HOPE: A Survival Guide for Trying Times,” chimp researcher and ambassador of hope icon Jane Goodall writes, “Hope is what enables us to keep on going in the face of adversity. It is what we desire to happen, but we must be prepared to work hard to make it so.” “Hope is a survival trait.”
It is only when people feel completely hopeless that they start feeling impotent and start giving up on their lives. A lot of people are there right now. Let’s become ambassadors of hope for them. As many souls as possible need to get in the game to enable us to reach the all-important tipping point and turn things around!
Let Beverly Glenn Copeland inspire you now… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbrJk92fQzQ
