For most of my life I worked at changing what was going on around me without any knowledge that I could change what was going on within me. This related to my mental, emotional, physical and spiritual selves as well as to the many selves I didn’t know existed within me as part of a global community of sentient beings. It came as a great surprise over many decades that I was part of a much larger whole, a kosmic whole or Holon where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts and each part contains the whole. When I began pondering this revelation something changed within.

And yet, as I reflect on what’s going on around you and me, I sometimes want to scream and fight the changes that seem to be overwhelming the planet. I want to point my fingers at who and what I see as perpetrators of a vast scheme to rule the world and exploit its resources for selfish and destructive ends. I want to destroy the destroyers, the perpetrators of despair, enslavement, fear and exploitation. I want to do unto them what they continue to do unto us. I want to change what’s going on around me without changing what’s going on within me. Then, in great love and loss, I WAKE UP.

In waking up, I’ve come to reflect on the natural order of creation. I’ve come to see Nature as a mirror that we can use to see ourselves for who we truly are rather than who we’ve been taught to think we are. I see a hundred year old pine tree standing tall in the same place it was when it was a seedling. I notice the aspen grove with its fluttering leaves flourishing in the same place it’s been rooting for decades. I marvel at the river that flows today along the same route that was carved out by snowflakes, rain drops, sun and wind centuries ago and envision the trajectories of time and space.

Today I saw six different people in my office that I’d never met before. They came for physical help which I wasn’t able to give them because of our limited and exhausted funds for such purposes. What I did give them however was food for the soul that every plant and animal on the planet knows innately. The change needing to take place starts within the Essence of our Being. It’s an inside job. The food for all Beings flows from an Integrating Source of earth, air, fire and water that’s seen and unseen, known and unknown; all working together in harmony to bring Life to Life. The gift is an inner turning, an inner orientation, a reality shift into ‘inner knowing and growing.’

We’ve all been taught, to one degree or another, that if we change what’s going on around us, all will be well. We have it backwards…….and it’s a mis-understanding that seems rampant in all people, places, situations and things. The reality is that we can’t change what’s going on around us in any significant way for any significant time until we change what’s going on within us. Stop for a moment and ponder this. . . . What are you wanting to change and how are you going about it? How is it working/not working? Now, look deeply and notice what inner shifts in perspective need to take place in you!

The more we under-stand what we are doing, the greater the results of our actions. We must ‘see’ for ourselves that our perceptions are distorted and misplaced in our outward projections. It’s only when we relax and under-stand that the problems ‘out there’ are products of the unresolved conflicts ‘in here.’ When the perspectives shift from outer to inner, new possibilities emerge and with a step by step, day by day approach, we accomplish much. To feel we are always right is to block the way of any self growth and change. Defending a false picture of ourselves is always fatal. It’s time to Wake Up!

• Asking the question: “Where were you before your mother was born?” has a tendency to short circuit the rational linear mind and open us up to a much larger universe than we were taught to know. It helps us relax and ponder deeper understandings. It opens us to new possibilities, to the mystery we take for granted and rarely question. Sit with this question and see how it might help you “change what’s going on within you.”
• What does it mean for you to ‘change what’s going on within you’? Have you made contact with the still small voice that lives in your depths? How often do you connect with this Essence? What are you waiting for? Isn’t this the pearl of great price, the gold within the lead, the knowing in the not knowing, the place called Home deep inside yourself? Give some intentional quiet time here over the next days, weeks, and months to awaken some new understandings and revelations; some in depth serenity, peace and illumination that’s here for you and all you love. . . .