Why Peace?
“Who will work for peace on our planet? In our relationships? Within ourselves?” These are questions we are currently asking ourselves. With all the negativity that is flooding our airwaves, people are once again saying peace matters, even marching and calling for peace in ways we haven’t seen in decades. We desire love for all humanity and a restored earth.
To make this ‘call’ our collective reality, we must do the work to make peace our experience. We must make peace with our past. We must make peace with the lives we have been giving, rather than wishing for a greener life across the fence. We must be peace. Peace is our path to wholeness, to healing, to the very best of our collective existence.
Change the conversation? Change the chairs!
How do we make peace? One way is to initiate new conversations and a new way to be in conversation. Peter Block writes: “Change the conversation, change your thinking, change your life. Maybe… listening creates the speaking. Maybe citizens create leaders, maybe employees create bosses, maybe students create teachers and children create parents. Maybe the purpose of problem solving is to build relationships.”
This is all to say that we have the power to make monumental changes and that one of the ways is by hearing from one another. We also need to change our environment to be better supported to change the conversation. One powerful and ancient First Nations method that changes the conversation, transforms and heals the conversation, is through Circle. We can create circles for healing, for visioning, for building community, for conflict transformation, for remembering our inner wisdom’s way to peace.
The vital Equinox conversation: Forgiving our Past to Re-birth our Capacity to Love
So now that we have a well-tested method on how to change the environment and the principles of circle to change the conversation, what conversation is vital this equinox? What do we do with all the hatred, the negativity and the resentment that is creeping into our spaces and newsfeeds and into our inner sense of hope? Forgiving our past, forgiving our hurts is truly a key and vital change point. Love cannot exist without forgiving. Forgiving what hurt us is only possible with love. Spring brings us renewed hope and in this place of hope, we can access the faith and power to forgive through love.
As Rob Voyle, change agent and Episcopalian priest writes: “Without forgiveness, people remain trapped in their past, obsessing over what has been done to them. This obsession leads the person to use their injury as a way to re-injure themselves and stay in a state of victimization. While they are looking back to the past, it is impossible to look forward and to experience hope. If we are resentful of things from our past, when we do glimpse the future, we are likely to see a repetition of these painful experiences continuing into the future. Rather than welcome the future we are likely to spend considerable effort in taking self-protective measures.”
Bringing in and participating with the equinox is a call to awaken, to re-birth our vitality. The ultimate vitality is love and forgiveness. A specific task of forgiveness is to release our resentments about what happened in the past. Rob Voyle states that “resentment is a current demand that someone or something in the past should have been different. While the event that created our resentment may be in the past, the resentment is in the present and is manifested as a demand about the past.”
Spring is a special time to release the demands feeding our resentment and instead choose to nurture our capacity to love. Really. It’s time to open to the warmth of the sun and to the flow of our vitality. It’s time to live in love, a new kind of love that truly forgives and creates a genuinely new and better future. We cannot use forgiveness to change the past, but doing so will certainly enlarge and enrich our future. And that is where we will live, in our future.
Where can you have this vital conversation?
Join me in the next Peace Circle on Wednesday, March 22nd from 7-9:30 pm and be re-vitalized by the ceremony of forgiving our resentments together. For details about this event, please visit Spring Peace Circle. Limited seating so don’t wait to register.
If you have never experienced Peace Circle, I invite you to listen to our podcast series and be invited into peace circle with Karen, Tonya and myself.
Peace Circle Podcast series
Join Shirley Lynn Martin, Karen McCarthy and Tonya Noble as we again invite you into Peace Circle with us, to cross the threshold into sacred space and time. In our third and final podcast in this series, we explore the ‘Magic of Peace Circle’ we have each personally experienced. What comes to light is that circle transformation is a process that already begins in our preparation, as well as in the actual encounter and continues even days following the Peace Circle. There is a subtle dawning of synchronous joy, peace and awareness of who we truly are that becomes real in our coming together. The magic is real!
Namaste,
Shirley Lynn