Yesterday I launched a new group into, Transforming Grief for Our World into Sacred Activism, which is a three month adventure of inquiry, discovery and co-creation. This feels like a good moment to share a little from the resources I created last year during the first months of lockdown: The Sitting with Death and Choosing Life Conversations, Series Four: Grieving for Our World.
When I speak of grieving for our world I speak of the obliteration of cultures and cultural diversity as much as about the desecration of nature. I speak of people’s inhumanity to each other and the cruelty of oppression and domination that has coloured our history. These forces of destruction are driven by the military industrial complex, corrupt governments and amoral profit-seeking multi-national companies. Yet we are all complicit. Or at least, by the very fact that you have the time and the comfort to consider such things, you are complicit in humanity’s headlong rush into extinction. And therefore we all have a responsibility to make our contribution to turn this tragedy around.
In the Sitting with Death and Choosing Life Programme, grief is seen as a starting place for creative action. Grief provides a special, poignant time outside the busy-ness of life to mourn what we have lost; to feel remorse at our own part in that loss; and to redeem our Soul inspired gifts, purpose and direction from suffering so that we may act and be creative on behalf of Life.
When you grieve for our world it is inevitable that you will experience a wide range of intense emotions – heart-breaking sorrow, passionate anger and rage, an alarming sense of betrayal and abandonment, paralysing guilt and shame, breath-taking horror and disbelief. The more you love the world and the more your heart opens, the more you will feel. It is overwhelmingly too much to bear. And yet, if you want to be part of the movement for conscious change and transformation you can’t stop feeling, you must let the river of sorrow flow through you and learn to transform sorrow into the true wealth of spiritual gifts. The fact that you are reading this means that Soul and planet are calling you to slough off old skins of shame and doubt, guilt and helplessness, and step forward to contribute whatever is in your heart to share for the good of the Whole.
Our willingness to grieve for ourselves and for our world is a vitally important part of evolving consciousness and the return to a soulful, holistic way of living. Experiencing grief, loss and death fully are essential aspects of the transformational process in which we shed whatever is limiting us and commit to making conscious choices. As we embod conscious, soulful living and take inspired, creative and experimental actions, we raise awareness and create an environment in which the collective consciousness can heal, grow and expand.
In the first three series of Sitting with Death and Choosing Life I offered some basic building blocks, practices, and questions for inquiry for the personal grieving process. These will support your practice of grieving for our world. Now it is time to take these grieving and healing skills and step beyond the personal into the collective and transpersonal. It is time to take on a bigger identity. We urgently need to move beyond the small self-interested egoic consciousness – even beyond our identification with family, friends and community – to identify with the whole of humanity as One Global Community. We need to identify with Nature, not only as Life itself and the source of our sustenance, but also as a wise teacher with whom we can, and must, learn to co-operate. We urgently need to recognise that both Nature and culture are not “out there” and separate from “me” but we are Nature and together we create culture. There is no separation. When we experience our belonging and participation in Life we move from the egoic self into, what Joanna Macy calls, the ecological self. We finally know that all Life is one interconnected, finely balanced whole of which we are a part, and our only sane choice is to serve that Whole. Beyond this, we may come to identify as Cosmic beings, with a divine purpose amidst infinite time and possibilities.
These larger circles of belonging and identity bring freedom and responsibility. Through the conversations in this book, and my own reflections on being alive at this very challenging and exciting time, I hope to inspire you into finding your way forward more confidently through the chaos and confusion.
The Crisis Apparent Now is a Spiritual Crisis
I am proposing that our current global crisis is a crisis of disconnection from Soul, Spirit and the Sacred. Over thousands of years the current threats to Life have been steadily gaining momentum as humankind has progressively been separated from the wholeness of Soul life through political and religious indoctrination, oppression and servitude.
As well as having many elements of disaster and destruction, a crisis is also an opportunity and a sign of evolution. In any transformational process old forms have to be destroyed so that new, more flexible and resilient forms can emerge. Now, amidst all the chaos and destruction, for the very first time in human history, masses of people have the chance to awaken to their essential nature, to the freedom of spiritual sovereignty and the responsibility for taking inspired and consistent action on behalf of Life. I believe the only way our crises can be transcended is through masses of individuals taking responsibility for the state of our own consciousness and then connecting together for support and practice, encouraging each other into inspired, Soul-led action.
As Souls we come to Earth to experience all aspects of being human and I question:
Why is such tragic waste and ignorance so woven into the human experience?
What is it for? And how may we move beyond it?
I believe it is in exploring these questions together that we will find the courage to keep moving purposefully through life with all its sorrows and blessings. And in doing so we will allow ourselves to experience all the many and paradoxical aspects of being human. Only then may we co-create a humane culture.
Rose Diamond
From the Introduction to The Sitting with Death and Choosing Life Conversations, Series Four, Grieving For Our World.
Find out more about the module here: Transforming Grief for Our World into Sacred Activism .
See the overview of The Sitting with Death and Choosing Life Programme, here.
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