DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.
On this solstice, a lot is coming through. This solstice feels like no other has felt for me, in my many decades on this earth. It feels like the right time to embody the creative process of death/transformation and rebirth on a massive scale. It is an opportunity to look at the darkness of humanity and what it has caused, love it, forgive it, and usher in the light that brings new beginnings, new life. A new consciousness and practice of Interbeing can emerge, if we choose it.
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          The theme of death, transformation, grieving, accepting, creating afresh has been very alive in me lately. I am seeing it everywhere, from small scales to large scales. Looking back, I can say this has been a life-long awareness that became a much more conscious, embodied, powerful experience nearly 2 years ago. It continued very powerfully in an experience the other night. I still cannot quite put it into words, but I can try to summarize by saying I fully embodied the dying/death/transformation process of Gaia, myself, all life, all existence. I experienced the fear, resistance, sadness, grief, letting go, accepting. I experienced relationships of these processes as parts of a whole that often, from our human perspective, seem disjointed, fragmented, purposeless. It left me weeping, gasping for breath, certain I was dying in a very real sense, and resolved to experience fully whatever comes.
          This was on the heels of a brief but intense reminder about the condition of the world—Gaia and all of the spirits residing with her in material form. Gaia is dying. At least the Gaia we know is dying. We are in the throes of the sixth mass extinction on Earth, a mass extinction that humans are causing at a rate that is 100-1000 times faster than historical rates. We have literally decimated other-than-human life on this planet, save our own. Yet our own quality of life, as a whole, is far below optimal, with diseases and illnesses on the rise even as death rates fall, individual and collective happiness decreasing. We live less healthy, less happy longer. We have caused the alteration of climate patterns to the point that the above realities will continue to worsen quickly if we stay on our current trajectory.
          The fate of the human population, as a whole, is also questionable. At the least, we can say future conditions will be much less favorable for humans to live comfortably on Earth. At the worst, humans will find it incredibly difficult or impossible to live here. How Gaia will emerge from this human-induced trauma is unknowable, but one thing is certain—even if humans go extinct, Earth will continue on without us, heal, evolve, grow, and flourish once again.
           As if these atrocities were not enough to cause deep and nearly incapacitating grief, we have the added component of social traumas quickening. In the last ten years we, as a collective, have experience deadly pandemics, extreme social unrest, increasing inequities and injustices, climate-induced refugees, war, fraud on massive and public scales, big corporations getting away with heinous crimes against life, unimaginably huge transfers of wealth from the many to the few, and more.
          The sheer frequency and intensity of the combined environmental and social upheaval that is occurring is enough to put anyone into a state of depression, and indeed we see depression rates rising rapidly. Sadly, numbing pharmaceuticals are the only widely approved method of dealing with depression, even though there is ample evidence that natural remedies for depression are available and work very well. These kinds of natural medicines and remedies, given to us by Gaia herself, shepherded by indigenous peoples across the globe, have be villified, criminalized, and kept from most of the population in favor of manufacturerd pharmaceuticals with a litany of unwanted and often deadly side effects, as well as low rates of success in treating the very conditions they are said to improve.
          And here’s the kicker. We know how to “solve” all of these issues. We know how to co-create a beautiful, thriving, abundant world. It is really very simple. Nature, when left to her own devices, manifests abundance, prosperity, more life, beauty. We are part of Nature, and ignoring her principles, continuing to play the game of separation when our true nature is Interbeing, is causing the entire Earth system, at all scales, to degenerate, degrade, destroy. We can choose to align ourselves with Nature’s principles, which, by the way, are also spiritual principles (Nature is Spirit in form). We even have the money. Just look at how much money has been transferred from the public into private hands over the last two years, how much money is transferred annually to the military industrial complex, chemical agriculture companies, oil companies, pharmaceutical companies. Allocating even half of these funds to regenerate Gaia would do the job.
          But let’s not overlook what really has to change here. We must change. Not just our morals, ethics, or behaviors, but our fundamental worldviews, paradigms, and even consciousness itself. We must experience and embody a consciousness of Interbeing rather than separation. Spiritual traditions have always told us that Interbeing, Oneness, is our true nature, the true nature of all of existence, seen and unseen. And now fields such as unified field physics, complex adaptive systems, and ecology echo that teaching with a different and complementary lens and perspective. When a consciousness of Interbeing is held in individuals and collectively, we can no longer harm the other, because the other is us. What we do to others we do to ourselves, literally and figuratively.
          Now, just shifting consciousness will not be enough, but it is an absolutely necessary condition for any outer, behavioral changes that manifest in other physical changes to occur. We must couple a new way of being and thinking with a new way of doing. Fields such a regenerative development and design help shift our consciousness while also helping to show us what to do, how to live in alignment with nature’s principles. People are already implementing regenerative strategies and technologies, living regeneratively, on scales from the individual to communities and cities. Now it is time to think and live regeneratively on a massive scale. It is really the only option if we want a thriving, abundant, beautiful world for all life.
          I do hope the next focus of this process of death/transformation and rebirth is more in the creative phase, a renewal and rebirth after the destruction of the old. I hope beyond all hope that we can actually avoid the worst of this process and regenerate Gaia right now! We are at a transformation point as a planetary whole. Either way we go at this point--toward new and more life, Source expression, and Interbeing as One, or toward less life (temporarily, of course, on a spiritual plane, but for quite a long time on the earthly plane), fragmentation, and destruction--the old and existing are dying, transforming to something drastically different.
          We can decide and create where to go from here. But first, we must look honestly and lovingly at what is happening for Gaia as a whole and all of her life and elements. If we can, we must experience across dimensions to Spirit and Source in order to put this all into a bigger context. We must accept this transformation, grieve, release, and then create new, higher expressions of Source. This is the way of creation, and we must learn to roll with it, co-create with it.
          This solstice feels like the right time to embody this process on a massive scale. It is an opportunity to look at the darkness of humanity and what it has caused, love it, forgive it, and usher in the light that brings new beginnings, new life. A new consciousness and practice of Interbeing can emerge, if we choose it.
          Love and Light to All,
          Leah
DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.