On one of our regular road trips in the last couple of years, a friend presented me with this hypothesis (as we were entertaining Siri’s back roads travel advice, yet overriding this form of artificial intelligence by organic impulse/intuition): Sheila, if you had found yourself with amnesia and had had to set out to re-create your life, how would it have been different and what would you have created? I said to her, That’s a hard one; I have no reference points for that. And, she reminded me that THAT was the point. Amnesia has no reference points. And so, I knew immediately, what my life would have looked like. 

No reference points. Like the back roads we were travelling on, we had no historical reference points to guide our choices for where we were driving; what we knew in each moment, however, was an intention. We were taking an unknown - yet intuitively known - route and choosing the turns, by feel and by deep and internal knowing… leaving Siri scrambling to catch up to us. 

Our beliefs are the gatekeepers to our thoughts; our thoughts become our things, our realities, our lives. For our realities to transform, a continuing pattern interrupt to how we are thinking about our lives and our living is essential. It demands knowing that, not only do we have choice, a very different choice is critical to our evolution and to our well being. When we consciously choose to take time to actively inhale our lives into the very cells of our bodies/our beings and to authentically exhale our unique experiences into our worlds, we magically invite the collapse of all that we have ever held as true in our realities about who and what we are as human beings; lies inculcated as truth, yet incontestably untrue. We ARE NOT our bodies.

It is essential, I believe, that we - meaning you and me and everyone the world over - remember that we are HERE (meaning on planet earth) because each of us is and has IMPACT. There is nothing we need do but to take a huge inhale followed by a long, resonant exhale, and to choose to BE our magnificent Selves and to speak the truth of our experience, warts and all. Sounds simple, doesn't it? Sounds easy. I look outside of me and I ask myself, Why, then, would we continue to be so hard on ourselves?

When it comes to our own innate capacity to heal our bodies, our minds, our lives and our worlds, what will happen when critical mass for the momentum of a new paradigm in thinking and living reveals itself? 

The presupposition, inherent in the above question, for me, is that we will get there... however, as to when, I have absolutely no clue. I am getting long in the tooth and I am not sure that I’ll live long enough to see it happen. Still, I am ever hopeful, even in those moments of my own deep despair, relative to whom I believe we humans have sadly become as a species; we are not ‘nice’ people. Gloria Steinem said the truth will set us free, but, first, it will piss us off. So the question becomes, If we are not ‘nice’ people, then who are we?