On one level, A CoCreative Path is my reflections on spirituality. From my perspective, that is a Journey of the Heart involving personal and relational transformation, an evolving movement toward greater awareness and harmony. On the relational end, it is a movement from fear based separation and competition toward heart driven connection and cooperation. Deep cooperation and a sense of community is required for fulfillment of human and planetary needs. In any ecosystem, the harmony of cooperation is vital for a thriving environment.
As in any spiritual path, trust (or faith) is required for cooperation to work. Not faith as in some sort of belief in the concept, but a trust that compels us to surrender. In surrender to cooperation, we are called to the center where we offer our perspectives, strengths, and gifts. We also bring our wounds, failings, and confusion. In the center we learn to listen to all the voices, boldly embracing who we are and letting go of our illusion and control.
In the center we learn to see life from multiple perspectives rather than what we see behind our eyes or what we hear from the voices in our mind. We enter the heart of the whole and experience our unity from a place beyond theory.
I believe we are in the midst of a changing collective story. The old story in our culture teaches that we are essentially alone in a hostile environment. It’s a dog eat dog world where only the fittest survive. This runs deep in our collective psyche and has brought us to the edge of destruction. The old story is filled with victims and villains, and has produced all sorts of power and resource imbalances. The inherent fear in the story is the power that drives most of humanity at this time.
I believe that story is a lie!
I believe people are waking up to the light in an unprecedented way. We are identifying many of the problems that we have developed – economic injustices, environmental disasters, and social disconnect. Many of us are also meeting the enemy head on and recognizing that s/he is us. We are growing in self awareness and also self acceptance. We are shifting from a place of judgment to empowerment, with a growing desire to co-create a new collective story. A critical mass can be seen faintly on the horizon.
To further shift our story and learn a new operational paradigm, we need to recover a deep sense of community and embrace a collaborative awareness. It is not enough to return to the unconscious sense of community in the past, along with it’s inherent us/them paradigm. We need to take a quantum leap forward into a collective and integrated whole.
In order to do this, we first need to embrace our individual center, the place in our heart where we know we are valued, loved, and complete – the place where our passion is ignited and our gifts emerge. There we need to cultivate self awareness and clear intention. We need to accept our ego with understanding and compassion, allowing our limiting beliefs, damaged emotions, and trapped energy to dissolve. We also need to explore who we are beyond our story, allowing our passion to burn and our gift to blossom.
We then need to embrace a collective center to fully function individually and together. To navigate the shift in our collective story, we deeply need to see our part in the whole. Like a cell in an organ, we need to embrace the community we are called to function within. And like an organ, our community needs to embrace the function it is called to serve the body.
In that collective center we can learn the art of cooperation and to truly see our need for one another. We learn to see ourselves from a broader perspective, and also experience the harmony and synergy that emerges out of surrender. Like in our personal journey to a heart centered life, we learn to let go of our attachments in order to embrace a deeper sense of who we are. This is foundational to our cooperative work and, again like in our personal journey, it requires letting go of control and embracing the chaos to move deeper into the center.
I believe that it is only with this deeper sense of community and cooperation that we are going to fully awaken and emerge individually. I also believe it is the only place we are going to shift our collective story to pursue harmony and equilibrium, to co-create the world that we know in our heart is possible.