Life is an eternal collaborative creative process in which human life is both an element and a byproduct. As biological organisms equipped with a perception of our body and mind, intuitively we participate on it as we coordinate our social interactions to meet our survival and welfare needs.
We carry in our DNA ancestral memories and in our mind our life experiences. We possess awareness and a sense of awe when contemplating the mysteries that surround life. We also carry the cultural values, attitudes and behaviors we learn since childhood.
This is the basis for our physical, mental, emotional and spiritual nature and what is reflected in the world around us.
This is so because everything that “is”—atoms, cells, trees, clouds, oceans, air, water, fire, earth, sun, moon, stars, planets and us—whether we are aware of it or not, is always offering its particular energetic frequency and influencing life’s events in one direction or another. Therefore, in the collaborative creative process, each one of us is, essentially, an instrument playing a particular energetic frequency in the universal orchestration of life.
And herein lies our main challenge as a species. Over millennia our mind grew accustomed to living in fear under the survival shadow narrative. We forgot that like rivers, we are meant to flow together to enrich the ocean of life. We forgot we are not separate from and above nature.
But this narrative is changing. Ironically, we have developed technology that facilitates each individual being exposed in real time to the catastrophic commonalities of environmental and social ills that we have created while acting out and promoting values, attitudes and behaviors that dehumanize us and violate nature’s integrity. And the more frequently we are exposed to polarized extremes in words, actions, and nature, the more the veils that blind our eyes and closed our mind and heart are vanishing.
And we find that if in oblivion or as a part of the evolutionary process, nobody really can know for sure, we've engendered confusion, anguish and fear of change, now we are presented with the opportunity to change this condition by relearning how sacred our individual power is and how to honor it.
And although the conditioned mind wants to resist, an open heart illuminates an ocean of wisdom and knowledge about what in our life is essential and life-giving. Spirit informs that when our eyes are wide open and seeing more clearly, the mind has no other choice than to surrender to the heart. When this happens the heart naturally awakens giving us all kinds of answers if we ask the right questions.
This opportunity envelops an essential step. It reveals us exercising a new sense of “response-ability.”
Far from the traditional meaning of a duty and obligation to someone or something outside the self, it means a sense of duty dedicated solely to activate our highest “ability-to-respond” to allow the unstoppable springing of emotions that life’s experiences provoke to freely flow back into the life force from which they emanate (pg.194 Uprooting Fear-The Heart's Accidental Journey to the Divine. https://www.auracamachomaas.com/gallery) This is what we call mindfulness.
This truth nurtures a dedication to seek, find, and maintain the fluidity of our energetic frequency in body, mind, and heart. In this way we can offer its highest expression while we transcend the mind’s old narrative and fine-tune our being to the actual conditions and opportunities before us.
Ancestral wisdom thus informs us of the way that we are to come to the clarity and courage to fully and positively embrace life with its uncertainties with trust, faith and hope and to support it with relevant values, attitudes, and behaviors.
Other benefits of practicing this kind of response-ability are that by putting our social interactions and survival and welfare needs to the service of fine-tuning the sacred and divine instrument we are, we become the change we’ve been wanting to see for so long in the world. This is the highest expression of social activism.
In the harmony we find in this process, there is the joy our soul desires.
It is said that before entering the sea a river trembles with fear. She looks back at the path she has traveled, from the peaks of the mountains, the long winding road crossing forests and villages. And in front of her, she sees an ocean so vast,
that to enter there seems nothing more than to disappear forever.
But there is no other way. The river cannot go back. Nobody can go back. To go back is impossible in existence. The river needs to take the risk of entering the ocean because only then will fear disappear, because that’s where the river will know it’s not about disappearing into the ocean, but of becoming the ocean.
Aura contemplating
Rio Itaguaré becoming the ocean. Brazil 2010
Copyright © Aura Camacho-Maas – December 2021. All rights reserved.
Author of Uprooting Fear.
Photos: Aura Camacho-Maas