Let's bridge the gap

Black lives matter...this movement stirred up something in me, something I have felt for along time, yet it has nothing to do with black lives, ironically.  Instead, it has to do with the way in which we choose to react to distinct groups of people.  You can put any label on it.  Sure, black lives DO matter, and so do autistic lives and Muslim lives and police lives and well, I could go on, but you get my point.

My husband and I took our boys to the Tenement Museum in NYC this weekend and the curator of the "Irish Outsiders" tour said something that dug into this deeply rooted feeling I have about all prejudice.  After educating us on how in early America the Irish were persecuted against and treated like trash, even depicted in newspapers as apes with low intelligence, she said that the trend of prejudice still exists today and over time, all you needed to do was replace one race or group with yet another.  It got me thinking about all groups which are judged, it includes anyone who does something different, believes something different, looks different or behaves differently from the accepted societal "norm" and that is subject to personal interpretation.  What creates this divide is misunderstanding, a clear lack of good old human compassion.  It's easy to brush off that which we do not know or personally understand, but if you think about your own life, isn't it possible that there are groups that don't understand something about you too?  It may not be the color of your skin, but what about your political perspective, your religion, it might even just be how you choose to eat or dress or even the car you drive.   Do you ever feel different from another group and thereby judged unfairly?  More importantly, what IS the remedy?

The black lives matter movement was created with good intent.  But all the violence and anger that has been drudged up isn't all that good, is it?  It creates a greater divide.  This anger has merit and it proves that there is still deep pain and healing that must occur for those who express such resentment outwardly.  This isn't just a black lives matter issue though.  For example, I know many many angry autism moms.  We have been dubbed "warrior mothers" because we are fighting a battle, we are on the front lines of a war, so to speak.  I get it, there is a lot to be angry about.  We can focus on what sent our kids down the autism path, we can focus on the government corruption, we can focus on the unfairness of our children's lives....the pain, the hurt, the anger.  Here's the thing though, if we put out anger, what we are going to get in return is more anger.  It's a law of nature, you get what you give!  Let me spin it this way, couldn't we also focus on how these experiences have changed us for the better too?  I for one, am grateful for how much I learned about our health and environment and I feel blessed to have the strength and desire to help others who are seeking help.  There is much to learn from every group, all we have to do is be open to it and to change our own perspectives!  How can anyone expect change, if we aren't willing to be the change we want to see (thank you Gandhi)?

Think about the power a group can exhibit if they pull together to spread the best of themselves and their cultures rather than showing their weaknesses?  What if "black lives" put focus on traditions and qualities of their ancestry that can improve the world?  According to the Black Men's XChange there is an African tradition of accountability that would benefit every. single. person.

"In this African tribe, when someone does something harmful, they take the person to the center of the village where the whole tribe comes and surrounds them.
For two days, they will say to the man all the good things that he has done.
The tribe believes that each human being comes into the world as a good. Each one of us only desiring safety, love, peace and happiness.
But sometimes, in the pursuit of these things, people make mistakes.
The community sees those mistakes as a cry for help.
They unite then to lift him, to reconnect him with his true nature, to remind him who he really is, until he fully remembers the truth of which he had been temporarily disconnected: 'I am good'."

Think of the ripple effect something like this would have!  Sharing cultural traditions like this could change the world! Our perspective can be influenced.

"When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change."  Wayne Dyer

And likewise, the autism community has so much to offer the world.  I spend much of my time educating others about the things I've learned from autism and PANDAS.  I prefer to see the beauty in what we have learned, but I can't control how it's received by those who cross my path.

My own personal experience of trying to raise my children with this compassion requires rewiring my own thought patterns.  We don't even realize how much we've been indoctrinated by society and it requires really taking a good look at our own behaviors first.  When we experienced bullying with one of our boys, I could have seen my child as a victim and encouraged entitlement by demanding respect from the other child.  Instead, I asked my child to use compassion in his approach, I asked my child to begin the flow of change.  First, we focused on examples of how the other child might have been driven to treat him and then we had to take the reigns and do something to encourage growth in the relationship rather than more anger and pain.  You know what, it worked!  Instantly.  It reinforced this form of problem solving for my child.  I can't tell you how many times I have heard people talk about teaching their kids to fight so they can overpower the bully (I don't even like using the word bully, which carries a negative connotation regarding a child who is acting out of pain and/or fear).  All this does is perpetuate the problems while reducing our sensitivity to human connection!  Of course, I do think children should be empowered to defend themselves in case they ever find themselves in a dangerous interaction with someone, especially someone larger than them, BUT I don't think we should encourage fighting as a response to the obvious expression of pain from someone else.  Ironically, in our case, even before I had heard of the above African tribe and their beautiful display of building up a person in pain, I taught my child to compliment people, to listen to others and to spend time making them feel worthy and cared for...especially if they are behaving like a bully!  Buddha once said that it's those who are angry that need the most love.  Thich Nhat Hanh eloquently explains it like this.  “When you express your anger you think that you are getting anger out of your system, but that's not true,” he said. “When you express your anger, either verbally or with physical violence, you are feeding the seed of anger, and it becomes stronger in you."

Only understanding and compassion can neutralize anger.

An experience from my childhood shapes this frame of reference for me.  When I was a teen with my own first car, I noticed that my mother wasn't locking her car doors.  I immediately brought her attention to it, asking why she wouldn't want to protect herself from theft.  Her answer was two-fold.  First, why create an obstacle for the thief to create more damage (ie - having to break the window to achieve success) and more importantly, she said, "besides, if they want or need something from my car and they need it so badly that they are forced to steal it, they can have it."  At the time, I didn't even realize how Buddhist this is.

Here are a few examples of short zen stories:  

The Moon Cannot Be Stolen
A Zen Master lived the simplest kind of life in a little hut at the foot of a mountain. One evening, while he was away, a thief sneaked into the hut only to find there was nothing in it to steal. The Zen Master returned and found him. "You have come a long way to visit me," he told the prowler, "and you should not return empty handed. Please take my clothes as a gift." The thief was bewildered, but he took the clothes and ran away. The Master sat naked, watching the moon. "Poor fellow," he mused, " I wish I could give him this beautiful moon."

and another

The Thief who Became a Disciple 
One evening as Shichiri Kojun was reciting sutras a thief with a sharp sword entered, demanding either money or his life.  Shichiri told him: "Do not disturb me. You can find the money in that drawer." Then he resumed his recitation.  A little while afterwards he stopped and called: "Don't take it all. I need some to pay taxes with tomorrow."  The intruder gathered up most of the money and started to leave. "Thank a person when you receive a gift," Shichiri added. The man thanked him and made off.  A few days afterwards the fellow was caught and confessed, among others, the offense against Shichiri. When Shichiri was called as a witness he said: "This man is no thief, at least as far as I am concerned. I gave him money and he thanked me for it."  After he had finished his prison term, the man went to Shichiri and became his disciple.
 
These examples show us how kindness has more power than anger.

If media could get it right, they have the power to reshape how we see the world.  They go after the hype and drama, because sadly, it gets more ratings!  And ratings equates to dollar signs.

This bears repeating...
"When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change."  Wayne Dyer

The habit of fear

"The habit of fear" is actually the name of a chapter in the book I am currently writing, but I wanted to expand beyond how it has effected our lives personally, because as part of my own awakening I have begun to see how deeply rooted in fear, we are as a society.  Our choices, our likes and dislikes, the way we parent and educate our children, how we relate in our relationships, and especially our medical choices, are all driven from a subconscious place of fear. 

Even those who consider themselves "healthy" in a physical sense are conditioned to make decisions out of fear.  Why do we do this?  Our upbringing, the subtle expectations of society, instincts, and ultimately our own willingness to accept this powerfully moving emotion.  If we do "this", then "that" will happen....Pavlov's Classical Conditioning at it's finest.  It's innate.  This form of learning has actually been so accurately labeled by Pavlov as "psychic conditioning".  Perfect description!

Let's get technical: It takes the repeated pairing of an unconditioned stimulus, a neutral stimulus, and an unconditioned response, to create a new conditioned response.  One exposure to a unique pairing of stimulus would only have this outcome, if the stimulus itself was very traumatizing, but the usual events are typically experienced slowly over time, with repeated exposures, creating deeply rooted subconscious responses.  A traumatic, one-time event that might have this effect would be a child who is walking along the street happily eating an ice cream cone.  A dog attacks the little girl, and the extremely traumatizing event paralyzes her mind and makes hard and fast connections between the fear she experiences and the ice cream cone, the dog and/or the peaceful walk alone.  She might fear dogs forever on a conscious level, but the subconscious response might be a new allergy to dairy and/or sugar, perhaps even to being alone and walking.  In fact, she could even develop an allergy to a flower nearby, if she was aware of it's odor at that very moment...it all depends on the connections her mind chooses to make in that split second and this will ultimately depend on the combination of her genetic breakdown and constitutional profile.  Three different people who experience this exact same thing are likely to have completely different outcomes, regardless, the trauma suffered has created a new instinctual response in that child.  This would be the less common scenario though.

So most of you know the famous Pavlov dog experiment where the pairing of meat powder and a bell encourages enzymatic salivation in the dog, then eventually the repeated exposure to this pairing creates a new response in the dog...enzymatic release and salivation just when the bell is rung.  If we apply this form of conditioning to an everyday occurrence as simple as learning to walk, we see the undertow of fear in our choices, which then become a new, conditioned response.  We take a step and fall which combines a few unconditioned stimulus and responses, the result is a healthy bout of fear  (and probably adrenaline) which naturally drives our need to do what it takes to remain standing next time.  At minimum, it invokes a change in what we plan to do next time, subconsciously.  Fear is a natural instinct, it's protective and it motivates our trajectory in many situations.  But when did it overtake our executive functioning to this point where we are surpassing good decisions and using fear to make poor decisions?  How did we go from using instincts to protect us, to this place of chronic fear-riddled inappropriate "instincts"?  As an innate instinct, this was something that was intended to protect or save us from danger (the green moldy berry tastes yucky, aka - it's toxic, don't eat it), yet now it is going too far and actually causing danger in certain situations.

Is there a natural law named after this phenomenon?  Where else is it applied?  Here is a thought process we see often, "If I don't vaccinate my child (all the while ignoring the obviously dangerous and harmful ingredients), s/he may contract the dreaded disease that the vaccine is intended to prevent and s/he will die".  We are making connections based on a combination of false information and blind trust, creating fear-connections that drive our choices, which are then harming our children. The initial intention was good, but somewhere along the way, it all got twisted up and demented.  Now we are accepting certain childhood illnesses as "normal", because they are overly common.  Since when did common = normal?  We've allowed conditioning to change our instinctual perception.  This is an evolution process that is occurring without our conscious awareness.  It is destructive to our population.  This wasn't prominent in the very first generation of vaccinated people, or second, or even third, although the incidents of dis-ease were growing in number over the years and the ultimate result are the canaries in the coalmine...it is epigenetically shifting the population, and the result is that our children are dis-ease stricken earlier and earlier with illnesses that were once only targeting the elderly.  In fact, autism has been closely compared to illnesses of the elderly like Alzheimers.  Don't let the different labels fool you, all you have to do is look up the symptoms.  Then, if you look up the symptoms of toxicity from heavy metals, the similarities run deep in all three.  The common denominator?  An overburden of toxins.  How did we let this happen, if we are following our intuition?  Well, we aren't following our intuition.  You know that first pang of fear you feel when you place your innocent child on the doctor's table and hold him or her down so they can inject them with a slurry of dangerous ingredients (for the sake of the greater good), you instantly brush off that fear as sadness for the pin-prick pain your child will feel, because we are being consciously conditioned to believe that our fear is unwarranted, and that we must do this for our child's safety...Your fear is VERY warranted and should you actually respond appropriately to that fear, you might save your child, or your child's child from some form of learning disorder, allergies, eczema, cancer and/or spectrum disorder. 

So clearly, vaccination is just one example of the larger picture, one that is very near and dear to my heart, but you can replace this with so many scenarios these days.  

There are a few problems with this new conditioning which we are falling prey to.

The obvious evolutionary shift can be stopped, all it takes is awareness of the mistaken process combined with a willingness to make change in our daily routines.  Blindly accepting anyone else's truth as your own has dire consequences, as you can see.

And what about the vibratory place fear ties us into? If you have been following my blog, I have spoken in other entries about the vibrational frequency of emotions.  Fear is very low, and saturating yourself in low frequencies on a regular basis will impact your core vibration, shifting it from healthy, higher vibrations, to low and unhealthy vibrations.  Our bodies are designed to handle the occasional imbalance, but when the lower vibrations become more prominent in our lives (from emotions, toxins, environmental onslaughts, poor quality foods, and so forth) our bodies begin to lose the battle.  How long can you swim upstream without tiring and giving up?  How long can you continue to fill the bucket before it overflows on you?  The law of attraction will respond to this chronic frequency and you will find yourself attracting lower vibration events that result in disharmony in your life.  Since our emotional and spiritual selves drive our physical selves, it is already evident where this evolution has taken us.  When you have some time, check out the research on happier people resulting in healthier lives.  Happy = very high vibration.  Are we truly happy when we are stuffing our instincts and going against our "knowing" at a soul level?  You can't trick your spirit into happiness, not for long anyway. 

How do we then reverse this dangerous spiraling evolution?  The challenge is in having to re-condition ourselves, having to unlearn what we have learned and doing so on a conscious level.  We must go against the grain by challenging our interpretation of our inherent consciousness.  This will bring us back to a true place of "knowing" from somewhere so much deeper.  We must learn how to trust our instincts better, deciphering what is dangerous from what is not.  Although we often interpret danger as merely physical, "...don't touch that stove, it's hot!", it is much much more.  It goes deep and there is a place in each of us where we DO know the answers to what is dangerous.  How do we tap into this tightly concealed space?  We must first start listening to our soul at an individual level, and stop comparing ourselves to others around us.  We are not our neighbor, our kid's friend's parents, our sisters and cousins.  You are only you, with your own quirks, needs and desires, which can easily be misrepresented by comparing to all of the above.  It may sound like voodoo to suggest listening to your soul, but simply trusting your gut is listening to your all-knowing soul.  Don't stuff your intuition by suggesting someone else's paper degree is smarter than your soul or that it knows you better than you do.  Only you know what works for you.  When you follow the guidance of your gut, you cannot fail.  But first you must learn to decipher what is truly yours and what is conditioned.  You can achieve this by pausing in that space between the event and your reaction.  Use that time to feel rather than think.  Take more time, if you need it.  Regular meditation is an incredible way to make use of the "pause".  Meditation connects you to your soul unlike anything else you can do, but again, listen to yourself, because "meditation" is merely a word that represents "a discourse intended to express its author's reflections or to guide others in contemplation", and if for you, that means taking a walk in the forest for clarity, then do that.  Someone else might find clarity in the pause of life when they sit in a long salt bath, another might sense their peace when they do yoga, dance, swim, ride a bike or write in a journal while sipping an herbal tea.  We are all unique in what we need, as well as how we find our answers.  There is a collective consciousness in this evolution.  The power of thought by the masses contributes to collective consciousness and will fundamentally effect the outcome, globally.  Look inside, listen to you, and let's rock this evolution!!