New Year Shift

[A New Year] is upon us, and it will be a year when you and I and conscious people everywhere will need to advance the transformation of our institutions, communities, nations and the world. That transformation must begin with you, but it must extend out from there to the whole world. The transformation we are speaking of shifts both the inner and the outer; as we shed limited identity and experience greater wholeness and health, we are given the grace and vitality to help shift the world.

As we enter [the New Year, let's all] participate in the shift:

Reach directly into your own deepest knowing about how to activate transformation in your own life. Use the light of your own awareness to transform any seeds of pessimism or numbness that have been gathering around your vision for yourself and your passionate longing for a more equitable, sustainable, peaceful, and love-centered world.

Call upon your own power to bring forth into this critical time a magnified and heightened sense of personal mission and let others hear and see what you are giving birth to. From the silent places of your own inner exploration and quest, from your heart’s core and your mind‘s greatest clarity, write it down, rehearse it if you must, and then share with others how and where you intend to foster transformation.

Affirm the true nature of your work, whatever form it takes in the world. They say the longest journey a human can take is from the head to the heart. Many of you have discovered that this journey is full of tests, and that the heart can be broken wide open in the process. Yet the heart has such transformative powers that it can expand beyond the confines of every form of hurt and hatred to embrace violently paired opposites and transmute every schism with love and compassion.

Ask yourself, where are you in that journey to the heart and how will it become visible around you? Set your heart’s assignment. Then be prepared to dialogue with your mind as you open fully to the power of your intuitive and emotional intelligence. Dialogue with every atom and cell of your own doubt and disappointment. Hear the sometimes muffled, but always potent, voice of your deepest spiritual intelligence and its compassionate dialogue with you. [...]

This is a time when what is on the inside is mirrored on the outside. We see in the current social and ecological breakdown the accurate reflection of worldviews that are based on notions of competitive advantage rather than collective benefit, material existence as something to throw away, and a perpetuation of the myth that what we think in our minds and feel in our hearts can be disconnected from the truth we declare to others. We have reached the pinnacle of the evolutionary moment that reflects back to us our fundamental self-deceptions and lies.

I ask you then to enter the New Year prepared for the great work that is now the work of every conscious citizen and organization on the planet: the work of speaking the deepest truth of our nature, the work of revealing our power to heal and to reconcile virulent conflict; our power to transform every dysfunction and limitation that stops us from living sustainably, peacefully and yes, even, joyfully on this beautiful blue jewel of Earth.

--James O'dea