Hi All,

A great sadness today as we are faced with another extreme example of how much people are hurting in our country. It’s on days like this that we really know how much we need each other.

The more I participate in life, and watch and learn, the more I see how important it is to work on “the darkness within.” However, my ideas about how this is best done has dramatically changed over the past few years.

In fact, I don’t think the concept of the “darkness within” gives a good picture of what is really going on with us spiritually and collectively. I think we would do better to think of it is as the “Normalness within” because then we wouldn’t be so afraid of it, and wouldn’t give it so much mystery and power.

We have both an individual and collective subconscious, which comes from the same place. They are both, really, the same thing. It’s our conditionings and the many conclusions that have accumulated in our grey matter (psyche) over time. It’s our individual and collective hurt. Instead of trying to cure it, or psychoanalyze it. or enlighten it, I think we simply need to nurture it with goodness and consciously feed it the nutrition it needs to be healthy.

It’s like a garden. Yes, weeds grow, but all it needs for health is care. It needs water, and fertilizer. It needs weeding, and pruning and harvesting. We don’t worry that a garden has dirt; that’s what stuff grows out of. We don’t try to kill weeds by not feeding them… because that would kill the garden as well. A good gardener simply keeps up with it, and gets out of it what they put into it.

Traditional spirituality in our country has done more for increasing the darkness within us than for nurturing our inner garden. Fearing sin, darkness and evil encourages those things to be fore front. I see the same problem happening in so much of the new age community as well. Focusing on getting rid of the negative always has the opposite effect! Even if we are crying out to not feed the negative… we are still giving it power.

What if life and spirituality were much simpler?

What if we enjoyed our full, messy and dirty selves? What if we responded by appreciating our craziness, and created lives that nurtured goodness in creative and natural ways? What if we simply put acts of goodness at the fore front and used that as nutrition to grow peace?

Everyone from neuroscientists to the local Reiki practitioner will tell us that it takes ten compliments to overcome one negative comment. I think that’s really good odds!

Ten to one means that we strive, every day, to put out humor, love, spiciness and compliments. Today is Monday and something terrible has happened. Do what ever you do (fax your Senator, complain, cry, hide in a hole) and then strive to do ten nice things.

Today we don’t have utopia. But today we can strive for an even keel.