Only Love Prevails
A couple of weeks ago someone sent me an email that said "Only Love Prevails" and that had a link ( http://www.openheart.com/peace/peace.html ) to a World Peace Experiment. The concept is that if enough people (80,000) can shift their emotional energy and world view that they can shift the balance of power in the world. So far they have about 12,500 people from 135 countries participating. It's an interesting concept and I figure there's no harm in trying it, so I'm making a serious effort to be mindful when talk of war or violence creeps into my earshot or line of vision and to remind myself and say out loud that "only love prevails."
Well, this seems to me like an interesting concept to apply to peace in my own personal life too. It's been a very unpeaceful time for me the past few weeks. It took me two weeks to draft a letter to my landlord affirming that I'm not responsible for paying for a visit that was made to check the boiler here. Interestingly the day they signed for my long labored over opus, the new boiler stopped running completely. Apparently the old pipes were not able to handle the energy of the new boiler and they all had to be replaced. Because I was both intimidated by my landlord's recent behavior and also really angry, I actually contemplated living without heat for five days and waiting so that he could - he uses office space here once a week - call the problem in himself (not my responsibility...) but then good judgment prevailed. The boiler is working great and the house is really comfortable for the first time since I moved here. I don't know what response I'll get to my letter about the last boiler visit call but I figure the fact that it actually broke down probably weighs in my favor. I am trying to approach the situation from the "only love prevails" perspective. I'm trying to not take it personally. I'm trying. Grrr.
Although there are people in the world who thrive on anger, I'm not one of them. I was talking to a friend of mine who also has great difficulty dealing with anger and in the course of our conversation it occurred to me that part of the problem - besides our bizarre childhoods - is that we are both deeply empathic. We both grew up in homes which were ruled by a mix of alcoholism, denial, and a great deal of anger. As empaths our experience of emotions is very physical, so we lived our childhoods surrounded by anger directed at us and those around us, experiencing the anger of others deeply in our bodies while at the same time we were not permitted to have or feel our own anger. We are both healing and allowing ourselves to experience more of our anger these days, but it continues to bring up a very primal and intense state of fear because the anger we knew as children, the anger we felt in our bodies, was, on some level life threatening. Although we are more able to experience our anger - we can let it into our bodies to some degree - we have not quite learned to let it back out in ways that feel safe to us. And we have not lost our fear of anger directed towards us.
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