It is often been said that, what a person focuses on with intent and passion, will manifest.  Also, whatever we give our attention to becomes stronger and more powerful.  If we wish to affect change, we have to focus on manifesting the things that we want, and we can’t do that if we are giving more attention to the things we don’t want.  To know what is needed, we have to understand what is missing.  To understand what is missing, we need to stay current and informed on all things going on around us. 

So, for the past year, I’ve been engaged in an exercise with myself, to try to live truer to what I believe.

First, it was (and still is) important to me that I stay current on what is occurring around me – and that includes listening to and watching what is happening politically in my country (the US), even if the news is deeply depressing to me.  Second, it was (and still is) also important to me that I not allow the deeply depressing and offensive information to consume me.  To do this, I needed to hear it, see it, be aware of it, and then let it go with the understanding that it was going to affect events and people differently in the ways it needed to, and that I could not control that outcome.  As a person who hates to see suffering and injustice inflicted on others, this “letting go” has been a really difficult path to follow, because my natural tendency is to get angry and to get involved and to try and help.  But I realized that my “trying to help”, was actually a form of control, and that I needed to let the essence of what was being witnessed and experienced, reach and affect others in the way it needed to, without my “forcing” outcomes from, most likely, a lack of full understanding. 

Don’t get me wrong…..I am not saying we should step back and do nothing in the face of injustice.  I am not advocating “doing nothing”.  What I am saying is that we all have a role to play in the unfolding of events that are occurring, and those roles can be very different – but all are needing to be fulfilled and have equal value.  What I am also saying, though, is that, ultimately, we can not control the affects and actions of others.  In doing that, we are judging, and perhaps, interfering with the lessons they may need to learn, or the opportunities to find their own expressions and greatness of being.  As I have mentioned in my previous posts, much of what we are witnessing on a large scale, currently, is a reflection of aspects of ourselves and our culture that need to be reflected on and transformed.

For me, I recognized that my personal anger was not getting me anywhere near my goals …… arguing about differences was not getting me anywhere near my goals …… and terrible things were still being done and would continue to be done, because they were too big, or too well hidden, for me alone to change.

You’ll notice that I stopped writing at the end of November.  There were a number of personal reasons for that, but also, an important reason was that I had hit a brick wall (metaphorically speaking).  I had reached a point in which it was increasingly more difficult for me to “let go” of all I was witnessing.  I wanted to see different results and had assumed that by the end of the year, the harm that was being done would begin to be reversed.  Instead, while lots of resistance efforts were holding back some of the darkness, it still seemed as if things, in general, were getting worse – they were certainly getting worse for significant numbers of people in our country.  So I felt lost.  I started many blog posts, but never finished them.  I found I had briefly lost my voice, because, in part, I was losing some of my hope. 

What happened to me is, I am sure, happening to many.  No matter in what way we are contributing to change, we are all experiencing moments of exasperation and exhaustion, and are finding ourselves stuck or slowed down in our movement forward. 

But then, something occurred to me…….

“What we focus on manifests…..What we give our attention to, becomes more powerful….”  Donald Trump, through his constant outrageous actions and despicable behaviors, has successfully managed to influence all of us to focus on him and to give him our attention!  He has, in effect, become a huge magnet for the country, and we are all being drawn to him, whether we agree with him or not.  His success does not depend on whether we agree with him or not – he will be successful as long as we continue to focus our attention on him!  But, if we want to inhibit his ability to be successful, we need to focus on something else.  To do this, we of course need to see and hear what he is doing, in order to know what we want to change, but then, rather than staying mad about it or arguing with someone about it, we have to “let the information go”, and then focus on what we want.  In other words, our energy needs to be directed to something positive we want to create, rather than focused on something negative we want to get rid of.  For example, if Trump takes actions that cause children to be harmed, we have to hear it, think about what we want to see, let go of any connection to Trump, and focus our intention on creating safety for children.  We need to completely remove Trump from the center of our attention – we need to remove him from the picture and no longer allow him to be the focus of our intentions.  It cannot be about him any longer……it has to be about the better world we want to create!

This is very different from simply removing ourselves from hearing about the ugliness, or escaping from it all, or doing nothing.  It is about pursuing something with intention, and creating something positive in a space where we perceive something to be lacking.  It’s about moving in a hopeful direction on purpose, rather than running away from something.

In coming to this understanding for myself and my own actions, I have been, for the first time all year, feeling as though I can now move forward with more focused intention.  In fact, the result for me has been, for the first time in a long time, an ease at letting go of the need to control.  I’m finding, now, that I can easily send “love and light” to Trump, to his Administration, to members of Congress…..because I am no longer focused on them as individuals.  I don’t have to hate them anymore.  It’s more important to me that my intention fills their “space” with so much love and light that they begin to see things differently, or feel so uncomfortable that they leave.  My goal is no longer to change them, because my focus is no longer ON them.  Rather, I am making my focus and intention be one of envisioning our democratic institutions conducting themselves in ways that are more in tune with our values and ideals, and are working in service to others.  That’s where my focus is moving forward……I am giving my energy to what I want to see manifested.