All experience is an opportunity for your spiritual growth....even this election.
I know most Americans woke up this morning to news that shocked them, whether they were happy or not about the results of the election. A man who has no military or political experience was just handed one of the most powerful and influential positions in the world. It is unprecedented in the United States.
The blue and red camps have been highly polarized during this election cycle, each one experiencing a huge amount of dissonance from within its own party. The Democrats stood in direct fundamental opposition regarding Bernie Sanders and the party’s ultimate choice of Hillary Clinton, and the Republicans never found unification within their party over their own nominee, Donald Trump, who is regarded as too extreme for the moderate republicans who used to dominate the party. In addition to the normal polarization exhibited between parties, now we are seeing greater polarization from within each party than ever before.
And I believe this is ultimately a good thing. It is this inner discontent and conflict on both sides that is showing us just how off-center we have become in our world views and how we hold ourselves in relation to others who are not like us. There is surely something valuable to be seen here, if we would only take the time to get objective and look deeper.
Bernie’s vision for America stood for compassion and expansion, but the establishment shot him down. On the reverse side, Trump’s vision stands predominately for greater contraction…building walls to separate and discriminating blindly based on fear and religious intolerance…and it was ultimately this contracted vision of who we should be that was embraced by the majority of the American collective. It gives us an opportunity to look at the values that we each hold dear, to explore whether or not those values are in alignment with greater expansion or contraction, and to decide which side we really desire to support.
Do you say you value freedom, but upon closer inspection find that your version of freedom has to be on your own terms for you to agree with it? Freedom, by definition, is expansive, while the selective oppression or suppression of anyone based on beliefs around race, religion, color or creed is fundamentally contracted. Freedom assumes the best of people, while any form of limitation or restriction on freedom assumes the worst. Is your freedom glass half-full or half-empty? You may believe you support oppressing others in order to protect and/or expand your own freedom, but decisions made from negative polarity do not lead to outcomes born out of positive polarity. Love doesn’t beget hate and fear doesn’t beget love.
So, the question we need to be asking ourselves, as we as Americans look to understand our collective choice of a president who would be labeled by many as a misogynist, racist and anti-Muslim, is why would we choose that for ourselves? In electing our president, we are collectively choosing to align ourselves with what they stand for.
Your mind may tell you that women shouldn’t hold positions of power, but would your heart want to limit your own daughter that way? Your mind may tell you that we are all safer and better off by keeping Muslims and the potential threat of terrorism they could bring away from our shores, but would the Christ you pray to…he who is your heart…agree with that position of opposition?
Look deeply now at the beliefs you’ve been entrained to hold and check them against your heart, against the ever-expansive Love that you Are. Wherever there is dissonance, you can use this election to be the catalyst to moving into greater resonance.
Keep looking…keep digging. You will be challenged and pushed to move beyond your own limitations into a Lightness of Spirit that is real and everlasting. And isn’t that the point of it all? To discover what we are not and, through that, rediscover that which we are but have forgotten…Love.
Shusara
