We Were Made for Times Like These

Post-presidential election in the USA, 2024, I am sharing an essay written by Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes, a Jungian psychotherapist specializing in trauma recovery.   She is the author of Women Who Run With the Wolves:  Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype.  Dr. Pinkola Estes is recognized for her  scholarship, teaching, writing, and advocating for social justice. 

I don't know when she wrote this essay or where it was originally published, but her message is exactly right now.

She writes:

My friends, do not lose heart,  We were made for these times.  I have heard from so  many recently who are deeply and properly bewildered.  They are concerned about the state of affairs in our world now.  Ours is a time of daily astonishment and often righteous rage over the latest degradations of what matters most to caring, visionary, civilized people.

You are right in your assessments.  The luster and hubris, the bald-faced audacity that some are engaged in while endorsing acts so heinous against children, elders, everyday people -- the poor, the unguarded, the helpless -- and this mother earth, is breathtaking. Yet I urge you, ask you...to please not spend your spirit bewailing these difficult times.  Especially do not lose hope.  Most particularly because, the fact is, we were made for these times.  For years we have been learning, practicing, been training for, and just waiting to meet on this exact plain of engagement. 

I grew up on the Great Lakes and recognize a seaworthy vessel when I see one.  Regarding awakened souls, there have never been more able vessels in the water than there are right now, across the world.  They are fully provisioned and able to signal one another as never before in the history of humankind.

Look over the prow; there are millions of righteous souls with you.  Even though your veneers may shiver from every wave in this stormy roil, I assure you that the long timbers composing your prow and rudder come from a great forest. That long-grained lumber is known to withstand even the fiercest storms.  To hold together.

In any dark time there is a tendency to veer toward fainting over how much is wrong or un-mended in the world.  Do not focus on that.  There is a tendency, too, to fall into being weakened by dwelling on what is outside your reach, by what cannot yet be.  Do not focus there.  

We are needed, that is all we can know.  And though we meet resistance, we more so will meet great souls who will hail us, love us and guide us, and we will know when they appear.  Didn't you say you were a believer?  Didn't you say you pledged to listen to a greater voice?  Didn't you ask for grace?  Don't you remember that to be in grace is to submit to the greater voice [rising up from within you?]

Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world at once, but at stretching out to mend  the part of the world that is within our reach.  Any small, calm thing that one soul can do to help another soul, to assist some portion of this suffering world, will help immensely.  It is not given to us to know which acts or by whom, will cause the critical mass to tip toward an enduring good.

What is needed for dramatic change is an accumulation of [such] acts.  We know that it does not take everyone on earth to bring justice and peace, but only a small, determined group who will not give up during the first, second or hundredth  gale.

One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do...is to stand up and show your soul.  Soul on deck shines like gold in dark times.  The light of such a soul throws sparks, sends up flames, builds signal fires, causes the proper matters to catch fire.  To display the lantern of the soul in shadowy times like these -- to be fierce and to show mercy; both are acts of immense bravery and greatest necessity.

Struggling souls catch light from other souls who are fully lit and willing to show it.  If you would help to calm the tumult, this is one of the strongest things you can do.

There will always be times when you feel discouraged.  I, too, have felt despair many times in my life, but I do not keep a chair for it.  I will not entertain it. It is not allowed to eat from my plate. 

The reason is this:  In my uttermost bones I know something as you do.  ...There can be no despair when you remember why you came to earth, who you serve, and who sent you here.... In that spirit, I hope you will write this on your wall:  When a great ship is in harbor and moored, it is safe, there can be no doubt.  

But that is not what great ships are built for.

We were made for times like these.

Being a Disciple

Every New Year we hear about resolutions and how they fall by the wayside in February or March.  It points to an apparent failure of discipline, an inability to follow through, when it comes to aspirations we have for ourselves.

Discipline is defined as the quality of being able to behave and work in a controlled way which involves obeying particular rules or standards.

When I  hear this, I resist!  Controlling myself by obeying a set of rules that I've set up for myself -- the whole idea evokes being disciplined by a scolding parent, the nuns at catholic school, or a micro-managing boss.  

No wonder we lack discipline!

In mental health or personal growth, the idea of controlling our behavior is problematic.  Working with people who are earnestly trying to heal, to overcome their conditioned behavior, reveals in short order that we are driven (controlled) by factors that are often unconscious.  Dynamics encountered in our early lives caused us to draw conclusions about ourselves and the world that we may not even be aware of.  These influences seem hard-wired, difficult to uproot and update to match who we are now.

So here's an idea.  Why don't we skip the annual attempt to discipline ourselves and consider becoming disciples?

Both words, discipline and disciple come from the same Latin word discipulus, meaning pupil.

When we hear disciple, we think of the followers of Jesus.  But what could this mean for us in the New Year of 2024?

If a disciple is a student, who do we choose to follow?

I've decided to become a disciple of my higher self.  My best version of me.

I find this expanded sense of myself on the meditation cushion and do my best to infuse it into my daily life.  Do I fall off the wagon?  Yes, for sure, all the time.  Constantly!  But I'm aspiring to align my will for myself with divine will for me.  

It's a practice of aligning with that dimension of being -- not forcing, failing, and recriminating.  It's a practice of remembering who I AM according to what I discover daily in my own experience and in the inner realms of revelation.

Our true nature, beneath the personalities we adopted, is as vast and infinite as the cosmos.  In truth, we are kind, generous and loving.  Our True Selves are unfragmented, unified in wholeness and integrity.  In truth, we are connected, through the energetic web of life, with each other, the planet, and the Divine -- whatever that means to you in your sacred heart.

When we acknowledge this dimension of being, our consciousness expands.  When we know ourselves as directly plugged in to the Source energy that created worlds, everything changes. 

We don't have to discipline ourselves to meet standards erected by forces that simply want to corral us into acceptable, appropriate behavior.  For our own good. To fit in.

Our choices are NOT based on what we mistakenly concluded about ourselves and the world as children.  Instead, we choose in concert with who we are today.  

My hope for the New Year of 2024 is that the massive awakening that is happening across the globe helps us realize the truth of who we are, unencumbered by the weight of all the false notions we adopted growing up, and embrace our higher selves.  

My hope is that we find quiet places -- the woods, an empty church, the back porch at sunset -- and recover this spacious dimension of presence and being.

You're invited to join me in exchanging discipline for discipleship.  Let us become disciples of the spark of the Divine within-- and dedicate ourselves to realizing it's unlimited vision for us in this New Year.