“Peace be with you.” “And also with you.”
I’m not Catholic, but I have attended lots of Catholic masses. Lots. Over my years of spiritual exploration that started for me as a child, I’ve participated in many different religious practices. One of my favorite parts of the Catholic masses is the part where the congregation participates and greets the people around them by saying, “Peace be with you.” Which one replies, “And also with you.” Forty years later, I still love it from the first time I experienced that practice.
“Peace be with you.” “And also with you.”
Peace is such a big word. Those of us not invested in the profitabilities of war, us 99%, want the political, profitable, and cultural battles to come to an end, so our world can have peace. We believe if we can achieve peace in our world we will have peace ourselves. We’ve been trying this for eons. We’ve created big organizations around peace, but still, violence rages on everywhere. Why if 99% of the world wants peace, we don’t have peace yet?
“Peace be with you.” “And also with you.”
Say your sink is filled with dirty dishes. There’s not a single clean dish left in the cabinets. The counters are piled high. You realize you are out of dish soap to clean the dishes so you go to the store. When you get there instead of buying dish soap, you buy more dishes. A few days later those dishes are now dirty and stacked there with all the others, still no dish soap, so you head back to the store. Once again you purchase more dishes since the pile of dishes at home to clean is feeling overwhelming. Over time the pile increases more, and the feeling of being overwhelmed at how you got here creeps in and roots itself. Soon you are eating out to avoid the mess altogether. You meet others but you don’t let anyone come to your place. You are actually pretty nervous about getting close to anyone for fear they will see your kitchen and the mountain of dishes. You believe one day you’ll address it, but time moves on and you just get comfortable living this way. The anxiety of it, the anxiety it has created is an old friend now and has become part of your identity.
This is our world. We at one point took too many trips to the store and never grabbed the dish soap.
“Peace be with you.” “And also with you.”
99% of us want peace. But, in the case of my story above, we are buying more dishes or eating out in order to find it. To have world peace, we must BE peace. I’m not saying “be peaceful,” though that helps. I’m saying our complete biosystems, our mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical bodies, need to be at peace. When we really look at why our world is not seeing peace after eons of creating all sorts of well-funded organizations, we need to look into ourselves, we need to see what is preventing our own peace. We need to do our dishes. We need to go after our internal peace with as much more passion and commitment as we have our global peace. It can seem easier to write a check to a non-profit working on saving the world or buy more dishes than it often is to focus our attention and efforts on our own disrest, but have generations of proof that looking for lasting peace outside of ourselves is not saving this planet. So, let’s stop.
“Peace be with you.” “And also with you.”
Let’s stop working outside of ourselves. There’s actually a beautiful world inside of each of us that would love our focus and our attention. When I stopped looking for my happiness, my freedom from anxiety outside of me, I found a universe of beauty filled with peace… and so much more. Humans are amazing, and so much of our lack of peace is the disconnect we have to this amazingness of ourselves. We’ve gotten ourselves so sick, so very sick mentally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually, that we don’t know how to pull ourselves out, so we look outside of the true problem to find some peace. We’ve been told it’s hard or even impossible to have complete peace, but I’ve experienced it, and I’ve seen others who live in complete personal peace. It’s possible… but you have to buy the dish soap, and you have to start cleaning some metaphoric dishes.
You can have peace.
In the practice of Ka Ta See, we have a Gratitude Ceremony. Part of this ceremony is to “dream the dream, and step into it.” We see that world as we want it to be and we say, “thank you.” We say thank you because with all our beingness we feel its reality, its existence, it is here, and we are grateful for it. At each ceremony I not only see my peace, I see others experiencing this peace within. I see my peace and their peace rolling out and affecting others so each person can share this sense of harmony and coherence with each other. “Peace be with you.” “And, also with you.” This is the world I live in, this is the dream I’ve stepped into. This is what I can help you find. You are welcome to join us for an upcoming Gratitude Ceremony. The more participation the more “juice” it has. It’s free and open to the public. No training is necessary. You can learn more here>>
If you would like to know more about how to bring health, healing, happiness, harmony, peace, and coherence to your complete biosystem, please reach out. Between the practice of Ka Ta See and The Red Doors, there are many tools to make your first step easeful. I’m here to help you roll up your sleeves and get your hands a little sudsy.
With big love and gratitude,
Lora