I AM A WOMAN, REGAINING LOST POWER
Approaching Why the Issue of Love and Sexuality has such a Central Role in the Political Theory of Peace on this Planet.
By Siri Gunnarson
“The most remarkable feature of this historical moment on Earth is not that we are on the way to destroying the world — we’ve actually been on the way for quite a while. It is that we are beginning to wake up, as from a millennia-long sleep, to a whole new relationship to our world, to ourselves and each other.” — Joanna Macy
THE MOST REMARKABLE feature of my current situation is not that I am on the way to destroying my love relationship — I actually have been sabotaging love in all the so-called love relationships I have ever had.
It is that I am beginning to wake up, after thousands of years of patriarchy, to a whole new relationship to love and eros and how these powers want to operate through me.
I am a woman on a threshold.
When I listen, my dreams tell me to go slow. An unexpected visitor appears on the edge of my consciousness, I feel him, her, waiting at the door. Go slow. Breathe. Gather your energies into your self. Care for your center. Connect in, from here connect out… know you are part of this beautiful creation. Let go, let the new in. Give space for the new thoughts to arise, gain ground and root in your being. Know you are supported by a healing impulse of life. Let it work through you. ‘Healing begins when you accept love.’
Simultaneously, fast waves of reaction ripple in my consciousness. In a moment of uncertainty, I crash. My system is flooded with fear. My tender heart closes, now fully guarded by the old rules and should. I become needy, I impose demands on the one I love. I grasp on to the very thoughts I just released, I compulsively chase after the one I wish to perceive and love. I am filled with my want. I want love so much I will fight for it, I do fight for it, and my fight leads me to the exact situations I fear, and creates fear in the others.
Do I realise I am fighting what I love?
Can I focus my strong ‘I don’t want this’ that I direct towards the perceived unpleasant outer situation towards the pain I am creating through my inner structures?
When we unconsciously react in fear our thoughts are not autonomous. The emotions we allow to steer us are part of a collective field of fear. The political theory, the foundation and giestig roof of the peace work of Tamera Healing Biotope 1, is based on interconnection and holography — we are a unified body of consciousness, constantly in communication with all of life, steered by a field of informational patterns that create energy fields. Informational fields can be tapped into and fed through our thoughts, feelings and actions.
A central thought, written by Dieter Duhm, states:
“There is the world that has created us and there is a world we have created. These two worlds must come together, this is the aim of the journey ”.
The dominant field humanity is currently operating on is an outdated system, the informational programming humanity has been running on since the rise of patriarchy and the beginning of agriculture — the world we have created — is faulty.
At its core, it is based on a wrong thought: we are separate.
Humanity cut itself from its source through taking power over life. We stepped out of connection with creation; we created personal ‘rights’, the right to have property, to own what once held as sacred. We began to exert our power over our co-creatures, our planet, and other peoples. Once we were stewards of the earth, now our giving is replaced by taking. What we once honored as our relatives became resources to use and consume. We denied the divine feminine and earth-cherishing traditions, the goddess was hidden and women with medicine and wisdom were hunted and killed. The true nature of love and Eros, as wild and free as prehistoric gardens and animal spirits, was contained into rules and agreements.
Another field is also at play, ‘the world that has created us’ latently running through all of life, springing up in many people and communities on earth. This is the Sacred Matrix of Life. Beside all violence, the healing entelechy of life has survived. Beside all suffering, the human heart still opens.
In the book, Terra Nova: Global Revolution and the Healing of Love, Dieter Duhm writes:
“To free the world from violence and war we need to flip a global switch. It is that switch which determines whether holograms of fear and violence or holograms of trust and cooperation are downloaded from the cosmic database.”
We have the power to flip the switch in every moment. Each time we do, we strengthen new neural pathways in our thinking and contribute to local and global energetic information fields. We reached a point, as humanity, where our species, if not our entire planet, is at risk if we don’t change our track. It is so unbearable to take in the reality we have created that we shield our hearts from perceiving the suffering.
When we do perceive the suffering, in the moments when we let the world in or realize the pain we have caused in the name of love, it is possible to be overwhelmed with grief and pain.
Last year I travelled to Rwanda and journeyed far into the reality of suffering, bearing witness to the trauma one generation later and entering the horror of Genocide through visiting sites and listening to stories of horrific acts committed by human beings on their neighboors. I learned about the global and local political situation that made a human being capable of such atrocities. I put my feet in the shoes of the perpetrator. What thinking would need to be in place to make me murder a child with my hands? Looking at the immensity of devastation, the prayer arose: ‘may I live my life in a way that makes violence impossible’.
We have the opportunity to decide. We have to make this decision again and again. The field of suffering is very strong. The wrong thinking in love, alongside dominant thinking about consumption, production, governance, and social norms, has been passed down from generation to generation. I received from my mother and father the ‘negative love patterns’ that resulted from the unfulfilled love of their childhoods. This chain of suffering, passing down of thoughts that do not serve love and life, has created local and global fields of fear which can be easily steered by governments and corporations for economic and power gains.
Where does the thought, word, action arise from?
Is it from a paradigm of fear, or a paradigm of love?
Does it create peace?
I am becoming a witness to where I hold on to my ‘right’ to love. Sabine Lichtenfels writes in her book, Grace: Pilgrimage for a Future Without War guidelines for love:
“Love is free. You cannot bind any human being to yourself by means of exercising a right over him. You cannot force anyone to be responsible for the satisfaction of your wants and needs. Love and desire are gifts of life, no legal matter. When you begin to demand love and sex you can be sure you have left your track. Return to it as fast as possible”
The demand for the resources of love is the same demand that creates war on the planet.
When I open my heart to fully take in the fear in the face of a child in a war situation, can I see that I am creating this reality by participating in a system of love that that justifies the killing of children in the name of ‘freedom’ or ‘democracy’ when it is really about control of so called ‘resources’. When I deny myself my free sexual nature and act disconnected to source I am participating in the subjugation of women and violence in love. In Tamera the healing work focuses on this as a core issue and here I am a student, a researcher and a lover.
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I am in love with a man who loves another woman.
My thinking tries to deny this reality, my conditioning screams ‘I don’t want this, this is not my love picture!’ My heart beats fast with fear, my emotional pain body steers me into reactions to reality that stifle the possibility of life healing according to its nature. My fear ripples in the love network, and love has no possibility to teach us through our perception and experience. This strong ‘I don’t want’, is the same ‘No’ based on fear that justifies nations and religious and ethnic groups to go to war against each other. My denying of the situation, laying my claim to what I deserve, in the name of love, is the same victim and perpetrator thinking present in every war.
Shamba Ayalon, a friend from Israel and co-worker of a group committed to creating a peace research village in the Middle East, asked me if I can see the parallel of my love situation and Israel wanting to control the Holy Land? What would a positive picture of peaceful cohabitation look like in Israel-Palestine? If I truly love this man, how do I perceive and treat him and his lovers? Here in Tamera we research the social structures and new thoughts for the creation of trust, for women to overcome competition and come together and support each other to be in their full power and full love.
We need to disengage fear and the hold of the pain-body.
Eckhart Tolle wrote in Power of Now:
“The pain-body wants to survive, just like every other entity in existence, and it can only survive if it gets you to unconsciously identify with it. It can then rise up, take you over, “become you,” and live through you. It needs to get its “food” through you. It will feed on any experience that resonates with its own kind of energy, anything that creates further pain in whatever form: anger, destructiveness, hatred, grief, emotional drama, violence, and even illness. So the pain-body, when it has taken you over, will create a situation in your life that reflects back its own energy frequency for it to feed on. Pain can only feed on pain. Pain cannot feed on joy. It finds it quite indigestible.”
Eckhart Tolle says becoming aware and dis-identifying from the pain body contributes to releasing collective suffering. Without awareness, we perpetuate the system of violence:
“Once the pain-body has taken you over, you want more pain. You become a victim or a perpetrator. You want to inflict pain, or you want to suffer pain, or both. There isn’t really much difference between the two. You are not conscious of this, of course, and will vehemently claim that you do not want pain. But look closely and you will find that your thinking and behavior are designed to keep the pain going, for yourself and others. If you were truly conscious of it, the pattern would dissolve, for to want more pain is insanity, and nobody is consciously insane.”
I am experiencing the power that enters when I do step out of identification, the power that comes when I let go of my fight. Dieter Duhm writes in the chapter ‘Regaining Lost Power’ in the book the Sacred Matrix: Every situation contains a certain amount of Mana energy, which we can use either for or against ourselves, depending on our behaviour. Those who take the path of power learn, step by step, to connect with these energies. This does not mean they will always have external success, but they will gain power.’
The switch from fear to trust lies in love and solidarity. Trust is only possible with truth and transparency, also in the area of love. This is the core of the healing work. In ‘Healing of Love’ Dieter Duhm wrote:
“To become capable of love, we must develop a system of life in which real trust between people arises and grows… It is this trust opens the heart and the body, dissolves the body armor and heals the soul.”
I am grateful to be in a community of peace workers in training, committed researchers towards creating social systems of trust. I feel the others support me through not identifying me with my pain body. When I am online, when my heart is open and my thinking is clear, I am encouraged by the possibility that with the positive steps I take I contribute to a collective field of healing where love can flourish according to its true and free nature once again.
I am entering community, we are co-creating a field of trust, and as I reveal myself and witness the others I begin to be able to perceive truth. As I enter life, I strengthen the reality of mutual support and abundance. New experiences of compassion and joy for the truth of the others plants seeds in my heart and mind, these experiences need to be watered and given space to grow.
I am a woman, at the end of patriarchy.
I am becoming aware of the power of ‘civil disobedience’ through my thoughts; new experiences of trust and autonomous thinking disempower the field of fear and scarcity. My peace research begins with me, because the urgency of changing my suffering into serving is so strong and ever present in my consciousness. I direct my energies towards healing my feminine heart, and I want to participate in healing the heart of the man I love… this extends to the others around us and out in to all our relations… the healing of love. Only with an open heart and full expression of my life energies can I step into true solidarity and co-creation of a future worth living for.
Protect and take care of the consciousness of a new beginning,
of that which is unborn, unsaid, and undone within you,
as you would an embryo that is soon to be born.
Focus your mind and spirit on this future within you.
The more awareness, presence and anticipation you can direct toward this birth process,
the more powerful the new creation will be.
Through you something new is growing on Earth. Be aware and precise!
Connect with the spirit of community. It is you!
Give your true thoughts and actions to the world!
Give your serving and revolutionary power to the world, for you are needed!
– Sabine Lichtenfels, Sources of Love and Peace
*ESSAY by SIRI GUNNARSON — Reprinted with permission by me, John Wolfstone.
