Thomas Hübl: Hello, and welcome to the Collective Trauma Summit. My name is Thomas Hübl and I am the convener of the summit. And I am delighted and honored to be sitting here with you, Michael. Warm welcome to the summit again, Michael.
Michael Beckwith: Thank you so much for the invitation, Thomas. It’s always my joy to be of service.
Thomas: That’s beautiful. I mean, you said it right now, being of service. I think the summit’s theme this year is how do we create a collective healing movement? And I’m wondering if you hear that, how do we start to collectively heal, transform, grow. What are the ingredients of a movement towards growth, development, healing, integration?
Michael: Well, I think we’re living at a particular time in human history where there’s a strong emphasis. A lot of it has to do with the fact that this civilization was locked down for a while. There was a lot of fear and worry that created a lot of anxiety and anxiousness and a foreboding future. Because of that, I think there’s become a tremendous interest in healing the traumas of our life, a tremendous interest in healing it, period. And when I think of healing, I think about the revelation of our intrinsic wholeness that there’s something about us that’s untouched by time and experience. And the density of the experience that we’ve all gone through, I think has catapulted people to really want to know about healing, want to know about how to stay healthy, want to know about how to come out of depression, want to know about how to live a life that’s not full of anxiety all the time.
I think the first thing in terms of a movement and individually, first of all, that has to become a kind of priority in our life. We have to actually establish a priority that we want to grow and unfold into the next version or vision of ourself. And instead of constantly reacting to emergencies, we have to place our attention on being greater versions of ourself every year. Which means we’re becoming in tune with the progressive universe. The universe is progressive, it’s always expanding. Even when there’s a little contraction, it expands again. We have to ask ourself, “Am I growing? Do I want to grow or do I want to just manage problems? Do I want to just react to circumstances?” And if we ask ourselves, “How can I grow? How can I be a greater version of myself?” By law, the universal presence by law will answer that question. Intuitive guidance, gut feeling, moving our soul to speak to us in a language and in a way that we can understand.
But many people, it takes a crisis to even move them into those introspective questions. We want to come out of crisis mode and actually deliberately say, “You know what? I don’t want to be the same person that I am now this time next year. I actually want to be a greater version of myself.” We have to actually embrace that. And as we do, we will find a movement of energy that begins individually and then we end up finding partners. We end up finding community. We end up finding people who are thinking along those lines. That’s how I would begin my opening statement with you, brother Thomas.
Thomas: When we are on our own, we are trying to develop, often there are setbacks, we fall back into old habits, we come back out, we remember we fall back. How important is community and the collective space to grow together? What’s the importance that you see in your work for them?
Michael: Well, that’s one of the pillars of transformation is community of like-minded people. When you’re in a community of like-minded people, whether that’s a spiritual community, whether that’s a community where you can just sit and talk and allow your feelings to emerge rather than to keep them stuffed down. That sense of being alone or, no, I’ll say, the sense of loneliness begins to dissipate. You realize as you’re in community that you’re not walking this path alone, that there are many people who may not have had the exact experience you have had, but there are many people who’ve had similar experiences or they interpreted their experiences very similar to you. And in that sense of being lonely, begin to dissipate, you’ll have community. I mean, obviously, we’ve probably all read much of the research that showed that individuals in community of some kind have a tendency to be more resilient, have a tendency to have greater sense of longevity.
The time of the lone wolf, the time of holding one’s feelings in, the time of not dealing with one’s emotions, being strong, and in that way, which is not really strength. Is pretty much over in terms of spiritual, mental, emotional, and psychological studies. Community is extremely important. One of the phrases that I’ve coined over the years is, true spiritual community grants you immunity from the lower frequencies of life. You start to hang with expanded high-minded people. That’s vibration, that’s frequency. And you start to hang in that frequency. And then through spiritual practice and certain modalities, you’re able to stabilize that frequency, even when you leave the community and go home. Even when you’re by yourself, you find that you’re able to over a period of time stabilize that frequency and then you develop a resiliency when challenges come up. You don’t just succumb to being bereft, you’re able to stabilize. And I think this is what we’re seeking to do. We’re seeking to develop a community.
I’m talking not just individual communities, but I’m talking about a global community that’s resilient to the challenges that we’re all facing. Because no one gets through the human incarnation without challenges. That doesn’t happen. And so we want to develop a level of inner resiliency to move through the challenges as gracefully as we possibly can. And community is one of the foundational pieces for that.
Thomas: And you’re also saying beautifully that the community doesn’t just mean when we are together in a gathering, community also has a feel to it. And when you’re at home, you’re still supported by the community that you’re part of. You said something very important, I think very important to know that it helps us to hold a certain state. There is a phrase that you sometimes say is, “Take back your mind.” Or like, what does that mean and why should we take back our minds? We’re living in a very intellectual time, science, technology, everything is about academic studies. What does it mean about take back your mind? Why is that important? Why in this time, why in a time of upheaval and crisis?
Michael: Yeah, I created that phrase as people were coming out of this tumultuous period of time that we were moving in. And I saw that people’s minds had been hijacked by the world of circumstances and situations and news items and interpretation of the news and fake news, just all of this was going on. And people’s minds were imprinted and impressed and conditioned and hijacked by the world. They didn’t have any sovereignty over their own mind. And so their whole inner chemical production was turning out toxic chemicals be a worry and fear and worst case scenarios. And so I started a podcast called, Take Back Your Mind. I’m writing a book called Take Back Your Mind. And the idea is we’re not our minds, but we have one. And our mind has been imprinted, since the time we were in embryo it’s been imprinted by thoughts and opinions and points of view and social milieu and religious fantasies and parental fantasies and societal fantasies.
And people don’t realize that they’re not really living their own life. They’re living a life that someone else has designed. They’re living a life of someone else’s agenda. And so the idea is to take back our mind. Having a level of sovereignty over our own awareness. I mean, so many people will wake up in the morning when the mind is very malleable. You’re kind of half asleep, half awake, and they immediately go to the news or the social media. The mind becomes conditioned by the world. We don’t want our mind to become conditioned by the world. We want to condition our own mind. And so in taking back our mind, we want to wake up and even go to sleep with an awareness of possibility, an awareness of activating potential. We want to enchant our imagination. So, instead of waking up and going to bed with worst-case scenarios, we want to wake up and go to bed with what’s possible, what’s trying to emerge in my life? What gifts do I have that need to be activated? Where can I serve in the world?
Now that question right there is very important, because oftentimes individuals are depressed, which means the lack of expression. But when you ask how can I serve, energy starts to flow. You go into expression rather than depression. And when that energy flows, you start to find that you have more access to parts of you that were closed off when you were living in a worst-case scenario vibration. So, we have to deliberately take back our mind because there are so many forces there, commercialization and all manner of things that people are trying to sell you, or you got to smell like this to be happy. There’s all kinds of things out there trying to grab your attention and to impress your mind. But we have to curate what we want to be impressed on our mind.
That’s dominion, that’s sovereignty, that’s taking back our mind. And many people just wake up and react to circumstances. They have no intention. They’re just reacting. I say they’re suffering from an intention deficit disorder. They have no intention other than to react to what they’re seeing. “Oh, somebody said something crazy on the internet. Let me react to that. No, take back your mind. You determine what goes in there. You have an intention. You walk in the direction of your intention. You talk in the direction of your intention. You have community that supports that intention. Your life one year from now will look a lot better, a lot different. Yeah.
Thomas: That’s amazing. If somebody feels really troubled, then there are lots of fears. So when there are stress, fear, and my mind’s all the time busy. How can I take back my mind when my emotions constantly remind me of the negativity or the difficulties, the problems? What’s the practice to actually really, it’s like a bit of an addiction. I am coming out of this old state into a new state. How can I do that practically?
Michael: Obviously, there are many, many modalities. One, you want to create some kind of movement in your life. If you just walk around the block, get off the couch, do not accept any RSVPs to a pity party, get off the couch and walk. Get some kind of movement. Secondly, your breath is extremely important. And oftentimes when somebody is in fear, anxiety, anxiousness, they’ll notice that their breathing is very shallow. Their shallow breathing. And so you can sit and you begin to perhaps take in six deep inhales, hold it for a second, and then release eight exhales. Now, when you take an inhale and the exhale’s a little bit longer, you’re activating your vagus nerve, which assists in easing the parasympathetic system. And you begin to have a level of coherence around peace. Your nervous system begins to align itself and become more in alignment with the state of homeostasis, a state of coherence around peace and joy.
These are practical things you can begin to do. If six is too much, you can take four in deep, sustain it a little bit, and then six out. You do that for a while, and you’ll notice that the emotions that have been running your life are beginning to settle down. Emotions are the condensations of previously held thoughts and beliefs and opinions that if you’ve had chronically and they’ve conditioned condensed themselves into emotions. So, emotions are merely a habit of what you’ve perceived hereto for, but you can begin to just walk, breathe. Parasympathetic system changes. The nervous system acclimates itself around a higher frequency. You change your chemical balance in your body and you start to feel more your real self. You’re not just fight or flight, not just nervous. “Oh, something bad’s about to happen”, which produces cortisol and toxic chemicals.
You’re now slowing down a little bit. With tonic chemicals flowing your immune system becomes stronger. You have more availability to your innate wisdom, more ability to wisdom, and guidance that’s coming from you. We can say it’s coming from our higher self. We can say it’s coming from your intuition, but you have more connection to the intrinsic wisdom that we all are and we all have. I would say movement, breath, obviously meditation is extremely important. That’s really a foundational piece. Find someone you trust that can initiate you into a practice of meditation. And then I would add this piece here, as you do a level of introspection in meditation or just stopping and watching the emotions, watching the thoughts. I call it dissecting the lies. You begin to see the lies your mind is telling you. What do they sound like? “I’m unworthy.” “I don’t matter.” “I’m not good enough.” “Everybody is okay, except for me.”
These are lies because intrinsically we’ve all emerged from a presence that is never an absence. Called by many names. I’m not a religious person, but I’m a deeply spiritual individual. And I feel and know that we’ve emerged from a love and an intelligence that governs everything. And so to say that we’re unworthy, that we don’t matter, we’re not enough. All the things the mind says, those are lies. Those aren’t truths. Those lies may have created experience, but the experience doesn’t necessarily mean that’s the truth.
I’ll give you an example. When I was attending a college many years ago, I started off at Morehouse College and we used to do a practical joke. Now I don’t know why we call them practical, but anyway, we would take a book of matches and we would strike the match, light it and blow it out. Somebody would see us do this and they would touch the person with a cold match. They’re thinking we’re touching them with a hot match, and they would form a heat blister on their finger many times. The truth was that they were being touched with a cold match, but they experienced being touched with the hot match and they burned themselves. They were actually experiencing their thought, but they weren’t experiencing reality.
I say that to say that many people, when they begin to dissect the lies within them, they’ll argue and say, “Well, I actually experienced that.” “I actually experienced not being liked.” “I’ve actually experienced not being supportive.” “I’ve actually experienced the experience of not being worthy.” You may have experienced that because you’re experiencing your thinking about it, but that’s not the truth of your being. If we do a level of introspection, we dissect those lies and we begin to replace those lies with a thought, a phrase, or something that is real about us.
“I’m worthy of more good than I can imagine.” “Everything is working together for my good.” “I am supported by a friendly universe.” And so these are ways that we begin to have a practice. Movement, breath, introspection via meditation, introspection, uncovering and dissecting the lies that we’re telling ourselves. But this is not just like theory. This has to become some degree of practice, particularly if one is stuck and stagnant in their emotional life, their emotional body, and they’re overwhelmed by it. You have to, what I call human interrupters, you have to interrupt it. You have to disrupt that. And if you’re walking, if you’re serving somebody “less than you.” Somebody’s in a different experience.
Oftentimes in our community, we’ll go out and we have something called “Sacred Service Saturday” where we’ll go out and we’ll have the community just go to all these nonprofits and just volunteer. And I tell them, “We’re not volunteering to get people to join Agape, nothing like that. We’re just volunteering, just assisting the community.” And when we come back and dissect the day, when people begin to share, they talk about how uplifted they were, how inspired they were, just by going out and serving, just by helping somebody. Going into the juvenile hall, going into helping pets, going into the senior citizen homes. Just something happens when they put their energy in giving; it changes their emotional body. Energy starts to flow, and they become free of the emotional contagion of loneliness and that sense of anxiety that sometimes follows us around.
Thomas: That’s amazing. I love that you’re doing that. That’s so beautiful. The service in the communities. This is really beautiful, lovely.
Michael: And what happens after that? Many times these people permanently become volunteers in these organizations. They loved it so much that they just decide that’s going to be the place where they volunteer. So it’s a beautiful thing that happens here.
Thomas: Very beautiful. Fantastic you’re doing this, great. I love it. And so you said a phrase before that says, “We’re living in a friendly universe.” Now people can argue, “How do you know it’s a friendly universe? Maybe it’s a neutral universe, maybe it’s something else. How do we know?” When you said friendly universe, maybe you can speak a little bit, how does the universe become a friendly universe for us?
Michael: Yeah.
Thomas: What does that mean?
Michael: Well, that phrase actually comes from Albert Einstein. Albert Einstein said that one of the most important questions that you can ask is, “Is the universe friendly?” Now, I know that that’s anthropomorphism, making the universe friendly is putting in a human image. I really like to say that the universe is progressive, which means this, that the cosmos, the multidimensional universe that emerged is reflecting infinity and it’s reflecting progress. That now that we have these tremendous telescopes, we used to have the Hubble telescope, now we have telescopes that are viewing galaxies and millions and trillions of galaxies. And what they’ve noticed is that everything’s expanding, even when there appears to be a contraction, there’s a greater expansion afterward. So I call that progressive. There’s a progressive universe. We’re connected to this progressive universe. We are holographic expressions of the entire cosmos, where, in other words, a holograph is simply the whole is contained within the piece.
So what looks like us being separate, the whole is contained within us. Since the universe is expanding, since the heavenly bodies, the earth, and all of the planets that are revolving around the central sun and the sun is moving through its solar system, the frequency and the vibration of these planets are increasing. Every year they increase according to science and according to shaman teachings and mystical teachings and scientific teachings, that means progress is happening. That’s what I mean by progress. If we are the exact same people that we are today, 365 days later, we didn’t stay the same. Relatively we went backward because everything else moved forward. It’s progressive, and we’re at the stage of our evolution of a species where we call this the age of agency. Used to be the age of biological heredity, DNA determinism, that your destiny was determined by your DNA, your heredity, where you were born, land mass changings.
But now we’re aware that with this is the age of agency we can participate in our own evolution consciously. Since the universe is progressive, we can actually join the party and begin to do these practices that allow us to unfold. Because if we remain stagnant, then because the universe is progressive, it will create a crisis that will push us into growth. But we don’t have to do that. We can actually take, as we started at the beginning of this conversation, we can actually take on growth and unfoldment as a priority in our life. Not just getting money, not just stacking how many houses we own, how many cars. We can actually take on growth as a priority. I want to be a greater version of myself, and now I’m in alignment with the progressive universe. So we don’t have to use the word friendly. That was a word that Einstein used. We can use the word progressive and embrace that frequency.
Thomas: Yeah, it’s so beautiful. It also ties into trauma because trauma is freezing movement, it’s ice and movement is flow. So when we hit our traumas, we don’t want to move and then we stay old. But you said that’s beautiful. And also I think collective trauma, like trauma that was here before we were born, we were born into a traumatized world. There’s a lot of frozen permafrost in our societies, and I think that creates this tension and the crisis you spoke about. But when we look at maybe that trauma was here before we were born. We were born into transgenerational trauma, systemic trauma. We were born into racial trauma or the perpetration of racial trauma. Can you speak a little bit, how can we deal with such a big impact that is actually still going on? When you look in the United States, there’s a lot of racial trauma inflicted every day, and there’s a lot of legacy here. So, how do you deal with this in your community?
Michael: Yeah, that’s very good. What you’re saying is very accurate. I should say that in the newest fear of the planet, all of that trauma is there, from African Holocaust, Jewish Holocaust, Vietnamese, Holocaust, you know, can go down the world. There’s a lot of collective trauma that comes from ancestral lines all the way into present moment. And that impacts us. What we’re seeking to do is to create a vibrational match to the part of us that’s healed. In any spiritual community, one of the first ways to come out of being victimized by ancestral or societal trauma is to begin to dissect your blame story. Every individual that’s vibrating at that level will blame something that happened for their particular trauma. We don’t condone bad behavior, we don’t deny that bad things didn’t happen, but we seek to come out of blame and to move into a deep state of forgiveness.
Again, forgiveness does not condone anything. Forgiveness begins to allow us to free ourselves from the inner anxiety, resentment, animosity, blame, that’s repeating the trauma over and over and over again. Every path with heart has some level of the depth of forgiveness, of releasing that energy, not condoning, but releasing that energy so that we can expand our interior awareness and become free. Without that, we just repeat the story of blame and shame, blame and shame, blame and shame over and over again. There are certain communities that want to remember all of that that happened in the past. If you keep remembering it incorrectly, you’re doomed to repeat it. You’re doomed to be paranoid. You’re doomed to feel that something’s always out to get you. At some point, you have to heal that. As you’re healing that through spiritual practice, you may remember the trauma, but if you remember the trauma doesn’t mean you’ve healed it. You just remembered it.
Healing doesn’t happen by remembering. Remembering happens in the process of healing. And so traditional psychiatry, you’ll dig through things and try to remember stuff. You’ll be on the couch for 30 years. But if you go through a true process of healing, which has something to do with forgiveness, something to do with dissecting the lies within you, something to do with taking the energy within you and getting it moving, you’ll start to remember the pain and the trauma of a grandmother. But you’re remembering it in the process of healing it, not healing it in the process of remembering it. That does not work unless you’re sitting with a therapist that has a very expanded consciousness and can guide you through that. But that would be the beginning of answering the question that you’re asking me. Yeah.
Thomas: How do you hold this in your community if there is societally there is a system of structural violence? People get hurt again and again. There’s a lot of fear. People are afraid for their health, their lives, sometimes their children’s lives. In a re-traumatizing environment, how can we generate the strength to practice what you said? Because to be hurt and frustrated and angry again, or also for many white people to keep up a system that perpetuates inequality or pain is simply our current state. How can we grow as a society in this?
Michael: Well, there’s two levels. Definitely, there’s racism and bigotry that’s systemically in the systems. Even beyond the people in the systems, the system itself is often set up, whether it’s the medical system, the prison industrial system, et cetera, it’s set up to basically malign people of color and poor people too, poor white people as well. And so it’s in the system. In our community, we won. We have at different periods of time classes and moments of dialogue where people come together and get to share the pain for healing, not just to vent. Venting is okay, but venting doesn’t have any long-term transformational value. It just has a temporary relief. And unless you get underneath the vent and discover the part of you that’s never been hurt, which is spiritual, then you’ll be venting the rest of your life. We’ve had at times come together in groups to have people in safe environments share their experience.
And then we have individuals like Asia Mason and other people in our community that are practitioners that assist people in moving through their particular healing. Now, so that’s on a personal level. Then there are individuals who feel it’s their dharma to actually be in these systems as activists of change. Now they’re spiritual activists, meaning they’re not just trying to tear down a system that doesn’t work. They’re trying to build a system that does work. That means they’ve become at some level visionaries. They’re beginning to articulate what does the juvenile system that works for children look like … For instance, we have a wonderful woman in our community named Akuyoe Graham. She’s a spiritual practitioner in our community. She’s an actor and she decided to take on the juvenile department. And she’s gone in there with powerful modalities, giving these kids that had been thrown away by our society and becoming retraumatized within the system, a voice, and through acting, through writing, through meditation.
And these people are growing up as writers, and when they come out of the system, they’re not carrying the system with them. We have her doing the modalities of healing, but she’s also gone into the system and changed it from within. Instead of just trying to tear it down because it wasn’t working, obviously, the kids were coming out worse than they went in. Now we have a birth of generations of these kids coming out in her, it’s called Spirit Awakening, it’s her foundation, coming out empowered. Why? Because they had people that loved them, saw the truth about them, supported them. I’m bringing a couple of things together. One, there’s the inner healing we have to go through. And then there are individuals that actually take on the system itself, go in from the inside out. We have people that go into the prisons.
We have a prison ministry here at Agape. People that go into the prison system themselves. We have people that go into different structures to actually speak from and about a higher vision. Everyone has to find their place. We teach, come, find out where you need to be healed in your own life. Because it’s okay, but it’s difficult for people to go out and try to change the world when they’re unchanged themself. When they’re angry activists, they’re angry, but they’re not really holding a vision of what’s possible. And so we want people to get their own healing first, then find what is your place in the world. We have another group of people that work in senior homes. They sometimes are maligned for not really taking care of individuals properly. They go in as volunteers and become shining examples of what it means to care for people in the later stages of their life. I think that everyone has a gift. You become whole within yourself, and then you find where in the world am I to share my gift.
It may not be your job, it might be your avocation. It might be what you do as your volunteer moment. But this is what we seek to inspire people to be about. What difference are you going to make in the world once someone has made a difference in your heart and soul? Yeah.
Thomas: That’s very beautiful. I love the service orientation of your work and how much service in the society is important and empowering. And this is very beautiful, so thank you for that. And let’s say how, and maybe that’s what your book is saying, you can tell us “Life Visioning”. How do we hold a vision? How does a vision become an intention that becomes more coherent, that we can hold in life, and that we can follow? How do we tap into our potential? One thing is we heal ourselves, but then how does this connect us to our potentiality that we can manifest in this life?
Michael: This is extremely important because every being has something within them that’s trying to express itself. And what I teach is that oftentimes this is hindered because people are living in a field of disempowering questions. “Why me?” “What’s wrong?” “Who’s to blame?” These are all questions that create a downward spiral. And as you get to the answer to these questions, you’ll end up creating excuses as to why you’re not moving forward. What I teach is asking empowering questions. “What within me is trying to emerge right now?”, “What gift am I here to share?”, “What qualities of being are trying to come forward?”, We begin to ask these questions or we can begin to ask a very direct question. And you can ask this in many ways. “What is life trying to live through me?”
If you like the word God, I mean we don’t teach it, there’s a man in the sky or anything like that. We don’t believe in the God, the sky God. We believe that God is a presence that’s never an absence. It’s a presence of love, beauty, intelligence, it’s life itself. “What is God’s idea of itself as my life?”, “What is life?”, “How does life want to express through me?”. Now, if I asked that question as sincerely in a meditative posture, I’m going to begin to catch vision. I’m going to begin to catch possibility for my life, and then I’m going to learn how to describe it. I’m going to learn how to articulate it. Because as we begin to catch it, as we begin to sensitize our spiritual faculty of hearing and seeing, seeing the invisible, hearing the inaudible, we begin to catch a vision for our life. As we begin to articulate it, it begins to become very real to us.
It established a kind of vibrational intention within us. This is why I’m living my life. I’m carrying this vision. This is my intention to hold this vision, articulate this vision, to take baby steps, and to walk in the direction of this vision. And then we ask, “What is it that I must become in order to manifest this vision, that becomes my growing edge?” I began to realize I need to grow in certain areas of my life in order to be vibrationally big enough to manifest this vision that becomes my priority. And again, a dimension of my intention. Then we begin to ask, “What do I have that can be in service to this vision?” Now, why is this question important? Because so many people are walking around as “have not’s”. They’re walking around thinking, “I don’t have enough. I don’t have anything.” But they’re sitting on resources that they’re blocking from the feeling of not having.
If you ask the question, “What do I have? What resources do I have to be in service to the vision,” you start to realize there are gifts that are latent within me that I might be sitting on. There are people that I know that can assist. I have resources. Now I’m walking in the feeling tone of having, and there’s a sacred law in the scriptures. And the sacred law simply says, “To he or she who has more is given. And to he or she who has not even that way she has shall be taken away.” It’s not personal. If you walk around feeling that you have, more comes to you, if you’re walking around feeling that you don’t have, you lose what you have. It’s just a law. It’s not a personal attack on anyone. We ask that question, what do I have that can be in service to the vision? And we start to hear inner resources or external, seeing external resources. This is all part of the vision process that ultimately curates a vision.
I live for this vision and my goals are within that vision, and my tasks are within that vision, and I walk in that direction. And then it keeps me motivated, inspired, keeps me out of depression because I’m living a life of expression, not depression. I hope that I mean, I’m giving you a cliff note version of it.
Thomas: No, it’s perfect. It’s so lovely. And you delineated very beautifully for us. What are the questions that we can ask ourselves and what’s the, I don’t know, the way to follow it progressively? One question I have when you speak is, let’s say, and I’m asking this for all of us. Let’s say I get a little glimpse of what I want to do, what I’m here for to do, what wants to come through me, and then I feel it. I get excited about it, but then my shyness, my low self-esteem, my doubts come in, and then maybe some people in the environment are not immediately resonating with what I’m saying, and that strengthens my doubts. How do I go through the phase of taking it, embodying it more until it starts to flow by itself? There’s a delicate moment in between. Maybe you can talk a bit how you guide people to not leave their vision again and then turn back to their old values or the old systems of seeing life, but actually, changing them?
Michael: Yeah, right. Well, you said a couple of things. First of all, when you begin to give birth to a vision and you write it down, you’re starting to feel into it. You don’t really share that with anybody unless you’re absolutely certain they are a supporter of your growth. Many people have an agenda for you to stay the same because you’re all in this similar vibration. And if you start to change, it threatens the group. It threatens your acquaintanceships. But if someone’s a true friend, they’re for you. Then perhaps you can share because they want you to grow, they want you to unfold. We have to be careful about who we share with. In the beginning, you might be just a small group of people, you might just be by yourself just writing in your journal about it, not telling anybody about it.
And then as we want to sustain this vision, as we ask, “What do I have,” we ask two other questions. “What no longer serves me that I’m willing to let go of?” You ask that question. And you’ll start to see there are conversations, there are habits, there are things you do, maybe unconsciously, that don’t support the vision. Maybe they used to support you who you were, maybe their coping mechanisms or defense mechanisms that are compulsive behaviors that you needed to do at a particular time in your life because you weren’t strong enough to handle the healing that was going on, that needed to take place in your life. Maybe they’re just habits. Maybe there are conversations, maybe there’s gossip. But you ask, “What no longer serves me?” These aren’t judgmental exercises. These are awareness exercises. Just becoming aware of where the mind’s been hijacked by certain things that no serve you.
And then you take this on. As you look at the vision, as you look at what you must become, your growing edge, you look at what you have, you look at what you are now willing to let go of. You begin to embrace the feeling of willingness. I’m willing to walk in this direction. Now, where there is willingness, there is a way, where there is willfullness there is a wall. So you’re not trying to, will you, trying to make to willful make something happen. You become willing. And then in your vibration of willingness, energy starts to flow through you. And then your work is to sustain that energy. The world starts to change for you a little bit. Opportunities start to open up. You start to meet different kinds of people. Potential starts to be activated. Possibilities start to show up in your awareness.
It seems like a small subtle change, but it’s totally expanding your perception. You’ll also discover that sometimes it is better to be alone than to be with bad company. If you can feel that somebody’s going to put you down because you’re changing and you’re starting to grow in a different way, sometimes it’s better to be by yourself, until someone comes into your life that’s proving, oh, they’re trying to grow too. They’re supporting you. These are subtle ways that we have to grow. I remember years ago as I was evolving, people thought I was crazy. I mean, the things that we talk about now, I mean I’ve been teaching for four decades. But years ago a lot of the things I was saying was on the periphery. Now they’re central. I mean, it’s things that I teach now. It’s in the culture, but it wasn’t 40 years ago. And so I lost all those friends because they thought Michael had freaked out. I’d had a spiritual awakening. But now those same people come to my community.
I’m not crazy. I wasn’t crazy after all. Or now we have Bruce Lipton, the godfather of epigenetics, saying these things in biology, we have quantum physics saying the same thing in terms of the quantum field and consciousness. But sometimes you might need to be alone rather than to be with company that’s going to put you down or tell you, “No, that’s impossible.” “Your family has never succeeded in that area.” “You can’t do it.” Sometimes it’s best to be by yourself until you forge that feeling within you that’s unshakable. And then you’ll radiate into your life the community that will support you.
Thomas: That’s beautiful. Yeah, it’s beautiful also to be selective, to not share it everywhere, to cultivate it in yourself, to let it flow through your willingness. This was beautiful. How to build energy and not just willfulness and breaking the walls. These are very beautiful qualities. I think many people can take this away and contemplate by themselves listening to you now. And so I see a little bit out of time. So maybe just to round up our conversation. We are living in a world where climate change getting stronger, there are so many things we could be depressed about. We could feel a lot of grief, less motivation. What does it take? What may be some practices or some inner ways of living in this time, how we create resilience? What are a few suggestions to us, on how we can embrace this time of maybe disruption and crisis and also climate crisis?
Michael: Yeah. We’re living in a very tipping point of transformation. Climate is one of them. I guess many scientists are saying by 2030 there’s going to be unless something happens, it’s going to be significant devastation. Many people are already dying because of the climate disruption that’s happening in terms of land mass movements and tsunamis and cold. I call it climate weirding. And yet I’m optimistic. An optimist is not a person that doesn’t believe there are any issues. An optimist is simply a person that believes there’s a solution to all the issues. And so on the planet right now, there are solutions to all that we’re facing. I’ll just break two things down. One, there’s a difference between the world and the planet. The planet is Mother Earth, Gaia, rivers, lakes, oceans, mountains, rainforests. Even though they’re being diminished, that’s Mother Earth and she is going to be okay.
Mother Earth’s going to be okay. We may not be okay, Mother Earth’s going to be fine. And then there’s the world. The world is the condensation of agreed-upon beliefs and opinions and points of view so that we live in a certain world that’s being broadcast via the news on a regular basis. Two people can be standing on the planet at the same spot, but be in different worlds. There is a world that we’re beginning to curate where the possibilities … Right now there’s so much on the planet in terms of solution, the solution to getting the plastics out of the oceans, the solution to reclaiming the soil, the solution to cleaning up the air, the solution to climate disruption that human beings are causing. But do we have the willingness and the consciousness to walk in that direction, or is the profit motive going to continue to drive everything so people are getting short-term profits for long-term pain?
We have to rise up as a species and shift our priorities from accumulating stuff to actually expanding our awareness and walking the direction of healing our psyche from separation so that we can make a beneficial presence as we’d like to say on this planet. There’s introspection. We have to go in and clean up our own inner climate. And then there’s moving that into action, whatever little actions, if we all do something every single day, it’s going to make a big movement on the planet. And then this transpection, which means we’re beginning to see beyond and we begin to curate answers that could actually change the outcome of what’s trying to happen on the planet. None of this is going to happen if we’re in worry. Because worry is mentally and emotionally rehearsing what we don’t want.
This is going to happen with a fiery vision that’s tied to action. Everybody has to take their vision individually and globally and find some action that they’re going to do because vision without action is a fantasy. Action without vision is chaos. We have to have the vision and then it has to have some level of action. If everybody does something every day in their own environment, everybody does something to walk in the direction of that, we’re going to create a vibrational tsunami that can change the world. That is our description of what’s possible on the planet. Does that make sense to you there?
Thomas: Yeah, a lot of sense. I love what you’re saying, how we cultivate our vision, but also put it into action. It makes a lot of sense. And none of us needs to do everything. None of us needs to save the planet. It’s an orchestra. We need an orchestra here.
Michael: Right.
Thomas: Give movement. That’s beautiful. Yeah, very powerful.
Michael: Yeah. Everybody can’t do everything, but everybody can do something.
Thomas: Exactly.
Michael: Yes.
Thomas: Yeah, that’s so beautiful. Michael, thank you so much for this. This is amazing. I resonated a lot with many things you were saying, and I really love, first of all, your commitment to be a visionary for so many years and that you kept on track, and that you built this amazing community and the work that you do. And I love, it touched me very much to see your service to the world orientation for your community. I deeply believe in that. And I think that’s an amazing way to channel energy, to liquefy our world.
Michael: Yes, it’s all coming back now. Since we’re not locked down now, now we can begin to move back into some of the service areas that we were doing before the lockdown. Now we’re beginning to move back into that again.
Thomas: Yeah.
Michael: We’re meeting in person, getting our service programs again. We love it.
Thomas: Yeah, it’s touching me. It’s really lovely. I’m a deep believer in that as our spiritual practice that seems very powerful. And it’s deeply resonant what you share today, and I think many of our listeners will take a lot away from this conversation. Thank you. You’re a lovely light and I’m blessing you for your work, and hopefully, it’s expanding and growing and doing good in the world. Thank you.
Michael: Thank you, Thomas. Thank you for the invitation. Keep on doing the good work you’re doing, brother, you’re touching a lot of lives. I appreciate you.
Thomas: Yeah, thank you. Thank you, Michael.
Michael: Bye-bye.
