We are constantly changing. The cells in our body are renewing and regenerating every couple of weeks. We are malleable beings held in special symbiotic relationship with our environments. Wherever we decide to place ourselves, we will become. Each morning we wake up we have the choice to put on a frame of reference that is as malleable as we are, that is steeped within a deep place of love, and that fosters a reverence for the magical mystical tour of our life.
We all come with an assorted frame of references. When I’m speaking of frame of reference, I’m referring to the lens in which we view our internal and external world. Our first frame of reference is the one that our parents helped us build. Then we start to experiment with other frames of references when we go through adolescence. Ultimately, when we become mature adults our frame of reference will likely be a mix of what our parents helped us build, what we experimented with as an adolescents, and the environment we choose to mature in as adults.
As an adult, however, we are still constantly changing and just because we have lived our life through one frame of reference, for instance that says we must succeed continually, have a house, car, kids, dog, and all the entrapments of affluence to be happy, we can stop and analyze if this is a healthy frame of reference to live our lives and whether it’s healthy and sustainable over the course of our lives. Some frames of references are polluted with stress and others are lacking important motivation. My suggestion is that we can cultivate the desire to choose to put on our peace lenses everyday and live from a frame of reference that empowers instead of getting us mired in apathy.
We can cultivate that specific desire by practice. When we practice putting our peace frame of reference also known as our peace lenses on, we train the mind to change the brain. If we’ve been operating from fear based frames of references our neural patterns are wired to be fear based and our responses to most things in life will be fear based. Once we start practicing putting our peace frame of reference on, we slowly start to change the neural patterns and structures in our brain and move from fear-based reactions to loved based actions. The key here is daily practice. Just as we can break down the fear-based frame of reference and build up the peace-based frame of reference, we can also tear down what we just built if we aren’t diligent about our practice.
The more we practice, the more we put ourselves in loving, safe, and secure environments, the more we place ourselves around people who are loving and we feel safe and secure around them, the more we build up our peace-based frame of reference. How do we practice putting our peace lens on? We start loving ourselves unabashedly as we are in the moment and we start training to become in similar words uttered by the modern dancer, Martha Graham, “an athlete of [peace and love]”.
Athletes get stronger by training. Not by training a long session one time a month or week, but they have a commitment to improve their skill everyday. Commit what you can each day, be it 5 minutes or 30 minutes, but do it daily. There’s no quick fix, just practice and commitment. What are we practicing? Deep breath to calm our minds and bodies, conscious based movement, feeding ourselves healthy food and drinks, filling our minds with inspiring material and places, and connecting to the wildness of our roots – Mother Nature.
Once we make this commitment, there’s no doubt that we will feel invigorated, inspired, and empowered. Will not so good stuff still happen with our peace-based frame of reference? Yes, it will. Life is unpredictable, but what will change is how we choose to act in situations of tragedy and difficulty. When we train like an athlete of peace and love, we become spiritual warriors.
Spiritual warriors are loving, compassionate, and committed to uplifting the hearts and minds of all of humanity. We don’t have to be Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi to be a spiritual warrior. It’s our human duty to do what we can to sow seeds of love and peace and we can do it in our everyday lives in the careers we already have, in the conversations we have at the grocery store, with the communication choices we make on the road, and so on.
The thoughts we think, the words we say, the actions we take are sent out in varying energetic forms and chain reactions and when we put our peace-based frame of reference on, we send out great gifts into the mystical sea of our universe for others stuck in quagmires to reach for the invisible love-vest so that they too can rise above and sing “Hallelujah”.
Om Shanti Om ~ Athea