Love and Compassion

Reminder from Mano: Send blessings to the plants along the freeway. Mature elementals have volunteered for this difficult job.

Back in the late 60s, I had a job for a while selling children’s encyclopedias door to door in San Francisco. The very charismatic leader of this group of young women was Werner Erhard, and the motivational tools he was using to encourage us to work on ourselves (while selling a lot of books) became the foundation for Erhard Seminar Training (EST). One morning-meeting “mantra” I remember was, “Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better.” It never seemed quite honest to me, and the fact that it still pops into my head sometimes makes me laugh. It went right along with the Peanuts cartoon of Lucy declaring: “I don’t want any downs. I just want ups and ups and ups.”

How different that feels from the way I perceive life now, nearly 50 years later, from my perch in older age. And how much less interesting. The alternative to all those “ups” feels, now, like a training in what to do when the downs do arrive. And I also work often with the spiral image, as I gain wisdom from those “dark night of the soul” interludes even as I know that the core dilemmas they carry will come back around. When they do, they are at least familiar, and they nudge me to a new level on the spiral. If I can remember. And the remembering always has to do with love (Christ love) and compassion—for myself, other people, elemental beings, and the natural world.

When the elementals were teaching Slovenian geomancer Marko Pogacnik some exercises for awakening the heart and manifesting love, he understood their accompanying message to be a lament that humans usually “keep their hearts nearly closed.” To do their part in creating cosmic love in the atmosphere, the elementals need our participation. “People, like all other beings,” they say, “are expected to give out the power of their hearts in exchange for the power of life they receive from nature.” This becomes a joy, not a task. And yet, alongside the spontaneous joy that signals a groove of well being and love, I also find it remarkably easy to fall into an old, more automatic cheeriness, which allows a sliding away from an authentic compassion for the hard parts. Love and compassion blend and weave together, and I must keep shaking them up, checking their truth, their aliveness, their balance.

The gnomes provide a model for how to be with ourselves and with others in the striving and failing, renewing and lamenting. Barbara always marvels at the constant encouragement of her gnome team. “We see you feeling like you are working against a strong tide of forgetfulness and slipping backward in your connection with us,” they told her a few years ago. “That is true in one way, but not in a way that is defeating. With the awareness of your lapses, which are part of the learning process, you can step to one side and let the rip tide of human lethargy pass. Then you can swim free in the currents of divine love that are ever present to support your work. Move into love of self—which signifies a big shift for you and for the collective. Love your self and set intention for the desires of your heart. Use your dissatisfaction to set the tone for change in the future.”

The gnomes tell Barbara that they come to council with her “for the love of a human, your love. When you worry that you have not done enough, your love is not present and we are not fed. We would like you to feel our love for you. We would like you to be nourished by this love and come to nature often to receive our infilling. Our love is not personal; it is the love of the Mother, which comes through us without thought, plan, or direction. Your love is also of the Mother, yet you turn it on or off according to the focus of your thought and feeling.”

The triggers that open my heart and let compassion flow arise from my own unique life path, and they aren’t quite the same as anyone else’s. We all need some assistance in the face of the world’s distractions, whether it’s meditation, walking in nature, a mantra. Dorothy MacLean, Findhorn founder and author of To Hear the Angels Sing, in a 1998 interview with Tanis Helliwell, gives us a view into her personal practice. She chooses not to have a special time of the day to meditate, for example, because she wants ”to be open at all times in every moment”, to become ever more aware. “As we bring love into all things, we transform the planet into a higher vibration.” Instead of spending our time lamenting the situation and complaining that “everything is going too fast and I can’t do it”, MacLean proposes that this very resistance causes stress. We need to accept the difficulties and find our own love and power within ourselves, without expecting God to just tell us what to do.

This work with love is at the center of Barbara’s work. “My current personal practice,” she affirms, “is to live in love. This means I must make the big shift from head to heart. To support this practice and prepare me for this current blog on Love and Compassion that Mary Jane was writing, Mano reminded me last week of a time in the late 1970s when I was meditating with friends. One woman saw a large gnome come into the room and place small, limp, pale gnomes around me. Slowly the small gnomes regained color and vibrancy. This experience was Mano’s first connection asking me to be of service to the elementals.”

“This is the first time I remembered that the exercise we were doing was to bring in the love of the Mother. We were to visualize a rose pink ray flowing into the top of our head, down the spine, filling our aura and flowing out of our heart. I had been pulling the pink in and pushing it out. We were cautioned, ‘Don’t try to make it happen; just ask and let the Mother open the endless flow.’ Mano brought this to mind so I would know the elementals were restored to life because I was abiding in the rose pink ray of divine love. It was more than just me.”

“Mano often asks me to send love to nature as I walk or work outside. This week’s awareness was to remind me to abide in the rose pink ray and be a cannel for the great love to bless nature, the elementals, and whoever I am currently with—including myself.”