Ground and center. Focus on your heart and find the flame that dwells within. Feed your heart flame with love. Breathe the Heart Breath, invoke the power, love, and intelligence of Earth and Sky, and notice how your heart flame brightens and intensifies. The light cast by this fire illuminates your inner landscape…
You see a well worn pathway and begin to follow it. Sweet flowers grow along the edges and a soft, warm breeze touches your skin. As you walk further down to explore the pathway, you come to a fork and veer off into a tunnel of bushes and trees that gets darker as you enter.
The world you just left feels very far behind you. You come to the entrance of a cave in the rock and crouch down to enter. Inside, it is rough hewn with a strange, musty odour. Soon, you can stand upright, but you must feel your way onward through the darkness. Your bare feet feel dampness on the floor of the cave. Your sense of direction is lost, and its difficult to discern up from down…
Something inside you shifts and you see a small pinhole of light. You are drawn to the light and you look through the small opening.
You are transported to a scene of abysmal suffering somewhere in the world…
You see a beleaguered city or village where no family is untouched by the suffering of the ware, and the cries of children pull at your heart…
There is a trail of refugees driven by fear and desperation, walking to a camp where thousands huddle in squalor, many bearing the vivid scars of man’s inhumanity to man; many with nothing but their indomitable spirit between themselves and famine, disease, and death…
You come to a place where the pressures of poverty, overpopulation, and indignities drive people to throw themselves at even the smallest hope for rescue…
Everywhere you focus comes yet another act of violence and degradation, terror and pain. The pain of these people becomes your pain, and the stench of death pervades even the safety of your cave…
Now comes the wind. You feel it enter the cave, this wind of time and change, which blows you back through the cave and onto the main path… Shake off the dust and continue along your journey, feeling the heavy ache of sorrow turn to compassion as you lament how humanity inflicts suffering. (It is through the experience of suffering that we learn compassion.) Each step brings you to a sense of determination to see that we create peace and harmony for our world. Examine inside yourself what you can do, what you can contribute to peace: peace within yourself… within your community… for the children… and for the future…
As you continue your journey, reflect on the knowledge that peace will not come to the world until each person finds peace within his/her self.
You arrive at a sanctuary where, upon the altar, is your heart flame. Feed the flame with your Heart Breath and your compassion for all the suffering that has ever been and is still occurring on our planet because of hatred and fear.
As the flame grows and brightens before you, your compassion also grows, until it reaches a place from which you can begin to forgive.
You can forgive your enemies… You can forgive those who believe differently from you… You can forgive the perpetrators of violence… And you can forgive yourself…
Focus on what you can do to create peace. Bring it into form as a commitment, a vow to action. See, hear, and feel from the depths of your being, from the marrow of your bones, what you can do to create peace. Now place your commitment onto the fire of your heart.
It flares into a bright blaze. In the radiant light of your heart flame, you now perceive a vision of a future where all beings live in cooperation, in harmony, in a world of natural abundance and prosperity, a world where people are at peace with themselves, and with one another…
It is this vision of beauty and peace that you bring back with you as you ground and return to your ordinary consciousness…
When you have fully grounded and centred yourself, you can open your eyes, knowing that you will share your vision with all who will listen. Together, we can make it happen.
From Planetary Healing, © 2012 by Nicki Scully and Mark Hallert, published by Bear & Company
