My anxiety is unreal tonight LOL. 

Text from one of my daughters the other night. She was on her way to a class and had tuned her radio to NPR, which was full of the toughest saddest story this week: Russia invading Ukraine. I was with my other daughter that evening, and she too was having anxiety. 

Do we know anyone who is NOT having anxiety?  

Dissolve it. It’s not just a healthy thing to do, it’s actually your deep responsibility.  

What are the labels you live in? 

Some of mine are sister, friend, coach, teacher, and most importantly, mother. 

I feel a charter to create a better world for my family. Which of course starts with my personal choice to be the change. 

I started on this path long ago with my decision to choose my happiness over staying in a failed marriage. I will never forget looking disconsolately at a pile of toddler laundry and thinking, I have to change this situation. I knew my daughters’ happiness depended on me being, well, fulfilled + happy. 

You always know the ocean because it tastes of salt. You always know enlightenment because it tastes of freedom. ~Buddha

ONE decision can change everything. Choosing to NOT be led by fear is often that decision, and it’s one we need to make repeatedly, as stakes go up. Fear is a false god. Choosing love is the way to wholeness, unity, collective expansion. Which is how we heal the world. 

Platitudinous? Maybe. But it’s what we need. Full stop. 

From a book by Tosha Silver I learned a technique called the God Box. Troubled? 

Do this today. Find a little box. Write down your worries and fears on slips of paper. Put them in the box. Assign them to the Divine. Let them go. 

I first tried this early in the 2020 craziness, when we were all stunned and terrified. Most of the worries I put into the box were related to my children. I felt helpless, angry, and defiant. I did NOT want my daughters to be living in a world that was in such despairing chaos. I put the slips of paper in the box with kind of a ‘Show me you can handle this, God’ attitude. 

A few weeks later I returned to the box. Everything in the box had resolved peacefully, happily. In the interim, I had many times consciously chosen trust and happiness. Fear and anxiety are dissolved by faith and love. If you are leading a team, a company, a family, you are charged with choosing happy empowerment over anxious fear.

Are you familiar with Wetiko? This is a concept I studied in 2016 after the US election.  

Wetiko is an Algonquin word for a cannibalistic spirit that is driven by greed, excess, and selfish consumption. It deludes its host into believing that cannibalizing the life-force of others is a logical and morally upright way to live. Wetiko short-circuits the individual’s ability to see itself as an enmeshed and interdependent part of a balanced environment and raises the self-serving ego to supremacy.

The opposite of Wetiko, I think, is Ubuntu. Which is a South African proverb meaning “I am, because you are.” We are here to shepherd and steward for one another. We are here to love each other, and be guidelights. Be the light, say the master teachers. 

It doesn’t mean turn away from what is happening in the world. It means shore yourself up so you bring your best to whatever you are working on, whatever battle you are forging. Times get tough sometimes. Our human journey invites–hm, no–challenges–us to get tougher. But with love. 

Our personal choice to move toward the energy of love, and out of fear and anxiety energy is the energy that creates worlds of positivity. And that is how we are meant to be—expanding the world through our creativity and love. 

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