Hope, Compassion and Oxygen Masks

There has been a lot of trauma in the world lately: Crimea and the Ukraine, Venezuela, the missing Malaysian plane, to name just a few. There’s fear, anger, hatred, and despair running rampant on our media outlets. We’re being told “what’s going on” without actually having to experience it personally. (Well, most of us, anyway.) Or are we?

Let me start by saying I’m not advocating ignorance or denial. It’s important that we know what’s happening around us in humanity to develop our compassion muscle. Burying our heads in the proverbial sand only weakens us, and humanity, in the long term.

What I DO want to say is this: everything that’s happening, even thousands of miles away, is affecting us. We ARE experiencing it.

Let’s go back to Einstein for a second – everything is energy. Therefore, everything carries energy about it. And energy can move faster than light. So, it stands to reason that when something “bad” is happening somewhere in the world you can bet it’s impacting the energy fields all around the globe in some way. (Likewise, when something good is happening, the same occurs. Yay!)

So, what does that mean for us?

Well, I’ve noticed lately that as I have felt more and more affected by the tragedy in Venezuela (it’s personal), I felt more and more compelled toward gluttony and devouring everything I could find on what’s going on…until I didn’t. I had to stop. Not because it’s gotten better (it hasn’t), and not because it’s resolved (far from it), and certainly not because I don’t care, but because I don’t want to add to the energy grid of despair, anger, and hatred that is encircling our blue/green orb. I want to mitigate it.

To do that, I need to take care of me. It’s the old “oxygen mask” theory:

Put yours on first, so you can help others with theirs.

I need to take care of myself, my emotions, and my energy in order to ADD positively to the energetic flow. That means I need to stay in balance, know what’s going on, and not react from a place of fear, but rather from a place of hope. In other words,

I need to be a guardian of hope during times of despair.

Hope involves compassion, which includes knowledge. Compassion is about knowing your boundaries, exercising them, and helping others from that perspective with grace, empathy, and understanding. Compassion also requires practice to be its most effective. It also requires self-care, as in the oxygen mask.

We need to be informed, we need to be compassionate, and we need to be breathing in order to be of service to change. Mostly, though, we need to be the hope.

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