Your imagination is one of the most powerful parts of you.

Everyone now alive on this earth, and for generations before us, has lived during a time of war. We are programmed from the start to imagine war, and to believe that we have no power over its inevitability.

There are countless ways to heal yourself. Gratitude is one of them.

Gratitude is a perfect way to show up consciously and remind yourself of your many, many blessings. When you say 'thank you', you are also saying you are abundant. You have received, you have been given to. You can have. When you express thanks, you are saying that you are already prosperous. This attitude, this energy, makes it easy for you to have more of what you do want.

With this grateful attitude, you are healing yourself. The wonderful thing about you healing yourself is that it spreads to others around you.

On my first visit to Europe, I saw the Berlin Wall and both Berlins up close, and had an important lesson in unity.

Two friends and I went on a month long journey throughout Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. It was December 1986, I had just turned 28, and I was ecstatic to see the world. We planned to be in Germany for Christmas and the New Year, and to travel to East Berlin for a couple of day trips while we were staying in West Berlin. This meant going to the other side of the Berlin Wall, through the Iron Curtain. That wall, that dividing line inside of Germany, was a sharp reminder of not only a horrific war, but the many divisions human beings create between themselves in daily life.

You have the power to create peace in your world.

Perhaps you don’t think that you have any power when it comes to making peace happen in your lifetime, but you do, and it all begins within you. How does it work? It all begins with the energy you choose to bring along.

You already know that you are affected by the energy of other human beings, both positively and negatively. What other people choose to bring with them, will affect the environment you are in.

A recent post at this blog, ‘Who made the rules you follow?’, examined some of the unwritten social rules that we follow, both consciously and unconsciously.

These rules are agreements by which we live our lives. As we have seen throughout human history, breaking a social rule can lead to punishment ranging in seriousness from being ostracized or shunned, to excommunication, banishment, imprisonment, or even execution.

Despite the threats of punishment, there are many who broke the rules, and thereby transformed the old agreements.

Being peaceful is easier than it seems.

We think it has to be hard to have peace, but it can be this simple. If you want to see peace on this earth, in your city, and in your lifetime, create peace within yourself, and carry it with you wherever you go. By your example, others will see that they can do this too. You bring them the gift of peace. 

You become an inspiration for this healing because of your own commitment to healing from the wars that rage constantly on this planet, and have done so for much of human history.

On this first day of a new year and decade, I'm inspired to share one of my favorite quotes about the political act of optimism.

Being optimistic, especially in times of darkness and uncertainty, helps us evolve and grow. Conscious optimism is a vibration of energy to embrace in 2020.

Optimism is an act of the spirit, a conscious choice. Being optimistic doesn't mean that we don't face the reality of current events, it means we don't allow ourselves to be beaten down by those events. Instead, we do our work, we show up, we grow, give, love, heal, and forgive. Only in this way do we create consciously.

Gentleness is sometimes mistakenly interpreted as weakness.

To a culture that prides itself on its show of strength, people who prefer to work in a gentle way are seen as being weak: unable to protect, defend, or fight for themselves. The prevailing wisdom in our modern American culture is that might and violence are necessary to 'save the day' and get things done.

Non-violence, to this belief system, is considered weakness, and therefore completely unable to create positive change.

Transformation time is upon us, all of us, everywhere on this brilliant planet we share, this beautiful earth.

We learn more about the world around us by the minute. New creations, inventions, and discoveries are showing up every day. The earth itself is transforming before our eyes, and we are being reminded to make more thoughtful, conscious, and intelligent choices about how we treat our home and the other beings who live here with us.

The great news is that the really big changes are happening within us. Opportunities for personal spiritual growth and awareness are endless.

What if people sang out loud, just because they felt like it?

What if this was a normal thing to do, to express one’s feelings with music instead of judging whether one was ‘good enough’ to be allowed to do so?

What would it be like to hear ‘hello’ from every stranger you met?

What if cars had no alarms?

What if leaf blowers were never used?

It isn’t all that difficult to create an atmosphere of peace on earth.

Each of us can do this, daily. When you and I carry the energy of peace along with us, we’re bringing healing energy wherever we go. This becomes a gift to whomever we see, whether we know them personally or not.

Not only that, but each of our individual loads is lighter as a result of choosing to carry peace along on our daily travels. This is because peaceful energy is a much lighter and brighter vibration than non-peaceful energy. Peace is a conscious energy.

You've surely noticed that destruction is a recurring and uncontrollable part of life.

So is creation, but destruction is the energy that gets the bad rap. Destruction is judged as a negative, an unnecessary evil, and it often gets mixed up with other energies like anger, unkindness, and war. Bad, bad destruction! Destruction is the bad girl (or boy) of energies.

Some of what is said about destruction goes like this: good and nice people don’t willingly destroy a perfectly good thing, and women are not supposed to destroy at all.