Change Begins Within

This weekend Radio City Music Hall hosted a most unusual benefit concert, staged by the David Lynch Foundation, with headliners Sir Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Donovan, Moby, Sheryl Crow and Ben Harper. The funds raised will support the DLF’s aim of teaching one million underprivileged children how to meditate. As the director David Lynch himself says “The more you meditate, the better life gets … it’s really the most fantastic experience to meditate, then out of meditation in whatever you’re doing – that just gets better, more ideas flow. Negativity inhibits creativity – it squeezes the hose, the big conduit of ideas. So when negativity lifts, we expand consciousness, negativity starts going away. All these things that are restricting us become less – you work in freedom with all these positive qualities growing.” He wants to make the Transcendental Meditation – made famous when the Beatles met Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in the 60s - that has made such an impact on his life “available to any student anywhere in the world who wants it”, so they can begin the process of change within themselves. George Harrison – also a lifelong meditator –who staged the first major musician’s benefit, Concert for Bangladesh, in the 70s would be mightily proud of this one.

Another celeb doing their bit for a greater sense of self-awareness was JK Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, who gave the Harvard Commencement address last summer. With easy humour and a total lack of pretension, she reminded the privileged Harvard graduates of the fringe benefits of failure. Her rags-to-riches story of impoverished single mother on welfare becoming a multi-millionaire is well-known. Less well-known is the value she places on the difficult times and how much she credits them with shaping who she later became.

She recounted “I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairytale resolution. I had no idea then how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality. So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to redirect all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter I whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.”

Telling the students that some failure in life is inevitable – unless they live so cautiously as to not make it worth living at all – Rowling added “Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will and more discipline than I had suspected. I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above the price of rubies. The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more than any qualification I ever earned.”

At a time when we have all been challenged by failure and loss, it’s a timely reminder that something stronger and more beautiful grows within when outer circumstances are challenging. As the French philosopher, Albert Camus, said “In the depths of winter I finally learned that within me lay an invincible summer”. You can only know the terrible beauty of those words when you have experienced that winter personally.

In our collective winter, it helps to see a purpose behind what we’re experiencing. Leaders in new thought, Marianne Williamson and Deepak Chopra, are about to run a workshop on weathering tough times, entitled ‘The Soul of Success’. As they describe it, “The economic recession offers us a unique opportunity to understand the difference between money and wealth. Money is a symbol that expresses how we value ourselves and others and also represents society’s values at a particular time and place in history. Wealth, on the other hand, is a state of consciousness that represents generosity of spirit that translates into material abundance.”

So, with a stellar line-up of musicians telling us change comes from within, JK Rowling reminding us that the gift of failure is clarity and the Williamson-Chopra event stressing wealth as a generosity of spirit, what else can we do this week but go within and ask ourselves what we really value? How wealthy are we in what we already have? If failure or loss is stripping away the inessential, what needs to loom large in your life? How can you find the gold in the dark, the gifts in the loss, the peace that arises from having survived the winter? We’re not going through this to come out the other end exactly the same. We’re collectively going through a value-shift, so what is it that you may have thought important that you now need to release? What needs to take its place? Redefine your own experience of wealth this week. Honour what is truly fabulous.

Just as I finished writing this, I opened today’s Note From the Universe, from www.tut.com, which is spookily on-message …

These are the times when hopes are dashed and chaos abounds, that golden opportunities, prized ideas, and new friends emerge into the view of all, but are only seen by the few who look.

Let's go crazy,
The Universe

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