Lifting the lid on Pandora's Box

We hold a Wellwishers' Meditation every month for those involved in or interested in a project we're developing to help make ourselves and our community more resilient in the face of climate change, financial volatility, resource depletion, that kind of thing (I love my long sentences, don't I?) This means not just working on the 'outer' to create local sources of food and develop a local response to flooding or environmental change, say, but also acknowledging the 'inner' change that is required within each of us to adapt to a changing world - and help facilitate a shift in consciousness to enable this.Anyway, the time was drawing near for this month's meditation - (I was half way through the yoga class that precedes the event) and I had no idea what the theme was to be about - and I was running it! Half way through our cool-down, as we lay on our mats in savasana, it came to me that what we needed to do was take the lid off climate change.We've had a funny old year, climate-wise, here in the UK. A warm winter, which has been a blessing, coupled with enough rain (and flooding) to inspire Noah to start building his Ark. And what came to me in the yoga class was to give a space to people's feelings around this.I kicked off by mentioning my experience of helping out with the floods (I've mentioned this, haven't I, in an earlier post) and the heavy feeling I woke up with the next day - 'as if my soul was sobbing' - and a feeling of mourning for the Earth. Others followed, sharing their stories of the floods and their often deep feelings of vulnerability around what had been happening. And then we kind of fell into meditation in honour of what had been said.It seems important to me right now that we take the lid off what is happening here on Planet Earth in relation to the environment and climate change. That we acknowledge the depth of our feelings about the planet, what she is going through... that we acknowledge our uncertainty, our pain, our fear for the future. And especially, I think, we need to give those growing up in this climate of uncertainty a space to explore their feelings and talk about it. That's what we're starting to do at the Transition Guildford offices in Guildford - and that's what I'm working with in some of my individual one-to-one coaching sessions.People sometimes think that if they take a lid off their sadness... their grief... their rage, then it will somehow become impossible to control. But for me it is exactly the opposite. It is like once we start to acknowledge what we feel - the good, the bad and the ugly, then our being can start to rally round and find 'solutions', our energy begins to unblock and free around that issue and we have more energy and inner resources at our disposal to deal with that issue and everything else. And we'll feel better, not worse. Yes, we may go through some kind of 'healing crisis', as we lift the lid and begin to take on deeper levels of truth, but it's nothing any of us can't handle.I can say this, of course, because I've been 'going there' with people and their emotions, in my groups and one-to-one work now for some time now - and I have developed a deep trust for people's process and each soul's' innate ability to find ways to heal. But we have to give it a chance! We do this by having the courage to open the Pandora's Box of our emotions... and once we do, we'll find that it will start to clear of itself and soon it will be a box of shining jewels. And I say this, yes, partly from an overdeveloped sense of poetry (hehe) but also from a grounded sense of seeing people transform.What do you think?Our next Wellwishers' Meditation takes place 7.45 to 8.30 pm, Monday April 28th at Transition Guildford offices. Please come along if you can.