There’s a lot of talk out there about the end of the world and perhaps for good reason. Everywhere one looks, we see total destruction of life as we’ve known it, frightening waste and lack of material resources, and systems of increasingly oppressive control. It’s enough to make anyone want to run for the bunker, so to speak. No surprise, many people take to the idea of prepping for emergency or even inevitable collapse.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, though it can be taken to ridiculous extremes (I’m talking to you Zuck, Gates and Thiel). It is even prudent. But here’s the truth. No amount of prepping is going to save you from the ambiguity of life. Life was, is and forever will be unpredictable. We can do what we do, of course. We can do our best. But obsessing over what may come and trying to account for every possibility is just a root chakra tantrum.
Some people are making such thorough preparation for rainy days that they aren’t enjoying today’s sunshine.
~William Feather
We can become so obsessed with the minutia of an uncertain future that we fail to live now. Besides, the only prepping worth doing, the only prepping that can see us through any scenario, is the inner kind. So in this month’s Alignment, let’s talk about some principles and precepts of inner prepping.
Death comes to everyone.
Funny how we do everything we can to ignore this simple fact of life. The way people collect things and try to gain power in this world, you wouldn’t think it was true. We operate as if we could take it all with us, like the ancient Egyptians burying their dead with possessions of great value. (I hate to break it to them…that stuff’s been rotting away where they left it for centuries or is now in some museum somewhere.)
There are so many stories of people undergoing horrific near-death tribulations, yet they survive. And there are stories of those who, on an otherwise perfectly ordinary day, die from something as simple as a small cut that gets infected. When our time is up, it’s up. But until that time, we go on “surviving 100% of our days” as the proverbial “they” say. What a waste of energy to worry about when our day or the day of those we love might come, for it surely will come and we have zero control over it.
Recently, there have been unusually big earthquakes, floods, and massive fires from one end of the globe to the other. In a matter of minutes, one’s careful preparations can become worthless. Of course, one person’s careful preparations can always become someone else’s blessing too, so there’s that. But we can’t plan our way out of everything. I’m not saying that one shouldn’t take precautions or follow some common sense preparations. Just know nothing we might do is a guarantee.
Everything is frequency.
This world of matter is vibrating. Everything around us and our own cells are dancing fluxes of energy. Even our very own thoughts hold frequency and have an enormous impact on our bodies and the greater world we experience. Our heart emits energy. Our emotions themselves are energy. If we don’t understand this principal, there is no hope of understanding the ways in which we easily succumb to lower frequency forces. And certainly, there is no hope of being able to change our frequency the moment we succumb to outside forces or if it falls as a result of our own sloppy energy habits.
Frequency is affected by many things. We may be tired or hungry or stressed out. We may be repeating critical thoughts. Perhaps we are shut down to our feelings. All of this has an impact on our ability to emit and attract. We all know how when we are in love or when life is going our way, we feel on top of the world. Nothing can brings us down. Likewise, we’ve all had experiences of keeping company with negative people and know the pull their energy exerts. We know and yet we don’t realize that we have the power to change our state, and often, even the state of others.
Frequency is no joke. There are forces at play taking advantage of our lack of awareness, keeping us in states of fear and anxiety. If we spend our days letting external frequencies determine our own, we’re not preparing. We’re sleepwalking. We have to recognize and actively seek that which lifts us up, nourishes our soul, and lights our heart. That must become the greater habit and impulse.
The better we know ourselves, the less we fear change in the world around us because the better we know ourselves, our sense of well-being doesn’t depend upon that external world, and perhaps most importantly, the better we know ourselves, the less we fear our own power.”
~Gregg Braden
Know thyself and heal.
To heal is to come into wholeness (or holiness per the original meaning). We must care for our bodies and minds but not in the ways we’ve been conditioned to believe. No one lives in your body but you. No doctor or therapist, no yoga teacher, no guru can tell you what you feel, and yet, how often do we unquestioningly give over our power of inner knowing to some or other authority figure, well-reasoned theory, or long-standing assumption?
Whether driven by our own disembodiment or by fear, the unconscious abdication of our power tends to cause, not heal, injury. We become more confused, not less. Now, to be clear, I am not saying ignore your doctor, therapist, yoga teacher or anyone who has trained in some knowledge which you may lack. Rather, I am suggesting you question everything and always check in within yourself before swallowing anything. Or put another way, stop seeking external validation for your inner knowing and/or over-riding your messages with someone else’s reason or contradiction.
Believe it or not, inner knowing is a muscle which we all have, but it has languished and become flacid over time, encased in self-doubt. With slow, methodical practice, we can retrain our inner radar and know when to pay attention, to believe, or to run the other direction. We know instinctively what is and is not for us. We can assess with clarity what is needed in any given situation.
And as Gregg Braden’s quote reminds us, when we know ourselves, we can fully embrace our power, not with arrogance but with certainty. Then what have we to fear? But we might need one more item in our prepping arsenal…
Trust in something greater at work.
I often write about how far removed we have become from The Source of All. We don’t know where we come from or who we actually are. So our faith, an energy we all expend toward something, is tethered to either the external world…faith in money, faith in religion, faith in Tiktok…or to our own inner reserves which often fall short. How anyone lives in this day and age without faith in something bigger saddens and mystifies me.
This Universe has an intelligence far greater than any human or human-trained AI could ever hold. It is run with exceptional mathematical perfection: the sun rising and setting, and the balance of all things despite our constant attempts to control everything (and even how often we destroy things) or even pray for outcomes we egoically prefer over some greater good. Still life continues. Still the sun rises and sets.
Is there not an immense and mystical beauty in that? Is that not Love itself in action?
For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.
~Rainer Maria Rilke
Journaling:
- In what aspects or areas of life do you often find your frequency of thoughts, attitudes, and emotions draining? In contrast, what elevates you?
- How often do you doubt yourself in the face of authority or peer pressure? How might this be limiting your power?
- What has your faith and is it helping you to stabilize in an uncertain world?
- How often do you ponder death or sit with the knowing that one day, everything must go?
This month’s practice:
I can think of no more perfect offering to accompany this month’s alignment than this song, Ready, by artist Cari Cole.
If you prefer a meditative practice, you can find this month’s alignment including meditation on my YouTube, Insight Timer and Wavlake profiles.