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Hello Reader,

"They" are not the enemy

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The world has become even more chaotic since my last email to you.

We're now all wondering if we're about to see World War III.

If you do not have a spiritual practice right now, I'll be honest, I don't know how you are managing. Because what is transpiring on this planet can only be understood from a spiritual perspective. From our human perspective it's just chaos, traumatic and terrifying.

From a spiritual perspective, we can be helped to see that the earth is experiencing massive changes as the entire frequency of the planet shifts. We are moving to a new era of peace as more and more people awaken but we are currently in the thick of it. This is the absolute SHITSTORM we get to experience on our way to building a better world. It is quite something to have volunteered to come to earth at this time. Well done you! Don't give up now!

A spiritual practice and community can help you to experience the extraordinary waves of light and love entering this planet. This is what keeps me going right now.

What the spiritual realm wishes us to realise is that

• we HAVE to let go of war as an answer to anything.
• We have to elect leaders that are more evolved spiritually.
• we have to start realising en masse that only by choosing peace within can we create peace outside of us
• what we're experiencing in the world is what a society based on fear looks like - and for the first time we have the option to REJECT this and choose to come from love instead.

Now I'm not sitting here saying someone whose just had their house bombed must choose inner peace. No, no, no. What I'm saying is that this is a COLLECTIVE ENDEAVOUR. We are in this together - one humanity.

Today I am talking about the work for those of us who are not immediately caught up in the war, or fighting for our physical survival.

Most of us have not woken up to the nature of reality, despite the 1000's of spiritual teachers that have been trying to awaken us in every century, through every religion (at their inception, before they got co-opted) and every spiritual book.

The nature of reality is that we project all that we cannot hold inside us, onto the "other".

Each of us does this every day. We blame someone else for what they have done to us.

We do this with our kids, with our partners, with our colleagues.

"You have done this thing to me! How dare you!" This is not how I would have behaved we say to ourselves - summarily appointing ourselves the judge and jury in each situation.

What every spiritual teacher has been trying to teach us is:

You must recognize that the origin of any problem is always within yourself. The external world is merely a symbol, or a reflection of, your current beliefs and understandings. In order for you to have an experience to forgive, you must have believed that some other person or force caused a negative event to happen to you. However, this is never the case. All individuals are always acting in service to you, and can only reflect your current attitude. Therefore, before you can forgive any other, you must recognize the challenge always lies within yourself.

Do NOT begin this spiritual work with the BIG assaults and tragedies and traumas of your life. Start small. Start with a grudge you're currently holding against someone for something you think they did. Meditate, light a candle and some incense, call upon your guides and then answer these questions: (they are from my Create Your Path As a Conflict Facilitator course.)

1. The facts – as briefly as I can describe them, without using any EMOTIVE WORDs
2. Can I step outside of the DRAMA triangle of victim/ villain/ hero? How might the other person feel like they are the victim and I am the villain?
3. Am I taking the role of “noble hero”, fighting for my cause, trying to protect myself, and seeking to settle the score?
4. Has my righteousness become self-righteousness?
5. What feelings does the other person have about this incident – and is this a case of them putting those feelings onto me, so now I have to feel all those things?
6. Whatever this person did to me – where have I done the same thing?
7. If I haven’t done the same thing to another – have I ever done the same thing to myself? Ie put myself down, questioned my ability etc (depends on your conflict)
8. What is this conflict here to teach me? Or what am I meant to see?
9. Why would I have manifested this in some way for my own highest learning?
10. What is the highest vision I can choose for resolving this situation?
11. Have I let go of my feelings sufficiently that they won’t come out sideways when I try to speak to the other person? Am I ready and able to approach the other person without getting into the drama triangle? (note: listen to your body - if your heart still races thinking about the event, you’re not ready.)
12. What are my next steps?

If you would be interested in attending a Masterclass in Personal Conflict Negotiation please reply to this email. If there is interest from 8 people, I'll run it next week. These skills are more needed than ever before.

Lawyers, interestingly, are particularly poor at handling conflict! Long story short - many of us are drawn to the law because subconsciously it seems like being a lawyer will help us avoid the messy inner work that conflict requires. But us lawyers need to take a long hard look in the mirror. We cannot help others resolve conflict consciously when we are unable to do so ourselves, in our own lives.

I received an email last week from a lawyer I care about deeply, who teaches conscious conflict resolution. What shouldn't surprise me, but does, is that the mail uses none of the conscious conflict methods we both know about and teach others how to use. If even one quarter of the above steps had been used prior to writing that email, the conflict would have shifted to a different place by now. But we can only keep our side of the street clean, so I will work these steps myself now, so that I don't perpetuate the drama triangle further by sending an ego based response back.

We are all human. But we are also lawyers, and therefore I believe strongly that we have a moral obligation to develop our conflict handling skills. The changes starts with us.

If you are an awakening lawyer you will start to see that we have created a legal system that “others” people. We may have been aware that the law has been used for oppression as much as it has been used for good. But some of us thought that was in the history books. Now we look at our current legal systems and see that they continue to dehumanise people. They incarcerate people. They pit people against each other, whether they are companies signing a JV, or people getting divorced or employees joining or leaving a company. The system has been built to “protect people from each other”. It is legal systems that have divided people based on their skin colour, their gender, their nationality and we start to wonder if we want to support this. We look outside of the legal system as we try to make sense of all this and realise the extent to which we have been programmed by society to fear each other and live disconnected from humanity as a whole and from Planet Earth, or Gaia. This is a profound and shocking realisation and will affect all of us differently as day by day we start to see the multiple ways in which we have been living in and supporting a sick and dysfunctional society.

We realise out of the billions of us on this planet, most of us actually want the same things. “They” are not the enemy, whether it’s “they on the other side of the border” or “they who look different to us” or “they who worship a different God”. We are shown how our negative programming is playing out for ourselves in our marriages, our friendships, our communities, our workplaces and the world.

These are heavy realisations. What carries us through the despair to new hope and meaning is our spiritual work.

Spiritual work is not just meditating.

• It is grappling with our egos whenever someone pisses us off!
• It is going to marriage therapy and figuring out your own contribution to the dynamic.
• It is journalling about the issues that are freaking you out until you start to see patterns and how your own behaviour and beliefs are creating the experiences you have.
• It's about letting go of the temptation to follow the media-driven dualistic narratives of "villain" and "victim" when we're looking at Putin and Zelensky. What might be playing out from a higher perspective?
• It's about letting go of the need to play out the drama triangle again and again in our own lives

We can do this. #wecandohardthings

Here's to choosing peace.

So much love to you all

*I have been hauled over the coals for using the word “tribe” by the more determinedly woke amongst us. It is seen by some as a word uniquely describing indigenous groups. I have carefully considered these arguments, did some reading and looked also at the modern usage of the word made famous by people such as Seth Godin whose book “Tribes” sold millions of copies and I am confident that the word does not confer prejudice in any way that would warrant its removal as a term to describe a group of people with whom one shares a significant cultural affiliation.