How people are creating a paradigm shift: ENOUGH for themselves, others and the planet. The self-help personal and spiritual growth book by Laurie McCammon, Enough! How to Liberate Yourself and Remake the World with Just One Word, shares cutting edge insights from spiritual awakening, evolutionary biology, quantum physics, the divine feminine, sustainability, the sharing economy, systems theory, Heartmath and conscious evolution.
Showing posts with label social movements. Show all posts
Showing posts with label social movements. Show all posts
Just a few days ago, I was working on designing a website to introduce my upcoming book, Enough: Beyond the Myth of Lack. I was searching for a concise way to describe what it is I do - my mission, and my book's mission.
Suddenly, it was clear to me: My mission is to help people to remember they are enough so that we can work together to create a New Story in which there is
enough for ourselves,
enough for our communities
and enough for the planet.
Just after getting that clarity about my mission, I stumbled across a viral video on YouTube entitled, "How Wolves Change Rivers." Obviously, you don't get over 14 million views by presenting a pleasant nature documentary on the lives of wolves. The video must have been saying something more profound. I was interested. I watched the video and it took my breath away. The wolves were demonstrating how nature creates enough. It also demonstrates how our inability to sense the subtle ways nature does this almost had disastrous results.
Humans play an unfortunate role in the story of the wolves presented in the video below. Thinking we knew what was best, we removed wolves from Yellowstone National Park. Happily, the wolves were later reintroduced and the story has a happy (if not surprise) ending. I believe that the Enough dynamic is all around us, in all the interwoven relationships in the cosmos and in our inner heart-knowing which is also rooted in relationship and in the subtle. We are getting better at seeing, better at sensing the subtle, better at trusting the quiet voice within that simply knows what is needed and what is right.
I was deeply touched by the story of the wolves, and I think it is because it tells a fundamental truth: we all are connected. We all are precious and irreplaceable, often in ways that are difficult to sense. All species were meant to have enough, but also to give enough back to the systems that sustain them - pay it back and pay it forward. Somehow many humans have lost this very basic principle which is essential to all naturally-occurring ecosystems:
What may seem to most moviegoers as an entertaining flick with
an unexpected and heart-warming ending is so very much more than meets the
eye. Notwithstanding the father and son dynamic
that many would consider the understory, what I saw was a third layer, a deeper and more universal theme about consciousness,
revolution and evolution here on earth.
Through clever use of humor, the beginning of the film, set
in Lego City, turns out to be a commentary on how media and advertising
controls our habits and behaviors. We learn, for example, that the main
character, Emmet, is willing to pay over $30 for a cup of coffee. The villain, named cleverly, “President
Business,” is an amalgam of “the powers that be” that control the world behind
the scenes and without the awareness of the pleasantly ignorant public. That government and business are linked in the
name of this one character is probably closer to the truth of the matter than
we’d like to admit. Is there really a
separation between these two bastions of power in our world? Unlikely.
In one of the most astonishing scenes, we see that in plain
site, city blocks are blown up in order to be reconstructed all over again
exactly as they were, and all seemingly with no alarm from the public
whatsoever. Such scenes cause one to take on a birds-eye view of our own
society and the ways that behaviors, buying habits, fashions, entertainment and
fads take up much of our conscious lives, robbing us of original thought and
more importantly, of the ability to think critically and perceive honestly. It could be said that the hero’s journey is
his journey to regain the use of his creative and original mind, and to trust
his intuition. We, like those in Lego
Land, seem oblivious to repetitive meta patterns such as war and the economic
system which repeatedly cause the problems they then rush in to solve, all
keeping humanity on a hamster wheel of problem, solution, problem,
solution. Meanwhile, we make no progress
in really addressing root cause of our most dire and rampant problems –
environmental devastation, starvation, violence and the like. Can we see that
the powers that be are distracting us from concentrating on these real
problems?
But if the movie were to stop there, it would be quite
depressing. Thankfully, it instead presents
a blueprint for getting out of the current malaise and brain drain imposed on the
people. There are some very simple, but
essential elements I will break down.
But first, how is it I noticed the story behind the story and why am I
so convinced that there is one? Just a
month ago I completed the a draft for a book about the topic of enough. What I saw unfolding on-screen gave me the
chills. It was practically a chapter by chapter demonstration of what I
had laid out in the manuscript, only mine is to be a serious book about the imminent shift of consciousness in our world. Those
watching the movie will wonder how it could be about the rise of the feminine as
the main character wasn’t a woman at all, but a man. However, the qualities Emmett drew upon to complete the hero’s journey were
not the usual masculinized ones of cleverness, brawn or bravery. Quite the opposite. It was instead his humility, his willingness
to listen to spiritual or intuitive messages, and his ability to see
connections between vastly different things that propel him on his way. So, not to get hung up on masculine and
feminine, hopefully we can agree that this is no ordinary screen hero.
What we realize is that Emmet, if anything, is
positive. When he learns about President
Business’s evil plot, he does not go negative, cower or run away. For a
very brief time, he considers the traditional hero’s path, believing the
prophecy that he is special because he found the Special Piece. But quite quickly, he is discouraged from
taking the egoic path of the lone wolf, and admits his insecurities to an
assembly hall of Master Builders (experts.)
It is this moment which actually propels him to a level of worthiness of
a leader, on a path more like that of Mahatma Ghandi, Martin Luther King, or
Nelson Mandela. His authenticity and humility become the powerful magnet for bringing together
those who have until then operated as independent egos. He gives an inspiring speech to these experts
about what it is they are missing, essentially saying, “If we would bring
together your creativity and genius with my ability to work as a team, we’ve
got what we need to change the world.“ Only when we acknowledge and appreciate
our unique enoughness can we give up the competitive game and trust that
together we are stronger and wiser than we are apart. We essentially find how our piece fits with that
of others to create a bigger whole. Humanity’s
evolutionary step is to marry the heart and the brain, so we can remember how
to share leadership that benefits the greater good. Before Emmett came along,
the Master Builders were hanging out in a cloud land, being creative
independently, but missing how relevant they could be as a united and more
cohesive force.
Much like the main character in the Lego Movie, I was unprepared to stumble upon “the special piece” and had to figure it out after
the fact. For me “the special piece” was a simple word, ENOUGH. And the more I examined it, we realized that
our society had only examined half of the enough story, the NEVER ENOUGH half. Never Enough has been the underlying “instruction
book” which keeps recreating the same
old problems over and over again for the past 5000 years. Daring to build
beyond the instruction book is the daring step Emmet and his allies take. For humanity, this means moving from the
tight adherence to Never Enough thinking and perceiving to explore Enough
thinking and perceiving. Without giving
away the ending of the Lego movie, I will at least say that another thing “the
special piece” and Enough have in common is that they both invite heartfelt
connectedness to replace ego-driven, fear-based rigidity. It is about feminine
qualities such as nurturing and acknowledging another’s value. It is about flexibility and creativity,
collaboration and the thrill of transformative discoveries embarked upon as a
community. It is what we are seeing blossoming all around us as “the sharing
economy.”
I hope as many people as possible see the Lego Movie, and I
hope that for every one it plants the seeds of what is truly and realistically possible. And I hope that for more than just a few, it
becomes much more than that, an invitation to become the bringer of the New
Story here on earth right now.
