A Personal Thanksgiving Message from James O'Dea
Gratitude is a substance. Some would say it is one of the strongest medicines we can take to help build an immune system bombarded with stress, fragmentation, and multiplicity. As it rides the in-breath to the heart, gratefulness softens the body's biochemistry, easing us out of the rushing flow of adrenaline in our system so that our bodies can find alignment with presence rather than nervous monkey mind.
In this state of presence, we are grateful to be alive. The hearth and home within our own being becomes warmer, more luminous and stimulates that essential feeling of nurturance that has made life possible for us. Experiencing gratefulness is akin to remembering who we are after all the doing has been done, and who we are when we find time to breathe and rest in our own being.
Gratitude gives us a taste of how deeply we are connected to the great mystery! We see patterns of connection that mysteriously form to connect hearts and minds, manifest extraordinary outcomes, and change the course of events; gratitude helps us perceive in all these fractals of change some greater sense of guidance and flow in the universe. It helps us tune into the possibility of conscious collaboration with higher possibilities. We see the good that we have been guided to on both individual and collective levels.
As I breathe in to the collective field of IONS and its members, I am stirred with gratitude by the colossal force for good that we represent in the world. We are an evolutionary community determined to be a voice for Reason as well as the spiritual and intuitive knowing that humanity has all the resources it needs to create a peaceful and sustainable planetary civilization. Together we are committed to revealing the power of higher consciousness.
We offer ideologically-rigid politics and dogmatically-stuck religion a way forward that is both scientific and spiritual. New science and ancient wisdom offer the possibility for a profound and even radical transformation of economic, medical, and educational systems and dysfunctional social conditions. Thank you for being part of a vanguard willing to courageously challenge dominant but outmoded notions about the nature of the human being and of consciousness itself.
Together we represent hope, a belief in healing, and many paths to transformation. We share with each other through community groups, weekly teleseminars, a vast network of luminaries and change agents, regional gatherings and national conferences. In this sharing, we see again and again that limiting and restrictive beliefs threaten to endanger our fundamental peace, security and survivability on planet Earth and that we have capacities not only to meet these challenges but to experience unity and integration in ways that suggest breathtaking evolutionary advances ahead.
Those of you who are Shift In Action members please continue to join us in the calls and the increasingly popular community hour in which members converse with each other after the formal conversation. There are now 11,000 IONS members in this program. And remember if you miss the calls, you can download these frontier conversations later, along with fascinating Essential Shifts interviews with some of the greatest minds of our time. In fact we now have 500 hours of audio and video on conscious change on the site, one of the largest such libraries on the web! I am looking forward to a teleseminar with Angie Arrien on December 20th -- what a seasonal treat to be in dialogue with one of the wisest women on the planet. And speaking of wise women, those of you who are in the monthly program will be receiving your quarterly CD in December which includes conversations with Joanna Macy and Julia Butterfly Hill. We are indeed a community that celebrates wisdom!
You will soon see a beautifully designed year-end greeting from us with an image of a grandmother and a younger woman. We see in this image the essence of intergenerational sharing. In this period of global testing for humanity, IONS recognizes the powerful transmission of wisdom that is now needed from our elders to the rising generations and, at the same time, the new evolutionary synthesis that is being carried by young people in their teens, twenties and thirties. We hope you will be inspired to send a special year-end gift to help IONS grow in the year ahead.
I am also deeply grateful to you who are Circle members and always look forward to seeing you at Board meetings and special events. For those of you joining Edgar for the Shuttle Launch in December, deep thanks for your inspired support. It is also heartening that fifty members have, in the past year alone, joined the Visionary Circle, which is a vehicle for remembering IONS in your will and estate planning.
So let us breathe thanks together, never allowing ourselves to deny the great suffering humanity faces in zones of war, genocide, or extreme poverty, nor denying that Earth's ecosystem is severely challenged. It is, I believe, precisely because we are prepared to face these truths that we can celebrate our power to transform every challenge that besets us. Some neuroscientists believe our ability to rise to challenges in evolutionary and creative ways is more significant than our intellectual achievement. With each one of you at our side, IONS will continue its groundbreaking work to explore the frontiers of consciousness to advance both individual and collective transformation.
So I shamelessly offer gratitude, hugs, and love to each one of you. May our work together prosper!
James O'Dea
