Lay Down Hopelessness. The Agency of the Awakened Heart.

Plus an invitation to join in meditation today at 10 am Pacific, 8 pm London time.

Hello friends.

Writing to you from London after a lot of personal passages.

Again, though, in the public sphere, we’ve had another violent week, with the usual accompany shock and grief. My worldwide friend on the group chat lighting candles for the slain in living rooms and sanctuaries, hoping for something better. The cycles of analysis and outrage and handwringing begin. Do you also notice, alongside grief, a hopelessness and inevitabilty in the field: an expectaion that this time will not be different? That violence will recur, polarization will deepen… that we are limited to witnessing, mourning, and surviving?

This acclimatization is one of the most corrosive features of our moment. The belief that this is simply how things go now functions like a sedative. It dulls agency, and we stop looking for leverage. We lower our imagination to match the pattern we have inherited and mistake repetition for fate. What appears as “realism” is actually the nervous system adapting to chronic threat by shrinking the field of possibility.

So, that’s what I have been writing about since 3 am. What might be different now.

I invite you to read this piece, and if you want to sit in meditation on this topic, we will be on Zoom today December 15 : 8 pm London time/ 3 pm US Eastern time/ Noon Pacific time/ 10 am Hawaii time at this link.

Together we build a pro-life culture of Love and Reverence. Keep your power where it belongs. Be in your center, in your values, whole and gathered.

With blessings for all of those globally caught in the cross fire of our collective misunderstanding, who are suffering directly, in shock, in despair, afraid, hopeless, who are waking up without their beloveds today.

Christine Marie

The Rhetorical Climate

If the phrase “it’s all love, or a calling for love” is true, then violence is a symptom of a disordered love, where devotion is turned toward grievance and imagined enemies rather than toward the protection of life. I’m not making an apologia for perpetrators here - we are all responsible for our actions- but noting that the soil in which such acts grow includes a kind of social permission for hatred, and narratives that strip others of dignity. The kind of recurring violence that we live within incubates upstream, long before a weapon is raised. It grows in atmospheres of contempt, dehumanization, and identity-based hatred. Language becomes a weapon. Repeated rhetorical aggression corrodes the inner life until conscience dulls. For some, cruelty begins to feel justified, even righteous.

Currently, we are seeing language that once would have disqualified leaders now propels them: cruelty gets coded as strength and contempt as truth-telling. When leaders model scapegoating and apocalyptic rhetoric, they legitimize aggression for others. They set the emotional weather.

And what should be unthinkable becomes ordinary.

When people are continually stirred into fear and antagonism, the capacity for moral restraint erodes. Some act it out in rhetoric. Some act it out in policy. A few act it out with guns.

But the root is shared. The old responses (mourning, commentary, outrage) no longer interrupt the pattern: they just exhaust us without changing the field. This moral and nervous-system climate isn’t “someone else’s problem”. It’s right here, it’s us.

There is an old letter from the early Jesus movement, written under empire, in a time of social fracture, that names exactly this. Timothy writes about authority severed from conscience, about what happens when leaders abandon humility and accountability, calling a shipwreck, a communal catastrophe. The letter is clear-eyed about how it happens: not through obvious monsters, but through the slow erosion of moral perception, language that dehumanizes and systems that reward domination. Through the quiet collaborations of people who know better but stay silent.

Even 2,000 years ago, there was recognition that violence does not usually begin with cruelty. It begins with the quiet severing of inner moral witness. It doesn’t require any doctrinal buy-in to recognize its wisdom: don’t let public life be organized by contempt. . It doesn’t respond to violence by endorsing counter-violence. Don’t become the division you oppose Instead, it doubles down on formation of character: gentleness, restraint, a good conscience, and care for the vulnerable. They are the only forces capable of interrupting the cycle before it turns lethal. The letter says not to collapse into despair or revenge, but to practice coherence and dignity. Know that any leadership that relies on fear, humiliation, or coercion has already departed from the way it claims to serve.

Expanding Coherence

This counsel seems true to me, but if it’s two thousand years old, why are we still here?

I feel that the teaching addresses a layer of reality (personal formation, moral restraint, the guardianship of conscience) but it doesn’t name what our era makes unavoidable: coherence must scale and become networked, without which we end up with private sanctuaries of decency inside a public ecosystem that keeps producing violence.

Of course, we need more people who have found their center, AND our moment requires integrity that can link arms. We need to be nested in a web of attunement: a living relational field that can hold pressure together. Networked towers of coherence tuned to the same channel: conscience, dignity, protection of the vulnerable. People who can sense one another, stabilize one another, and call one another back without exile.

It is tempting to believe that nothing will change, because that belief seems to protect us from disappointment. BUT it actually quietly absolves us of responsibility. History does not shift because people hope harder. It shifts when enough people stop reproducing the same emotional and moral weather. There is a lot more possibility available when coherence links, and this moment is asking for a new kind of participation. It’s actually already summoned a different kind of participation.

The Heart is a Power Center

Yesterday, a dear friend and one of the most profound teachers of our time, Patrick Connor, gave a most beautiful teaching that I think is relevant here.

He said effectively this: We’ve been trained to treat the heart as a vulnerable, fragile inner chamber… something tender behind walls that must be guarded, as if the wrong person might slip past the gate and damage what’s precious inside. But the heart is not a vulnerable chamber. It is a power center. An alchemical, reality-transfiguring organ. One of the most powerful centers of human intelligence we have.

What we often call “protecting our heart” is frequently keeping that power turned down or offline. Choosing caution over coherence. Living as if love is what makes us vulnerable, instead of seeing that love is what makes us authoritative.

The fear underneath protection is understandable. We fear that something unsafe will get inside. That loss will ruin us. That violence, grief, or betrayal will dismantle what we cannot bear to lose. But Patrick’s teaching offers a different understanding: the heart does not receive reality passively. It reshapes reality through resonance. It is not invaded. It transfigures.

He invites us to see the difference between having a heart that opens to an unsafe world and being the heart. When you are the heart, you are not letting the world in to harm you. You are radiating love outward into the field of reality. You are metabolizing experience moment by moment. You aren’t bargaining with the external world for permission to exist. All the power stays with you.

This is the shift from living outside-in to living inside-out. It is not a psychological adjustment. It is a transfiguring change of orientation. The heart awake as steady present love.

Agency without Hatred

With this teaching in mind, we are invited to live from the heart as power center, not outsourcing responsibility for the field to leaders, commentators, or “the culture.” The mature heart sets coherence, stabilizes and metabolizes fear rather than transmitting it.

An awakened heart stops treating violence as an external event to be mourned and starts treating it as a signal about the field it is participating in. This is not self-blame. It is adult participation. The question shifts from “how do I feel about this” to “what do we emit into the relational atmosphere every day.”

The heart that is fully online does not flinch at contempt, fear, or hatred. It doen’t exile them, and it doesn’t obey them. It includes them without being governed by them.

Inclusion does not mean agreement.

It means nothing inside the human field is left to ferment in exile.

We stand beyond polarity.

When contempt arises, in ourselves or others, we don’t have to crush it, argue with it, or perform our virtue against it. We can feel it, name it, and allow it to move through the field without organizing our actions around it. The heart has the capacity to hold even the most distorted emotions without becoming distorted itself.

Violence does not come from feeling contempt. It comes from being captured by it. From letting it become identity, strategy, and permission.

The heart as power center works through containment: it can hold grief without leaking despair. It can hold anger without converting it into contempt. It can hold fear without passing it down the line. The awakened heart severs the transmission of violence.

Living from the power center means practicing non-collaboration with degradation. You stop sharing the clip that spikes adrenaline. You stop using language that reduces whole people to abstractions.

You starve the rhetorical fire, you deny it air.

There is another deep move here: from witness to steward.

Witnessing says, I see.

Stewardship says, I tend.

The awakened heart tends the local field: homes, circles, classrooms, workplaces, comment threads, bodies. It asks: what kind of nervous system am I offering this space, and then chooses calm, which is a form of authority.

The awakened heart relinquishes the fantasy that awakening looks like consensus. We don’t need everyone to agree, we just need to remain intact. And it only needs a small percentage of people, numbers wise, to do this. We need to be faithful to conscience, to life, to the refusal of othering over time. This is how weather actually changes: through sustained atmospheric pressure.

The Relational Field

A coherent heart is powerful. But a coherent web is protective. A single coherent human is a lighthouse, and if you combine them, you get a field effect. Many points of coherence linked, mutually sensing, mutually stabilizing.

So much spiritual development stalls at the level of private attainment. You can become calm, clear, luminous and still be socially irrelevant if your coherence does not translate into relational capacity. Awakened individuals now feed into inter-awakened systems.

This web of attunement is different from a group of people who agree:

• Synchronized without sameness. People think differently, hold different identities, bring different histories. And all are tuned to the same channel: conscience, dignity, non-othering, reverence for life.

• Self-correcting. When fear spikes, the network dampens it rather than amplifying it. When someone gets captured by outrage or certainty, the web offers recalibration without exile. Calling back, with kindness and without coddling.

• Mutually regulating. Our nervous systems entrain. A coherent web can hold people through grief without collapsing into numbness, and hold anger without tipping into hate.

• Protective of the vulnerable. A true web of attunement makes it harder for cruelty to travel and easier for safety to be restored. It changes what becomes socially permissible.

Candle Lighting

So what comes in the throughline with the candles? Our grief has an embedded invitation to us, that we stop waiting for the world to change and start more actively tending it right where we are, and to build a relational culture where dignity is normal, where conscience is tended, where the vulnerable are protected as structure, not sentiment.

It is to create circles…small enough to be real, steady enough to last…where we practice non-othering as devotion, where we repair ruptures quickly, where we refuse the addictive chemistry of contempt. If you want the web to be real, it has to have shared practices. A rhythm where you name what you will not amplify, what you will repair, who you will check on. A rapid-response care protocol when violence strikes—meals, rides, accompaniment, presence at vigils that are protective rather than performative. A communal commitment that directly counters othering, especially toward those being targeted now.

Join us on Zoom today for a short meditaion, and on our regular monthly

Living Tantra community call next Sunday, 12/21/25.