Reflections: Breakdown in 2012 - Breakthrough in 2013? (Part One) by Lucira Jane Nebelung

Today is the day the world is supposed to "end." Given all that we have been experiencingand witnessing, maybe it is. Perhaps what is ending is the world as we know it.

Perhaps what is ending is a world we blindly created and lived. Perhaps what is ending is our unconscious focus on fear - fight, flight, freeze - with a radical shift to consciously live and lead our lives from love - care, understanding, respect.

The world we know will end - bringing the opportunity for new beginnings - when we choose and commit to change ourselves.

Breakdown to Breakthrough

Globally, we have experienced a multitude of violent, catastrophic and devastating events in the last 10+ years. We are seeing generations of abuse and exploitation exposed. Many of us have withdrawn emotionally, mentally and physically, ignoring our inhumanity and indifference towards one another. What happened last Friday and since in Newtown is, in the word of a friend who lives there, "surreal", beyond mental comprehension and understanding. We all deeply feel and share sorrow, rage and despair at the loss of these innocent lives.

Newtown brings a loss of innocence to all of us. The worst in us and the best in us were revealed in the same moments. We can no longer close our eyes, be silent, and pretend ignorance. Newtown is our "tipping point" for how we create our future. If we allow, our breaking hearts will wake us up to courage, resolve and perseverance that says "never again." Not just to gun violence but to all the ways that we are violated and we violate others.

This means we stop looking outside of ourselves for something or someone else to blame or "fix." The truth is that what's on the inside shows up on the outside. Together, we ourselves have created a society with the conditions that enabled this to happen. Our collective concepts, actions and laws are an amalgamation of our individual thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and values that we largely force on one another.

Our individual responsibilities as human beings mean responsiveness to one another. We have seen the enemy and it is us. We created this tragedy and have a hand in every one of the others. We are all responsible by what we accept and how we act. Both as individuals and as a society, we can no longer be innocent of our creations.

Life is showing us what is unsustainable. It's not about gun laws which are merely one symptom.It's about the fundamentals of every aspect of our social structures: government, business, education, and religion. The old way, the way of fear, is in breakdown. When the Romans encountered a "problem", they wrote new laws. When the Greeks encountered a "problem", they created a new approach or concept. We can't legislate ourselves to universal peace and prosperity.

Breakdown can only bring breakthrough when we fully engage with one another with an intention of universal well-being. Breakthrough means conscious choice and response rather than automatic, fear-based, conditioned reactions. Breakthrough means a life of integrity, the conscious integration and wholeness of mind, heart, body and soul; thoughts, emotions, actions and spirit. Breakthrough means authenticity, being the author of life and acting from the core of our being, that which unites us.

...../To be Continued..

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Lucira Jane Nebelung is a Faculty member of the Center for Leadership Studies, The Graduate Institute, and Founder & Principal of "Leading as Love". She wrote in from Norwich, Connecticut Area.

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