“If you think you’re too small to make a difference, try spending the night with a mosquito.”

In the spiritual traditions, there has always been talk of transmission, the recognition that the freedom, love and wisdom of the teachings can be transmitted through a living human being. Most of the time this person is understood to be the teacher; but the truth is actually much bigger than that. We are all transmitters. Whatever our state of consciousness is, we are transmitting it all the time. And we are all receivers. In the indigenous traditions, they recognize nature as a great, unending transmitter. So there is wolf medicine, hummingbird medicine, the medicine of the elements and of the plants. Anyone who has ever heard the cry of an eagle, or seen one soaring through the sky, knows intuitively what this medicine is. You don’t have to be a shaman to receive this kind of transmission.

When my mother was dying, she would listen to a video of the great Tibetan teacher, Chogyam Trungpa, over and over. He was talking about the enormous power we have to influence each other, in every minute of the day. ‘Please,’ he would say, ‘remember this-even ten minutes in a taxi can be a moment of transmission for that driver, if you are connected to your basic goodness and sanity.’

The reason I’ve been contemplating this lately is because of the immense helplessness and despair that so many people are feeling right now. I read an article recently about a top secret meeting that was held in the U.S. about a month ago. Scientists, engineers, environmentalists and political leaders all gathered together to discuss the fact that the polar ice caps are melting at a rate none of the scientists ever anticipated. Unless something changes, within the next decade many of our coastal cities will be under water. Somehow that shook me, even more than Al Gore’s movie about global warming, because the American policies in relation to our environment seem to be based on a profound level of denial. When I read that article I realized that they do know what is going on- we all know. As Joanna Macy says, “The body knows, because it is intimately connected with the larger body of the earth.”

When clients and students speak to me about their depression, anxiety and despair, I feel more and more that it is not just personal. It’s a collective feeling of helplessness in the face of a radically unknown future that awaits us. It’s so easy to sink into apathy and inertia, to convince yourself that you’re too small to make a difference, and escape into television, drugs, sports, or even meditation.

“What can I do? I’m just one person?” I hear people say this all the time. And I remember a story one of the women in my ‘Heart of Communication’ course told us a few weeks ago. In the middle of the course, she went to Baltimore, to help a friend at a conference center in the downtown core.
She found herself in a place full of skyscrapers, surrounded by the desolation of the inner city: a lot of black people living in great poverty and violence.

“I’ve never seen such hopelessness and despair,” she told us, “It was heartbreaking. I would go out to run errands for my friend, but what I was doing was not important to me at all. I wanted to bring some love somehow, into the devastation that was everywhere. It was a deep longing in my heart, that just kept getting stronger.”

One day she was looking for some cardboard boxes. She went to a store and spoke to one black woman about what she needed, and then another. In the beginning, both of them were very unfriendly. “ I could see them looking at me with this deep hostility,” she said, “and I understood it. For them, I was like someone from another world, a world they would never inhabit. But I just kept listening to my heart, and being there with them, just open and present, without pulling away. Somehow, by the time we found those boxes, everything had changed. And I had to wait while they went on the internet to find the best crab-cake place in Baltimore for me to have dinner.”

“That’s amazing, ‘ I said, “that it could change so quickly. What happened?”

“ I didn’t say anything, “ she said, “but somehow the love just found a way through, a way to make that connection. They felt it, and they responded. “Yes,” I said to her, “their minds thought you were totally separate, but their hearts knew something else.”

This kind of transmission happens in all the dimensions and levels of our being. In Tibetan Buddhism, they understand that our ‘mind streams’ actually interpenetrate each other. I heard about this from Peter Fenner, in the Radiant Mind course. Instead of praying ‘for’ another person, we can just allow the love and compassion of our mind stream to penetrate theirs, through the power of our living intention. It’s so easy to hear this as something esoteric, but it’s happening all the time. With family members, and people close to us, it’s much easier to notice. I’ve often been amazed that when a deep shift or opening happened in my life, my mother or my daughter changed too, before I even spoke to them about it.

No-one is without power to affect the whole. This is the good news that lives in the very core of our lives.

with love
Shayla