I was listening to a feature on the BBC World Service about the Afghan women’s football team, who have recently been reunited in New Zealand. My eyes flooded with tears. Now, I have no particular reason to feel this way about refugee Afghan sportswomen, but the tears came up anyway, from somewhere deep down. Not for the first time: this is happening quite often, prompted by the smallest of triggers.
Yesterday it was a little bat: it comes out at dusk, swooping around in our farmyard, catching insects attracted by the lights in my cabin. Up came the tears, set off by an upwelling feeling for the lonely struggle of the bat to find food, thanks to a serious decline in insect populations in Britain. Yes, that bat and its fellows could be doomed by the unthought-through ecological malpractices of the British people, blithely getting on with our lives, worrying about the prices of school uniforms, avocados and tankfuls of petrol.
Another was a story about computer programmers in Gaza, trying to find work internationally, on laptops retrieved and refurbished from the rubble – they just want to feed their families. Another was a story about seamen stuck on boats in the Persian Gulf – they just want to go home. Their kids haven’t seen them for ages. They’re victims of a geriatrically whimsical president in a faraway country who labours under the belief that his priorities are bigger and more important than everyone else’s.
These aren’t just narrowband tears restricted to feelings of pain and sadness. Sometimes I emerge from these soggy interludes with a smile and a feeling of relief – not because relief is imminent for these poor souls, but because of the tender humanity and emotional solidarity that lies within these feelings. This human vulnerability, so easy to bomb, mow down and bulldoze, is where the future of humanity lies.
Our desensitised world is so caught up in its dramas that we forget what we’re here for. Though we have a wide spectrum of feelings about the state of the world, collectively we have lost our emotional anchorage, our moral compass. We’re burdened with enough of our own problems, and distant people are another matter. It’s a sad dilemma, this.
Occasionally bursts of empathy come along when we see lines of refugees in a futile trek over the mountains, heading for refugee camps far from home, or a baby lying dead on a beach on the edge of the rich world. That child had lost its chance for a better life – a life of cars, refrigerators and the juggling of timetables and monthly bills.
But mostly, while we get empathic twinges as the media trot out yet another disaster in someone else’s backyard, we don’t have time. We have to get on with stuff. This is the way in which, on this planetary world, we’re unwittingly destroying ourselves, as well as all the other critters and species who nowadays find themselves dependent on our decisions and behaviour. I’d love things to be otherwise but, well, sorry, I’m too busy right now.
Nevertheless, we are all empaths underneath, true humans at heart, and herein lies a big solution. Not in arguments about net zero or GDP, but in a feeling of human togetherness and shared vulnerability. We’re all in this together, sharing as we do a rather small world. Yes, even billionaires are lonely and afraid.
Our current global trajectory pushes us in a direction where, to our horror and surprise, we might rediscover a big truth – that it is in our own best interests to prioritise everyone’s interest. To make sacrifices in our own lives, just as the world’s victims and underdogs today are doing for us.
It’s in our best interest to let those tears come up. To feel the pain of the world. And its tender joy, sprouting like springtime flowers in the nightmarish wastelands of today. To forgive ourselves for screwing up. To see things with another optic. To set the past behind us, entering the future facing forwards.
Whatever unfolds in the coming decades, our descendants shall one day live in a new world, whatever form that takes – we are creating it now. We’re getting closer to a showdown, a catharsis of global choice, and we’re all here for that. If you wish to escape it, that’s fine, but you’ll be missing something – missing the redemption of a planetary world. It’s the biggest game in town. And it’s happening in our own hearts.
Following on from Inner Doctors, this is about a related issue, a pathway, a way of processing, a way of answering questions and solving problems.
Sometimes, with a wry twist, I call it intwitting – this is etymologically rooted in the Germanic word Wit, meaning intelligence or awareness.
A cultural bias in our modern world tends to regard intuitives as twits, as somehow weak, foolish and irrational, and this is unwise.
Many great inventors, entrepreneurs and even computer programmers are intuitive, whether intentionally or not. Eureka moments are big moments in history, even if many remain unrecorded.
We’ve had our intuition and instincts trained out of us by religion and education, particularly through doubt and fear, and nowadays not least by mobile phones.
In this podcast I tell a few tales about how intuition works for me, how I deal with it, and its ins and outs.
I quite recommend not being a retired humanitarian. Or, for that matter, trying to retire from many other helping and caring roles and professions. Because people come back for more, often for very good reasons, even if they’d prefer not to, and levels of genuine need in the world are rising sharply. So pulling out isn’t as easy as in a normal job. And when it comes to helping a person find food or pay an emergency hospital bill, it’s not a matter that can wait. “Is there a doctor on board?“, “Granny’s had a fall…” and “Could you just…?“.
This presents a dilemma, because the world needs people who help. Not advisers but actual helpers – people who do things. While some people are called to do it since they are by nature server-souls, it’s often foisted and dumped on them by a society that lacks time for being human, and server souls are not remembered and honoured very often.
Capitalism is not geared to accommodate compassion and empathy: you’re supposed to look after your own interests and, if you don’t, that’s your responsibility, and tough luck. The tragedy of this is that genocides happen and we as a society regret it yet we implicitly permit them, always busy with other things. That’s one of the great tragedies of our day, and we tend to worry more about Donald Trump than people in Gaza.
It’s not that enormous sacrifices are necessary, since £10 from a thousand people does make £10,000. Theoretically, many hands make light work. But it’s easier raising money for pussycats than for humans who live far away. Part of our problem is that our societies are so privatised – everyone’s supposed to look after themselves, and that’s the way the world is supposed to work.
But it doesn’t – there are too many things such an approach fails to cover. We have delegated caring to professionals, leaving it to them, yet there aren’t enough professionals, and many are under-supported. Also it’s personal closeness and family and community involvement that often are most needed, not regulated care administered according to official guidelines, done by stressed-out, underpaid people in uniforms.
We all get genuinely overloaded with issues and concerns… another war, another famine, another hurricane, another vexatious issue, another person needing concern. Compassion and empathy grate with the heartless pressures of staying alive in a capitalist system.
One of the frustrating issues I’ve faced in my humanitarian work is that I was always pressured to raise money, and that’s not my strong point. Philanthropists are regarded as rich gits who are there to disburse money, but my wealth is rooted in healing, reconciliation, communication and concocting occasional bursts of sheer magic. Even so, money needs are critical for many people, and often these needs are urgent. So it often defaults to money.
On Monday night I attended an all-night spiritual ceremony, processing this kind of thing in my heart through the night. It was a chance to step outside such concerns and look at them from a soul level, getting focused on inner healing. At present I have a friend in Gaza, with baby, who needs rescuing, plus a village of Tuareg people who need help (they’re under attack), plus a spirit-granddaughter, Phyllis, aged about six, whom I thought was dead. She has recently been found, rescued from Niamey in Niger and has now contracted malaria while in transit. So she’s in hospital in Ghana, in a country where, if you don’t have funds to pay, they dump you outside and leave you to your fate. That’s because of privatisations that rich countries imposed on developing countries in the 1990s, as a requirement for lending them money.
But we have achieved one thing: she’s safe in Ghana with Maa Ayensuwaa, who will look after her. I always suspected Phyllis was one of those rather special kids – her dead mother Felicia was a special soul too. Eighteen months ago, Phyllis had the fingers of one hand chopped off by a drug-crazed, murderous criminal, all because her mother refused to hand over a memory-stick that his gang wanted. I hard-talked with him just before he did it but I could not dissuade him. Perhaps Maa Ayensuwaa will train her as an Okomfo, a traditional healer – she needs to pass her remarkable knowledge and gifts on to someone, and perhaps that’s why Phyllis is still alive today, to inherit the secrets of Maa Ayensuwaa’s line of healers and bring their heritage of knowledge into the future.
Lo behold, as soon as I returned from the ceremony, tired yet in good spirits, in comes an urgent request from a hospital doctor for £100 for medication for Phyllis. Which, of course, I do not have, since I’ve already paid for her rescue and that emptied me out. The doctor cares about Phyllis but, if he breaks the rules, he loses his job. Telling them to seek support elsewhere is no help at all since they have already done so (and it’s rather callous and discouraging a response too).
So I’m back in the loop, begging people for money, yet again. I used to be much better in a team, when working with my old soul-sister Pam Perry – she could get on the phone and rustle up funds and action much better than me. With only one lung, she’d sit in bed with her oxygen tank, phone and laptop, raising money for Jerusalem Peacemakers and the Hope Flowers School in Bethlehem, Palestine. We were a dynamite pair because I gave her brains, backing, online outreach and magical input, and she was great at what she did.
In magical operations I work best as a battery-backup, a reserve warrior for heavyweight situations, a standard-holder and a protector and minder for those at the frontline. Or, at least, that used to be the case – but cancer went for my lower back and bones, and I cannot carry the same weight I used to bear.
Still, as one with a conscience and a heart that some regard as too soft, and with the involvements I’ve had over the years, I’m still at it, scrabbling for money to save someone yet again. In one sense it brings gladness to my heart and meaning to what remains of my life, and in another sense it’s a weighty bane. It’s difficult finding people to replace me. I have personal relationships with the people I work with in Palestine, Mali and Ghana – I’m unhappy about just dropping them during a time when it’s getting harder for them.
So that’s the story for today: raising money for a rather special child who’s struggling to stay alive.
In September I’ll be doing an AHA workshop on this issue, in Penzance, called ‘Changing the World’. It’s for helpers, activists, meditators and change-agents of any kind, and it will cover real-life questions concerning personal risk, life-purpose, commitment, psycho-emotional issues, burn-out, energy-management, holding true to your core beliefs, staying with it despite everything, and tricks for getting through. And planetary healing too.
Not that I’m the world’s greatest expert on this (is anyone?), but I do have some real-life experience. I’m still accumulating it, even as an old crock, and today it concerns one of those small yet big hurdles you come upon: how to create a miracle and raise £100 out of thin air when you don’t feel like it and you’re already worn out.
If you’d like to contribute even just a fiver to help Phyllis get better, that’d be really welcome. Drop me a message and I’ll give details about a bank transfer in UK or PayPal from elsewhere. Alternatively, please send her and Maa Ayensuwaa a healing, supportive prayer. Thank you, and bless you.
From a personal growth viewpoint it’s common to talk about boundaries. Well, yes, that’s true, but that’s not really the goal: after all, most wars and disagreements concern boundaries and we can go on forever being anxious about what separates us. It’s really about sharing and how to do it well, for sharing is a healing thing – personal, societal and global.
We too can become refugees, fall through the net and need help – too often we forget that. Giving is a concept with problems around it – it’s sharing that is really the big issue. It’s always an energy-exchange. It’s in our mutual interests to share what we have. Recipients share too, what they have – if it’s only their humanity and efforts.
However, even then, sometimes we’re tested, especially when we seek to treat others as we would have them treat us and they don’t return it. In such a situation I just try to keep going forward in faith without giving up.
There’s a level deeper too. To survive in this game I’ve really had to learn it in my cells. As a mantra of perseverance it gets me through the difficult stuff, and I’ve quoted it before…
It’s alright in the end, and if it’s not alright, it’s not the end.
Notes from the Far Beyond 
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