Tag: Turkiye

Turkiye and Syria. Some thoughts.

If you find yourself inwardly involved with the earthquake zone in the Middle East – an ancient, historic area at the centre of Eurasia where so much history has happened – then it is possible to do some innerwork to assist from wherever you are. It is possible to transform concern into activity, wherever you are.

I suggest that, as a group, we keep to our Sunday evening meditation slot – it’s important not to rush at things, and we don’t have a system worked out yet for activities like this. Unless something else arises between now and Sunday to change this, we can focus together on the region then.

As individuals, if you wish to do some work with this crisis over the coming days, please do. Use it as a way of self-training – there will be plenty more crises like these in coming years.

Note how they often come in twos (currently Chile and Syria/Turkiye), but just wait, because they’ll come in threes and fours before long. All that’s needed is a loaded situation and a whacky fullmoon line-up, and here they come.

If you’re not in a position to focus much on it, practice holding it in the back of your mind as you live your life, and give it focus as and when you can, when you have a quiet moment. I sometimes use a small rosary or mala as a way of keeping partial focus while living my life.

As you know, I prefer not to prescribe methods and strategies since a diversity of approaches is important. But if you need some ideas and a basic structure, here are two recordings made last year, when we visited Pakistan at one of my Magic Circles to help with mop-up and after-care there. One is a talk and meditation, and the other is the meditation only (20ish mins long).

The talk and meditation | Just the meditation

Here are a few thoughts to contemplate.

1. Since this is a really big crisis we can really only tinker round the edges but, remember, there will be many people worldwide adding their thoughts and prayers. So find the gaps;

2. Look around for people who are forgotten, unnoticed and undiscovered, going through it on their own;

3. one approach is to help the helpers – the first-responders, doctors, social leaders, activists and ‘community mothers’;

4. you can work with the living and/or the dead. With the living, help them find solutions to their needs, solace to their hearts, warmth, food and contact with relatives and neighbours. With the dead and dying, help them deal with their situation and get over properly to the other side and to a ‘reception squad’ who can receive and care for them as souls;

5. use your imagination and inner instincts. Experiment, follow your feelings and do whatever you’re best at doing;

6. this is an energy-exchange. What are these people and this situation bringing to us, giving us and teaching us? No country, including our own, is exempt from disaster.

7. healing energy comes *through* us, not from us, so bring in any deeper influences that you customarily work with, however you see things, and act as a vehicle for such influences – a bit like a healing drone;

8. it’s better to do small things well than big things badly, and make sure you complete and wrap up everything you start.

Unless you’re that way inclined, you don’t have to ‘do meditation’. Just hold it in your heart-mind, stay calm and bring calm, keep with it, note your thoughts and experiences and, if at a loss to know what to do, imagine yourself actually there, doing what you would do if you were there. If that just involves making tea for people or holding their hands, do it. This matter of consistent and well-paced energy-holding is important. Keep it simple.

The tensions released in an earthquake are not just geological. Human tensions affect things too. This is an area where the world’s first settlements and towns arose, many armies have marched across it and, in recent times, much oil has been pumped out of it. Consider.

Disasters are one of the mechanisms by which world change comes about. It’s tragic, but they shake us out of our customary busy indifference, exposing the human underneath. So one thought or prayer to make is for these tragedies to lead ultimately to real improvements and breakthroughs. May those deaths and hardships become more meaningful in the way they catalyse progress and redemption.

The Indonesia earthquake-tsunami of 2004 led to enormous strides in large-scale disaster-response, and to all sorts of changes big and small. Also it became really clear that the key first responses to disasters come within local communities, often through churches, mosques, temples and brave individuals who, in that moment, suddenly find they have a calling. Big organisations often take a week or two to get activated and deal with logistics and supplies, but it’s the people on the ground and in local communities, in that first week, who make a critical difference.

Resilience is all about the capacity of any society to handle whatever is thrown at it. At moments like this, the togetherness of a society makes an enormous difference. As Pluto enters Aquarius this and next year, until 2043-44, the togetherness of humanity is the central question. Here we have it. This is a soulquake, a prompt from Gaia.

With love, Palden.