Healing Mantras

My walk through the online Collective Trauma Summit feels like a stroll through the woods, astonished by the little treasures of Fall leaves and wanting to bring them home to arrange in a basket on my table. But instead of leaves, there are little phrases tossed out, some accidentally poetic rhymes, some that I’m re-arranging as such. Rhyme and rhythm are age-old strategies for remembering what’s important in the short, terse forms of mantras, proverbs, sayings, short poems and songs. (Advertisers use it too, but for a self-serving purpose. I’m still wondering if I brushed my teeth with Pepsodent whether I’d remember where the yellow went!). 

 

All of these below are first-draft arrangements of reminders of how to heal ourselves and the world (same process), some of which might be worthy of further development into a bonafide poem or song or rap. For now, just a look at what we need to discard, what we need less of as business-as-usual in counter-productive and threatening to our health and survival, what we need more of to co-create the world we deserve and long for. In no particular order (and thanks to the many people who already used some of these words, though not in the re-arranged form here):

 

• Less fanatic forgetfulness, more fantastic forgiveness.

• Less invincible heroes, more wounded healers.

• To sustain the eco-system, dismantle the ego system.

• When the present isn’t pleasant, don’t flee it. See it. Be it. And begin to free it.

• When the heart is filled with fear, don’t feed it. You don’t need it. Just feel it, then heal it.

• When troubles turn up at your door, throw you down to the floor and shake you to your very core, don’t ignore. Run toward the roar. 

• When the slings and arrows come to your town, aimed at you to bring you down, stand firmly on your being’s ground and sing out loud your beauty’s sound. 

 

Sounds better spoken—or sung. If you want to make a hit song from any of it, let’s negotiate my royalites. J