Embodying Hope in the World Today
Transformation happens when our learning is infused with intentional processes of becoming.
Each week, following an ICN article, we offer invitations into deeper becoming—spiritual practices, ways of engagement, and opportunities for life integration. This rhythm seeks to intensify our mystical practice, deepen our embodied engagement, and call forth greater transformation in ourselves, our communities, and the world—the I, the We, and the All.
IF YOU MISSED IT LAST WEEK, WE ENCOURAGE YOU TO FIRST READ THE ARTICLE INFORMING THESE PROCESSES: “Resurrecting Hope”
“Worlds Anew” – image by Dalmo Mendonça
We invite you to consciously and intentionally engage in the following processes for your personal lives, WeSpace groups or other spiritual communities, and global participation.
A Body Prayer
Practice, Engagement & Expression
of Resurrected Hope
Herein are words from the article Resurrected Hope. To engage as the article also invites, through touch, with God Beyond Us, you may be inspired to move your body. To be with that which we cannot fully grasp or even describe, our body may lead The Way. Perhaps you will stand, and read one line at a time, and move as you feel led. Dance, like no one is watching!
And so we live in this resurrected hope.
What does it feel like to be immersed in God, in whom we live, move and have our being? Let your body show you.
We rise up from the eternal, full of love.
Perhaps you crouch down and SPRING up (Hope SPRINGS eternal!), or simply lift your arms high, or merely feel your heart open up and outward.
We reach out in faith, touching the mystery still becoming all around us.
How ARE you reaching out, how can you reach out, what wants to reach out and hold YOU?
We create together in power, bringing forth the coming of heaven on earth in the still-unfolding resurrection of God in the world today.
Can you represent POWER with your body? What might it look like, feel like, and SOUND like, to bring forth?
If you like, go through line by line again, and then close with this consecration:
We are the resurrection of Christ among us
here and now
alive in our midst
full of hope
in and through us
becoming ever new
the salvation of the world.
This practice of embodied hope was created by Beth Biery
Interweaving Deeper Engagement with Hope
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Welcoming Interspiritual Wisdom
Joanna Macy is a Buddhist scholar and activist who founded a movement called the Work That Reconnects. At the time, she noticed that people were responding to the growing nuclear armament in distinctive and mostly unhelpful ways. Most notably, denial of the situation because it was just too much to process, or a kind of hope that left the solutions to technology or to the “powers that be.” That kind of hope was without action. She taught that hope, to be true hope, had to be active hope. She published a book called Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We Are in with Unexpected Resilience and Creative Power (now a revised edition).
In this book, she developed a spiral of themed activities which help people reconnect to each other, to their feelings about what is happening, to their personal agency, to genuine hope, and to action which is rooted in the courage of community and love for the earth and Life itself. The spiral begins with gratitude, then creates a safe space to honor our pain for the world, then opens our capacity to see with new eyes, and final fills us with courage and support to go forth in unique actions to benefit Life.
One of the most powerful stories she tells is from her Buddhist tradition, “The Shambala Warriors,” which carries a theme like Clarissa Pinkola Estes’s “We were made for these times.” In this story, we see ourselves with new eyes, as Shambala Warriors, fitted to the task of going forth from our divine vitality to we/re-create anew what is not working in our world today.
This WeCreating Invitation for deepening engagement was brought forward by Martha O’Hehir
Engaging in the Living Hope of Our Lives
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Holistic Attending to Our Spheres of Influence
So then how do we live?
“Spheres of Influence” refers to the areas of our lives we can make an impact through our presence and actions. As we seek to integrate spiritual practices and learnings into our everyday lives, we are invited to consider how these lessons, practices, and ways of being can influence the world around us.
We invite you to consciously reflect on how you might embody WeCreating Hope in your life—in your local community, online spaces, or throughout the mystical cosmos.
Hope is not passive nor something we simply wait to see fulfilled. How might we carry the reality of eternal and mystical hope into the spaces where we live, work, and play this day, tomorrow, and this week?
Consider these spheres of influence and the invitations to welcome our embodied hope as creative arisings in our lives in these areas:
🕯️ Personal Sphere (I):
How can I welcome the inner sphere of Eternal hope from deep within the Source of my true being, especially when external circumstances arrive with disruption?
How might I call upon Mystical Hope when faced with the fear or despair of a situation or difficult outcome?
Set an intention or inner process, like a mantra of Living Hope, to consciously integrate in your daily life.
💞 Relational Sphere (We):
What is one relational environment or setting that might be served by a greater direct presence of hope? Can we bring that presence the next time we are there?
How might we embody hope as an act of communion, living from the wider and deeper connections that exist among us, rather than the fractures and divisions of fear?
🌍 Global Sphere (All):
What might it look like for us to connect with the larger field of hope beyond our singular and group perspectives?
In what ways might “cosmic” hope be manifesting and moving in the world today, and how can we join in with that greater flow?
🌀 Evolutionary Sphere (Becoming):
Welcoming the sphere of the future, open to hope from the goodness of realities not yet come, but waiting to be brought forth.
Welcoming the sphere of the past, open to the resilience and endurance of hope in the face of all that has been set against it before, yet not ultimately prevailed.
Welcoming the sphere of the now, open to the arising of new sprouts of hope in places of our lives we may not dare to hope, perhaps in ways and forms that look different from how we expect.
Welcoming the sphere of the eternal, open to the mystery of hope beyond time, yet also moving with force through deep time. Welcome the eternal divine resurrecting with hope and living vitality into the world today, into us, into you.
We also offer you this beautiful song of hope this week:
All Images are open-source, used with permission, or created by ICN