I recently had the good fortune to take an intensive training with the Pachamama Alliance whose mission is to bring about an environmentally sustainable, spiritually fulfilling and socially just human presence on the planet. They believe this takes both inner work and outer work… we must transform ourselves and transform our world. As a psychotherapist and someone who’s taken my own transformative journey, I know the value of doing the inner work of personal healing and psychospiritual development.
Those of you who are familiar with my book, A Guide to Shifting Your Consciousness, know that it’s a guidebook for the inner work of personal transformation and sees that inner work as also contributing to the healing of our world. I now realize that the inner work, as essential as it is, is not enough. The outer work in the world is also essential if we are to create “the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible”.
So, I’ll be writing a series of blog posts sharing my interpretation of what I’ve learned through engagement with the Pachamama Alliance. I hope you find it as enlightening as I have. I’ll start by putting the inner and outer work in a context.
We human beings are designed to evolve and become all that we can be. This brings meaning and fulfillment to our lives and gives us a huge leg up on happiness. After all, we all want to be happy, right?
We live in a culture that tells us that happiness is measured by how much we have and with the idea that the more, the better. Consumerism we’re told is the key to happiness and the media bombards us with this message; despite the fact that we know it’s not true and it’s destroying our planet. So what does?
The field of Positive Psychology and the “science of happiness” research has been aimed at understanding what brings us happiness and how we go about getting it. Many valuable insights have been gained from this research, some of which I’ve shared in previous posts. One of them is that finding meaning and purpose in life definitely trumps possessions or status. Addressing our unresolved pain is another one.
However, the issue of happiness is complex these days. It requires more than doing our personal work of healing and/or deepening our spirituality. The pain and fear of millions of people living amidst poverty, oppression and violence has seeped into the collective consciousness and the web of life. The grief and despair so many of us feel related to the destruction of our environment, ecosystems, and whole species affect us as well, whether we’re conscious of it or not.
The reality is, like it or not, we cannot find and secure personal happiness in isolation from the happiness of others and all of life. We are all truly interconnected in the web of life. Interestingly, when we do our inner work and evolve our consciousness one of the results is that we move from a “me” to a “we” mentality and begin reducing self-interest and focusing instead on the welfare of all. This new consciousness then needs to be embodied and acted upon… that’s the outer work.
This is essential and urgent. We are at a crossroads in terms of the future of our planet and its life forms. For the first time in the history of evolution, it is not natural processes like natural selection or mutation, but human beings and their choices and actions that are determining the trajectory of evolution of life on this planet.
And, the untold suffering of far too many people on this planet along with the chronic stress, anxiety and depression that now seem to be taken as “normal” or “just the way things are” are signposts that we need some major course corrections. All these realities will not change unless we put our altruism to work in some form of activism.
Each of us gets to decide how we take action for the greater good and how we contribute to the course corrections needed in our world today. I’ll be discussing this more in future posts. One final note… the good news: when we serve something greater than ourselves, it brings a sense of purpose and fulfillment, and the science of happiness research has found that altruistic acts were one of the highest correlates for happiness!