Can We Change the World?

Can We Change the World?

by Rev. Sheri, founder of Angel Messenger

The famous Chinese philosopher and poet Lao Tzu said,

“When pure sincerity forms within, it is outwardly realized in other people’s hearts.”

Likewise, when love forms within, it is outwardly realized in other people.

When we are hurt or when we face difficult times, we often shut down our hearts. Doing this closes off the very special part of us that shares who we really are with others. We reach out to others from our hearts, and our most genuine response to others come from our hearts.

Shutting down like this distances us from people, forming a barrier between us and them that many will not dare to cross. This leaves us lonely, feeling unloved and unlovable, and unsure whether the problem is with us or with everyone else.

When we shut down our hearts, close the door and throw away the key, vowing to never let anyone hurt us again, we end up isolating ourselves and sometimes even fall into addictive behaviors … using drugs, alcohol, or food to medicate our pain. When we give out less love due to the closed doors of our hearts, we get less love in return. Our pain and distance, and our feelings of being unloved and unlovable, create even more distance between ourselves and others.

Instead of shutting down, locking up our hearts, and becoming distant, we need to learn to process and release our hurts. To do this, it is helpful to follow Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s model for grieving. We do have to grieve for the hurts we sustain before we can move past them. Ross originally wrote the stages of grieving about the loss of a loved one, but they can be applied to any loss we have in our lives.

Being hurt by someone breaches trust and creates a feeling of loss.

And we enter into the stages of grieving …

1. Denial

Our first impulse when we are hurt by someone is to deny that they meant to hurt us or to deny that the hurt is as bad as it is. One of our next thoughts might be, “If I just ignore what happened, the relationship can continue as it was without my having to address the issue.”

2. Bargaining

We may even try to make a deal with God or the Universe in order to lessen the pain or help us to put our world back on it’s axis, thus making things “normal” again.

3. Anger

But denial and bargaining usually only last so long when we do not deal with the hurt. We carry the pain us and it festers, becoming larger and larger until it eventually triggers our anger. When this happens, it is so easy to leak our frustration and aggression all over other people who were not even involved with the hurt in the first place. By not dealing with the hurt, we can end up hurting those we love most. It is so very important to acknowledge the anger, connect it to the hurt, process it and release it.

4. Sadness

Next is the feeling of sadness we get when we realize that, due to the hurt, things between us and the person who did something we found hurtful will be irrevocably changed. One of the hardest things for most of us to do is just to sit with the sadness and allow ourselves to feel it … to really embrace and accept how we feel. Most of us would rather deny and ignore the sadness and completely jump over this step, but that will just take us right back to stage one.

5. Acceptance

Reaching acceptance does not mean that we find the hurtful thing that was done to us acceptable. Acceptance simply means we have chosen to do our process work and release the negative feelings we have toward the person who caused the hurt.

When we use these steps to deal with our hurts, we can keep our hearts open rather than shutting ourselves off from the world. When we open our hearts to the world and send out loving energy, the loving energy magnetizes people to us. Anyone and everyone who needs or wants love is immediately attracted to us; we become a beacon of love.

Can you imagine how the world would change if everyone processed their pain in an appropriate way? Can you imagine what would happen if everyone became a beacon of love? By sharing our love with others, we can truly change the world around us and that change would become a ripple effect, spreading out to reach more and more people. We do have the power to change the world.

Angel Blessings,

Rev. Sheri
Founder, Angel Messenger