Lighten Up with Lisa
By Lisa Dawn Wax
A little bit of literature sheds a whole lot of light!
“ No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main…any man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind;” Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, Meditation XVII pub.1624
John Donne (1572-1631), English Metaphysical Poet
Hi Readers! First off, I’d like to thank those of you who emailed me with all the your wonderful compliments and feedback from last month’s column. I was pleased to know how many of you enjoyed reading the article and were inspired by to take on last month’s challenge to change just one thing in your lives in order to initiate a chain of events of change. I hope you are continuing with your progress and look forward to hearing more success stories, as I’d love to share them in future columns. For those of you who missed last month, I invite you to read the .
Last month I introduced the theory of energy of thought via imagination and your individual power to create the life you want to live. This month we’re going to build on individual energy and discuss the principle of a collective universal energy. Once again while these terms might seem New Age they are merely a rebirth of much older beliefs. I am writing this column almost 400 years after John Donne wrote his essay with the above quote and Donne’s work was published 1500 years after its original inspiration which was taken from the New Testament, Romans 14:7. The words may have changed, but the message remains the same. Solidarity…We are all socially and spiritually interconnected and with this knowledge comes the power to persevere.
I’m going to dare to go one step further and reveal that in addition to being interconnected with one another we are interconnected with a Source Energy, also known as a Divine Consciousness or Higher Power. It is this higher power that has the ability to not only unify us as a collective energy but to empower us all so that we may live the lives we desire to live… the lives we are meant to live. So, how do we tap into this collective divine source energy? We simply need to realize its existence and acknowledge our mandatory participation. By participating I mean to say accepting our interconnectedness as truth and acting as one group instead of one person. We must reach out to those in need as well as recognize and accept help when others reach out to us. We must truly believe with our hearts and in our souls that we are never alone.
I’d like to share a joke I heard years ago but remember often. A man is drowning at sea and he looks up to Heaven and prays for God to rescue him. A scuba diver swims by with a life preserver and the drowning man waves him away, saying, “God will save me.” Then a boat comes by and throws him a line. He doesn’t take it, saying again “God will save me.” A helicopter flies overhead and drops a rope. The man again turns away and says, “ God will save me.” At last the man drowns. At heaven’s gate he sees God and asks him, “Where were you? Why didn’t you save me?” God replies, “I sent the swimmer, the boat and the helicopter, the rest was up to you.” The drowning man not only turned away repeatedly from help that was within his reach but also failed to recognize the precise divine intervention he was seeking. I believe that many of us do this on a daily basis because in our pain and suffering we focus on feelings of alienation rather than searching out our true connections, our life lines, our saviors, our Lucky Charms.
Lucky Charms, as I like to call them, are people and/or events that help us when we are least likely to reach out for help on our own. They can be someone we know, or a stranger who smiles at us for no reason, or possibly even a guardian angel in disguise. They can be a fortunate situation. For example, I consider writing this column to be one of my Lucky Charms as it allows me to connect positively with so many of you. They can also be a negative situation that challenges you to rise above yourself and find a strength within that you never even knew you possessed. I’m sure we all have at least one story of tragedy or despair where we somehow managed to emerge from the darkness into the light. This transition might have been due to the love of family, support of friends or even the growth of our soul. No matter what the source, Lucky Charms force us to acknowledge and embrace our connections to each other, to ourselves and to the collective energy of the spiritual world in which we live. In 1955 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French philosopher and biologist, wrote The Phenomenon of Man and stated, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience”. Whichever statement you choose to believe is unimportant. The importance is to believe in the unifying existence of spirituality, to know that we are all connected and to remember we exist to help each other.
Remember a funky little R&B inspirational song that echoed the theme of solidarity? I’m speaking of the 1972 hit song “Lean on Me”. I wish I had space in this article to write all of the , but here is the chorus.
“Lean on me when you’re not strong, and I’ll be your friend
I’ll help you carry on, For it won’t be long
Till I’m gonna need – Somebody to lean on”
At some point we all need somebody to lean on and the best way to ensure having a friend is to be a friend. So, this month I challenge you not only recognize the Lucky Charms in your life (including the hidden painful ones), but to be a Lucky Charm in someone else’s life. A friend of mine shared the term “Pass Along Therapy”, which is similar to the principle. The Pay It Forward principle asserts if someone does you a kindness, turn around and do a kindness for someone else. This creates a chain reaction of kindness, universal energy in motion. The Pass Along Therapy principle focuses more on healing, asserting that if you help someone else you get the added benefit of also helping yourself. This can easily be achieved through charity and volunteer work. I don’t know anyone who has volunteered for a cause they believe in and not felt some sort of personal benefit from having done so. Personally, I am a volunteer for Hospice of Palm Beach as a patient visitor. There are no words to accurately describe the pure fulfillment of soul knowing I am helping someone through their darkest time. It raises me high above myself where I can see more clearly and gain a perspective I wouldn’t have otherwise seen because it takes me out of the individual consciousness and into the collective consciousness. I am a Lucky Charm for the patient and family members, but the experience is absolutely a Lucky Charm for me as well. Albert Einstein once said, “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” If we can rise to a higher social consciousness and become a part of the collective consciousness or as John Donne said, “a piece of the continent” then we can uniformly welcome the opportunity of enlightenment and the ability to heal both our personal and universal pain so that we can rescue ourselves and mankind. The boat, the helicopter and the swimmer are all waiting for you to lift up your hand and grab on to hope, but don’t forget to then pass them along to someone else.
Once again I’d like to close with a song quote. This one is from The Beatles.
“Oh I get by with a little help from my friends. Oh I get “high” with a little help from my friends. Oh, I’m gonna try with a little help from my friends.”
(Note: Although I’m sure Paul and John were speaking of a different “high” than I am, for the purpose of this article think of it as a raise in consciousness and energy.)
Until next time, may your days be brighter and your lives be lighter.
Lisa Dawn Wax, aka Lightworker Lisa, has been certified in Massage Therapy, Fitness Training and Reiki Healing for over 15 years. In addition to being a born Lightworker she is a certified Angel Healing Practitioner; both of which basically confirm her intuitive abilities to help, heal and teach. Using reiki (energy healing), divine messages and intuitive readings, she has helped many people to identify the source of their pain, clarify current life situations, and successfully redirect their focus into positive channels. If you’d like to share comments about this article or if you are in need of affordable healing and/or life coaching via divine inspiration with immediate results, please call her at 561-594-3948 or visit her new website .