Pathways To Peace is counting down the days by featuring an innovative Pathway To Peace every
ten days.
Today Pathways To Peace
Features
L
ongtime Friend, Colleague, Mystic, Spiritual Activist, Author, and Peace Ambassador -
Pathways To Peace (PTP) is honored and delighted to feature our Beloved Friend and Colleague, James O'Dea, and to honor his lifetime commitment to Peace and Peacebuilding. James is a modern day prophet who combines mystical realization with effective modern day activism. James has been described as a wise global citizen whose compassionate heart has emerged from the fire of a lifetime of sacred activism.
A New Tool for Peacebuilders
In these times, Peacebuilders around the world are looking for inspiration, tools for sacred self-care, and practical and heart-based ways to affect change. Throughout the years, James has been dedicated to lifting up, supporting, and promoting Peace and Peacebuilders. James O'Dea's newly released book, Soul Awakening Practice, is an essential guide to Peacebuilding today.
James describes his new book, Soul Awakening Practice as, "a book of prayer and contemplation for evolutionaries and activists, for deep ecologists, for spiritual seekers engaged in passionate renewal and for all those thirsty for a spiritually coherent worldview. Please go to James' website below to order the book, it will be an essential guide for Peacebuilding in our times. Here's the new book and
check out the video below for the Soul Awakening Prayer - it's powerful medicine for the Peacebuilding soul!
Soul Awakening Practice
Prayer, Contemplation & Action
Enduring Partnership for Peace
James has a long-term partnership with PTP and its Founder, Avon Mattison. Their work together, along with so many other dedicated Peacebuilders, has grown Peace and inspired Peacebuilding around the world. James describes the partnership with PTP in this way, "
Avon was with me every step of the way as I designed the first Peace Ambassador training for The Shift Network. Now there are well over a thousand Peace Ambassadors from thirty countries. She has also modeled par excellence how to integrate profound spiritual insight with skillful and even masterful peacebuilding." As just one example of his generosity and commitment to partnership, James provided scholarships to his Peace Ambassadors training for PTP partners and volunteers. PTP is honored and grateful for this enduring and committed partnership that has made a real and positive difference in the lives of so many.
Your heart is not your own. Ownership is an attribute of mind. There is only one heart in the whole universe. It is the same heart experienced in different degrees by all life. A New Earth is possible when we drop into the freedom of our shared heart. But if we stay on the balcony of the mind - we will only end up painting the same old wounds on a dark and crowded canvas of the future. - James O'Dea
Peacebuilding in an Ever-Changing World
Peacebuilders and Peacebuilding strategies have evolved with the times, responding to ever-changing needs locally and globally. The cry for Peace has never been greater than it is today. When asked about the evolution of Peacebuilding over time, James had this to say, "There was a time when we thought peacebuilding was so complex it could only be carried out by professionals. Now we see that creating a culture of peace requires peace education and practice at all levels of society and across all sectors of societal activity." Like PTP, James has dedicated his life and work to creating an ever-expanding network of Peacebuilders who have the tools, skills, knowledge, and support they need to activate Peacebuilding through their respective "pathways".
"We live in an era when a bold and coherent worldview is emerging that integrates evolution, ecology, spirituality, new science, participatory democracy, and activism. At the center of this worldview is a consciousness that we are designed for creative collaboration and that we can harmonize with Nature in ways that secure health, sustainability and a planetary peace that seamlessly weaves unity and diversity." - James O'Dea
Words of Wisdom from a Master
There is so much more to share about James and his work, so we hope you'll check out his website to learn more:
www.jamesodea.com
And, the best we can do is to share some words from James himself. Thank you, James, for your partnership, leadership, wise counsel, and inspired work that makes such a difference in our world! Here are two select poems from James that inspire and motivate and our work today.
An Invocation for our time:
This Consecrated Hour
Do you not see them
the ashen ones, the grey ones
the starving orphans , the seduced innocents,
the decimated specters of conflagration,
all the beings trampled in degradation
crowding our collective shadow field?
Go find
them. In this, this
consecrated hour of human becoming find your estranged,
your lost and abandoned family
and embrace them into the vital marrow of your life.
Kiss them until the ashes of their betrayal turn from grey to red
and the blush of love blows through
the one soul, the one life of all
Do you not feel them
the slicks of poison, the necrotic plastic
the ocean's dead-zones, the cancers, the tumors
the die-offs, the daily extinctions
the breath of life suffocated on a genocidal scale?
Do you not feel them in your own flesh and blood?
Go heal
the pain. In this, this
consecrated hour of human becoming feel your rivers,
your lakes, your mountains, feel their freshness, their pure life force
coursing your veins, opening your heart to the one Mother,
the one soul, the one life of all.
Do you not know them
the guardians of the moment, the secret listeners
the
agents of truth, the instruments of soul awakening-
consciousness raising- light resurrecting power of transfiguration
in the center of your own compassionately ripened awareness?
Go manifest this power. In this, this
consecrated hour of human becoming
sing the communal choirs of collaboration
showering our wounded world with the
divinely feted audacity to celebrate
the one soul, the one life of all.
I am a Peace Ambassador
I am moving from being locked into anger and outrage at war and violence or being defined as a protest movement to creating a culture of peace from the ground up and from the inside out.
I am moving from reactive finger-pointing condemnation and judgment of others arising out of my presumed superior moral positions to engaging in dialogue, listening and non-violent communication strategies.
I am moving from making those who disagree with us as the enemy to recognizing the inherent flaw in creating hostility or enmity as a peace strategy. In this way my work attempts to dissolve polarizing approaches and behaviors.
I am moving from a consciousness that is problem-sourced to one which is solution centered. This has a radical impact on how I organize. I am informed by vision and my tactics are not always defined by the opposite side of the problem.
I am moving from relying on partisan ideological frameworks and abstract intellectual theories to integrated approaches that are embodied manifestations of peace at individual and collective levels.
I am moving from activism which leads to burn-out and relationship breakdown to one in which working for the cause of peace requires self-care and time for quality relationships. I am an ambassador of love and compassion.
I am moving from piecemeal, feel-good, band-aid approaches and interventions to whole system maps and whole scale systemic transformation.
I am moving from the battle ground of proving who is right and who is wrong to understanding worldviews and how they are transformed and exploring who is wounded and how they can find healing.
I am moving from an obsession with punishment to the search for truth, reconciliation and restorative justice.
I am moving from demanding rights to assuming our responsibility to create environments which promote rights and emphasize individual and collective responsibility for an ecologically sustainable, socially just, democratically vibrant and healthy world.
About James O'Dea
James is a former President of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, Washington office director of Amnesty International USA, and CEO of the Seva Foundation. He is a founding member of The Evolutionary Leaders group and on the Advisory Board of The Peace Alliance, Kosmos Journal and the Laszlo New Paradigm Institute. James worked with the Middle East Council of Churches in Beirut during a time of war and massacre and lived in Turkey for five years during civil upheaval and coup d'etat. In Turkey he survived a knife attack and gunfire into his apartment and in Lebanon escaped West Beirut during a temporary ceasefire.
In his human right work, he has met with world leaders, testified before Congress, helped organize NGO participation in the World Conference on Human Rights, and engaged in human rights missions abroad.
He has taught peacebuilding to over a thousand students in 30 countries with the Shift Network, has worked with peacebuilders in several of the world's hotpots,
and has conducted frontline social healing dialogues around the world.
James has met, studied and collaborated with spiritual elders and realized masters in several traditions. James is both a mystic and an activist. He currently resides in Crestone, Colorado.
James O'Dea
is author of The Conscious Activist, Cultivating Peace, Soul Awakening Practice (June 2017)
www.soulawakeningpractice.com
and other acclaimed works.
His upcoming book is a poetic collaboration with artist Marika Popovits entitled
Enter the Luminous: states of consciousness in image and word
(August 2017).
Connect on
Facebook
Facebook community where we are sharing reflections and practices from the book, and our application of these practices amidst tulmutuous personal and global challenges.
#ShareThePrayer & Review The Book
Easy ways to circulate the Soul Awakening Prayer online via social media and on the ground in your local community. Leave a brief book review and help the prayer make its way into people's hearts.
James O'Dea
Soul Awakening Practice | The Conscious Activist | Cultivating Peace | Creative Stress
© Copyright 2016 - JamesOdea.com - All Rights Reserved.
What is Your Pathway To Peace?
We'd love to hear about it! Pathways To Peace honors, celebrates, and supports Peacebuilders around the world. You can contact us by emailing:
[email protected]
About Pathways To Peace and the Culture of Peace Initiative
Incorporated in 1983
, Pathways to Peace (PTP) is an international organization dedicated to making Peace a practical reality in our world today. PTP is an official Peace Messenger of the United Nations and has Consultative Status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council. PTP works locally and globally, inter-generationally and multi-culturally, to promote Peacebuilding, Peace education, and to collaborate with other organizations in initiatives that help further the Culture of Peace Initiative (CPI).
With participants from around the world, the Culture of Peace Initiative (CPI) is a cooperative local-global Peacebuilding Initiative uniting the strengths of organizations, networks, projects and people to realize a Culture of Peace for the Common Good. The CPI also serves as a vehicle for bringing to light many previously unseen and unheard Peacebuilders working along diverse paths, who are embodying the emerging Culture of Peace within Humanity. The annual highlight of the Culture of Peace Initiative is the International Day of Peace, which provides an opportunity for individuals, organizations, and nations to work together, on a shared date, to create practical acts of Peace with a year- round impact.
About the International Day of Peace
An annual focus for PTP is the International Day of Peace (Peace Day), held annually on September 21st.
Pathways To Peace has worked with the UN to observe and promote the International Day of Peace since its inception in 1981 and has grown International Day of Peace from a single event of a few hundred people into an annual global observance that now reaches hundreds of millions of people.
The International Day of Peace ("Peace Day") is observed around the world each year on 21 September. Established in 1981 by unanimous United Nations resolution, Peace Day provides a globally shared date for all humanity to commit to Peace above all differences and to contribute to building a Culture of Peace.
http://internationaldayofpeace.org
Is the theme for the International Day of Peace -
September 21, 2017
This theme relates to the UN's "Together" campaign which relates to the fair and compassionate treatment of refugees and seeks to promote awareness of our global community and a common desire for Peace. We all are One.
