Editor's Note:
In her later years, SoulCollage® Founder Seena Frost thought a lot about various aspects of the fundamental worldview underlying SoulCollage®. She realized how similar these are to the basic assumptions and ways of thinking about human life on earth that characterize the global Paradigm1 Shift now underway. For many people around the world, these newly reconfigured ideas are modifying, or replacing, the paradigm that has been shaping our lives since roughly the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the mid-1800s (itself another such shift). The following is adapted from her CD SoulCollage® and the Paradigm Shift
, recorded in 2012, along with material from her columns on the topic in our monthly newsletters.
1 The Merriam-Webster Dictionary describes paradigm as "a philosophical or theoretical framework."
|
Jean Houston (Community Suit), by Seena Frost |
I Am One Who lives and teaches from mythic space. Cross the threshold into this juicy place and witness the Larger Story.
(Jean Houston was a gatekeeper for Seena's paradigm shift that led to founding SoulCollage®)
There are several elements central to both SoulCollage® and the Paradigm Shift. For example:
Heart energy is emphasized as a balance to our present dominant mind energy. This shifts the way we humans relate to each other and to planet Earth. Echoing ancient peoples, we see the earth as being, like all its creatures, a living organism upon whose health we depend for our very lives. We recognize
the deep interconnection of all life, even as we
celebrate the uniqueness of every person. Each SoulCollager's card deck is a vivid record of the unique mix of personality parts, personal networks, particular ways of experiencing instinctive energies, and the specific archetypes (universal patterns in human experience) most important in that person's life.
We recognize that for human life to thrive, it is also best lived in a
human community that is supportive and compassionate. One essential aspect of the new paradigm will be the human capacity to
embrace diversity and to be flexible enough to
listen to differing perspectives, even as we remain clear and secure in our own. Our very diverse world is becoming more of a global community every moment because of all our incredible technology. A tolerant way of listening and relating is becoming more and more essential to our survival. More than ever, we need to be able to
practice cooperation.
However, really listening without judgment is difficult. Just as competition is hard to give up, so is our tendency to simply dismiss ideas that are, in our opinion, wrong. We distrust the
different because we don't understand it, and actually we don't really want to take time to try. So how can we humans gentle down our need to quickly declare one idea right, and then exclude all others?
SoulCollage® consists of this very work, applied to discovering our own inner parts and learning to consult them, to really listen to all of them no matter how negative or childish - or wise. This helps us be good at doing the same for others. In SoulCollage® communities, we share our cards and openly consult our images, then sit with others while they do the same. We learn to listen deeply, keeping our personal ideas or interpretations to ourselves while we do that. Perhaps we will help someone by writing down the words they speak from a card, but we don't add our own.
We empathize with and give respect to the wisdom that bubbles up from another person's soul. We allow them to be as vulnerable as they need to be. We rejoice and laugh with them at moments when they are transformed by their own words. In these ways the SoulCollage® process helps people learn how to listen and to respect the diverse perspectives of others. Right and wrong don't enter in; both/and will eventually lead to our finding a balanced pattern and a solution that benefits everyone.
We can also listen to diversity inside our selves, to our many internal guides and challengers with their often-conflicting agendas. It pays to get in touch with these inner voices, even if at first we see only their negative sides; if repressed, denied, or projected, they can sabotage our whole life. We start by finding and training the Observer part of our self, a part that can step back and look at our inner arguments without judgment or prejudice, one who can
gently call hiding parts up into awareness.
Using SoulCollage®, we do this by intuitively creating collage cards with powerful images depicting the energy of those parts that are angry, greedy, or afraid, and also the organized, generous, loving, talented, and smart parts. Each one has its own card, with its own distinctive images and identifying name. As soon as we have a few cards made, and perhaps in a group of supportive people, we consult these images. We ask a question and draw cards to answer it, listen carefully to the answer the image gives, and see how it fits with our question.
Because we want to see the whole picture, we draw two or more cards to receive several perspectives, a more comprehensive view. Often the part that is blocking progress will turn up to explain its misgivings. Then other images turn up and possibly give an answer that helps this part step out of its box, and begin to manifest as its wise, loving, creative essence.
|
|
|
Scared Child (Committee) by Seena Frost (Paradigm shifts can be scary because change is scary)
|
Our nation and the world appear to be fragmenting and slipping into chaos. Clarissa Pinkola Estes has characterized the mood of our time as like being in a
crouch position. One's whole self gets rigid, and feelings of separateness and fear can set in. While crouching, individuals and nations become polarized - the more one side insists on its way, the more its opponents feel they must become more extreme in the other direction to avoid catastrophe. There is much either-or talk and little balancing or investigating the doings of one's inner self. People are scared and angry.
Simultaneously, however, more and more people are
stretching, standing up from their crouch position, awakening to a sense of a new age coming, of a world united, of
partnership across differences. Millions of people are reaching out to one another, joining their voices in a huge cry for economic, military, social, and spiritual changes. New, transformative spiritual paths offer a worldview inclusive of all people and all faiths which is not escapist but truly earth-embracing.
|
|
Heart Chakra Lioness (Companion Suit) by Seena Frost |
|
Barbara Marx Hubbard, futurist and founder of the
Foundation for Conscious Evolution, imagines humanity's current stage in this evolutionary shift as akin to the mush of a disintegrating caterpillar, crouching within the cocoon it created, forming into a butterfly. As the caterpillar digests itself
imaginal discs - highly organized groups of cells, each bearing the pattern for an adult butterfly body part - divide rapidly, using the mush as fuel to form a butterfly.
I love this metaphor for groups of people all over the world who have a vision of a new paradigm. Gradually, over the last hundred years, these clusters of human "imaginal cells" - at first scattered around the world, rare and regarded as crazy - have multiplied. Each is awake to her/his own particular place in helping evolve this form. Now they are joining together to partner in bringing this butterfly vision of a new world society into reality.
|
|
|
Waterbearer (Council Suil) by Seena Frost |
I laid out all my 100-plus cards and selected nine that speak to me about the evolutionary shift. Most striking is that my guiding heart animal, a lioness named Bernard, appears in six of these nine SoulCollage cards. When I ask her about the evolutionary shift, she says:
I Am your heart energy. I alone can lead you out of this mouth of destruction. Follow me, all of you with your candles, all of you children and grandchildren of this beautiful planet. There is a place of balance ahead and I am leading you in that direction. The shadow of war will grow less and less dense. The WaterBearer who now holds the planet in her arms will be honored there. People will again dare to think, and then act, outside this old world's conventional boxes and begin to manifest as our wise, loving, creative essence.