The Difference Between a Peace Rally and an Anti-war Demonstration

I was recently given an ancient carved stone as a gift. I felt it to be a very powerful object and my instinct told me not to bring it into the house and so I left it in the garden so that it could cleanse and charge. But as the days went on the stone grew in my mind. I began to feel it to be malevolent.

Then one night I could not sleep, I felt it pulling at me and at the house and so I began to protect my home. I called in all forms of protection, it seemed like it went on for hours and it was exhausting. The next day I wanted it gone.

Mother Teresa once said that she would not attend an anti-war demonstration, but she would attend a pro-peace rally.

And this is in essence what I realised the following day. I had been focusing on the negativity, the fear and darkness that my mind had come to associate with the object. Even when I was trying to bring in another response, it was retaliatory, from within the same dialogue.

So that night I decided to focus primarily on love. I have written a book called “The Protection, An Invitation to Angels.” (www.vimeo.com/theprotection ) It began as a search to create an alternate response to my son’s fear when he was going through a very difficult phase. But it is something that derives clearly from my own spiritual practice. Much of it deals with transformation.

By using the words and the images from my book, but sculpted for this particular experience I was able to focus on a feeling of love and peacefulness. As I meditated whilst doing it I understood that no thing was purely good or purely bad. It is as in the symbol of Yin and Yang.

I understood that perhaps the stone had been used with what I sensed to be negative intentions, but that was not its totality. In its entire journey on this earth, from its formation underground to its journey to my garden table, it had been touched by many things and contained within it other possibilities.

My focus on its “darker side,” limited my experience of it to only one possibility. The minute I could shift focus and call for light and love to completely fill the space, it was no longer malevolent. But it couldn't be done in negation of the thing I feared, but rather through touching an alternate expression and expanding on that.

I believe that we are like alchemists with our life as the alchemist’s laboratory. I think of fear, challenging experience and their offshoots as the base metal that we work to transform into gold.