It’s time for a July 2020 Energy update! Let’s talk Covid! Let’s talk ongoing crises! Let’s talk about George Floyd.

Transcript:

Hey, it’s Melody Fletcher, and for those of you who watch my videos regularly, I know, I’ve once again been absent for a few weeks, and it may seem like I’m coming quite late to this party. Where have I been? Why haven’t I been front and center in supporting you, my lovely audience, through these crises? Why haven’t I spoken out about George Floyd?

If you’ve felt unsupported by me these last few weeks, I apologize. I didn’t actually go anywhere, I’ve just had my hands full working in the background, supporting my clients and students, AND being inspired into a whole new direction, which I’ll tell you about later in this video. I haven’t been hiding, I just had to step into the energy of solution in a more specific way and stabilize there before I could talk about it publicly. So, basically, I’ve had to go and do my own work for a bit and level up massively, in order to bring something truly useful to this conversation.

But, before we get into that, the question I’m hearing most often now, is: “Is this shit ever going to end?” In my last energy update, I talked about how the quarantine was actually serving a really positive purpose: it was giving people a much-needed break, causing us all to slow down, and creating a ton of self-awareness. So, even though there was a fair amount of fear in the world, we could also see the silver lining. The awakening of humanity had begun in earnest. And, for the most part, those of us doing this work could actually enjoy the quarantine.

Well, now it’s been a couple of months and we’re all sick to death of the quarantine and the virus. It’s gone on just a little too long, now, right? There’s talk that this may last for many months more. There are massive fears of a total economic meltdown. Individual families are struggling and especially in countries that have no social safety net, like the United States, for many, it’s beginning to look a bit hopeless.

And then, without the whole Covid crisis being resolved first, George Floyd happened and sent a collective gut punch around the world. What the hell, Universe? How and why are we manifesting this?? What did we do wrong?

Nothing. This isn’t some kind of punishment. It’s a process of awakening. And, as I’ve been telling you, waking up is a bitch. Coming out of denial and acknowledging the pain we’ve been carrying around with us and ignoring for, well, millennia, is hard. We don’t want to do it. We’d rather just turn on the morphine drip, lie back and pretend everything’s fine. But that doesn’t work. Not on an individual level, and not on a global level.

But let’s go ahead and talk about how awakening works on an individual level. Chances are, that if you’re watching a video like this, you’ve already gone through that process a few times. So, it should be pretty easy to recognize, especially in hindsight. And, once you understand how awakening works for an individual, it’ll be much easier to make sense of what’s happening to us collectively. Because, as it turns out, the process is exactly the same, whether you’re talking about it on a micro or macro scale.

I’m going to share with you the 5 Stages of the Awakening process. And, by the way, if you’d like to see this teaching written out, you can always do that on my blog at MelodyFletcher.com. We publish the transcript of each video there for your reading pleasure.

The 5 Stages of Awakening

Stage 1: We’re constantly living in Denial.

This is true for everyone, so please don’t feel singled out. The world has problems. Individuals have problems. But, for whatever reason, we don’t really want to acknowledge those problems in a way where we could actually do something about them. And that’s because of our limiting beliefs which state that we can’t really do anything at all to make things better. So, it’s better to just pretend like things don’t hurt. This kind of denial allows us to put up with some pretty unacceptable stuff, both in our own lives, and in our communities. For example, you may be in a relationship that isn’t awesome. In fact, it drains you. You’re putting up with a lot. But maybe you believe that you have to pay the price of “putting up with” stuff in order to get something you do want. Like security, affection, or validation. Maybe you believe that you have to work really, really hard in order to deserve even a little bit of money, love, or dignity.

Whatever the beliefs are that cause us to put up with something, anything that doesn’t feel good, they create a cage of limitation around us. This cage becomes our reality. In the cage, we are told that we are powerless to dismantle the cage itself, so we have to work within its rules. So, for example, you might be stuck in a job you absolutely hate, but you’re willing to make the best of it, because the cage says that this is where you belong. So, you decide that you can be content at your crappy job as long as they keep stocking the cafeteria with donuts. In other words, the tiniest amount of positive allows us to put up with a whole ton of negative. Like the boyfriend who has no job, cheats on you, and constantly puts you down, but hey! He’s good in bed, so… yay?

Stage 2: Awakening has to be forced (usually)

When we’re talking about the process of “awakening”, we’re really talking about becoming aware of what’s actually going on. It’s the process of coming out of denial and being willing to acknowledge how we’re truly feeling, warts and all. We see what we’ve been putting up with, even though it doesn’t feel good, and may actually be quite torturous. We feel the pain we’ve been suppressing for a long time, often years. We take the blinders off, turn off the morphine drip, and get “real”.

Well, obviously, this awakening is painful. We’re not creating pain by waking up, but we are finally acknowledging and therefore experiencing the pain that’s been there all along. And that, well, is a bitch. We don’t really want to do this. No one does. It’s much more comfortable to just stay in denial and pretend than to actually face our shit. And in most cases, it’s scary, because the cage will tell us that if we do take a look at the bigger picture, we’ll lose whatever scraps we’ve been able to sacrifice for. So, waking up is dangerous! It isn’t, really, but this belief is really rampant, and explains why some people will react so violently to the idea of even others waking up.

The bottom line is that no one WANTS to do this work. Not in the beginning, anyway. We kind of have to be forced into it. And that brings us to…

Stage 3: “Negative” manifestations or “crises” help us to wake up

So, we don’t really want to go through the process of waking up. Which means, that we generally need some kind of catalyst or series of catalysts to kind of force us to wake up. Let’s say that you have a massive tumor on your leg. But you’ve been in denial about it, taking tons of painkillers, and just not looking at your leg, in order to avoid the truth. Oh, you can’t ignore it completely. In the back of your mind, you know that your leg’s in trouble. But your fear that it might be something serious could keep you from letting your worry become conscious. It feels a lot better to just pretend that there is no issue.

Only when your leg becomes too painful to ignore, only when the pain in your leg becomes worse than the pain or fear you feel at the idea of rattling the cage, will you finally be willing to take a look, acknowledge the situation and do something about it. Now, of course, you don’t have to wait until your leg threatens to drive you insane with pain. You can learn to become aware of the pain much, much earlier, when it’s just a tiny bit of discomfort. This is something I teach my students in my LOA Academy program (shameless plug), but it does require a certain level of awareness. So, usually, you don’t even find yourself looking at teachings like mine until you’ve gone through at least one major awakening round. In other words, you had a crisis, or a series of crises that got you to change direction and look at different kinds of information for answers.

The crises in our lives, the painful experiences, are almost always there to help show us that we’ve been putting up with something that’s hurting us. Something that, usually unbeknownst to us consciously, we don’t actually HAVE TO put up with. Our negative manifestations are there to show us our cage, the limitations we’ve blindly and unknowingly accepted, and which really, REALLY aren’t serving us.

Stage 4: Awakening doesn’t happen all at once

Now, because awakening is so painful and scary, and because we humans can be so freaking stubborn, it often, as in almost always, takes more than one crisis or painful event to get us to wake up. We’re stuck in an old pattern of perspective and reaction, one which we generally didn’t consciously choose or buy into, but which we will do almost anything to just keep going back to. We’ll use the same neural pathways that we’ve always used, until we’re well and truly forced to create another. Even if those old pathways don’t really serve us; or serve us anymore.

So, think of it this way. You’re in a truck that’s stuck in a deep rut or trench. The trench forces you to keep driving straight ahead. That’s all you can do. You really want to go to the right, there’s some beautiful and awesome stuff over there, but you can’t. The trench is too deep, and your truck can’t turn out of it. Now, imagine that some force comes and pushes you sideways. Your truck rocks a little. “What the hell was that?!”, you exclaim with surprise. You got hit, your truck rocked a little, but it didn’t pop you out of the trench. At this point, the tendency is usually to go “Oh well, that probably meant nothing.”. You ignore it, talk yourself out of acknowledging it as significant, and you get on with the work of driving through the trench.

Then, BAM, another force hits you from the side, even harder than last time. Your truck rocks a bit more, even slightly lifting off it’s wheels on one side. At this point, you can’t help but acknowledge, at least for a few seconds, that something has happened. But you don’t know what it was, and since you can’t make sense of it, you ignore it and maintain your pattern.

Now, imagine that you keep getting hit, harder and harder, until the truck pops out of the deep trench and sets off on a new course. Once out, you can see clearly that the trench wasn’t nearly as deep as you thought it was. In fact, you could’ve driven out at any time with just a sharp jerk of the steering wheel and a little bit of gas. But you didn’t know that. From your point of view, the trench was way too deep to just drive out of, so you kept driving through that trench, that old pattern, that old, well-used neural pathway. Until you were forced to change.

But by being forced to change, you now have the ability to drive to that field on the right, where fruit trees grow, and butterflies roam and fairies dance in the night. In fact, the only reason that you were forced to change was so that you could move towards that which you want, that which will serve you much better, that which feels good.

These “negative” manifestations, or catalysts, really, are not there to punish you. They’re there to say “Snap out of it! There’s something so much more delicious over there! Go get it!”. So, while it can feel like crap is happening TO you, it’s actually happening FOR you.

Stage 5: Change happens quickly after the shift

As soon as we give up the old pattern or perspective and see a new path forward, a domino effect begins where changes can happen very quickly in our realities. Solutions simply begin to appear to problems that seemed unsolvable before. And yes, this can seem quite magical. It’s not magic. It’s a type of technology. But when you’re so used to working hard to make things happen, problems simply solving themselves can seem downright miraculous.

Once we make a massive shift, it opens up a ton of energy and will have a profound impact on our entire lives. Often, we let go of an old, limiting identity. The way we see ourselves, the world, and our place in it all changes. It all expands. More becomes possible and life becomes a bit easier.

Change is hard only until we surrender to it. In other words, the “bitch” part of “waking up is a bitch” refers to the part of the process where we’re fighting the change. This is where our fear is still winning. This is where the cage is still winning, lying to us that we’re not strong enough to break out. That it’s not possible. Defying and overcoming those voices, is the hard part. But as soon as we do, it all gets easier. It’s like we’ve opened a door with a Tsunami of awesomeness behind it. As soon as we open that door, the energy just floods out and does what it’s going to do. Changes that were damn near impossible before, become easy. The underlying energy has shifted, and therefore all actions and reactions will automatically change along with them.

Micro vs. Macro

These 5 Stages of Awakening apply not only to the process of the individual, but the collective, as well. In other words, it works on a small, individual scale as well as on a huge, global one, and everything in between. Let’s take a look at what’s happening in the world right now, through this lens.

If you think of the whole world as one body, one individual body with billions of cells, with each one of us representing one cell in that body, and different communities representing different organs and tissues, then consider that this body is sick and in a whole lot of pain. Yes, our education system, political system, social system, prison system, economic system and all other systems are broken and definitely need some attention. But underneath all of those systems are human beings – the cells in the body. And there are huge, gaping wounds all over that body that we’ve been in massive denial about for far too long.

It’s impossible for any cell or group of cells to distance themselves from the whole. While not all parts of the body are wounded in the same way, all wounds affect the whole. You may be in the big toe, but if the lungs are infected, you will be served by that infected blood. What’s more, if the lungs fail and cause the whole organism to die, so will the big toe. Also, you can’t just cut off the right leg because you disagree with it. Like it or not, we’re all in this body together.

But we haven’t been acting like it, have we? Imagine if the liver just started threatening the pancreas? Or the heart starved the kidneys until it got what it wanted? What if one group of cells decided that it just wanted to take the resources of another group of cells; you know… just because it could? When this happens in the body, we have a name for it. It’s called cancer. What if one group of cells decided that it could just take a lot more resources than it needed and hoard them, leaving the whole rest of the body to do with less and less, even to the point of illness and possibly death? In nature, this behavior is classified as parasitic.

We need to rebalance

When you get a parasite infestation in nature, there will always, eventually, be a balancing force to get rid of that parasite. In the wild, for example, many animals will respond to the invaders by eating medicinal plants that kill the parasite and flush it out. Parasitic infestations are only ever able to get out of hand and do widespread damage when there’s an imbalance in the environment. A dog that’s already sick, undernourished and living in squalor can get a rampant mange infection, for example, while a healthy dog can usually ward of the infection, often without treatment.

I think, looking at the world today, we can see that we have some pretty horrific imbalances going on, along with a pretty rampant parasitic infestation. Parasitic energy is that which takes but doesn’t give back. It removes energy and resources from the system. Can you see some evidence of that in our world?

The imbalances we have in our environment stem from the illusion that each cell or at least group of cells is somehow separate, and that we don’t affect each other. This allows us to hold the belief that one group of cells can harm another without affecting themselves or the whole body. It also lets us continue to operate in survival mode, where your death or destruction may be necessary to my survival. When you look at us all being part of the same body, this perspective becomes ludicrous.

The body does not become healthy one group of cells at a time. The body becomes healthy as a whole. A wound in one area of the body wounds the whole body. Every cell in that body is affected and involved. There’s not such thing as “that’s not my problem”. Every cell has to be considered, given resources, and heard when it has information that will affect the whole. Damage must be repaired, and balance must be restored in order for the whole organism to not only survive, but hopefully thrive.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what we’re waking up to. Of course, each individual is going to be going through their own, specific journey, but as a whole, we are waking up to the currently painful idea, that we are all connected, and that we all affect each other. Oh, and that as a whole, we’re in a crap ton of pain.

How long will this last?!

And that awakening has not yet taken place. You’ll feel it when it does. Look around you. Look at the news. Look at people’s reactions. People are still so afraid of each other. Not everyone, of course, but a huge, significant part of the population. We’re still fighting each other, clinging to small, arbitrary tribes, and waging war against some other tribe. You know, because… survival. It took nothing to get people to call the police on their neighbors, because they wouldn’t conform perfectly. You know, like they did in the McCarthy era, or Nazi Germany. We’re still looking for the others, someone different to us, sometimes only very slightly different to us, to blame.

Enter George Floyd

And into the middle of all this volatility, came George Floyd, riding the next energy wave to hit us, designed to help snap us out of our old patterns. We’re being challenged to see what we’re willing to put up with, how we’re willing to treat each other, and how much we’re hurting each other and therefore ourselves. And this is not something that people want to wake up to. The whole race issue is super scary and super painful. But it’s important that we look at it, really look at it, so that we can begin to actually heal these wounds. And if you’re white, like me, don’t think for a second that this isn’t your wound, and that this issue doesn’t really involve you. This wound is all of ours, which means that we all have to engage in a healing process.

What does that healing process look like? Well, this is where I have a bit of an announcement to make. The reason why I’ve been not been posting publicly in the last weeks, the change I just went through myself and what I’ve been inspired to create. It became clear to me a few weeks ago that I was being called to get much more specifically involved in this process of awakening. It was time to teach in a different way, not just by breaking down and explaining energy, but also by demonstrating how to do that in the real world. Oh, and not just in general, but very specifically, on the subject of race. As you may be able to imagine, this temporarily scared the shit out of me. You see, I’ve always considered myself an advocate for the disenfranchised. But what I definitely didn’t want to be was a white savior, or straight savior, or cis savior, or whatever. I didn’t want to be another well-meaning white person that didn’t really understand the issues, but “did something” and could therefore feel good about having “helped”.

So, I decided that I wanted to do better. I sat with it, released a surprising amount of fear, and then, the energy opened up and a solution was born. I was invited to participate in that solution, and I wholeheartedly said yes, as did everyone I’ve asked to participate so far.

You see, something I’ve come to understand is that when it comes to race, Black people, in general, are not afraid to talk about this subject. Like, at all. They’re very, very good at it and they have a ton of practice. White people, on the other hand, don’t really talk about race. Not anyone else’s, and certainly not our own, possibly because we usually don’t think of white as a race, simply because it’s not usually an issue for us. White people who consider themselves woke are often terrified to engage with this topic for fear of treading on toes and being misconstrued as racist. We don’t want to get it wrong.

On top of that, we generally know very little about Black people. While people of color HAVE to learn white history, or what we consider to be our history, but which is most often a totally falsified, white-washed, glossed over, heavily edited to the point of being fictionalized history, as a matter of survival, WE haven’t had to learn shit about Black history. In fact, having gone to high school in a very white environment in the U.S., I can attest to the fact that not only was I not taught Black history, but I wasn’t even taught Black history existed. I was well into adulthood before I realized that there were a whole bunch of different versions of history, and they painted a very different picture.

So, basically what I’m saying is that when you mix together this fear of getting it wrong and the massive ignorance, not to mention other ingredients like white guilt or white shame, you don’t tend to get a lot of white people talking about race. And that is a problem. Because, as I already mentioned, we’re all in this together.

As I sat with these realizations, I occurred to me that even though I’m a teacher, I, as white person, really have no business teaching anyone about race. I mean, I can break down belief systems and constructs, but the idea that I was somehow going to speak on issues of race specifically didn’t feel appropriate to me. I’m not qualified to do that. Because I have not lived that experience. And there’s so much as a white person that I don’t know.

But what I am willing to do, and what I’ve always been willing to do, is learn. I’ve always had honest, sometimes brutally honest, and authentic conversations with people of color in an effort to better understand the issues and underlying systems. And so, it occurred to me that having those conversations publicly, conversations between white and black, where there was no judgment, no defensiveness, just an openness to learn and a willingness to be totally wrong, plus a willingness on the part of the person of color to forgive possibly stupid questions… well, it occurred to me that learning publicly this way was another form of teaching and could be really valuable.

And so, we created something new, called Conscious Conversations, where we’re willing to get uncomfortable and have those conversations we’ve been avoiding for so long. We’ve already recorded the first 4 conversations, each between myself and a woman of color. Right now, we’re focusing on black and white race relations, but this series could easily expand to include all kinds of conversations, like for example, Native American voices, Latino voices, LGBTQ+ voices, disabled or differently abled communities, etc. Your suggestions are definitely welcome, and you can leave them in the comments below.

The idea is that all voices need to be heard, which means that we have to start listening. These conversations are an attempt to do that. Because these are not safe little interviews, but rather deep dive conversations, the videos will be longer than usual. We’re editing that footage now, and we should be ready to publish the first interview within a week or so, with the rest following shortly thereafter.

The Rest of 2020

Ok, so that’s the exciting news out of the way. But what about the rest of this year? Will it get better? Well, that depends entirely on your own, individual energy. But generally speaking, no, it’s not going to get better. It’s going to get worse first. The hits will keep on coming, just like they do when we’re personally going through this process, until enough people have woken up. This doesn’t mean that everyone will be enlightened, it simply means that enough human beings in an area or in the world have stopped living purely in survival, and are no longer willing to put up with sacrificing themselves or huge sections of the population (other parts of the body they’re a part of) in order to just get scraps. When we’re no longer so willing to throw each other under the bus; when we’re no longer so terrified of each other that we have to kill each other to feel safe; when we can approach each other with openness, recognizing what we have in common and celebrating our differences, the unique contribution of each cell, each organ, each part of the body, when we learn to take care of each other as a way of taking care of the whole and ourselves in the process, when we’re willing to overcome our prejudices, our ignorance and our fears, to reach across to someone different and presume that they are a friend rather than an enemy, when we learn to face our own pain and engage in the healing of our own wounds as well as the collective ones, when enough people awaken to this perspective, that’s when the waves will stop. That’s when the dominoes will fall. That’s when you’ll see massive changes sweeping the world, problems that seemed insurmountable will simply be solved, and we’ll finally be able to show ourselves what humans are truly capable of when we start to cooperate. It’s a big change, to be sure. But it’s leading to a world so different, so changed for the better, so empowering, that we can’t really even imagine it right now.

This is the time to do the inner work. This is the time to face the fears, acknowledge the pain, and pay attention to what we’ve been putting up with. Yes, it’s going to be uncomfortable. That’s the point. It’s been uncomfortable for a long, long time. We just haven’t really acknowledged it. The morphine drip has been turned off and it’s time to see the truth.

Along with the Conscious Conversations series, I’ll continue to publish some teaching videos like this, although possibly not all as long, but hopefully more frequently. I know that this video has been longer than usual, so thank you for watching all the way to the end.

For now, the next video coming out will be the first in the Conscious Conversations series, so look out for that, and don’t be shy about letting me know what you think in the comments. As always, thank you for bringing your light to the world. Bye!