Activating A New Community

Where two or more are gathered ...

If we believed the news, we’d feel hopeless. As crises mount, so does the feeling of impotence. But that disempowered lament - “What can one person do?” - can be traded in for a positive (and realistic) alternative that I phrase this way:

What one person can’t do, two or more people can do.

There’s never been a greater need to cooperate. And, ironically, we’ve never been more polarized. What’s been lost in the fear fueled irrationality of the last three years is compassion for each other. This tells us what the priority is: To come together again… in a new way: heart to heart.

The Activation Formula

We’re designed to care about each other, to respect our differences. Polarization is a programmed aberration. It’s a bad spell, engineered to ensure we won’t join forces to create loving communities that don’t require excessive external, top down control. But it takes more than awareness to break that spell. We need to activate a new spell and this is what I’ve been working on. The latest iteration rolls out in four steps, similar to the Hawaiian ho’oponopono forgiveness ritual.

1. Welcome.

2. Thank you.

3. I love you.

4. We resonate…

The Activation Formula champions how friendships based in Love can make a positive difference in the world. I agree with whoever said that it takes an open mind to enable the heart to open (hence the name of my foundation, The OpenMind Fitness Foundation), but I’ve chosen a intertwined double heart image to represent this practice because I believe that we open our minds and hearts with each other, not on our own. Here’s the formula, a work in progress:

Welcome. The process starts with awareness, seeing someone, thinking of them. Here they are. Can we welcome them without judgment?

Thank you. Thank you for being in my life. There are no accidents and this person, whoever they are and however different they might be from me, bring something important into my experience.

I love you. This is the final step in the ho’oponopono ritual, preceded by “I’m sorry, please forgive me, thank you.” Perhaps the activation process is meant to follow this one. If it proves difficult to say “I love you” and mean it, maybe it would help to use that other formula, to back track and run those first three steps. The block to love may be something that needs forgiving.

We resonate… We resonate with… what? Joy, happiness, confidence, hope? Tuning in to another, can we sense the frequency we’re resonating together with? Or, can we just feel it, without the need for a descriptive word? We resonate together, either in unison or in harmony, similar to each other or wonderfully different. We’ve just joined forces and a quantum ripple is produced. Who will it touch, what might it trigger?

Paradise

I just returned from a three day river trip on the Rogue River, enjoying utter seclusion with a handful of new friends at the Paradise Lodge.

One of the guys in our party asked a very good question: “Why do we talk so much about what’s wrong? Why can’t we talk more about what’s right?”

I agreed with him and awoke the next morning with an idea, inspired by a story my business partner told me. Decades ago, Chris was pitching a series in a Chicago television station when, going down in the elevator, the doors opened and Mr. Rogers himself walked in. Apparently this was where they filmed his show.

As Mr. Rogers and Chris rode down together Mr. Rogers greeted Chris with these words: “So, what wonderful things are you up to today?”

A spirited conversation followed, as Chris described their project and Mr. Rogers showed genuine interest. Chris has never forgotten that kindness and I thought of this story on the river as I fell asleep that night, wondering, “How could I greet people differently?”

I awoke with a phrase and began trying it out over breakfast in the lodge. Instead of saying, “Good morning, did you sleep well?” or something else innocuous like that, I greeted a few people with: “So, what gives you hope for the world this morning?”

This usually triggered a blank stare so I followed up with, “You know, it’s so easy to get into negativity but I’m really trying to be more positive. So, I’m curious, forgetting about all the bad news for a moment, what’s something you feel good about?”

And… wonderful conversations followed. I heard about sons making the football team, a friend who survived an illness, a mortgage application going through, neighbors resolving a conflict, a clean water project in Africa, better air as a fire was extinguished… Once we got started talking about positive things the floodgates opened.

It might be easy to dismiss this and say that a positive conversation isn’t going to actually accomplish anything positive but I disagree. I left those conversations feeling energized. My frequency up-leveled. I became more radiant, more loving, I was contributing more good vibes in every moment in every exchange, no matter what the topic or activity.

I plan to keep doing this and learning from every conversation. I encourage you to experiment and post comments to let this Substack community know what happens.

I’m also using the Activation Formula every day as a meditation, spending five or ten minutes thinking of friends and family and even of strangers and going through the four steps with each of them.

“What can one person do?” Not much, actually. But together, in person or in awareness, there’s no limit to how much loving friendship we can generate. And I believe that’s a contribution that changes the world!

“What one person can’t do, two or more can do.” Or, as it was said in the original that I’m drawing this from: “Where two or more are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst.”