Rev Dr. Cynthia Ramirez Lindenmeyer, From the (virtual) Pulpit, Omaha World Herald Feb 7, 2021.
During November and December, Omaha billboards reminded drivers along the I-80 corridor of the antidote to suffering: JOY. Each of us has the innate capability to live joyfully while surrounded by the ever lingering cloud of sorrow, but it requires letting go of continual cultural conditioning and shifting our perception. Long ago, indigenous medicine elders embraced the Shamanic Medicine Wheel to cultivate primordial joy. A return to living from the heart shifts our perspectives from anger to compassion, from scarcity to generosity.
Scientific mystic, Carl Jung, observed change requires three phases: insight, endurance, and action. Revised perspectives require endurance to shape action. Through conscious awareness, each one of us can mentally rewrite destructive storylines to supportive ones that will begin to empower freedom. At birth, we are untethered from constricting labels and identities, but along the way we become attached to cultural identifications and our minds become conditioned. We forget who we are, what is sacred, and our joy dampens as if imprisoned in a windowless dungeon. Sacred activists believe transformation comes one person at a time, beginning with the one whose reflection stares back in the mirror.
The word samskara derives from the Sanskrit sam (joined together) and kara (action). We all carry our own deep conditioned samskaras of pain and hurt, narratives likened to repetitive hollows in a river formed over time from the natural flow of water. Recurring patterns encountered on the life journey are reminders of the deep samskaras unconsciously directing our reaction, thereby possibly sabotaging our ability to embrace a God formed from the universal force of unconditional love.
Devotion to a meditative practice helps free the heart and mind to experience the life-changing transformation from thinking the body has a soul to, “I am a joyful soul that has taken a body.
