by Kayt Kennedy
I have a mission in life. I’m sure of it. Problem is, I can’t seem to remember what it is. I think it has something to do with saving the world. That’s it! I can feel it! It’s up to me to save the world!
What can I do? The rain forest is disappearing, hazardous waste is being stored in our soil, the oceans are being polluted and depleted, our landfills are brimming with disposable diapers and old tires, the water tables are dangerously low, species are in danger of becoming extinct, whole nations are starving and blowing each other up, gangs are terrorizing people everywhere, our prisons are overcrowded, the national debt continues to rise, and most of the food we eat is said to be bad for us. I’m not up to the job!
How many of us have a similar sense of mission that we feel we’re not up to?
As a mother of two little boys and an active member of Another Mother for Peace, I protested the Vietnam War in the ‘70s. But it wasn’t until the early ‘80s that I began to feel an urgent sense of having ignored my life mission, although what it was eluded me. By the mid ‘80s I felt a call to open a peace center in Gainesville, Florida, where I was then living. On the summer solstice of l986, the doors of Reunion Center for Peace opened with its mission motto painted on a huge blue sign atop the building: “Personal peace now. Planetary peace by the year 2000.”
The Peace Center held world peace meditations each day at noon and one evening a week, hosted a popular open-mike coffeehouse each Friday evening to pay the rent, was the meeting place for followers of A Course in Miracles and Arnold Patent’s You Can Have It All, offered weekly classes on learning to love ourselves and each other, had a bookstore that was open five days a week carrying a wide variety of books, music and other peace paraphernalia, sponsored workshops, speakers, peace expos, established Gainesville’s participation in the ongoing December 31 World Peace Meditation, and held annual peace concerts on the summer solstice.
My life was consumed with the Peace Center and keeping it alive. Paradoxically, very little peace showed up in my life. I was virtually a one-woman show, people and causes pulling at me from every direction. I felt like my life juices were being drained from me, but I was not going to the well to get replenished. Everything that stood between me and peace showed up to be reckoned with. I cried a lot. My noble mission had become a burden, an object of dread. I felt like a failure, because there was a lot less joy and a lot more sacrifice in doing what I felt I had been called to do. But I couldn’t quit! I couldn’t abandon the world that depended on me! I had a cosmic obligation!
One morning I got a call from the police telling me that the Peace Center had been burglarized. I was aghast. Who would be low enough to rob a peace center? (Who would steal my peace? Hmmm...) Virtually everything had been taken. There was no insurance to cover the losses. Secretly I was relieved. It was over!
But my relief was tainted by my sense of failure. Why hadn’t it worked? Why hadn’t running a peace center been a peaceful experience? I had taken on the mission of saving the world and couldn’t even save myself. I was in despair.
Avatar, with its mission to create an enlightened planetary civilization, showed up in my life in l989. Using the amazingly efficient Avatar tools, I gratefully began to put the unpeaceful pieces of my life together. I saw how much of my ego and an indoctrinated sense of sacrifice had been involved in creating even such a worthy cause as a peace center.
I had projected unpeaceful parts of myself onto the world and tried to do the work “out there.” The work to be done was to create peace with myself: peace with all the things I did but thought I shouldn’t do, peace with all the things I didn’t do but thought I should do, peace with the dreams I had abandoned, peace in my relationships with family, lovers, friends, peace with the way things show up in my life, peace with my power to change them.
Each of us has a mission to save the world, to help create an enlightened planetary civilization. That mission is for each of us to save ourselves, to enlighten ourselves (i.e., unburden ourselves of limiting, restricting beliefs), to create peace, joy, purpose for ourselves on a moment-to-moment basis and extend that peace to the world. That is our blessed cosmic obligation. As each of us creates peace within ourselves, we are truly creating peace on Earth.
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