December 21, 2012: Love-Based Beginning, Not Fear-Based Ending

lotus_on_water_0By Jillian Vriend

Today, December 21st, 2012, is a significant day. It’s significant for different reasons, depending on who you are asking about it. Some see it as the end, some see it as the beginning. There have been a growing number of people who felt that today was literally going to be the end of the world as we’ve known it. They have been predicting this primarily due to astronomical factors – including a planet that is supposedly four times the size of Earth entering our atmosphere, a sudden planetary alignment, solar flares, and the earth’s axis shifting around – leading to devastating earthquakes, tsunamis, and floods,

These people connect their reasoning (although it seems that there is no scientific evidence to support them) and intuitions to the completion of the long-count Mayan calendar, although many others now suggest that the calendar completing was not about a literal ending, but symbolizes one cycle or phase ending and a new one beginning. People from around the world are visiting areas in Mexico during this time, especially the Yucatan city of Merida, which is close to the Mayan ruins at Chichen Itza, to celebrate this shift into a new era. They are honoring the ushering in of a more enlightened and conscious phase of human evolution, rather than expecting that the end of an old way of being will bring literal death and destruction.

December 21st is also the first day of winter, the winter solstice, and, most notoriously, the shortest day of the year and the official beginning of the winter season. To me, December 21st begins the seasonal influence of Kuan Yin, one of the four faces of the Divine Mother that we feel offer a powerful healing when connected to in an intimate and personal way. The other faces are the Dark Mother or Kali (springtime); Magdalene (summertime); and Mother Mary (Autumn).

Kuan Yin offers an invitation to stillness, reflection, and meditation in whatever forms your soul (through your Daemon) is most comfortable with. I’ve found the deepest connection with Kuan Yin through taking himalayan salt baths, contemplative prayer, conversation, and SoulFullHeart energy healing offered to myself and others. Kuan Yin invites us to embrace a non-violent means of relating to each other, eating vegetarian (or at least feeling where and how the meat you eat has been treated), merciful compassion with boundaries, and straightforward directness with care. We are all in each moment arising and dissipating, so Kuan Yin also teaches us non-attachment to things which do not matter.

I feel that Her energetic presence is particularly strong and available to us right now because of Her commitment to, as her name represents, to “hear the cries of the world.” In Her deep embodiment of compassion for the needy, we are given a template for the force of care and compassion that is needed to move us out of the dark place we are in as a human species in which so much of our kind is in need and suffering. She reminds us of our connection to each other, in an infinite place of Oneness where individual personality is transcended and the spark of divine humanity that lives in us all is palpable, experiential, and deeply remembered.

So, on this significant day, I choose to celebrate with love, as is offered to me by Kuan Yin and the other faces of the Mother, rather than in a place of feeling fear of eventual devastation and destruction. I do feel that we are in a global phoenix cycle, yet that the changes necessary will come at a rate and pace that we can bear and respond to. In the arms of the Mother, we find comfort, mercy, growth, and care. In Her arms, we experience our most profound essence as sacred human reflections of the Divine.

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2012: Year of Transformation and Letting Go

By Jillian

So, it’s here….2012. The year that prophecies and predictions, both modern and ancient, claim will cumulate with a world vastly transformed from the one that we live in now. During 2011, this transformation was already in process with widespread outbreaks of protests, governmental upheavals, devastating weather events, social unrest, and economic collapse. Many feel that this will continue, escalate, and accelerate during 2012; leading not to the destruction of the planet or literal end of the world, but still to a significant change of it.

Cycles in nature are seasons of birth, death, rebirth, and arising from the ashes. This process of birth-death-rebirth are woven into the fabric of our species; an imprint from the Divine in our DNA. Over and over again in our human history, the civilizations we have built, the beliefs we’ve attached to, that which has given our lives meaning, has been taken away, forcing us to let go.

We feel that surviving this current cycle of change is about feeling that which you are being asked to let go of, seeking intimacy and meaningful connections with yourself/others/the Divine, and surrendering to this overall process of birth-death-rebirth. There is no real way to prepare for this kind of change; there is only seeking the heart and grace for which to respond to it.

We are a society out of balance with more emphasis on our masculine expressions of achievement, doing and image-based progress, and action. Coming back in balance with our feminine expressions of heart and being-based leadership, compassion, connection to each other and our earth is a transformational process, experienced not without growing pains, loss, and the letting go of what isn’t working for us anymore.

Hate, fear, and greed have been the signatures of this “iron age” and the golden age feels to offer us the opportunity to heal these shadow aspects of our human nature. There is much hope and love in this offering, even as there will be loss and pain in the process.

This is the first part of a four part series about the 2012 Mayan/Inca/Aztec prophecies and what they offer about this process: