Something Shifted, Did You Feel It?

by Sharda Chaitanya

What a terribly powerful, frightening and beautiful 10 days this had been.  Between Hurricane Sandy and President Obama winning a second term, the thrust forward in to a new phase of our journey couldn't be more evident.  Once the lights went back on after the power outages caused by the storm, it would seem on the outside that everything would be okay again, at least for those that did not suffer irreparable damage.  But not so.  Even with electricity restored, grocery stores mostly stocked and one's usual routine back in place, something was profoundly different.  In my life, the sense that 'things will never be the same again' has never seemed quite this overwhelming.

The impact of the storm is something to be felt, and I am not sure it can be appreciated from afar.  It is something that we, as a collective consciousness here in this part of the world, experienced as ours.  It is so different when something of this magnitude happens elsewhere; it creates a disconnect because of cultures or distance. This event was meant solely for the people to whom it happened.   This may seem obvious, but there really is no reason for anyone else to worry, it is our karma unfolding.  To send forth love and light and empathy is wonderful and is received wholly, but the resultant aftermath, and beyond, can only be measured by each individual's personal gauge.  I can say this because I am here in the middle of it, and it you are also, and you don't feeling differently, then you are deluding yourself and horribly out of touch with what is truly going on.

This storm created, in the parlance of ascension, more of a chasm between dimensions.  I feel it within me, outside myself and observe it as I walk around the neighborhood.  This feeling or knowing is intuitive and experiential at the same time, and it couldn't be more real.  The history of my own ascension has prepared me for what I am observing now - a split, if you will, between energies whose lines of demarcation are almost palpable. The sense of all of us ascending uniformly has never been this tangible and paradoxically each one's place within that is different.  Returning to a pre-Sandy complacency is not possible.  Opening oneself to  the energy, without fear or pity or sorrow, and examining it from the heart what we endured collectively within our psyche, will help us attune ourselves to the wisdom behind this massive act of nature.  It does not mean we have to know how it ends or where it is even taking us, and that is part of the wisdom.  Again, I am talking as if I know what God is intending, but I strongly feel like we need to have faith and to trust that part of the journey, a significant part, which is the not knowing; the letting go and surrendering to the Cosmic Intelligence, knowing everything is in order.  Somehow we are realizing it is not all up to us anymore. 

Frankly, I am tired of controlling, even the good outcomes.  I don't express this out of apathy, but because of humility.  Who am I to say or think or act on behalf of the forces of creation?  I am hugely insignificant by comparison and thus at the mercy of a benevolent intelligence whose predominant expression is love.  Wow, I can't imagine that those still suffering at the hands of this storm are feeling anything close to love or compassion from Creator.  How hard we must work in order to get to the point of being even remotely in communion with spirit.  How to do this, what has to happen, where does one begin to leave behind a world of contrivance and enter into the abode of love?  Did it take a hurricane-level storm to at least begin to wake us up?

An energy of epic proportions just exited this whole part of the country - the water and wind came in and washed away and blew away everything it felt needed to leave.  The magnification of movement on this scale has categorically wiped out very old, stagnant energies that were painful and deeply buried in the history of this location.  Walking outside the night of the storm with a friend, the vibration of the atmosphere can only be described as other-worldly, etheric and quietly chaotic.  There was a sense of something big that was transpiring all around me, and yet I couldn't see a thing.  It was barely windy and the rain we experienced was a hard drizzle at best.  As such these are not unusual conditions, but the mood permeating the ethers was palpable.  Something was upon us and there was no where to go nor anything to do.

I could have left that day and easily returned when it was 'all over'.  First of all, it's not all over, in fact, it's just beginning.  And secondly, I wouldn't have wanted to be anywhere else, this is where I wanted to be if I was going to witness the darker side of our ascension process - the Earth was creating drama and I wanted to be there to see how it played out.  I saw old emotions and mental fluctuations surfacing; I did some great meditations but I also went into fear.  I tried to cope, I tired not to cope, and just be.  But all the while the most pervasive sense of knowing was that at any time the power of nature could sweep me away.  But oddly enough, that thought was not attached to a sense of fear, but rather I found myself trying to gauge my connection to Source:  did I have what it takes to exit peacefully?

An immeasurably enormous amount of energy just moved through our world and the 'aftershocks' are still reverberating.  Part of me keeps on waiting for the real changes to become manifest, because what I am seeing around me I know has disappeared on a certain level.  This is not a neat theory or wishful thinking, it really happened.  The wind and the water came in took what they wanted and left, and all the hungry ghosts who left that night were glad to be gone.  The hurricane is the singular most obvious external indication, for me, of what we can expect from the process of ascension.  Not so much that it should always be devastating, but that it is going to be that instantaneously transformative.

The storm I feel was a precursor, a preview, in terms of magnitude, of what is going to transpire.  Something great is on its way and we have been called to wake up and discover what that is.  Our collective consciousness has been sealed because the shift has occurred, and we all felt it.

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The salve that is healing the wound of Hurricane Sandy is the re-election of President Obama.

Going to the voting station that day I felt and saw things that I hadn't quite seen before or I hadn't paid attention in the past.  I live among the poor and disenfranchised, mixed in with a little of the hipster population who think it's cool to live in the ghetto. I went there at an hour which I figured might be less crowded - how wrong I was.  I have never seen the place so packed that wasn't the after-work rush of voters.  As I looked around me as I waited on line, I realized I was the only white person there!  God, WHY does this always happen to me?  I'm not kidding, and it is not a racial thing in that sense, like a black and white thing, it happens with me and all different persons of color.  Never mind that, it's just how it is.

But being there that day and seeing all these people, in varying degrees of ill health, coming to vote for President Obama opened me up to something.  The sense that he is this beacon of hope in what is for many a dismal existence.  Forgive me if I sound patronizing, it is not how I mean this.  The deep and heart-felt feeling of his being their leader, our leader, to take us from the clutches of poverty and want, has been renewed.  What happened four years ago on election night when he was declared the winner seemed to be the backdrop of the energy in the room.  Maybe we didn't get as far as we would have liked in these first four years, but by the looks of the number of people voting that day, they  hadn't given up or lost faith.  With everything else that had been going on, with the electricity turned off in the high-rise projects for days, there was still reason to hope.

And indeed they were right.  President Obama's victory shifted the energy once again, and this time the elevation of pure emotion and spirit was at an all-time high!  How much we needed this and deserve to have this for ourselves and our country.  With the President's reelection we all are able to relax and breath easier.  The pain and sorrow that was felt by the hardship and destruction of the storm suddenly became manageable and less burdensome.  We have hope again and we have every reason to hope.  During his first four years in office he gave the big players what they wanted.  Now, this is our time, the people will get to see the real Obama and the nation will be healed.

His light is a large part of the shift.  Everyone who voted for him sees it or knows it on some level.  What he has cannot be faked.  The collective joy and emotional release that came as a result of this victory even further set in motion our shift toward ascension.  And this time, instead of being an act of God/nature, it was an act of the people.  We create our destiny and nothing feels better than when we do it together.  To all those people who I stood in line with waiting to vote I say, good job.  Congratulations!