May/June 2009 Editor's Viewpoint
Divine Guidance: Be Here Now

Divine guidance provides a powerful understanding of the present moment. Rather than unconsciously allowing the past to influence your reactions and choices, divine guidance focuses your thoughts on the present situation. Divine guidance helps you to clean the lens of your perception, leading you to compassionate responses and choices.

Everyone has lived a unique life, filled with many experiences and choices influenced by the ideals and values you learned during childhood, including family values, social ideals, human rights principles and other influences that have shaped your personality. When you interact with others, you pull from your store of values and beliefs to respond to the situation.

Oftentimes our childhood values don't translate well when relating to other people who bring their own set of values to the situation. Divine guidance helps you to navigate situations where you may not understand the choices or values of others. It helps you to step beyond initial feelings of judgment and fear to look below the surface of the action to understand that if faced with a similar situation, you could have very easily made the same choice.

Before my son was born, I worked in an office in a busy downtown area. One day as I was eating lunch outside, a woman and her toddler sat down on the bench next to me. The little girl, curious about the world, walked toward the curb where traffic whizzed by. The mother stood up, grabbed her daughter by the arm and swatted her squarely on the bottom. The girl began to cry, so the mother comforted her with a hug.

I was struck by the thought that the girl's only solace in the situation came from the same person who also caused her pain. I immediately remembered my own childhood where I had to seek comfort from adults who were also my abusers. I harshly judged the woman sitting next to me, putting her in the same category of abusers I'd known from my childhood, feeling no compassion for her at all.

This is where divine guidance steps in to help you navigate through the daily experiences of life. In the situation, I immediately reacted with condemnation, pulling from my past known experiences to judge what was happening in front of me in the present. Divine guidance gently shifts you away from old reactions based on the past toward clearly seeing the present situation through the lens of compassion.

Had I connected into divine guidance after seeing the mother spank her child, I may have recognized that she wanted to protect her child and chose to strongly let her daughter know to stay away from the street. I can have compassion for her desire to protect her daughter, and at the same time I can recognize that as a parent today, I choose different ways to teach my child about safety. I don't like to see a child being spanked, but on some level I understand the choice behind the action and I can feel compassion rather than judgment.

Rather than unconsciously allowing the past to influence your reactions and choices, divine guidance focuses your thoughts on being here now.

- Vicky Thompson

Heart of the Issue
Be conscious of the thoughts and choices you make.