In the physical world, we are separated by distance. What happens to someone on the far side of the earth may seem to have little consequence or effect upon me. We believe our thoughts and feelings are private, locked within our skulls and our skins. But in the subtle energy world, we are all connected in profound and interdependent ways. It’s as if we were all standing on a great trampoline. When one person bounces, it makes the whole trampoline move and we all bounce to some degree. Subtle energies are not limited by distance.
Subtle activism is a procedure for taking advantage of this invisible connectedness. It is a way of working with your own subtle energies and spiritual resources to create a clear, clean, positive, vibrant and healthy energy environment that can be a helpful contribution both to people and places in trouble anywhere in the world and to people and places where opportunities exist for something good to arise for the benefit of the world. It can be used as a response to challenging or difficult situations in which people or nature are suffering, or as a way of empowering and boosting the emergence of positive actions and developments that bless the world.
It is not meant to be, nor can it be, a substitute for physical action where and when such action is possible; rather, it is a complement to what we can do physically, a way of deepening and empowering our physical activism. It recognizes that the world is more than just the matter we can see and touch; it is also a world of thought, feelings, subtle energies, and spirit, a subtle environment that can benefit from our attention and helpfulness as much as can the physical.
–David Spangler (edited excerpt from Lorian’s Subtle Activism Card Deck manual)
Many people in our society see traditional activism and subtle activism as being mutually exclusive. Some on the more spiritual side might feel that activism is futile without consciousness change and so they choose to focus more on the subtle side of things. Some on the activist side might deride what they feel are futile and self-indulgent “thoughts and prayers,” feeling that the only valid way to change the world is to stop injustice and institute new laws and policies via boots-on-the-ground protest and lobbying.
For the past 13 years, I have been working behind the scenes with Vance Martin, the president of an organization called the WILD Foundation to enhance via subtle activism their on-the-ground, grassroots, national, and global efforts to protect and defend our wild Earth (thus helping our planet stabilize climate change, halt mass extinction, and reducing the likelihood of new pandemics) . We feel it’s now time to share this work with you.
One of the basic tenets of Incarnational Spirituality is that our living planet Gaia is a wholeness comprised of both human and non-human life, and both subtle and physical life, and together we are part of a whole planetary community. Vance and I have repeatedly witnessed how effective this physical-subtle partnership approach to activism can be.
After years of intense but discreet field testing, we’re ready to share some of our successes:
The first project we worked on together was the 2009 WILD Congress in Mexico. It was a challenge with swine flu running rampant, the global economic downturn hitting hard, and the drug lords leaving bodies everywhere. Signups for the congress were way below what was needed to make the event a success.
After consulting with David Spangler, we decided to work with beings that David whimsically calls “underbuddies.” These are an amazing, very primitive, etheric species of being. They seem to exist in a kind of threshold space between the manifest and unmanifest. What they do is they anchor qualities and energy into a space. So if you've been depressed for a month, they're going to anchor that into your walls, into your furniture and everything. If you meditate every day, they anchor that energy. They don’t have independent agency, they just anchor what's there, for better or for worse, but you can work with them and consciously have them anchor a particular energy into a space. They exist both in an individuated sense within a specific space and there's also an overlighting underbuddy, like a drum skin all across the world, so that you can work with locations at a distance.
Vance would bring me pictures of the Expo Center, a kind of cold metal building in Merida, Mexico where the Congress was going to be held, and we started working with the underbuddies to anchor in love and joy into the space. The signups gradually began to increase and by the time the congress started we ended up with around 1600 people from 65 countries around the world.
President Calderon of Mexico was scheduled to speak on the first night. At the time because of the drug lords, he was the most targeted leader in the world, so he brought 3000 troops, as well as tanks and snipers. Plus there were multiple checkpoints with metal detectors and men with machine guns. There were literally over 1000 people lined up around the building, delayed for over an hour because of all the checkpoints. It would be reasonable to assume that people would be irritated at the long wait to get in, but when Vance went to check on everything, arriving a half hour late himself because of the roadblocks, he was surprised to find an atmosphere of joy and celebration all along the long line of people. Jane Goodall, who also spoke on the first day and had been scheduled to stay for only two days, liked the energy so much she changed her schedule and stayed for the whole week. She said, “The energy here is fabulous. I think I must stay.” This meant a lot coming from a woman who travels more than 300 days a year and is busier than most presidents.
A more recent example:
WILD has been been working for many years now to get acceptance by the U.N. and various government institutions for a policy that we call “Nature Needs Half,” which boils down to the scientifically proven fact that we have to restore nature in a large portion of the planet in order to save life on earth. The institutional response to this proposal up until recently has been that its neither pragmatic nor politically possible.
Over 11 years, Vance and the team at WILD gathered a large, diverse coalition of mostly NGOs and finally got the opportunity to propose the “Nature Needs Half” policy (known in the jargon as a “motion”) for debate and vote at the next big meeting of a major international conservation organization. This was a big deal because most of the motions from this organization get taken up in the UN conventions or in government policy. It’s the starting place of a lot of international conservation and environmental policy.
Because this is a very large bureaucratic organization that operates in three official languages in over 130 countries, Vance realized that we needed to connect with the overlighting deva of this institution to hopefully be able to come to a sense of consensus with its diverse membership.
He put out a sort of “all points bulletin” to ask the deva of this organization if it would work with us. Its response was startlingly quick, but very neutral–neither friendly nor aggressive. It evidently had never been contacted by humans before, so it was like “What do you want?”
We entered into dialogue with it and over the course of four to six weeks of regular contact, the energy lightened up considerably and started to become even friendly. Vance was able to introduce it to other members of the institution and other organizations.
When the time for the gathering came, there were 5000 masked people in person, plus a lot more online. There was a lot of confusion and several negotiating sessions over how to deal with this unusual situation.
When it finally got to the floor, the motion was approved with virtually a bigger majority than any of the others. We were surprised because usually when governments don’t like something, they abstain from voting so as not to be seen as naysayers, but there were only a few abstentions and 87.5% of the governments voted "Yes."
This drove home the fact that inner work and the focus on connection, relationship, love, and curiosity can bring very pragmatic outcomes.
There are a variety of other examples of WILD’s successful combination of subtle and boots-on-the-ground activism. They include areas considered by the UN to be some of the most dangerous places in the world. Yet WILD has counter-poaching units actively patrolling in those locations.
I spend about one to two hours a day every morning doing subtle activism to support various projects, including WILD’s. We have beta tested at large world gatherings and some of the most dangerous areas on the planet and it works. It works for both improving bad situations and for supporting positive situations, and it’s something you can do at any level, from your own home to your neighborhood to anywhere in the world. It takes practice and persistence, but all the tools you need are here within Incarnational Spirituality, thanks to the work of David Spangler.
Here is an episode of the Lorian Podcast that I participated in along with Vance Martin and David Spangler, where we talk about our subtle activism work with WILD.
If you would like to get involved with subtle activism Lorian has several resources to get you started:
–The Subtle Activism Card Deck
–My books, The Wonder-Full World of The Home and The Wonder-Full World of The Home: Second Story
–Classes on subtle activism and classes based on my book (see our Class Schedule page for our current offerings)
–The Subtle Activism self-directed study course (scroll down the page to find it)
[The book and card deck links above are affiliate links through Amazon.com. Lorian may receive a small commission for your purchase at no extra cost to you. Thank you for your support!]