“Letter to a Young Activist During Troubled Times: Do Not Lose Heart, We Were Made for These Times” is ©2020 by Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph.D., all rights reserved

Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, a mestiza Latina and longtime activist now in her mid-seventies, continues to testify before federal and state legislatures for social justice causes of disenfranchised persons. She is a poet, an author whose books — including Women Who Run With the Wolves — are published in 42 languages, and a post-trauma recovery specialist, serving 9/11 survivor families and students, teachers and community after the Columbine High School massacre. She is a senior diplomate Jungian psychoanalyst in practice for fifty years, the former chair of the Colorado State Grievance Board, and the first recipient of the Joseph Campbell “Keeper of the Lore” award.

April 4, 2020
Dear Brave Souls: This was printed a few days ago in our alternative newspaper that is read by many young persons. Many many readers came to read…
Please share this blessing letter with those you wish… including your local newspaper {if editorial needs to, we can be contacted projectscreener@aol.com }
My foreign and domestic agents are working to forward this blessing letter to our forty-two publishers from South Africa to Mexico, Canada, Central and South America, Australia, New Zealand, most nations of Europe and Eastern Europe, goodly amounts of parts of the Middle East, island nations, UK and the north countries
I can’t convey how I feel thrown to my knees in prayer when I know, for reasons beyond my hard work, for reasons beyond working to bring ‘the work’ for a lifetime, that somehow I have been given such — I don’t know what is quite the right word– but /and to make offerings to/for many…
Our UK publishers and our Italian publishers have already seen the blessing letter last week, and they are tearful and uplifted to have it so they can distribute far and wide. I hope you will keep all in your prayers; they are under great duress of many kinds, as we all are. Yet, we will rise. We will. It has already been decided by the innate design of the human psyche and soul.
It there is one thing humans have inborn, it is the deep instinct to rebuild… to scrape the ruin and build again. And again And again. I think of all the disaster sites Ive served at where everything has been lost including family members and animals, let alone dwelling place, forests, gardens, family treasures of many kinds to the heart and soul.
Even whilst still in the midst of the wounding, the rebuild instinct kicks in more and more, and is given a home in one’s heart of seeking, heart of actions, and is not spurned nor scorned.
Im adding the cover letter was sent last week to select some persons, and that will be sent to my publishers who will see if their newspapers will also carry these words…
This comes with love and I am covering you in prayer daily. Dont forget. We are. Together.
dr.e

The letter before the letter:
Everything is going to be alright. Stay in good fettle. DON’T listen to the endless loops of ‘the news’— they are like a bench grinder to the spirit.
I’ve ridden out 8 recessions as a self-employed person for 53 years, and ridden the tsunamis from all manner of persons/cohorts intent on slaying myself or what I love and seek to shelter.
Not despite, but because of travails: We can do this. I’m old as dirt. I know this time too shall pass. It will. We’ll rebuild. We will.
Rx: STAY WELL, STAY IN.
Learn something valuable
Stand in the sunshine
Take a meditation walk by yourself
Talk to friends
Rest
Drink water
Eat decently
Create something beautiful/ useful
Pray and bless everything
and everyone you can.
No lack of love, ever,
Dr. E.
THE BLESSING LETTER:
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Do Not Lose Heart,
We Were Made for These Times
Mis Estimados Queridos, My Esteemed Ones:
Do not lose heart. We were made for these times.
I have heard from so many recently who are deeply and properly bewildered. They are concerned about the state of affairs in our world right now. It is true, one has to have strong cojones and ovarios to withstand much of what passes for “good” in our culture today. Abject disregard of what the soul finds most precious and irreplaceable and the corruption of principled ideals have become, in some large societal arenas, “the new normal,” the grotesquerie of the week.
It is hard to say which one of the current egregious matters has rocked people’s worlds and beliefs more. Ours is a time of almost daily jaw-dropping astonishment and often righteous rage over the latest degradations of what matters most to civilized, visionary people.
You are right in your assessments. The lustre and hubris some have aspired to while endorsing acts so heinous against children, elders, everyday people, the poor, the unguarded, the helpless, is breathtaking.
Yet…I urge you, ask you, gentle you, to please not spend your spirit dry by bewailing these difficult times. Especially, do not lose hope. The fact is, we were made for these times.
Yes. For years, we have been learning, practicing, been in training for and just waiting to meet on this exact plain of engagement. I cannot tell you often enough that we are definitely the leaders we have been waiting for, and that we have been raised, since childhood, for this time precisely.
I grew up on the Great Lakes and recognize a seaworthy vessel when I see one. Regarding awakened souls, there have never been more able crafts in the waters than there are right now across the world. And they are fully provisioned and able to signal one another as never before in the history of humankind.
I would like to take your hands for a moment and assure you that you are built well for these times. Despite your stints of doubt, your frustrations in arighting all that needs change right now, or even feeling you have lost the map entirely, you are not without resource. You are not alone.
Look out over the prow; there are millions of boats of righteous souls on the waters with you. In your deepest bones, you have always known this is so.
Even though your veneers may shiver from every wave in this stormy roil, I assure you that the long timbers composing your prow and rudder come from a forest greater. That long-grained lumber is known to withstand storms, to hold together, to hold its own and to advance, regardless.
We have been in training for a dark time such as this, since the day we assented to come to Earth. For many decades, worldwide, souls just like us have been felled and left for dead in so many ways, over and over —
brought down by naiveté, by lack of love, by suddenly realizing one deadly thing or another, by not realizing something else soon enough, by being ambushed and assaulted by various cultural and personal shocks in the extreme.
We all have a heritage and history of being gutted, and yet remember this especially…we have also, of necessity, perfected the knack of resurrection.
Over and over again, we have been the living proof that that which has been exiled, lost or foundered can be restored to life again. This is as true and sturdy a prognosis for the destroyed worlds around us as it was for our own once mortally wounded selves.
Though we are not invulnerable, our risibility supports us to laugh in the face of cynics who say “fat chance” and “management before mercy,” and other evidences of complete absence of soul sense. This, and our having been “to Hell and back” on at least one momentous occasion, makes us seasoned vessels for certain. Even if you do not feel that you are, you are.
Even if your puny little ego wants to contest the enormity of your soul, the smaller self can never for long subordinate the larger Self. In matters of death and rebirth, you have surpassed the benchmarks many times.
Believe the evidence of any one of your past testings and trials. Here it is: Are you still standing? The answer is, Yes! (And no adverbs like “barely” are allowed here.) If you are still standing, ragged flags or no, you are able. Thus, you have passed the bar. And even raised it. You are seaworthy.
In any dark time, there is a tendency to veer toward fainting over how much is wrong or unmended in the world. Do not focus on that. Do not make yourself ill with overwhelm. There is a tendency, too, to fall into being weakened by perseverating on what is outside your reach, by what cannot yet be. Do not focus there. That is spending the wind without raising the sails.
We are needed, that is all we can know. And though we meet resistance, we more so will meet great souls who will hail us, love us and guide us, and we will know them when they appear.
Didn’t you say you were a believer? Didn’t you say you pledged to listen to a voice greater? Didn’t you ask for grace? Don’t you remember that to be in grace means to submit to the Voice greater? You have all the resource you need to ride any wave, to surface from any trough.
In the language of aviators and sailors, ours is to sail forward now, all balls out. Understand the paradox: If you study the physics of a waterspout, you will see that the outer vortex whirls far more rapidly than the inner one.
To calm the storm means to quiet the outer layer, to cause it, by whatever countervailing means, to swirl much less, to more evenly match the velocity of the inner, far less volatile core — till whatever has been lifted into such a vicious funnel falls back to Earth, lays down, is peaceable again.
One of the most important steps you can take to help calm the storm is to not allow yourself to be taken in a flurry of overwrought emotion or despair, thereby accidentally contributing to the swale and the swirl. Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach.
Any small, calm thing that one soul can do to help another soul, to assist some portion of this poor suffering world, will help immensely.
It is not given to us to know which acts or by whom will cause the critical mass to tip toward an enduring good. What is needed for dramatic change is an accumulation of acts: adding, adding to, adding more, continuing. We know that it does not take “everyone on Earth” to bring justice and peace, but only a small, determined group who will not give up during the first, second or hundredth gale.
One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Soul on deck shines like gold in dark times.
The light of the soul throws sparks, sends up flares, builds signal fires…causes proper matters to catch fire. To display the lantern of soul in shadowy times like these, to be fierce and to show mercy toward others — both are acts of immense bravery and greatest necessity. Struggling souls catch light from other souls who are fully lit and willing to show it. If you would help to calm the tumult, this is one of the strongest things you can do.
There will always be times in the midst of “success right around the corner, but as yet still unseen” when you feel discouraged. I, too, have felt despair many times in my life, but I do not keep a chair for it; I will not entertain it. It is not allowed to eat from my plate.
The reason is this: In my uttermost bones, I know something, as do you. It is that there can be no despair when you remember why you came to Earth, who you serve, and who sent you here. The good words we say and the good deeds we do are not ours: They are the words and deeds of the One who brought us here.
In that spirit, I hope you will write this on your wall: When a great ship is in harbor and moored, it is safe, there can be no doubt. But…that is not what great ships are built for.
This comes with much love and prayer that you remember who you came from, and why you came to this beautiful, needful Earth.
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“Letter to a Young Activist During Troubled Times: Do Not Lose Heart, We Were Made for These Times” is ©2020 by Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph.D., all rights reserved. Creative Commons License by which author and publishers grant permission to copy, distribute and transmit this particular letter under the conditions that use be non-commercial, that the letter be used in its entirety word for word, and not altered nor added to, not subtracted from, and that it carry author’s full name and this copyright notice in full. Other permissions via facebook message: dr. clarissa pinkola estés.
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Brief Bio
Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, a mestiza Latina and longtime activist now in her mid-seventies, continues to testify before federal and state legislatures for social justice causes of disenfranchised persons. She is a poet, an author whose books — including Women Who Run With the Wolves — are published in 42 languages, and a post-trauma recovery specialist, serving 9/11 survivor families and students, teachers and community after the Columbine High School massacre. She is a senior diplomate Jungian psychoanalyst in practice for fifty years, the former chair of the Colorado State Grievance Board, and the first recipient of the Joseph Campbell “Keeper of the Lore” award.

About Suzanne

Suzanne Lewis, editor and manager Wholisticbodymind.com since 2000. Suzanne is a Planetary Peacekeeper, an Agent for Conscious Evolution, a Spiritual Healer, a Mother, a multi - faceted artist (beads, gems to trade beads; guords star seed art; published author and Lover of Life for the sake of All our Relations.
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