A DAY TO RESONATE - CONGRATULATIONS, AMERICA!

I'm taking most of tomorrow - Inauguration Day - off from my usual work. Something has shifted in America, and I want to align my consciousness with it, contemplate it, be one with it.

Early on in the 2008 campaign for the presidency, many of my friends were surprised to find me so caught up in anything "political." Those who really knew me, knew that I long ago had eschewed the ego-driven, negatively impulse-ridden game that politics had become. With a determined intent, I decided almost three decades ago that my contribution to our evolution as a race of beings was to help others, and myself, to evolve their own individual consciousnesses, to facilitate change one person at a time.

Then, one day, I looked up last year and there was Barack Obama. A politician, yes, but a very different one. It's not just that he was a different color, or that he was talking about oneness. It's what I saw when I looked at him with the scrutiny that I had developed in my training as an expert in body language. Here was an adult, an emotional adult, in an harmonious adult body. He wasn't riddled with the distortions, deformities and ticks that a person displays when they are holding lies just beneath the surface of awareness, when they are impacted and contracted from sitting on suppressed rage and pain for years. This man was remarkably free of those tells compared to most politicians, in fact, compared to most people I know.

When I saw the clarity in his eyes, the steadiness in his demeanor, the relaxed firmness in his tone, just like when I saw him sink that 3-point shot in Kuwait, I knew I was seeing something extraordinary. It has been a very long time since we actually had an emotional adult in the White House. In fact, it has been a persistent, steady decline in that area during my adult years, culminating in the tenures of Bill Clinton, the hormone-ridden adolescent, and the completely devolved child who is leaving tomorrow.

But yesterday in Washington, there were hundreds of thousands of people singing and dancing outdoors as if suddenly they had awakened to a new world. (The HBO tape of the concert left me sobbing. Worth seeing.) People were gathered in Washington in celebration rather than protest, in light-hearted optimism instead of grim negativism. People were actually happy - in Washington! I haven't been to Washington since the 1970's and amazingly, I found myself wanting to plan a trip there. The monuments to Washington, Lincoln and Jefferson suddenly looked so beautiful, like they'd been washed or renewed. They glowed with the light of an awakened spirit.

So, I'm taking a time out tomorrow to join with that spirit, to contribute to it with my focus and intentions.

Congratulations, America!