This episode is exactly what you need today. How do we learn to connect with those who see the world differently? What’s the answer to division and discord? We know that shouting (in real life or metaphorically) hasn’t worked because no one is listening.
Patty shines a light on how divisiveness will only lead to more anger. When fear rules, no one side really wins. Instead, we all lose.
There is a choice to be made about how we move forward. Finding our way to peace is the first step.
So how do we heal? How do we find our way to love? That’s what Patty shares in this very helpful, very hopeful podcast.
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Transcript
00:04: Welcome to the Space for Magic podcast, where people who are led by their hearts come to learn the secrets to receiving all the gifts the Universe has for us. I’m your host, Patty Lennon. I’m an ex-type A corporate banker turned intuitive coach. Using a blend of common sense, brain science, and just a dash of magic, I’m here to help you create abundance in every area of your life and business. Welcome!
00:36: Hi there. Welcome to the Space for Magic podcast. I’m your host, Patty Lennon. And an interesting thing happened, so last week, we dropped an episode on Wednesday, which like every Wednesday, and technically the election should have been over, when I had recorded the podcast, the election hadn’t even happened, and last week I was talking about the in-between places and finding peace in those in-between places, and I got a bunch of messages from listeners just saying, how do you know… How do you know he wouldn’t be at this mess and I hoped we would be, but I realistically figured we wouldn’t… I try, among other things, to receive what’s happening around me, that’s part of the receiving method, that’s part of what we talk about, and receiving schools receive everything. Right, and as I received what was happening around me and listening to people, what I felt was just people were very torn, and that is an unfortunate state for the country I live in – for the United States, but I think it happens. It’s happening in a lot of places, this increased polarization between people and really feeling like a lot of people feel like there’s not even great options when it comes to politicians.
02:07: I think a lot of people were voting against a candidate more than they are voting for a candidate, and I’m hopeful that by the time this podcast drops, we do know who is officially elected as the President of the United States, but hey, we might still be in the in-between place, but there is something that I do know, and I do try and stay relatively neutral publicly about politics simply because I’ve walked both sides of the political spectrum or… Well, I’ve walked one very extreme side, I’ve been a white conservative Christian Republican, I was that way for most of my early life right up into my mid-20s, and now I would consider myself a moderate, and a lot of times I actually lean Republican. I haven’t recently, simply because of who the candidates have been, and in the case of President Obama I just was so completely inspired by him that I couldn’t not vote for him, and yet I have conversations with people. There are still plenty of people in my life that are conservative and Republicans, and I know where their minds are, and I know where their hearts are, and despite what is the storyline being produced on the left side with more liberal Democrats.
03:41: They’re not all racist, right, they’re not all the people that they’re made out to be, and to my conservative friends, my Republican friends, democrats, liberals, they’re not looking to make us a socialist country, they’re not communists. The reality is, if we all understood better what any of these things mean, we would realize how close most of us are to the middle, most of us live in the middle, and we’re just so determined to figure out who the enemy is, bite them, and all that’s doing is dragging us down. That’s what’s happening in the United States, but I know it’s happening in other places, I know what’s happening in communities, it’s happening between countries, and we have to stop this. We have got to stop this. And it really does start with us, it starts with us individually. I know so many people that I respect and that I love, who are convinced that they live on some moral high ground, simply because they have decided that the other side is the enemy, and it’s a falsehood, the enemy is this… This polarization, we all subscribe to or were encouraged by or were hypnotized into the polarization, the enemy building, the fear the hate…
05:20: That is our enemy. That is our enemy, and there is only one enemy, and it is that, and there is only one side that has the moral high ground, and that is love, and it really doesn’t matter what your beliefs are, if you’re digging down and reaching for love, and… Yes, we’re human and we’re gonna be imperfect and we’re gonna get it wrong sometimes, and each of us is gonna get it wrong sometimes, but if we are pouring criticism and judgment and pain, and hate and anger and sarcasm and criticism in any form, pouring it into the world is not the moral high ground, it is absolutely not, and you’re not on the moral high ground, nor am I, if we’re pointing fingers at someone who is pouring hate into the world, we don’t suddenly take the moral high ground by speaking poorly of someone of judging someone, of being sarcastic of someone, because we feel like they’re more that way… Right. We don’t gain ground with that, there is only one higher ground, and it is love, and we must figure out a way to find love for each other, and I know it’s hard when…
06:48: I’m gonna speak specifically to my Democrat friends, when you’re watching people support a president that encourages racism, it’s hard not to conclude that someone voting for that person is racist or is accommodating racism, and to an extent… I agree with you, but ty, the middle ground is where we move forward, you know, when there’s a Venn diagram, you’ve got these two opposing forces, you’ve got the left and the writer, you’ve got the Republicans or the Democrats, or whatever, your opposites are, men and women. Whatever it is, when you go to the farthest pieces of that Venn diagram, all you have is one side or the other, it’s the place in the middle of the cross-section where those two sides meet, and that’s where possibility and promise for working together is… And no one in this race can take the high ground in terms of love, I really don’t think so, and I think there’s a lot of places in the world where those that feel that they’re on the right…
08:28: When we look at it through the eyes of, Are we contributing love to this world? I don’t know that it necessarily maintains that moral high ground, even if there’s the best of intentions behind it, and look, I’m not perfect with this at all, and I think I even feel so strongly because growing up, especially during my right-wing conservative days… Oh gosh, I was intolerable. I was in, I was so convinced I was right. I was so convinced that saving babies, unborn babies was so much more important than anything else, an innocent lives was pre-eminent to anything else. And I want you to hear me. That’s what I believed. I wasn’t disregarding other things, I really just, none of them weighed against that particular issue, now I’ve shifted from that position, but I didn’t shift because someone screamed at me loud enough, I shifted because enough people took the… To have conversations with me, I shifted because I fell in love with the constitution, and the more I studied it, the more I realized life before birth was a matter of faith and not a matter of law, and that just… That’s me, that’s where I come out on it.
09:52: I’m not saying that to give me two of one position or another, I’m telling you because I know that the majority of listeners are probably more leaning to the left and leaning towards the Democrat side, and you look over at so many white women who have voted for Trump, and you think How… How did that happen? And I can’t explain all of it, I can tell you that I’ve spent the last six months taking many conversations offline with my friends that feel very strongly about staying behind Trump because they believe they’re voting against socialism, because they believe they’re voting for the police because… And I hope in those conversations that maybe one or two minds were changed, I’m not naive enough to think many were changed because it’s a long… Long road to get there. But what I can tell you is that over the last year, I know many of you have come to love my father through stories of him after he passed, I did my best to bring him to life and to share what I was going through and talk about him… And I’ve heard from many of you those stories have been meaningful, and he was also a right-wing conservative, white Christian male, and he held a lot of beliefs consistent with that.
11:30: I will tell you he did step away from being able to support President Trump after the first news got out early, early before the 2016 election about some of the things that President Trump said about women. That was enough for him. But that was after 40 plus years of me constantly pursuing discussion with him, constantly having discourse over so many issues, uncomfortable conversations, and you know, my eyes were open sometimes too… My mind was changed, and I think those are the conditions that have to be available to all of us, we have to be willing to change our minds, not on the fundamentals. You know, I’m never going to change my mind that we need to find a better way to help populations that do not have the same rights as we do, whoever we is. If I’ve got more power, if I’ve got more privilege, it is my job to use that to help people who don’t have the same privilege. Absolutely, but if all I do is scream and yell and judge and demean another person, even if that feels good, and even if I think I’m right, it’s not going to move the dial, and we have to move the dial, we have to start moving the dial in I don’t know.
13:14: When you listen to this, who is the president? I hope you do. I hope you do, just because I hope that this is over and then we can start to move forward, but what I know is whoever it is, that individual doesn’t determine how we are moving forward. And if you’re not here in the United States, and this isn’t something that’s affecting you directly, I promise you, there’s something in your own life, there is a situation in your own life where you’re so convinced you’re right and the other person is wrong, and yet you need to live in community with them, and if that’s the case, you are going to find a… Have to find a basis for discourse if you want to find peace if you want to move forward because demanding that you’re right and that another person completely gives up their position… It never works. It never works. We were discussing politics in our house a couple of weeks ago, and my daughter said, I just don’t understand how this person could think this, and it was a pretty common discussion that was going around at the time, and I said, Well, think about it.
14:37: And she said, Absolutely not. There’s no way that I can understand how they could think that, and I said, Well, then you’re not gonna get a seat at the table. And she said, What does that mean? And I said, you know as you get older, you don’t have to agree with someone. What someone else says, You don’t have to approve of it. You don’t have to even change your mind, but you do have to keep an open mind and you do have to accept where they are coming from, and if you do want the opportunity to change your mind, if you want an opportunity to be part of a discussion, you have got to figure out where the other person is coming from, and if the only conclusion you can make is evil, and let me tell you, sometimes that’s the right conclusion, but if one and over and over again, that’s the only conclusion you can come to, you won’t be a problem solver, you won’t be part of the future. All you’re ever gonna be is someone that’s loud and screaming, who builds a group of people around her that thinks exactly the same way she does, but you won’t be a changemaker, you have to see possibility in people, you have to see where the middle ground is, you have to figure out where they’re coming from if you have any chance of even guiding them to what you see as possible…
16:08: And I can say that because I’ve learned it. I can say it because I have so many times banged my head against the wall, I spent an entire summer, almost an entire summer, not speaking to my father, because I just could not understand where he was coming from. I have spent so much of my life hanging out in the moral high ground, and when I look back on it, all I see is lost opportunity, all I see is lost time. Of course, I do believe everything happens for a reason, but I believe, especially for those in the United States, for those of us who are facing possibility with every option on the table, including going to a much darker place, we are going to have to figure out how to create space for magic here, because that’s what we need right now. And by magic, I mean the ability to rise above what seems humanly possible, and the only thing that creates space for magic is love, and it starts with us being able to see each other through the eyes of love, no matter what we believe. Now, I know that that’s probably gonna go against what you may be feeling right now, especially depending on who has won the electoral votes to become the president in 2021, but I could not say this anymore, I am watching too many good people tear each other apart.
17:51: I’m watching my community tear itself apart, and the thing is, at the end of the day, all we’re gonna have is a community that’s torn apart… No one will have won. Not really. And in the end, what did that get us… I know this is a much darker approach and I’ve taken before, but as I look at my children and I look at the country we’re handing them, I know we can do better. I know we can because I see the goodness and so many people, and if we look for and we find it in each other, I know we’ll do that. I send you my love, and I send you peace for your heart, and I truly truly do love you.
18:37: Hey, thanks for listening. If you know someone who needs to hear this message, please share this episode with them, and if you’re feeling really generous, I’d love for you to leave us a review at your favorite podcast app, it helps us reach many more people and it fills my heart with so much joy when I hear what you have to say about what I’ve shared. I’m cheering for your success, have an amazing day, and don’t forget. Always create space for Magic.
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