We don't do enough soul work in this country. We operate on fear, including, and especially our politicians and our corporate execs.
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This came to me in meditation today. Now when I say meditation, I use the word loosely. Before I sat, I had to dance and sing around the room so I wouldn't doze during it. When I wore myself out, I sat and started quietly breathing into it, and here's the message I got. "You can't do it wrong." Since I can make myself wrong in about thirty seconds, this was good news. And I think it came from my friend, Carrie.

I've heard it from every spiritual teacher I've followed. Why? Because we do our best in any given moment, given what we know in that moment. Ah, there's the thing ... given what we know in that moment. When we know more, we do it differently. That's it. That's the point of the soul work. We raise our awareness and we get a redo! Woohoo!

So how would Carrie get into my meditation? Easy. She's dead. Oh, that may sound blunt but that's pretty much how she talked. When she was dying from brain cancer, she would get a kick out of going to a bank to cancel her accounts. When they would try to sell her something else, she would look them in the eye, smile serenely and deadpan (oh, bad pun there), "No thanks. I can't use it. I have brain cancer. I'm dying."

Their jaws would drop, speechless, nonplussed and Carrie would be tickled with her own mischief. So was I. I was on this ride with her and had been for the ten years since we'd first become best friends. We bonded during our simultaneous divorces, she from her third husband and I from my first. She chose to learn her lessons from the variety pack. I got mine from sticking with the same old cereal.

But Carrie was a wise one. Having recovered from serious alcoholism, she worked her spiritual program like a mother $!#$@!! (her language, not mine:)). She did Alcoholics Anonymous, Al-Anon, Overeater's Anonymous plus much more. She was a SEEKER. Then, just for fun, in our ten years she encountered: early MS, seizures from a brain bleed, a broken neck, financial woes, huge stress, lung cancer and finally brain cancer.

With each one I saw her work her spiritual program and her humor into miracles, so that by the end, she was so enlightened, I think she was ready for lift-off! Good thing. She was about to. But before she did, during her two month bout with brain cancer, she said to me, "Kar, you can't do it wrong." "Really?" my doubtful self queried. Then I asked, "Aren't you mad at God?"

She smiled beatifically. Now beatific is not a word I would normally use to describe her. Irreverent? Yes. Beatific? No. But she was living between worlds, with one foot here and one on the other side, and all her friends could sense it. So when she talked, like EF Hutton, we listened. She responded, "Are you kidding? I am floating in a river of grace. And it's all been perfect, every bit of it." The next question, "Do you regret any of it?" Her response, smiling, "I regret all of it and it doesn't matter. It's all been perfect, every bit. And you can't do it wrong."

By this time, you might really be doubting my dead friend. The world is a mess. Politics is corrupt, corporations are more so, war, pestilence, locusts. Are you nuts? We have gotten it wrong.

Here's the kicker. "When we know more, we do it differently. That's the point of the soul work."

Here's the missing piece: are you ready? We don't do enough soul work in this country. We operate on fear, including, and especially our politicians and our corporate execs. That's why the greed and the hunger for power ... they can never have enough or accumulate enough because they're running on as much fear as we are. I know this personally. I even wrote a television pilot script about it.

The way to stop that, to turn this Titanic around, begins with meditation.

It's our personal link to that great GPS in the sky.

Don't take my word for it or Carrie's for that matter. It is coded in the ancient mystical traditions of our religions. Of course, in the past few hundred years, they skipped that part.

Congressman Tim Ryan recently wrote a book about it, A Mindful Nation. Oprah and Chopra have taken it to the airwaves. And here's the good news. It's a do it yourself job, in the comfort of your own home.

Carrie came back from the dead today to remind me. Trust her. She was down with it.

You can be too.

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