As I often say, I usually don’t know what I’ll be writing about each morning. This morning I am so excited to have been lead to find someone else who is looking for warriors for our time.

What first lead me to think about Spiritual Warriors was the following, written by my friend Joshua Taflinger, who lead the Dakota Access Pipeline water protector ceremonies in Indianapolis in 2016. Joshua went to Standing Rock several times.

I am inspired to share with you all more directly a post I wrote, because I consider you an established & effective nature/spiritual warrior, and believe that there is a need for the perspectives shared in the attached post to be more common thought in the minds of the many.

If you feel truth from this writing, and are inspired, I highly encourage you to re-write your own version, in your own words/perspectives, and post to your network.

With the intention of helping us all wake up, with awareness, clarity, and direction.

..spreading and weaving reality back into the world….

Joshua Taflinger

This is the post Joshua was referring to:

What has risen to the surface at Standing Rock is a physical/spiritual movement. Learn how to quiet your mind. To find the silent receptive space to receive guidance. To learn to adapt and follow the pull of synchronicity to guide you to where you will find your greatest support and strength.

What I have found in my time praying in the indigenous earth based ways, is that it’s not about putting your hands together and talking to god…. It’s about quieting and connecting with the baseline of creation, of nature. Tuning into the frequency and vibration of the natural world, the nature spirits. The beings and entities that have been in existence, for all of existence, the examples and realities of sustainability and harmony.

It’s about becoming receptive to these things. Being open and flowing with them. The spirit guides us, but we have to make ourselves receptive to feel, sense, and respond to this guidance

Joshua Taflinger

---

I’ve written a lot about spiritual warriors over the past several years: https://kislingjeff.wordpress.com/?s=warrior

This morning I came across this article about the work of Margaret Wheatley.

Seventy-five year old writer, consultant and activist Margaret Wheatley has studied the cyclical nature of civilizations throughout history and she is quite confident that the end of our civilization is closer than we might like to think. And she is doing something about it… something radical.

Wheatley is building an army of ‘warriors for the human spirit’ with people who want to lessen the suffering in the world – whether it be from natural disasters, political strife, war, famine, or from the tyranny of daily injustices in modern life.

Her warriors are trained as leaders with compassion, kindness, servitude and generosity as prime requirements. Wheatley has amassed a library of resources – articles, podcasts, videos, and even poems – to help inspire your inner warrior.

Warriors Wanted: Why One Woman is Training People to Defend the Human Spirit –by CBC Radio, syndicated from cbc.ca, Jun 17, 2020

I also think we are near the end of our civilization. It’s like we are in a perfect storm of chaos with rapidly accelerating environmental destruction, global pandemic, rapidly increasing poverty, military tensions, and global collapse of economic and political systems.

As my friend Ronnie James writes:

I’m of the firm opinion that a system that was built by stolen bodies on stolen land for the benefit of a few is a system that is not repairable. It is operating as designed, and small changes (which are the result of huge efforts) to lessen the blow on those it was not designed for are merely half measures that can’t ever fully succeed.

So the question is now, where do we go from here? Do we continue to make incremental changes while the wealthy hoard more wealth and the climate crisis deepens, or do we do something drastic that has never been done before? Can we envision and create a world where a class war from above isn’t a reality anymore?”

Ronnie James

---

Warriors exist through every culture. The deeper tradition of warriors which you can find in other cultures is that the warriors arise when something needs protection. And in this time, for me, it is human beings – people – who need protection. We need protection because we do have these great human capacities that I could define as our ‘human spirits’: our generosity, our creativity, our kindness.

There is a tradition of spiritual warriors or peaceful warriors that occurs over and over again in history. So we are standing on the shoulders of millions and millions of other people who have trained as warriors. And that’s also important because there’s no such thing as a casual warrior. You have to train. You have to sacrifice. You have to have a level of dedication that is really unusual these days. 

The commitment is to service. Warriors for the human spirit are committed to serving people but the quality of our service is that we vow not to add to aggression and not to add to fear. We want to be the embodiment really of the best qualities of human beings. And those are qualities of presence, good listening, confidence that isn’t based on arrogance just on self-knowledge. And we want to be there for others not for our own glory. 

Margaret Wheatley

---

For us, warriors are not what you think of as warriors.  The warrior is not someone who fights, because no one has the right to take another’s life.  The warrior, for us, is one who sacrifices himself for the good of others.  His task is to take care of the elderly, the defenseless, those who cannot provide for themselves and above all, the children, the future of humanity.

Sitting Bull

---

The following describes, and has a link to an online flip book about Warriors for the Human Spirit.

---