My Personal Story

"It's Time to Know Who You Are: The Evolution of A Peacemaker"

by Virginia Swain

Seeing a photograph of the earth from space always gives me a sense of peace. I had often wondered about the deep, dark silence that astronauts experienced in space until I saw the book, The Home Planet, by the Association of Space Explorers. It's on my bookshelf, telling of a common experience the astronauts had of the Sacred, across their cultural, geographic and religious boundaries, that changed them and brought them to action for peace back at home.

That sense of the Sacred awakened me one day in 1979 and brought me to action for peace in the United Nations twelve years later. But first I had a lot to learn about all the levels of unconscious behavior that needed reconciling within me and were not peaceful. Research by a social psychologist, John A. Bargh, shows that 99% of what we think is conscious perception and thought is actually unconscious. That is, unconscious perception, judgement, and planning all go on before we are consciously aware that we are perceiving anything.

I was not aware of these patterns, but I found that my unconscious behaviors when brought to consciousness, can be healed and used for the good in myself and in the systems in which I work and live. When I was working as a human resources manager in a multinational corporation, my brother, Bobby, called me one day in 1979 to ask if he might have lunch with me. He was in a crisis with his girlfriend. Could he wait till next week? I was too busy to have lunch that day.

The phone's ring was very loud the next morning at 5:30 a.m. My mother's voice, breaking, told me that Bobby had been killed in a car accident early that morning by a drunken driver. I had no inner resources to deal with my grief, nor for the divorce that came the next year. Then the death of my father raised my stress-level index up to the boiling point. I began planning how I would kill myself.

Then, inexplicably, a sense of the Sacred appeared to me when I saw a patch of light differently than ever before. It kept me alive. On an early morning walk near my home on the Connecticut shore, I felt I had been suffused by the patch of light. Although I could not rationally explain it, I lost the desire to kill myself. I've since been told I had a
near-death experience. I had to come close to death so that I might learn how to live all over again.

A newfound sense of Presence gripped me. It was palpable. I became hungry to bridge my experiential understanding of the light with an intellectual, conceptual and emotional knowledge. I needed to find a place to go to every daythe same place where I could place my candle, my icons, and where I silently waited to receive the love of the Sacred over and over again.

Over time, I felt my whole life impacted by the light experience. I left the human resources job and found another as a marketing manager in a non-profit where I could be home to spend more time with my son. When he was with his father, I went on retreats and workshops. Sharing my experience with others and learning about the inner life of the Sacred became my most important focus. To find wholeness and balance in my life, I explored my new perceptions with a spiritual director and career counselor.

My marketing job was satisfying. However, I began to explore a vocational calling to lead workshops and retreats. After a few years of adjusting to this very different rhythm in my life, I did some discernment work about my next steps, spending time praying about all the possibilities and listening for inner guidance. I learned the art of spiritual direction, being present to another on a spiritual journey.

Then, after a year, I felt a profound need to just be and stop doing. I needed preparation for more listening. The listening would address my yearning for yet a deeper place of peace than I had ever experienced before. Alone in my apartment, I huddled in a favorite rocker while frightening thunderstorms kept me up into the night. I saw the face of God that summer of 1985. Inexplicably, in the midst of one terrifying storm, I felt a sense of great peace. The words that came to me come back often when I'm quiet: Be still and know I am God.

I offered myself to God, hoping I could be an instrument of peace. I needed still more quiet time. This is what my soul had been yearning for. I went to a monastery where I spent 5 days of quiet communion. Out of that time, a sense of being directed from within emerged. An experience of true power. I asked God for guidance in what I was to do next. I had quit my job. I felt naked, emptied and ready to listen, humbled.

One week later, I dreamed I had moved to San Francisco to be a consultant and to get rid of my ego. Two days later, an invitation arrived to my cousins wedding in San Francisco. A week later, I met with my spiritual director. Before I could tell him about my inclination to move to San Francisco, he asked me not to make any plans. Who knows, he said, you might want to move to San Francisco! I was stunned.

One month later I invited my friends to join me in a letting go ritual when I further emptied myself in preparation. I made a bonfire to burn the professional human resource and marketing reports and papers I had saved over the years, not trusting myself enough to replicate them. The sacred fire of transformation, an ancient symbol, was the place where
I dumped the papers I could not throw away. Exhilarated by the experience, I danced into the night. I felt free!

The next month I was on a plane to San Francisco to attend the wedding. I felt like I had come home. I found friends and an apartment, paving the way for me to move to San Francisco in two months. Back at home, I had to move out of my apartment and get rid of all my belongings and say goodbye. I might never come back! A call came from a Boston friend. Someone she knew was moving to San Francisco the same week! We were off, stopping at friends and family, along the way.

It was in Oklahoma City that Mary literally woke me up out of a sound sleep. She told me, "It is time to know who you are. When you know who you are, then you can help others be who they are. I am Mary, the Mother of God."

A gold and blue image awakened me to the greatest love and compassion I have ever felt. In the church in which I grew up, I only heard of Mary at Christmas time. This was an amazing experience from a figure with whom I did not have a history. I was awe
struck and told few people.

I spent most of my 18 months in San Francisco, sitting on a rock mid-way up a mountain, Mt. Tamalpias, overlooking San Francisco and the ocean. The mountain was known for its feminine energy and was even shaped like a woman. From this vantage point of great beauty and isolation, I filled 15 journals with my experiences and reflections, learning more about my gifts and becoming aware of how much I'm loved by God. Mary led me to an experience of love, unlike any I had had in my spiritual experience. The lush greenery of the mountain, the safety of my rock, the inner preparation I had been going through helped me embrace my feminine self. One day, as I was leaving the mountain, I heard the mountain tell me I didnt need to come there any more and that it would always be within me.

The timing was perfect! I had been invited to consult to a well known non-profit agency that was having some growing pains. Was this my new vocation, based on my experience of peace? I felt both blessed and scared to start this new venture, allowing compassionate love to be part of my consulting style in organizations.

I came back to the East Coast with a renewed sense of myself and how much I'm loved, knowing my gifts as well as a way to apply them in the consultation. Little did I know I was just on another leg of my learning. This time I had to become spiritually grounded after my mountaintop experience, bringing in my masculine qualities and my years of pragmatic experience. This work led to a consulting career as an organizational and career consultant.

I moved back to be closer to my mother and son so I could renew, take responsibility for and heal relationships with family members. If I couldn't walk the talk, how could I be a peacemaker? Learning valuable life and relationship skills brought me to a deeper sense of peace that I could share with family.

A trip to Sweden came to pass. I was invited to be a consultant to a startup organization. My host took me on a side trip to the Baltic Sea. It was 1988, still the midst of the cold war, the Russians were our enemy. Putting my hand in the water on the shore of Sweden and realizing that this water would soon touch the shore of the Soviet Union, I suddenly
had an experience of unity with the Soviet people and with all people. Words and phrases came to me. My host took me back to his office where I entered them on his computer. These words and phrases became an outline for a book and audio tape that I co-authored, The Way of Peace: How One Person Can Make a Difference Toward World Peace. Here I learned the link between personal peace, peace in families, work, country and global peace and became more spiritually grounded.

In 1991, the Persian Gulf Resolution passed in the UN, and I felt the biggest vocational call of my life at that time. I literally felt pulled into the United Nations. My innermost being cried out, "Enough!" The use of force to resolve dispute has to stop in the UN first. I made
a covenant with God to do all in my power with my professional skills and personal intention to find a better way to resolve conflicts.

On the train to the UN, where I knew no one, a woman who had been there almost 45 years sat down next to me. We began to talk when I noticed her reading a book about United Nation's policy. She became my mentor and teacher, opening doors for me, leading me into my newfound work. I moved to New York to begin a graduate study of international peacemaking and community building in organizations. Drawing on my first
job as a US Peace Corps teacher in West Africa, where I learned about the healing power of community life, the UN was now my learning laboratory in the practice of peace internationally.

Earth Summit preparations on the environment were going on as I began my UN work. People from all over the world were congregating to get ready to go to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1992. After living in West Africa, I had an affinity with people from the southern hemisphere. I found that I could serve as a liaison for them to meet people from the north and adjust to the fast-paced New York and UN culture.

After awhile, I felt a sense of purpose and intention about going to the Summit. Hundreds of people helped me by sending their visions and prayers as well as small and large donations to the trip, in exchange for my writing and speaking about my experiences when I came back. I placed their written visions and prayer on a gigantic Tree of Life, a beautiful sculptured tree, in the center of the Global Forum, the people's conference of the Earth Summit, alongside hundreds of thousands of other prayers and visions brought by other delegates from all over the Earth. Experiences of connection and joy that I had there still are memorable, but two images strike me still that have shaped the next stage of my training as a peacemaker. One was meeting a child who lives on the street whose love and joy melted me as I handed her a delicate Wing of the Heart, a celebration flag. Even in her need, she was full of hope. I couldnt speak for two weeks after I came back. I had never seen such poverty in the favella (slum) where she lived, not even in my experience traveling in Africa. The second image is being part of the deepest silence I have ever
encountered. In an all-night vigil of the worlds religions where 30,000 people gathered to worship, sing, and dance, the Dalai Lama brought us together in the morning into the silence. Out of those depths, a sound arose that gathered such momentum that it became one song of our common humanity People were singing and dancing together as if wed know each other our whole lives.

It seemed important to have academic credentials as a peacemaker in spiritually grounded leadership. I designed a masters thesis project integrating the community building and conflict resolution models and experiences I had studied along with the experiences at the Earth Summit. My own model evolved, a framework or ritual for protracted long term conflicted situations that could be custom-designed by participants.

After inviting those who participated in the Earth Summit to weekly meetings at my new home in New York and facilitating a UN debriefing for those Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) who had gone to Rio, a project took shape over time as I and others became more intentional. I sensed that as we prayed and shared our visions for peace, a new partnership with the Sacred was emerging. As I prayed and listened, I felt moved to invite the UN community to join me in a custom-designed Earth Summit vigil at the United Nations that had a political focus. I noticed that many UN community members thought that peace was out there rather than a reflection of an inner state of being. I
wanted to create an enviornment where they could find out the truth of where peace comes from, just as I had.

Security precautions made it prohibitive to spend the night at the UN and replicate the Earth Summit vigil. I invited a group of artists and team members to envision creating a Sacred space together. My vision became a shared vision, incorporating what others peacemaking dreams were. I allowed others to broaden it and deepen it, to make the experience meaningful for those who created it as well as for potential participants. Our process together was as significant and as important as the goal. Ground rules were elicited from members of the planning team to discover what would help them be safe in expressing their true self. The Sacred Container thus formed was a safe place where people would honor each other to express their true self, at the same time of taking full responsibility for any inner conflict projected or blamed on another. These became our
core principles.

Gradually, over time, I felt a sense of political will growing in me. Others who joined me felt the same call to action from our deepest selves. With the help of a team member, I redefined politics in my thesis to collaborative changemaking and peaceful evolution. Politician is servant leader. As we brought a social ill to the UN community's attention, the need to highlight the plight of children, people made the link to the Earth Summit by giving flesh to Agenda 21, the first consensus document of its kind, from the Earth Summit, under consideration in the General Assembly at the time of our event. Agenda 21 is signed by 185 nations with the blueprint to conserve the earths resources for the 21st century.

The day arrived. First a vigil, where adults could forget their titles and roles for a day and experience inner peace and reconciliation. A celebratory procession in the UN introduced the final segment of the day in the General Assembly Hall. Children told us their ideas for
peacemaking through song and dance. The vigil allowed adults an opportunity to recreate an experience of awe and wonder in their lives. We learned to listen differently to children. The process invited us to a transcendent moment of unity or global citizenship, as the Sacred was invoked. A safe and trusting environment to allow participants an experience of brotherhood and sisterhood in community released the untapped unconcious potential in people. Once freed we can moved forward in servant leadership. Many people became global citizens. Some of us still work together in political action.

The name, Celebration of the Children of the World, emerged, after I met the street child in Rio de Janeiro. I wanted to call the plight of marginalized children to the attention of the UN community. The Secretary-General responded by offering the full weight of his office to
get through the last-minute security snafus as well as a personal representative to speak. The event was also supported by a coalition of groups of NGOs, governments, international civil servants, and New York residents. The coalition was still growing at the time of the event. The need for community was real where spiritually motivated people come from all over the world and then find they dont have the interpersonal or systemic skills to deal with each other, or the UN structure that was largely formed in the cold war era.

I wrote my thesis and prepared for graduation in Cambridge in the spring of 1993. I had to find my relationship to the Sacred to find out who I am before I could live my purpose in marriage and vocation. At the time of my graduation, a UN colleague suggested I meet her former boss at a UN non-governmental organization, Joseph Baratta. I was intrigued remembering my experience with Mary in Oklahoma, and her loving relationship with Joseph. This Joseph lived in the city of my college, so I invited him to my graduation party. We were married two years later and now work together for peace.

We share a great love and common understanding of world peace through very different approaches. Joseph is a scholar and I'm a practitioner. We have learned much together in the nine years weve been married. We started a Center for Global Community and World Law to work together for societal and global change. We have worked together on many projects in Boston and in the UN community.

On my own, I started to provide holistic counseling, career and organization development (helping people through the transitions of this time), in both non-profit and for profit organizations. I counsel people and organizations, helping them find their mission and purpose, learning who they are and then help them apply their new sense of vocation and confidence in a spiritually grounded and compassionate way in their families, work, and organizations.

Two holistic counselors served as team members for my masters work at the UN. Their input helped me recognize how an individual could go through a transformation in a group setting. So, over the past three years, I entered into a certification process by the New England Holistic Counselors Association. A holistic counselor uses an I-thou process, is a professional masters level degree counselor from an accredited college in counseling, and is a versatile healer with an interdependent world view. This program uniquely prepared me with personal and life skills to be a guide to an individual or an organization in a time of global transition such as these times. I learned the responsible habit of thinking differently which facilitates the revisioning and restructuring necessary for going forward. My supervisor offered tutoring and readings, went over audio tapes of sessions with my clients. Finally, my final interview came and my certification was accepted and I became the first counselor certified under this comprehensive program in Boston.

My life learning peacemaking continues. I am grateful for the presence of Joseph, my husband, in my life. Little did I know, my personal work from 1979-93 had just begun. I did know how we could create a Sacred Container for our growth. Over a period of nine years, I have experienced a transformation unlike any of the others in my quest to be a peacemaker.

I now call the UN celebration model The Peacebuilding Process of Reconciliation to Develop Political Will. Since 1992 I have implemented this peacebuilding framework in ten local and international settings. Individuals are guided through a framework, custom designed for each implementation to honor and heal historic conflict patterns. After a planning process to address the problems and build a team to solve them, comes an interactive and artistic setting in which individuals experience steps to solidarity with one another as they face inner conflicts and behavior that reinforce self-interest. Several more stages mediated by appropriate questions are given through the artistic framework: silence, reflection. A chance to be accountable to the unconscious behavior that has been hurtful. Asking for forgiveness. Participants are then led to an experience of unity in community, when they are willing and when the Sacred is invoked. They then can experience a transcendent moment of I becoming We, in brotherhood and sisterhood. People finding out who they are can happen in this group setting.

The Peacebuilding Process of Reconciliation has been evolving as I grow. I haven't felt grateful all the time as I faced the hard work of resolving unconscious patterns. I'm more at peace now, ready to go into the next stage of my lifes work in Greater Boston. Each step of my evolution toward peace has become part of a spiral I use in the Peacebuilding Process of Reconciliation to Develop Political Will. Because it's a spiral, it allows one to go through this process over and over again, remembering the steps to global community.

The Peacebuilding Process of Reconciliation was created and used as a conflict resolution tool where a shift in consciousness from division to solidarity, comes from the joy of interconnectedness. Relationships from true self form a sense of global community, brother and sisterhood. This is done by a felt experience to help people move from an intellectual framework to emotional response. People commit to support one another from a sense of love and respect of each other's dignity. Overprotective barriers are removed; listening is more respectful. Identity is expanded beyond role or national affiliations. Just as I offered the steps to the United Nations community, I now offer the steps to emerging and existing leaders through an Institute for Global Leadership and a Life Leadership and Reconciliation Leadership certificate program. I hope my work will help others know who they are so that by ripple effect, can help others be who they are.