Call to Peace, with Rev. Kim Andrews

Transcript

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Hello and welcome to this episode of Decide on Joy, a podcast coming to you from Harmony Spiritual Center in Fort Worth, Texas. My name is Jim Kovold. Yeah, and my name is Reverend Dr. PJ Stanley and we have a wonderful guest here today talking about her peace initiative. Kim Andrews from Sachse, Texas. Yay, from Sachse, Texas. Sachse, Sachse. Sachse, Sachse. That's what everybody ends up saying, because you can't say Sachse. You can't say Sachse without saying Sachse. You just can't, right? That's actually spelled S A C H S E, not S E X Y, but, but hey, who's quibbling? Yeah. Yeah. So I am the founder of The Call to Peace. The Call to Peace. And I'm also spiritual leader at unity of saxes. Excellent. Yeah. Beautiful to have you here. Thank you for asking me Yeah, so tell us about call to peace so it is a peace initiative born out of my own life I Started working on cultivating a life overflowing with Peace decades ago, basically. Cause my upbringing was a little crazy, right? Yeah. But then whose wasn't. Yeah. I remember you telling me this story about you and your husband asking you how, how you doing? Yeah, and I would just get agitated because he merely asked, How you doing today? And how's your day going? You know, very nice question for a husband to ask. And I knew that he was asking because he really cared how my day was going. And if it wasn't going well, if he could do something about it, he would. He actually would. But because of watching my parents, you know, bump heads all the time, and the passive aggressive way that we, dealt with each other and you know that there's another love language called sarcasm That we lived by And that meant that I always thought that most loving statements had an ulterior motive And that I couldn't trust it. It wasn't just what it was. Well, he said and so I'd get that. Why are you asking me? How i'm doing? I don't look like i'm doing. Okay, like what's what's wrong with you? And so So that went on for a while until one day You I caught it, yes. And I thought, why am I agitated? Because I know this man is not my father. And we don't have the kind of marriage that my parents had. We don't. And so I had to check in on that. And then I realized it came from my programming. From how I grew up and watching my parents together. And I thought there's no reason for me to be suspicious. Right. Of this man asking me how I'm doing. Right. And so I took a deep breath and I turned around and smiled, so of course now he's, he's like, okay, is she okay? Oh. Oh. What happened? Where's my wife and what have you done with her? Cause he wasn't always used to getting the right, he was used to agitation most of the time when he would ask that question. And so I turned around and I smiled and I said, I'm fine, thank you. Thanks for asking me how I'm doing. So now he knows what to do with it, and he's used to that kind of an answer, but in the beginning it threw him. I remember you telling me that you came to the conclusion that Peace wasn't the absence of something. It wasn't just being quiet. Yeah, it's not about quiet, because my upbringing was quiet. My parents fought like once every six months, but then they fought very loudly for like an hour. And everything they didn't talk about for the last six months got brought up in that one hour. And they would do it after we went to bed, but of course we lived in a three bedroom, one bath house. And we heard everything and we were sitting at the top of the stairs listening, of course, as kids do. Yeah, as kids do. But yeah, I thought because my house was quiet. And that they didn't fight on a regular basis. So that meant we had a peaceful life, but there was always tension always. And my mother taught us to walk on eggshells around my father because you just don't want to upset him and I don't want to fight. And so we avoided conflict. I didn't know how to deal with conflict avoidance growing up. So as an adult, I had to teach myself that. So I think most people think peace is quiet and it can be, but it's not. But it doesn't necessarily mean that you are in a quiet environment, in a peaceful environment. In a peaceful environment. Yeah, and certainly I thought, coming up in an alcoholic family we never talked about elephant in the room. There was no elephant, there was no elephant. So if you didn't talk about it, it wasn't there. That's right. It wasn't real. And so for me, that's what peace looked like, but there was inner turmoil all the time. Me too. Yeah. Yeah. You just throw something over the elephant and you walk around and you bump into him. Right. He's, you know, he steps on you and stuff like that. Yeah. And then, you know, at some point somebody gets tired of bumping into the elephant and then maybe there's a fight, but you don't, you don't talk about it until then, God forbid you have an adult conversation. Right. Nothing is resolved. Nothing is ever resolved. You just fight until you're done fighting. So when you mention something called a peace initiative I immediately go to like a world peace or whatever but we're talking about a personal level peace. We're talking about both actually. first was that I had to be peaceful myself. And so I started, I realized that I actually had created a modality for peace and that there were five keys that led me to peace. Five things that I do in my life all the time that have led me to this deep level of peace that I didn't know about. And I didn't know was possible in my early years, like my first through my early, My late 20s, I would say. So it's an acronym, URISE. So, the first one is U for underpinning, to have a foundation for life. Something you believe in that that grounds you. Because life happens, the rug can get pulled out from under you at any time. That life can change on a dime in an instant, and we need something outside of the physical world, outside of everything that is you know, things that we see, hear, and touch, that grounds us, and it doesn't have to be religion, it doesn't have to be God, it can be a set of principles, it can be how you feel about nature, it can be your higher self, But something that allows you to be centered and grounded outside of the world. The, the second one so it's U R I S E. I is intuition or introspection. To listen to your, cause we, I believe we have this inner GPS or intuition. And I do trust my intuition. I learned that it's always guiding me to my highest and best. Yeah. And so in the beginning I would hear it, but not do it. Not, not, not pay attention to it. Doesn't matter. And then I would say, oh, wait a minute, something told me not to do that craziness. And yet I went and did it anyway. So how about if I listen to it next time? And every single time I followed it. Nice. It was great. Estes for solitude, quiet time, because you know the world's noisy. We're on our phones all the time. We've got devices. You're out, you can be in a restaurant, five TVs. Just in front of you or you're watching TV and stuff's running down on the bottom on all the noise no all the time I just noticed even on social media there are ads now coming up on social media, so it doesn't matter It's everything's noisy, so we need to get away from the world and be with ourselves Yeah, and with that higher self whatever that underpinning is that's where you commune With that underpinning is to educate yourself educate yourself about yourself so that you know, and you're self aware about who you are, what triggers you, what bothers you. So ever since, like with my husband, him asking me, how are you? At some point I thought, well, why does that bother me? Right. Yeah. That's a good question to ask yourself. Why am I agitated right now? And I don't want to be agitated. All I want is peace. Right. And so why am I agitated? So I had to go back and really take stock about that. I mean, know thyself is such a great principle to me. You know, cause this is everything. I mean, cause everything, you know, we just do, we're going with the with the four agreements and that's just, you know, don't take things personal. You got to know yourself, all this sort of thing. So, yeah. So the question is, why am I taking it personally? And I don't have to, cause we have a choice as to how we feel about things. So it doesn't, we can't stop things from happening in our lives. Well, we can choose how we respond or react. Oh, I love that. We talked about this. So just. It's the difference between responding and being responsive and being reactive. Big difference. You, did you say the R? I heard you, you, yeah, and I just, like, why the heck did I just skip over that? So the, the R is release to, to vent your emotion because usually we think through our emotions and they don't always guide us to our highest and best. So release your emotion and trust it. It's just energy. Just let it go. You know, most people, I didn't trust my emotion either, especially when I, Started to really feel, had a lot of loss in my life, started to feel a lot of grief. Yeah. And I was afraid of the intensity of the emotion. Right. So I wouldn't want to go there, but it doesn't mean you're not feeling, it just means you tucked it somewhere. Right. And it's going to find you. Always. Sooner or later, it's going to creep back up at the most inopportune, well grief is always there. At an inopportune moment. It's never a good time. But it happens. But at least when it comes up, if you can vent it in a place with a trusted person, or learn to do it by yourself, and a friend taught me how to do that for myself, and then you can clear your, all the stuff that's boiling up inside you, and then you can think. And then you can go, With you can hear your intuition, you can get quiet, you can hear whatever is talking to you, your highest self, your intuition, whatever it is. And then you can have great guidance as to how to move forward with something. But if you don't release that emotion, it stays in And it, it can turn into other things. A lot of read, a lot of scientific studies have been done now, that if you don't release emotion, it can turn into disease, it can turn into some other kind of problem. We start self medicating in ways that aren't healthy, whether it's porn, sex, alcohol, social media, whatever it is, we do something other than feel what we're feeling. So release is important so that we can get clear. And then I started reading about how the peace studies of the 70s and 80s and people who were meditating were able to lower the amount of crime and A conflict in war torn countries when they meditated on a certain area of the world that, that they did in Washington DC and they meditated on an area in the Middle East. And those nice and crime and the conflict went down as they were meditating. And I thought, well, the problem was when they stopped meditating, right? They went back up, the numbers went back up. Sure. Let, let, so I thought if we could all be more peaceful 24 7. Maybe that would stem the tide and all the masters in the world, the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu gosh, I'm going, can't think of the other names right now. Thich Nhat Hanh occurs to me. Yes, thank you. That's the name I was thinking of. All said that we will not have world peace until we have peaceful individuals in this world. It makes sense. How could you? How could you? And that is very much against the current Climate change. Pop culture, whatever. Which for ages now it seems like the message has been that you should be angry. That's right. If you're not angry, not just annoyed, but like enraged about something, then there's something wrong with you. Absolutely. and so to have a way to sidestep that to, to get through that and go in a different direction. It is an excellent thing. We know, you know, if you, if you bring the piece, I mean, if you bring the piece, you can actually bring it into the, into the space just by you. Absolutely. Yeah. I've had people get angry with me because I was not angry with them. And we're in, we're talking, people are talking about something and I'm most often now will sit and just, I'm just listening to people because I don't, I don't have a dog in the fight. Right. And there's no fight. You know, I'm, yeah, I'm too old for that now. Too peaceful. I don't want to fight and I don't want a dog. So so I, I've had people say, what's wrong with you that you're not upset. Well, I'm aware of the issues and I know what I feel and I know what I think, but there's no reason to be upset. This doesn't change anything. Right. It doesn't, it changes nothing. And so, yeah, yeah, I'm fine. Well, thank you for asking. In such a peaceful way. But I'm able, I'm able to sit in the midst of chaos and be peaceful and just watch people. Just watch them do their thing and decide I don't want to do it with them. Doesn't mean I don't care. No. It just means. I don't care to get amped up about this. Correct. I think people do, you know, watch and see, well, she seems calm and I'm all riled up. How did this happen? You know, just kind of looking at you and looking, just, I mean, people look for examples of things. We don't necessarily know how something works. We certainly know it's working when we see it. And so, just for you to bring that presence, it's beautiful. And I've had a lot of people, that's when I started to pay attention to how I'm living. Mm hmm. And is this meaningful for other people? Because people kept saying you were always the calmest person in the room. You just, you just carry that. And I, and I think, oh, okay. And then I thought, well, why is that? What did happen? What changed? Because that was not the Kim that we knew 40 years ago. Which is encouraging. That means it can be learned. You can make a decision for it. Yeah, it's a decision. It's a way of life. So you have a number that you use when you talk about your peace initiative. Tell me what the numbers about 8, 945. So in the peace studies, they actually came up with a a formula for deciding how many people you need to affect a certain number of people in the population. So it's actually the square root of 1 percent of whatever population you want to affect. So there are 8 billion people on the planet about right now. And square root of 1 percent of 8 billion is 8, 945. Less than 9, 000 people who are peaceful to their core are needed to bring peace to this planet. Amazing. That is nothing. 9, 000 people to affect 8 billion. Yeah. Eight billion. Yeah, eight billion. And so when I heard that, I like something turned on in me and I thought, surely I can find 9000 people out of eight billion. Yeah, I mean, here in the Dallas Fort Worth area. I don't know how many people got here, but we got a whole lot more than 9000. Yes, we probably have 9000 people moving here a day. So you don't have to go anywhere, you can do it from where you are. I can do it from where I am. And it doesn't mean you don't have to go out and protest, you don't have to go out, you don't have to sign petitions, you don't have to do any of that. You just need to make your life peaceful. And then you get the benefit, and then a natural consequence is that the Consciousness of the world becomes more peaceful. So there's no, it's not like you had to, to spend an hour a day focusing on peace in Gaza, for instance, or no, I just, I just go around being as peaceful as I can in every moment. Yeah. And so I'm very aware of how my day is going, how I wake up. What is my mood? How am I responding, you know, to my husband? Because, you know, our, our significant relationships are great barometers of how peaceful we are. Yes. And if you're going to lose it, you're going to lose it there. Do you have something, right, on your website where people can join? That you share with them, that you guys, you get talking about how to do this individually. Like how would someone know to do what you're doing? So yeah, so my website is called the call to peace. com there's, I actually have a peace lifestyle program that I created where I explain these five keys, the U RISE, U R I S E and how to live those and how I started to live them and how they came up and some of the, the hurdles I had to jump to learn how to be peaceful and cause it, it is, it's a thing. And as soon as you. I did have a peaceful life, but when I got conscious of living peaceful. All the ways I'm not peaceful started to crop up And it was in my face because I thought I'm supposed to be the peace lady. What the heck? How's this working? How's that working out for you? Dr. Phil would have been on me. How's it working for you right now, Kim? Well, not real well because my my my husband just asked me how I'm doing Stuff like that was coming up, you know, I realize that when I'm tired When I'm really tired, I am I am hard to live with and I am not nice and so I try not to get to the point where I am tired and exhausted because I do not relate to the world right. And so that's one of my things I have to work out because that helps me clear my head. It helps me relieve stress. I'm so, I'm so much more of an angel and a peaceful being when I have worked out in the morning. It just fizzles out all of my type A stuff that gets me going. Right. So now I know how to live and I know how to catch myself if I'm not meditating. That's, that's how I'm in solitude. That's how I commune with my, with God, because that's my underpinning is God is spirit. And so if I'm not meditating on a regular basis and spending that time with what grounds me, then I'm a crazy woman and I'm not peaceful. So I, you know, it's, it's, it's a, A deep self commitment. Yeah. Yes. Yes. And yet the payoff for me is immeasurable And there's not a price tag I can put on it right just not because life is just wonderful. Yeah, so in case people haven't been taking notes And things here and they want to remember this the the website is called Thecalltopeace. com. Yes. Is that correct? It is. Yes. Yeah. Spelled just like you would think. Thecalltopeace. com. Yeah. And there's some resources on there. I have some videos on there about things like, you know, if you get to chaos and all of a sudden you're not sure what to do, how to calm down, how to vent your anger in a healthy way. You know, things that I've learned for myself. There's affirmations on there because sometimes I have to talk to myself out loud. Yeah. And say that. That everything is good in that that God is in charge or whatever works for me in the moment. So there are resources there for people to do and I've, I'm always making updates to it and starting it starting in a couple of weeks. I'm going to have a a 15 minute peace meditation on Sunday mornings at 8 AM central. And so I'll have information on my website soon so that people can start their week that way and then get in the habit of having this peaceful vision because if we can. We can only, I believe, manifest in the world what we're willing to envision. And you have to envision it no matter how crazy the world seems. Exactly, exactly. Because it's really, you know, so everything else, whatever, you just talked about it too, Jim Just about how this, there's just a lot of talking going on. There's a lot of talking going on, a lot of information with no, no real substance in terms of what does, what does it mean to you? And so your whole point about knowing thyself. And so I get to ask myself and you get to ask all of us, what's this to me? With all this stuff that's going on, what's my role in this? What is this to me? And you know, and so it just sounds like it's a commitment to decide. That this is what you want. You want to be more peaceful in your life. And the benefits of that are, you know, beyond physical and the health benefits and all of that. Just to be able to be a calm enough person that you get to live the life you want to live. You're not being, you're not reactive. You're, you're, you know, you're responsive and saying what you want and who you want to be. For me, that is, that's living the best life that you're choosing. You're choosing the life you're living. And I love your, you know, the you know, the name of your podcast, because for me, I didn't have joy in my life till I got peaceful. I just did not. Yeah. I did not. And, I mean, I had moments of happiness and things were well and I'm having a good time, but to have an undercurrent of joy all the time? Yes. Didn't happen until I got peaceful. And I, I know now, even if I can't get to happy, or if I'm not feeling particularly joyful, I'm at least at peace. At least at peace. At least at peace. And there's a lot to be said for that. My God. A lot to be said for that. And, for me anyway, the idea that you can actually Affect the course of world event gives you a reason beyond just so I will feel better. It's a bigger thing. It's a bigger thing. Yeah. Yes. And, and you can just Google seventies, eighties peace studies and the information will come up and it's quite a fascinating thing that we, that our consciousness matters. It does. It does. And that there's a global consciousness that we all contribute to and right now I think that it's a fear. It's pretty up in the air. It really is. And anger, like you were saying. And and of distrust. Yes. Oh yeah. Yes. A lot of distrust in the world. And that is so far from peace. But look what's happening globally now. You know, we're, yeah, you know, they're talking about, you know, with North Korea and Russia and Ukraine and, you know. I mean, things have been happening for centuries in other countries, and we haven't gotten to peace yet. And what, it's not because it's not possible, it's not because, you know, we keep thinking there's a dog in a fight. Right. When really all it's about is us living together as peacefully as possible, and to be able to have lives filled with joy, and to be able to come here to do what I, I believe we're all here to do something. Yeah. Special in the world. I do. I do too. I really do. I, we all have a purpose and a reason and you're just, you're not going to get there if you're all caught up in what somebody else is doing. That's right. It doesn't matter what somebody else is doing. What are you doing? Do you? Yeah. Boo boo. Boo. Do you? Please. Yeah. Okay. We can stop there for this episode and thank you for joining us, Kim. Thank you, Kim. Beautiful. Thank you for asking me. Yeah. Thank you all for listening and we will see you the next time.