The power of spirit within us wants to shake us up and shake loose all the stuck things, all the things that don’t work about how we’re living our life, how we’re being in our world and how we are expressing ourselves. And that power won’t stop. It hasn’t stopped for me. It keeps calling for something more. Ultimately it calls us to be free—free from something perhaps, but more importantly free for something: free to be fully alive.

On a recent Wednesday evening at Sunrise Ranch, I witnessed a powerful spiritual occurrence flowing through four people who spoke at our service hour. It was remarkable! Here is what I saw. The Rimrock Room was nearly full with people from our community. The four people who spoke stood in front of the stone wall built from field stone, local to this part of Colorado. Without introduction or any kind of ceremonial opening, they each stood up at a microphone and spoke for what must have been about fifteen minutes.

So externally, what was occurring was very simple and plain—four people speaking in front of a stone wall. Yet it became clear, as each of them spoke, that something of great moment was occurring. It was clear from what they said that they were each in the middle of a world, what I think of as a creative field. That field contained people and events, near and far, ultimately spreading out to the whole world. But closer to home, it also contained all the thoughts and feelings that the person had in relationship to that world. It was very clear that there was turbulent energy on the move for each of those four people in their own creative field. And there they were, in the middle of all that turbulence.

What was also clear was that in each case there was peace and calm, and there was presence in the middle of all that turbulence. The person was bringing a conscious focus into their creative field. It seemed to me that in the middle of all the turbulence that the person was acknowledging was present in their life, they were saying, not in so many words but by the whole of what they brought, “And I am here. Yes, all this is going on. There is all this turbulence, and I am here. At my center, I am unmoving and unmoved. I am present. I’ve been present; I will be present. I am here for this—for this grand creative process that includes both deconstruction and a building up.”

Out of the presence they each brought there was an expression of conscious awareness, brought to focus through their words. There was clarity and coherence.

So there was this amazing confluence of the turbulence, a still presence, and an expression of conscious clarity from that presence. Those three elements created a fourth—a powerful spiritual current. People participating in the hour perceived a reordering of the energetic pattern the speaker was working with and a marked change in the energetic pattern in the room. It was the kind of experience that made you want to ask the person next to you: “Are you sensing what I am?”

That is what happens when a person brings higher vibration into their own immediate experience. It is what happens when a person is fully present amidst whatever turbulence is occurring in their world.

In being present and focused, we are opening ourselves to vibration from a higher level. When what we express in words and in many other ways is based in that experience, higher vibration is coming into the energy pattern of our creative field. It is coming into our bodies, to begin with. Our physicality likes it! Our endocrine system lights up. Everything in us awakens, being bathed in higher vibration coming through our energy pattern. But it is not just our physical bodies that are activated by higher vibration. Our emotional body is affected. We feel different. We are changing the pattern of energy around us and we are affecting the people who are with us. On this Wednesday evening, I could feel this happening big-time in the room. There was a reordering of our collective energy.

The eye of a hurricane is an apt physical representation of stillness at the center of turbulence. The whole system of the hurricane symbolizes the creative process. The hurricane balances and reorders energetic space. There is destruction in a hurricane, and there is some destruction, or deconstruction, when a person or a group of people begin to open up to higher vibration. When there is stillness and clarity, the creative process tears down old patterns that have not been working. It creates new, life-giving energy that builds new life patterns.

The hurricane reorders the creative field. Fortunately for us, the reordering takes place over time. Even if we awaken spiritually, there are patterns in our creative field that contain the residue from ages of stuck thinking and self-destructive behavior. That is present in the world around us and in our own emotional body. We can put a bright smile on, and if we see ourselves as spiritual, we can act the part. But if we have the karma from the ages sitting in our emotional body, it will take a hurricane to allow that to be reordered. It takes the ultimate commitment to presence and clarity to let the reordering go all the way through.

This isn’t a sunny-day activity. This is an everyday activity, because it is on some of those rainy days when the work is going to depth. And if you are not up for the rainy-day work, there is no reordering, because anybody can be spiritual on a sunny day. There is no change just in that. It takes stillness and clarity in the midst of turbulence to let the creative spirit of the universe do its perfect work.