My Vision

“A new leadership is needed to draw on, strengthen, and integrate the vision of the writers of the United States Constitution as if it were a living, evolving document. The new leadership develops the feminine, creative, imaginative and spiritual side of self and then integrates with the male side of self in everyone. An important part of the vision of new leadership is to bring healing to the family as the first step of humanity’s healing on the planet. The relationship of man and woman being equal is missing from the Constitution. The new model of leadership starts with the healing of the relationship between man and woman.”
–The Holy Spirit, speaking to me on Mt. Tamalpais, Mill Valley, California, 1986

“The Phoenix I am offering is a leadership and development model, sensitive and responsive to the divided society in which we live.”
–Excerpted from A Mantle of Roses: A Woman’s Journey Home to Peace, Virginia Swain, 2004

Since my first memoir was published in 2004, I have lived new chapters in my story. I have learned to grow in my knowledge and experience of inborn gifts and talents since I was too busy to see Bobby on that fateful day in August 1979. Bobby’s death left me reeling, hopeless, suicidal.

After my awakening of Love, Bobby’s death taught me how to live. I feel closer to Bobby now than I ever have, having experienced heaven as much closer than I thought, as my father taught me. I have also learned to access my inner Voice through that tragedy. And because of Bobby and then the death of my father and my marriage, I was broken open by the darkness to become aware of and know the Love of God. I still have to step off the treadmill when my life gets too busy or if I’ve of fended someone with unconscious behavior. Needing to reflect on next steps is always very important.

I have discovered a meaningful spirituality for my life. Its resources are beyond my wildest imaginings. A living economy is necessary, as I learned on Mt. Tamalpais, in the vision of the American Sun. We need an economic system which consciously aligns the resources of the earth with the needs of natural and human systems. Sustainable growth and change comes from such connection as I learned from Mt. Tam being within me as well as the Hopi Prophecy teachings.

With my understanding and my experience of the Phoenix, I offer the Peacebuilding Process online as an America’s Soul Café by empowering participants to become clear what they can offer America’s Soul to address the problems of the environment and ending the cycle of violence.

Participants have offered commitments to help with racism as people with white skin still persecute those who are different from them. White people need help cleaning the lens through which they see another person.

Hispanic and Native Peoples, African Americans, Arab and Asian peoples are all important to the mosaic of our world and need recognition for their worth. Once there is no “us” or “them”, we will have achieved the goal of all of us being brothers and sisters. We then could extend our understanding into our foreign policy.

I have stayed close to the earth since Mt. Tamalpais told me “the mountain is within you” in 1987. I have lived a journey of the spiritual integrated with the practical, inspired by Elizier Bouffier, Dag Hammarskjöld and Thomas Banyacya. Out of that time, I found answers that have brought me to where I am and continue to guide me as I grow and train new Reconciliation Leaders.

I still work to transform my inner unconscious unhealed conflicts. I have learned the benefit of going to Christ through my inner Voice for healing, comfort and discernment. I have also learned how to address and reconcile the cycle of violence within myself and within the resistant systems in which I work.

I apply my learning to my nation now as it enters a critical period of its history and its destiny. Will we reconcile our past in order to go forward? Will we take responsibility for ourselves and our actions? Will we honor our vision of freedom and respect for all people? Will we share our resources with others as a new leadership model?

As an American citizen deeply connected to the United Nations, I feel responsible for working with others to heal my country’s past with America’s Soul Cafés as well as offering resources for its future path—a 200-year present as taught me by my mentor, Dr. Boulding. Our destiny must be aligned with the world’s destiny. The most important part of my new intention is that I connect to my inner Voice and the soul of the person or group with whom I am working. Together, we dream for what we want for our world.

As practical idealists, Reconciliation Leaders use their imagination to draw an image, make a timeline backwards and an action plan to achieve our dreams. I am now clear that Christ handing me the Mantle of Roses has led me to a new definition of healing, church and leadership.

My hope is that the Celebration Model of 1992 could be a forum for political action in a new way. Political action is one of consciousness-making and -raising through the shift in consciousness of global community, replacing the politics of power and self-aggrandizement. The politician is an instrument of collaborative change making and peaceful evolution. The leader is reconciler and instrument of peace.

When I facilitate the Peacebuilding Process for America, my dream is that
America’s Soul Café can be the way to help Americans join the Phoenix, be heard and be freed from feelings of alienation, isolation and disillusionment. It is important to take down the barriers and walls.

My peak experiences given to me by God in meditation gave me an understanding of Love and Oneness for my soul development and healing:

Being broken open by the darkness of death in 1979 when my brother was killed when the light on the water suffused every cell of my body.

The Mantle of Roses Christ gave me in a waking vision became my image, protection and invitation to healing in 1986.

Restoring faith in my goodness when Mary came to me to tell me who I am so I could help others be who they are. She also told me not to worship her, only her son Jesus.

When I was visiting the Baltic Sea in Sweden, I reached into the Sea and received a flow of words and an experience of Oneness with the Russian people. It was during the cold war in 1987; In 1992, I used words from the flow of words in the Earth Charter presentation in the Vigil of the Celebration at the UN as part of my master’s thesis project.

After 18 months of visiting Mt. Tamalpais in 1986-87 and receiving the Holy Spirit’s invitation to redefine leadership and help the Constitution evolve to include people of color and women. I had a sense of the mountain ‘being within me’ and words telling me I didn’t need to come there anymore.

Being called to the UN in 1991 during the Persian Gulf Crisis with clarity without fear.

Elizier Bouffier planting 12 acorns daily to heal his grief, transforming the landscape of his part of France to a verdant forest.

Loving experiences with street children in Rio de Janeiro during the Earth Summit 1992.

Meeting Thomas Banyacya, Hopi Elder, and being invited to a new vision for America in the Hopi Prophecy, later incorporated into Reconciliation Leadership.

Dag Hammarskjold’s meditation room being in the “center of stillness surrounded by silence”; redefining security to begin reforming the United Nations.

God comforting me during 9/11 World Trade Center attacks. That night a dream of a Phoenix rising from the ashes of Ground Zero requesting healing to redefine American leadership.

Re-visioning the relationship between man and woman as the first step to redefine leadership when I met Joseph in 1993.

Answering the need in the United Nations for the second step to redefine leadership when I started being a Reconciliation Leader in 1992, then offering to teach it to others in 2001 after 9/11.

Feeling led to spend five years in a high school where I used mediation and expressive art to help students move through their conflicts.
Hearing the Grandmothers speak to me after learning my grandson Alexander Daniel was coming in 2003.

Listening to White Buffalo Woman as she appeared in 2005 to teach me and give me a bigger perspective of the earth changes coming.

Using expressive art as a way both to de-escalate my feelings as well as empower my visions.

Now I’m being called to offer a spiritual renaissance to the United States by facilitating America’s Soul Cafés as the next step in reforming the UN.

Will you join me, dear reader, to awaken the American promise practically and emotionally through the Spiritual Renaissance, America’s Soul Cafés, an implementation of the Peacebuilding Process? Will you do your inner work and follow your inner Voice of Love to help the United States?

I am feeling the urgency of the American promise being awakened as we hear the angry voices of the disenfranchised and isolated in contrast with the voices of the 1%, the wealthy who have enjoyed the benefits of free enterprise and globalization.

I invite you to join me on my new blog and website, VirginiaSwain.com as well as the Institute for Global Leadership (www.global-leader.org) I founded and directed after 2001 when the Phoenix came in the dream.
The Sacred is an untapped resource until it is recognized and named. If reconciliation is to be possible among people, it first must take place within each human being. Tapping into the Sacred in oneself allows an experience of Oneness. The Sacred offers a resource for healing each person’s deep wounds of a disillusioned soul.

On October 13, 2013, I invited three other Reconciliation Leaders, Sam Onapa, Anna Sandidge and Sarah Sayeed, to co-present with me at a meeting of the UN Interagency Framework Team for Preventive Action. Hosted by the United Nations Development Program Bureau for Crisis Prevention and Recovery, a framework of UN agencies, programs, funds, departments and offices to coordinate integrated initiatives for early preventative action, our meeting was a call to action to Reconciliation Leadership and the Peacebuilding Process.

I have written of the Peacebuilding Process in the Balkans and Philippines. I conceived and applied the Peacebuilding Process to be a deep,transformative process conducted in prayerful partnership with the Sacred. As facilitators, Reconciliation Leaders listen and hear positive and proactive solutions to challenges. As healing brings closure, it also builds bonded relationships and community beyond team building whereby tasks are accomplished because people really care for one another.

The Peacebuilding Process revisions the future so that all people can work together, with our Creator, to achieve the common good. Reconciliation allows for forgiveness by reuniting victims and perpetrators to one other. It is a Process to identify each person’s unique wisdom and talents where all Americans can extend their contributed wisdom as a patch on the patchwork quilt of the Divine Plan. Soul force remains a powerful alternative to armed force.

I recalled the Commission on Global Governance’s report emphasizing that “the world needs leaders made strong by vision, sustained by ethics and revealed by political courage that looks to the longer term and future generations for whom the present is held in trust,” and showed that the Reconciliation Service had developed the Peacebuilding Process to provide individuals and groups with the perspectives, tools and techniques for multilateral approaches to sustainable development. I was so gratified that the room was overflowing with delegates and international civil servants and non-governmental representatives taking notes.

I hope my work will help others know who they are—so that by a ripple effect, they can help others be who they already are.

I am going to my own country with an action plan to bring the spiritual to the practical. I still hear,

Be still and know I am God.

I am on the right path.

Will you join me to awaken the American soul by awakening your soul first?

Will you come to America’s Soul Cafés and join the spiritual renaissance of the Peacebuilding Process of Reconciliation to Develop Political Will to empower “We the People”?

Will you join with me and the Phoenix, dear reader, on a soul journey to redefine your life and leadership so that faith in America can be restored?