A Year of Peace

It has now been one year since our move to the beautiful orchard, winery, and tourist city of Penticton, BC.

After moving in, while passing our empty moving boxes on to someone who was moving out of the city I asked them why? They cited the crime rate which is very high; 236% above the national average.

The crime rate is high in Penticton because of the large number of homeless people who congregate here between our beaches for the 5-month temperate period. They’re the ones mostly responsible for both the violent, and property, crimes in the city. Property crime, in particular, up 264% over the national average, is easy to morally and ethically compromise for someone in a survival frame of mind.

We’ve got “Crime Clime” when it’s not winter and -27 below. Also, the Okanagan Correctional Center is about 20 miles south, in Oliver, so time-served felons are routinely released straight onto our streets and, due to a housing crises, homelessness in the area increased by 45% last year.

More mental health beds are needed for the homeless in every community in British Columbia.

No longer being physically able to run miracles, similar to last summer’s mindful wind-bending firefighting experiments, I decided to try my hand at recurrently mentally holding the thought of “Peace” for Penticton as the epicenter of Peaceful (Okanagan) Valley.

As a matter of record I mentioned that I was doing this during this interview on Peach City Radio. Therein I mentioned that you can’t give anything to anyone that you don’t have yourself so, if you find Peace elusive, first try holding the thought for 15 seconds, build up to a minute, and so on…

Peace is part of the path and destination in the spiritual philosophy of both the east and the west and one of the ways that you can tell who is ‘walking the walk’ and who isn’t.

Peace is inherent in meditation and meditation has long been said to be a good practice for infusing Peace in a larger geographic area without even thinking about it as a conscious blessing. Thinking a solitary positive thought, like “Peace”, is similar, in discipline, to maintaining thought-free consciousness during meditation. This is another of my experiments in mindful manifestation.

Sometimes the thought and feeling of Peace transmutes into Love. Peace, like Joy, feels proximal to Love and Love permeates many, if not all, of my mindful manifestation experiments.

So now one year of this exercise has elapsed and it’s time to look back at any changes in the crime statistics. The only evidence available so far is a Global News report published on the 10th of November; Crime Down. Therein it states that crime has been down for the last three quarters coinciding exactly with one year ago when I first undertook this mindful exercise.

Coincidence, maybe? With homelessness up 45% it seems challenging to consider maintaining continued success. The odds of it ending seem extraordinarily high.

What has happened in Penticton crime-wise since November is currently a mystery but I did see something, a couple of months ago, about the year-over-year crime rate being down by 32%.

So far, the results of this peaceful experiment appear optimistic and there’s every reason to be encouraged and… …to continue with it.

You’re invited along to try. There’s a homelessness crisis exploding in Penticton BC and these precious souls can use every little bit of the Love and Peace that you can spare. Send positive thoughts of protracted Love and Peace to Penticton and Peaceful (Okanagan) Valley.

There’s nothing to lose but stress.