Contagious Love Experiment / Vets Turn To Love

OFF THE WIRE
CONTAGIOUS LOVE EXPERIMENT / VETS TURN TO LOVE

As veterans we were programed to kill but as children we were wired to love. The dilemma of PTSD is that fear and hate short circuit our original wiring and we no longer can accept or give love and trust virtually no one. By taking responsibility for love we can, in essence, restore our original wiring and become fully functioning and loving human beings again: Allen L Roland

Many veterans with PTSD cannot accept love for they feel they do not deserve love and they continually sabotage their joy for the same reason ~ their hearts have closed and they live in the Gray Zone where no light can penetrate and no one dare enter.

As a therapist and group leader working with veterans with PTSD ~ I find that unworthiness is the common deep seeded characteristic of veterans who have been short circuited from love by fear, self hatred and anger. The only antidote for unworthiness is gratefulness which begins with the people who have always loved us and ends with ourselves as well as compassion for our own quest to reunite with our original wiring of joy, intention and purpose.

Which leads me to the Contagious Love Experiment where two Iraq Vets also found out that love conquers fear and hate ~ they then began to spread it by journeying across the country with their message of love and peace.

On February 28, 2010 ~ Nadya Williams wrote an article in Truthout entitled Turning Point: When Soldiers Have Had Enough in which she wrote of these two young veterans of the Iraq War, Josh Stieber and Conor Curran, during part of their six months of walking and biking from the East Coast to the West to engage in dialogue about war and to become involved in community service along the way.

Excerpt: " Neither young man spoke of killing anyone, and no one from the audience asked. But each spoke of turning points when they decided they could not continue as soldiers. For Josh this was a gradual process, but for Conor it came during his second tour while conducting random searches with his squad for weapons caches in Ramadi, without adequate intelligence. They set upon a home with an exceptionally beautiful garden and proceeded to tear it apart and dig it up. "Then the man of the house came out with a tray and served us all tea!" said Conor. "He spoke English and wanted to be our friend. He showed love to us and we were terrorizing him " Thus the seed for "The Contagious Love Experiment" was planted.... Conor and Josh had many encounters along the roads of America since the spring, but the one that stood out for them was meeting a Vietnam War veteran who told them, "Instead of uniting against a common enemy, we should unite for a common goal ~ peace."
http://www.truthout.org/turning-point-when-soldiers-have-had-enough57257

Josh and Conor are perfect examples of what happens to veterans who emerge from the Grey Zone of unworthiness into the light of gratefulness along with the need to be in service from a place of love and celebration.

And the reason love can indeed become contagious is because it resides deepest within each one of us and is not only the driving force of evolution but connects us all through a Unified Field of love and soul consciousness ~ whose principle property is the universal urge to unite.