“What would it be like if the entire world spoke the language of love?”

This is a question Kay Sandberg asked on a recent Awakin Call. It became evident during the call that Kay lives her life around this question. Kay is founder, chief visionary, and president of Global Force for Healing. The vision of Global Force for Healing is to express the power of love and compassion as driving forces in global transformation. The primary project right now is called the Healthy Compassionate Birthing Project, which provides organizational support to, and connects, grassroots projects and birthing clinics around the world. Kay has also been a consultant to the Dalai Lama Foundation located in Redwood City, California, and has worked with His Holiness's book, Beyond Religion.

Kay’s life offers powerful guidelines on how we can all speak the language of love.


Community

“Love is a hologram, so by this loving act, it actually impacts love at all levels, and the well-being of the community, all the way up to Pachamama, Mother Earth, the planet,” says Sandberg when asked about the numerous humanitarian projects she is involved in. For Kay, speaking the language of love involves seeing everyone, even the planet, as our kin. We are all one community.



When she worked on a book with the Dalai Lama, her main takeaway was how we are all connected: “The main lesson is to awaken as global citizens and to get beyond ‘us and them’, particularly as it's expressed through religious practice, to ‘we’. And to see that love and compassion --- not only see, but to embrace, to live, that love and compassion are the essential ingredients for a healthy world.”

Kay’s sense of connectedness doesn’t end with global citizens. She also actively works to maintain the love and connection with the planet and nature. For years, she volunteered with The Pachamama Alliance. Kay reflects on the impact of that volunteer work: “So it did transform me to be as involved as I was in the Pachamama Alliance for many years, when I could embrace the totality of Pachamama, which means Mother Earth, Father Sky, and all of life for all of time."

So the first guideline of speaking the language of love is to see everyone and everything as part of our family.

Contribution

When we see everything as connected or part of us, we feel a responsibility to contribute to the welfare of the whole. Kay learned this lesson at a very young age when she had a near-death experience of almost drowning: “I knew by age 12 I was here for a reason, that I had survived these things, and I didn't know what the purpose was, but I knew there was a purpose.”

Later in life, this sense of purpose was revealed to Kay in a mystical experience she had in Brazil. Here is Kay’s account of the experience:

“In the summer of 2001, I thought I was going to The House of John of God, Casa de Dom Inacio, or House of Saint Ignatius, in rural Brazil, Abadiania, Brazil, outside of Brasilia, where a world-renowned Brazilian healer goes into deep trance and, when he's in deep trance, basically brings forth wisdom and advice from other healers, mostly South American men, and also several saints.

…So when I was sitting in meditation one day waiting to go in for the one-minute or two-minute audience with John-of-God, I basically felt this presence around my right ear between my right ear and shoulder. I can still feel it now when I talk about it. And the presence --- and of course we were all in silence, this was within my own being --- basically identified itself as the consciousness or the spirit of Mother Teresa.
What my next assignment was, was to found what at that time she called the ‘Global Fund for Healing’…And that I didn't have to worry about what it was, but to basically just keep saying yes, and also study her teachings. I didn't have to emulate her lifestyle, so I kind of breathed a sigh of relief at that, because I felt like intuitively, in other lifetimes I have taken that vow of poverty, and that there was a different path for me in this lifetime. I was about 50 when this happened. She said, ‘The reason you're still in the San Francisco Bay Area, even though you've been trying to leave to move to a small town or a rural area, is that some of the allies that you need to learn from and ground this huge vision, live in the Bay Area’. A couple of names, like Doctor Rachel Naomi Remen, I literally met the next day after getting home.”



Like Mother Teresa, Kay Sandberg felt the responsibility to help others in need. Kay feels this sense of responsibility and purpose as a blessing in her life: “So many of my friends suffer because they don’t feel that they have a sense of purpose.”

Healing

Kay’s main channel of contributing to the well-being of all centers around healing: “Healing as a return to wholeness.” She finds great joy and purpose working to support loving, gentle birth as a force for global transformation thought love: “I believe that how we are in birth, that is, what leads up to birth, the birth experience itself, and what happens especially in those first several weeks, imprints a baby for the rest of her life, or his life. It also makes a transformative difference in the lives of everyone that is present to that birth or well-wishers for that new being's birth.”



Unfortunately, healthy, gentle births are not a reality for large numbers of women and children, since over “800 women a day and 8,200 newborns, defined as birth through day 28, are dying needlessly in childbirth.” Through the Healthy Compassionate Birthing Project, Kay works tirelessly to prevent this unnecessary suffering. “It doesn't have to be that way. Ninety-nine percent of the maternal and infant deaths currently happen in the most under-served, so-called developing world. Ninety percent of the mothers and babies who die in childbirth could be saved by very simple pre-natal care, good nutrition, safe environment, and then post-natal care for mom and baby. Ninety percent of those deaths are preventable… I realized that the biggest or at least the first impact that we could make with grassroots projects would be to offer ‘voice and choice’, to offer loving, gentle birth as a universal human right to those who are least-well-served or completely unserved by the current medical system.”



Speaking the language of love doesn’t always come out in the form of voice or communication. It often emerges as service. Kay saw mothers and infants suffering and immediately acted to relieve that suffering: “I have so much love and respect and want to do whatever I can for them.”

At the end of the call, Kay blessed all the listeners with a prayer that summed up what drives her life and her work:


"May all beings everywhere be filled with loving presence; be held in loving presence. May all beings everywhere know your deepest essence is loving presence. May all beings everywhere touch a natural and great peace. May all beings everywhere, starting with everyone on this call, awaken and be free. Amen”