"Continue to find joy in your life and bring joy to others. You are truly Good News for the suffering poor."
Author, Declan Coyle, is one of the most positive and affirming persons I have ever met. It is from this belief, in the goodness that is in everyone and the capacity of everyone to be positive, self- affirming and affirming of others, that he has developed a basic philosophy of positive living which he names, “The Green Platform.”
The contrasts he makes in his book, Living the Green Platform, is with the opposite, the negative “Red Platform,” where many people unfortunately stand. An attitude to life we are challenged to leave and transfer to the positive “The Green Platform.”
Declan Coyle is a brilliant and inspiring public speaker. He sees positivity almost everywhere and calls on everyone he comes in contact with to step away from a “Red Platform” of negativity that has a defeatist attitude and a loss of self-confidence and self-worth to a conscious effort to have a positive view of one’s self and life itself. It’s a very real challenge to live out.
His affirming statement to find joy in life is an important one, especially for our team at the *PREDA Foundation in the Philippines, where we are faced with many social and personal problems of the neglected, abused children and poor.
This challenging situation, where children as young as ten are routinely and casually imprisoned behind bars, in dreadful circumstances, and many children are trafficked into the sex industry, and many more are sexually assaulted, can become natural at times to feel hopeless. But Declan Coyle is right, we can find hope, joy and happiness in the lives of the positive people and events around us.
After rescue, affirmation, therapy and freedom, the children do change and transition into a more positive self-affirming way of understanding and base their good choices on this.
In our training program at PREDA, we follow "The Green Platform" principles, and teach the children who see themselves as victims of brutality and abuse, to throw out the negative "Red Platform" feelings of hatred and anger and nuture emotional relief by choosing to embrace the positive values that we can show them, that they already have within themselves. This is transforming. It brings a great sense of inner freedom.
This is what I have learnt from my friend Declan - think and act positively especially when the negative aspects of the world challenge us.
When others fail us, we need to choose to take a positive attitude or we fail ourselves and others. We can choose our response. We can take responsibility for ourselves. With positive determination and a will to avoid falling into despair and blaming ourselves or others for everything that goes wrong, we can learn to choose wisely and live positively with responsibility for our own decisions.
In our work at PREDA, it is the children who recover, who bring us renewed joy and hope. I cannot forget one of the many abused children, at 11 years of age, her parents had separated. She was continually sexually abused by her father and was taken from place to place whenever neighbours became suspicious of the relationship. The young girl was defeated, under her father's power and control.
At 14, she became pregnant to her father and gave birth in a local government hospital. Yet no one challenged the father when he signed a document of live birth to say he was the father of the baby. And yet there were people of concern in the village when she returned with the child.
Concerned members of community contacted the *PREDA child rescue team, who immediately rescued the mother and baby to the safety and caring staff at the PREDA Home for Girls. The girl's father was arrested and is in gaol and on trial.
Today, a year later, with help and support, therapy, positive affirmation, encouragement and inspiration, typical of "The Green Platform", the young teenage mother and the child are well and safe, with a hopeful attitude for the future. The young mother's recovery has brought us joy too.
As Declan Coyle writes in the preface of his latest book, Living the Green Platform: "The Green Platform is an inner place where we consciously choose all that is positive, uplifting, creative joyful, inspiring, compassionate and generous. It is where we generate positive energy and choose actions that bring joy to others."
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Declan Coyle’s excellent life changing books The Green Platform and Living the Green Platform are available from ballpointpress1@gmail.com |
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As Declan says: "The power to choose how to respond to a given situation is at the heart of The Green Platform. We can choose our response. What makes us truly human is the power to choose, free will, and the power of reason to direct that choice with wisdom. This power is what will empower each and every one of us and transform our lives."
Fr Shay Cullen SSC has been a missionary in the Philippines since 1969 and is the Founder of the PREDA - People's Recovery Empowerment and Development Assistance Foundation. For more information please visit: www.preda.org.