Conspiracy

Are we being controlled by forces outside of ourselves?

Conspiracy theories are interesting and popular. It doesn’t matter what side of the political spectrum you are, or what your culture or religion, your culture probably has some choice conspiracy theories.

Is the religious right conspiring to enslave you? Is the ultra-progressive left working in secret to allow Satan to take over the world? Is there dark money or a deep state that is working to take away your rights? Is corporate America – or the 1% – conspiring to strip you of your freedoms (for their profit by the way)?

Is the government secretly spreading diseases or covering up a plan to eliminate one or more segments of society through contrails or water-borne pathogens? Was the moon landing a hoax? How about the Holocaust or the Crucifixion?

Are we really being ruled by Lemurians or Atlantians or Arcturians or Pleiadians? Did the Egyptians perfect space travel? Are aliens here among us? Is the government hiding information about UFOs?

I find all this amusing and it makes me wonder why, no matter what side of any debate one is on, there is a deep suspicion about things not being what they seem.

Why do we do this? Here is one idea.

Each of us came to have a physical or 3-D life through the power of a deep intention. It doesn’t matter if you see this traditionally, as in God made us, or if you see it through a different cultural lens, as in my Karma brought me to this point, or if you see it through a more new age lens, as in me and my guides planned this life for me for some purpose.

The power of the intention is pretty much beyond our current ability to comprehend.

Up until now, at least, the execution of that intention required each of us to be very forgetful. We have had to believe the illusion of the world 100% or we wouldn’t be able to keep the world going. We could not afford to remember who we really are, partly because if we did, we wouldn’t be able to collectively keep the story of the 3-D world going.

We have had to believe fully in our perceptions of separation. We have had to believe 100% in the perceptions of time and space. Maybe we still need this to keep our reality intact. Not sure.

But we are not separate. We are a part of a unified whole. We are made of a Love that has never left us. We are part of a continuity that supplies and supports us fully, even if our worldly perceptions don’t match that description.

Deep in the hearts of our spirits, we know that Oneness to be the truth. There is indeed, something going on beneath or beyond the truth we perceive with our five earthly senses. Beyond our minds and the stories we tell ourselves and each other, there is a deeper level of existence that is just outside the range of our worldly perceptual ability.

This is where the conspiracy theories originate. Our personalities make up stories about this feeling of something more going on that are consistent with the overall stories we tell about the “realities” of life on Earth – and all too often consistent with our propensity to scan for danger and focus on the scary and negative.

We can’t describe or refer to this inner knowing in a direct way, the way it’s hard to describe a dream that made so much sense when we were dreaming it, but upon trying to describe it to someone else in a waking state, it makes little sense at all. So our brains and our cultures and our personalities devise stories of some other force that is working where we can’t see it.

Once we find a story that helps us make sense of our deeply shrouded inner knowing, we spend a lot of energy trying to find evidence that supports the story.

Try this on the next time you find yourself engaged in a conspiracy theory conversation.

Stay tuned….

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It All Comes Down to This

You may already know this about me, but I like to think.

I like to ask questions. I like to look for the questions beneath the answers and I keep digging until what I find makes sense.

For example, as a child I wondered why things and people die. Our family cat died when I was very little, so maybe that was one motivation for wondering about this. I don’t really remember the cat except that my grandmother seemed to think it was hilarious that it was named Whiskey. Made sense to me, it had these long whiskers…

I was not upset about the cat. It died in the night. My mom seemed to think it required a long, sober explanation. I was more curious about why she thought this than I was about the cat.

When I was six, and attending Vacation Bible School, I did ask a question or two, but the answers I got only led to more questions.

Around that time, another mother was driving carpool. She asked us if any of us had to use the bathroom before we drove off. She was very nervous about this and told us that it was important that we speak up if we had to go because if she started driving and we started peeing, and she had to stop short, the pee would get sucked back up into us and kill us.

I knew that she was lying to us, but I was pretty unmoved by her lie because I already knew that adults lied all the time – despite making a really big deal about telling the truth.

This was one area that didn’t make sense to me. It inspired me to ask myself what people meant when they talked about lying and truth.

All this is just to say that I have been digging down for a very long time, looking for stories that would hold up under scrutiny.

And it all seems to come down to this: we humans are carrying around a core belief that drives much of our behavior, thought and feeling. This belief is a mistaken belief. It is not true, but it operates the same as a universal truth, just as, for example, if a person believes she is ugly, every thought and decision will be tainted by that belief, and her actions in the world will be different from those of a person who believes she is beautiful.

Every one of us carries around a belief that translates to “I’m not good enough.” It takes on a variety of flavors: People betray me. People abandon me. I am not strong, young, old, healthy or smart enough to_____. I have to earn love. I have to be good so god will love me or so I can get my reward in the afterlife. I have to tame my basic nature, which if left to itself would be greedy, slothful, angry, or ______. I have an addictive personality. I shouldn’t eat gluten, fat, sugar, salt or meat; I only crave them because I am weak or toxic. I have karma to work out. I made mistakes in my past lives.

We carry around our version of not good enough – and we project it out onto the world too.

For example, we see all kinds of not-enoughness around us. There isn’t enough money to fix our education system. There isn’t enough space for all the people here. There isn’t enough clean air or water. There isn’t enough kindness in the world.  And we see our sense of not-enoughness where we see people who are evil, twisted, greedy or rude. Or we see people who suffer or inflict suffering on others.

All of these stories arise from the feeling of not being enough.

But guess what? You are enough. I am enough. Just the way we are. We are good enough. We don’t have to strive to be better. We don’t have to struggle to fix things.

So why does the world appear to need so much fixing? Why do we have this innate drive to better ourselves?

The innate drive to blossom and improve is easily confused with an underlying sense of unworthiness. But it actually exists independent of the belief in our unworthiness. We entangle and confuse the two because our society LOVES stories of triumph over obstacles. So we invent an obstacle (I need to get better at _______in order to feel good enough) to overcome and then we meet our goal and for a minute, we feel like enough.

Only for a minute though. Then we let the story of needing to do and be more drive us towards more achievement.

The innate urge to blossom is another thing, and it’s an urge that makes life beautiful and interesting and fulfilling.

But why do we tie it to a story of not being good enough?

I think it’s because in the process of becoming a human – a spiritual being deciding, if you will, to have a human experience – we have had to believe fully in our separation from the unified field.

In Christian mythology we were “cast out” of the garden. Many cultures have their own version of “original sin.” To the human mind, why would someone get “cast out?” Because they were not worthy of staying in that garden. They had sinned, erred, fallen or were simply, by the nature of their being, unworthy. Or the person, in previous lives, had made mistakes and needs to atone for them in this life.

These stories are a sort of lazy way to help us maintain a sense of continuity in our perception of separation and therefore allow us to experience a life where we believe ourselves to be separate. Separate from each other. Separate from our god. Separate from the earth we live on.

It’s an interesting phenomenon because while some of us spend a lot of energy trying to re-connect, through earthly relationships, or through activism or religion or spiritual pursuits, we’re also working against ourselves subconsciously maintaining the sense of unworthiness that supports the illusion of life itself.

The question arises: Can we maintain our perceptions of life and release the sense of unworthiness that is a fundamental building block of those perceptions? Or: Can we fully understand our own value and worth and still have a life on Earth?

Some of us are getting closer to finding out.

I think it can be done, but it will require a kind of spiritual maturity that may be off-putting. Instead of relying on a deeply subconscious and automatic sense of unworthiness, we will have to rely on a more conscious execution of Presence and choice. We will have to actively choose to perceive separation, distance, time and all other characteristics of this 3-D experience. We will have to deeply connect with that other innate urge – the one that drives us to explore and blossom – and begin to use that as our inspiration. This is a harder row to hoe; It’s easier to rely on a default faulty belief. But it is also a much, much more fulfilling way to live.

Yes, I think we can do this. More, I think we are doing it. We are, as a species, shifting to deeper self-awareness and finding a deeper sense of our own innate value.

Stay tuned…

BEING WELL

‘Gonna lay down my burdens, down by the riverside…and study war no more.

Some of you may know that I do a Relax and Release meditation just about every day. I used to refer to it as a healing meditation, but soon realized that if I was focused on healing, the unspoken message is that there must be something to heal. So I changed how I refer to it.

Anyway, a few days ago I emerged from my meditation with the idea the “if I want to be well, I need to give up being sick.”

That thought quickly expanded to a lot of other areas. If I want to be wealthy, I need to give up being poor. If I want to have ease, I need to give up struggling. If I want to feel like I belong, I need to give up holding myself separate. If I want to be loved, I need to give up resisting love. If I want success, I need to give up failing.

If I want a world of peace, I need to give up war.

Whoa! What?

I am in love with the way this thought has been expanding in my consciousness for the past few days.

How do I give up being sick, or poor, or struggling or failing, or war?

First step? Acknowledge that those ideas are in here, firmly implanted by my culture, my karma, my beliefs.

Next? Explore where and what they are. Where is my belief in illness? What does it feel like? What stories surround it? Where am I clutching, hanging onto the stories? Where is my body tense? What do I react to with insistence that it is true? What feels closed to the idea of consistent, vibrant, wellbeing with no opposite? What evidence do I collect to support my limited belief?

Then? How can I relax there? How can I stop clutching?

Finally? Let it go. Release. This seems to take a while, but every day is easier.

Do you believe in sickness? Does it seem as if struggle, pain, violence or sadness are real?  The Goddess, the Sourceress, knows that truth is only what we feed to the Universe, so why continue studying illness, struggle, lack or war?

Stay tuned…

Awakening

When I was a kid I took piano lessons. I was already too buttoned up to have any real feel for the music, but I loved the mathematics of it and I loved making noise on the keyboard.

I remember a piece I had to learn. It was a piece I really liked; I felt like a pianist when I played it. My hands had to fly up and down the keyboard, cross over each other, and even though the piece was all arpeggios and super simple to play, it felt awesome.

The problem was that I wasn’t very good at piano, and I made a lot of mistakes. I practiced and practiced and seemed to get worse and worse. I had already had my dinner table experience, so, unconsciously I was already looking for the ways in which things turn out the opposite of what they seem. This idea kept me practicing long after I would have liked to give up.

Then suddenly, one day, I sat down and started the piece – and it flowed. I played it almost flawlessly. I’ll never forget how that felt.

I’m bringing this up today because there’s a lot of craziness in the world, and I hear a lot of talk about giving up. I also have breathed myself through many episodes of hopelessness and despair so deep that ending my life seemed like a better option than trying to face the overwhelming pain in the world.

It’s my nature to be a fleer rather than a fighter, and I am not afraid of dying, so checking out sometimes feels like a viable option. But here’s my point.

If we give up now, just because the odds seem overwhelming, we’ll be missing out on that feeling of flow when it comes.

Humans have been praying for this very set of circumstances for a very long time. A hundred years ago, the Spiritualists and Theosophists were praying for the Will of God to supplant the little will of man and for a New World Order. Fifty years ago at the birth of the modern-day New Age movement, we were praying for peace, harmony and an end to war.

And yes, it looks sometimes like we’re going in the wrong direction. But if you believe in prayer, in the power of mindset and intention, we have to be going in the direction we want, even if things look dismally the opposite. So what is actually happening here?

Could it be that we are closer than we think?

I think that we cannot fully emerge into the world we dream of until we have done some major housecleaning. The process of visioning and then embodying a peaceful world is the process of awakening. And we cannot fully awaken if there are still dark corners of unresolved murkiness in our consciousness.

The world and the shifting and changing and chaos and apparent negativity is graphically pointing out to us the darkest corners of our own spirits. Oh, I know. I can hear you say it: I don’t hate. I am not prejudiced. I don’t lie. I am not fearful or greedy.

But this is the important point. Yes, you do and yes you are. So am I. As long as I can perceive such things in my world, I can be sure that these things are lurking in me. I don’t want and/or cannot see them in here – so I project them onto the world and people out there.

The only healing that can take place is the healing we can do for ourselves IN HERE.

It’s not so bad. Maybe only a few more practice sessions, as shitty as they feel right now, and then we will sit down one day and the piece will flow.

Stay tuned…

Inside Out

When  I was 7 or 8, I was sitting with my family at our dining room table. We moved around a bit, so I know I was between 6 and 11, because those were the years we lived in that house.

My sister (older) and my brother (younger, probably about two) were goofing around. She was poking at him and he was laughing in that delightful giddy laugh of toddlers. There is something about that joyous sound that just requires everyone to smile.

But that evening I was not smiling. I don’t recall what I was irked about. I got irked a lot when I was a kid. What I do remember is that I was feeling desperately, horribly alone. My parents were doing whatever they did, chipping away at each other from either end of the table and my sister and my brother had each other.

I was alone. And worse, I couldn’t see any conceivable way to ever not be desperately horribly alone.  My innards recoiled at the way my parents talked to each other and the electric hostility that almost always crackled between them. My sister knew how to play and make the baby laugh. I was too serious to feel competent at playing. Besides, although the baby was giggling, I knew for a fact that when my sister did teasing, poking tickling stuff like that to me I hated it. I could never be comfortable playing that way with a baby.

I thought I was broken. Not quite human. I didn’t know how to play and I didn’t know how to bicker. I didn’t know how to fit in.

I worried about this a lot when I was young. And this particular evening I was fully immersed in my invisibleness and my misery.

But suddenly, something came over me. It’s hard to describe, like trying to describe an oddball dream. I remember being aware of the room, the hutch behind me, built by my grandpa, and the collection of tiny brass miniatures standing in a row on the back edge, the buttercup china dishes that were stored in the lower cabinet. I have no idea why this was important, but it formed a sort of gestalt, a holistic view of the dining room scene that I felt more than I saw.

And I knew, right then, that everything was OK. The words I heard were “everything always turns out the opposite of how it seems.” The feeling was one of peace. For a moment I could lay down my worry and my judgment and just be OK. For a moment I felt held like I had always longed to be held. For a moment I fully understood the advanced spiritual concept – which I would not even hear about for at least 10  more years – that our world, our lives, are illusion, that none of it is real and that appearances are very deceiving.

I had no mental level understanding of what was taking place, but I had a spiritual/energetic knowing about how it all works. I did not have a vocabulary to explain what I have known since that moment, and I did not have a tribe within which I could explore this huge idea. The understanding of IT ALL, came to me in ways a little girl could experience – a feeling of safety and words that soothed my distress.

I have spent all the ensuing years going after grounding and understanding and trying to articulate the knowing that came to me all at once in my family’s dining room..

So here’s a game to play. What if everything is the opposite of what it seems?

What if instead of being held helplessly to the ground by gravity, we are actually engaged in a struggle to stay grounded and not float away?

What if instead of struggling to remain healthy and live a long time, the struggle we are actually engaged in is all about creating the experiences of illness and death?

What if the money that we describe as being super-concentrated among a small number of people, is actually only distributed that way because the rest of us are actively engaged in pushing it away from ourselves and into those corners?

What if instead of educating children, what we really need to do is to allow ourselves to be educated by them?

What if telling stories of our victimhood doesn’t liberate us (as in: we must never forget or history will repeat itself!!), but only mires us down into more and more victimhood?

Stay calm! It’s only a game.

I know that questions like this can trigger all kinds of reactions. I know because I have lived with such reactions for most of my life. I encourage you to spend some time exploring these questions, or others like them, deeply. This isn’t an “oh yeah, cool idea” kind of game. It’s a depth game.

If you’re not willing to play, I totally understand. Just ignore me and go about your life. I’m just a crazy nobody anyway.

But if you are willing to play, if something about those statements tickles your intuition, then maybe you’re becoming a goddess too.

Stay tuned…

Authentic Creation

A friend asked me the other day if I still thought about the life I used to have before the relationship ended which spawned this blog.

It got me thinking about that time. I remember that the words, “I just want my life back,” kept reverberating in my skull. Now, all these years later, I was inspired to ask myself just exactly what it was that I had been longing for and the answer kind of surprised me.

I thought I was wishing for my relationship to get back to what it had been, but the truth is I didn’t really like what it had been. I liked what I imagined it could be.

Have you ever done this?

I didn’t know it then but now I realize that I was trying to control the conditions of my life to try to create something that I didn’t have the self-awareness, courage or power to create authentically.

I think just about everybody does this. We think we can control the trajectory of our health, for example, by taking vitamins or getting treatments or exercising more, or not eating sugar. But the trajectory of our health is created in an unseen world directed by our mindset and the stories we reiterate inside, the beliefs and attitudes and history that we hold. We can’t powerfully control that trajectory through our physical actions alone.

Every Science of Mind practitioner knows this. Most New Agers would agree with the statement in theory.

To create greater levels of health, wealth, wisdom and love in our lives, we have to commit to these things energetically, and we have to be diligent about being aware of how we are applying our energy to the conditions we are creating.

This commitment is how we create authentically and it takes a vast level of courage to do it.

What I was trying to do was to make the other people in my life be the force that created the conditions I thought I wanted. What the health-seeker is trying to do is to control the body’s intake of substances and/or output of effort, thinking that those physical actions are what creates the condition of health.

But the physical level of our bodies and our relationships are not creative by nature. They are reactive; they play out the stories we give them.

The courage comes in when we have to face down the tremendous momentum of our cultural suppositions.

What would it take to commit to health – no matter what you eat?

What would it take for me to identify, express and go ahead and create my dreams, no matter what the others in my life say or think or do –or don’t do?

Can I commit to finding and tapping into Universal Power, laying bare my soul in commitment to my ideals, and allowing the Power that creates worlds to take me on its ride to my goals – without trying to control the ride?

I can. And I am.

Stay tuned..

Boredom

I love boredom. It’s a rare commodity these days. Instead of a condition that once crept up on us, it is one we have to actively cultivate if we want it at all.

Once many years ago, before I owned my first cell phone – even before I had acquired a pager (remember those?) – I went on a four day retreat and I took nothing with me that could be considered input. No books. No music. I did take lots of paper, pens, colored pencils, and my hiking shoes. I did get really bored. It took a lot of effort to not pick up one of the books in the library of the place where I was staying. But I also created some really cool poems and a couple of drawings I still like.

I was thinking about that time this morning and I realized that I almost can’t imagine doing that again. I spend so much time on my computer and phone, that it would feel beyond weird to go off for four full days without at least having them with me. Even if I resolved to not turn them on, which I probably would do in the end anyway, I would want to have them with me.

They connect me with the world, with my family and my friends. Even when I am hiking in the wilderness, I have my phone with me.

It’s weird. I have a whistle that I take with me on long hikes. I carry it just in case I fall or some other unanticipated circumstance finds me and I need help. The sound of a whistle carries far and it is how I would flag down help if I needed it. Yet, I would feel more naked and vulnerable without my phone, than without my whistle – even if the place where I am going has no cell service, where the whistle would be much more useful.

And it’s not just the computer or phone. I rarely sit still any more, unless I am purposefully sitting down to meditate or take a nap. There’s always something going on. I grab the next paragraph in the book I’m reading, or I pick up a magazine, or check Instagram (there might be priceless photos of my grandkids that I haven’t seen yet!). If I’m thinking of what to write, I’m likely playing Spider Solitaire while I think. While I drink my morning tea, I’m also doing a crossword puzzle.

So if I want boredom, I have to practice giving it some space to develop. You might ask why I would do that in this very busy life. It’s because the real creative thought can only arise from the quiet space of boredom.

It occurs to me that maybe we, the people of Earth, haven’t come up with solutions to some of our difficult problems because we haven’t taken enough time to sit quietly cultivating boredom and seeing what creative thoughts come up in it. Maybe we have so much trouble being civil to one another because we are always on the go, go, go, and we don’t take the time to reflect or to find peace inside – it feels so unusual to not be doing something. Maybe we don’t appreciate each other because we haven’t sat with ourselves enough.

I realize I miss it; I miss sometimes feeling bored. So I’ll schedule some time this weekend to go sit outside without my phone, without my book, without even my journal and see what happens.

I’ll whistle if I need you.

Stay tuned…

EVOLUTION

I’m not going to argue the point about whether or not we are evolving. I have addressed this in other places and from my perspective, we are certainly evolving. We are each evolving personally and we are evolving collectively – as a whole earth system.

Evolution is likely a messy process. There are bound to be uncomfortable changes and strange periods where things don’t make sense. I’ve been working with people for a very long time and there are some characteristics of people who weather change gracefully, which, if we choose to develop them can help us through personal and global shifting. Here’s what I’ve seen.

It takes:

Courage:  Of course we’re going to need courage. We will need to face things that are unprecedented. Evolution implies encountering things that are brand new – never heard of before. The subconscious mind is terrified of this and tends to label new things as monstrous. Even scarier, we will have to face things within ourselves – our tendency to judge, our intolerance and biases, our fears and need to control. And it requires courage to face these things.

How can we develop courage? The best way is to make a practice of doing new things, or doing familiar things in new ways. Then just notice your physical, mental and emotional reactions to the newness.  Teach those frightened inner aspects to relax and breathe. Hold your own hand, like an ideal mom would and build your courage one step at a time. Start small. I once had a client who was very frightened and resistant to changing. He started out with simple actions, like reaching for the shampoo in his morning shower with his non-dominant hand.

Ability to stand in unknowing – non-judgment: One of the hardest things we ever have to do is to stand firmly in a state of unknowing. Our minds like to analyze and figure out how things are going to unfold. Our bodies like to act and move.

There is an art to standing and just being present with whatever is, without trying to understand it or control it any way.

Many meditation practices can help develop this inner art. Learning to breathe rather than react is helpful too. We can cultivate this art by following the anti-advice: Don’t just do something! Stand there! Practice this throughout the day. Don’t worry if you react 10 times and then finally remember to breathe just once. Which leads me to…

Patience –especially with oneself: No one knows how to evolve. No one has ever done this before. There is no standard to measure our progress against. There is no place where we are supposed to be. We’re all doing the best we can each and every day. There are some teachers who can point at common landmarks of the journey, but even the wisest among us cannot know your particular path.

Resist the habit of urging yourself onward through judgment and the habit of focusing upon what you haven’t accomplished. Instead, keep reminding yourself that your journey is unique, that you’re doing fine. Spend time each day, not only in gratitude, but in appreciation for tiny steps you have made, tiny victories.

Deep self-awareness: Begin to understand those aspects of yourself that science rejects: your bio-energy system, your energetic connections with others, with the Earth, with Spirit. It may well be that graceful and conscious evolution requires that we know ourselves in these “woo-woo” ways.

There are a lot of fun games we can play that will help develop this capacity for knowing ourselves more deeply. Spend time in nature. Get to know some beautiful plants and pretend to listen to them. You will have to get very quiet inside to be able to hear them. Try to see the energy around trees or other people. See if you can see energy passing between people as they talk to each other.

Be lighthearted and have fun.

Because YOUR particular journey through this evolution is a vital part of the whole process, and because there is no other person who will walk through this in YOUR particular way, YOU are very important. Get to know yourself. Arrange life to reflect your input and propensities.

You don’t need to be a bully to get things to go your way. You just need to honor yourself so deeply that things unfold naturally in ways that suit you. Get to know your true creative power –as opposed to the types of force and control that we have settled for, as humans, up until now.

Groundedness:  Along with developing energetic self-awareness, we also have to make sure we are more grounded than perhaps we ever imagined. Humans tend to hold all their energy up around their heads. Ideas spin off out of our brains. We hold silent conversations with ourselves analyzing and categorizing everything we experience.

The reason it’s important to bring the energy down, is because it feels better. When our energy is up around our head and shoulders at times when conditions are changing or feel uncertain, it can feel like we’re being tossed around in a tidal wave. If we identify with our thoughts and our thoughts are spinning out of control, we will feel very scattered and uncomfortable.

If we make a practice of grounding our energy, bringing it inward and downward, those times of shifting will feel less scary and chaotic. We’ll remember our intention to breathe instead of reacting.

Again, spend time in nature. Put your butt and your bare feet on the Earth. In fact, remembering you have feet in any circumstance will bring your energy down. We used to use this with some of the violent and angry teenagers we worked with. We told them to not look down but to remember which shoes they were wearing and tell us about them. Worked like a charm to de-escalate turbulence and calm rage.

Positive assumption: I can’t stress this enough. Humans are partially wired to scan for danger and contrast. That’s OK, but we’ve developed the habit of placing most of our attention right there. Then we try to control and manipulate the world to safeguard against the worst case scenario. So much of this activity is unconscious, and a lot of pressure is applied towards it from our society.

Believe it or not, this tendency inspires us, as a culture, to allow huge industries to grow up around our fears. We wouldn’t think of not having insurance, if we can afford it, and we’ve made it illegal to take many risks that used to be common.

These industries then prey upon our fears and reinforce the habit of concentrating our attention on the horrible things that might happen.

We have to shift out of this and begin to balance the precious commodity of our attention between scanning for danger and noticing the amazing serendipities and synchronicities that occur every day. We have to begin to notice miracles, and take time to celebrate happy outcomes.

And we need to develop the habit of making positive assumptions about each other. Rather than assuming that people are acting from their most basic fears and vices, we need to begin to assume that everyone is doing their best – that everyone wants to be a good person and do well.

We need to begin to ask ourselves, “What is the best thing that could happen here?” rather than constantly preparing for the worst case scenario.

A gratitude journal is a good way to begin this process, but we have to do much more than sit for 15 minutes at the end of the day. There is a lot of momentum to overcome in our imbalanced worldview. What is happening around you right now? What miracles can you identify? What positive assumptions could you make?

 

We are going to evolve whether we like it, or whether we believe it, or not. Like with all things, we can make it graceful and enjoy the process or we can make it difficult and painful. Let’s commit to developing these qualities in ourselves so that we can enjoy the ride.

Stay tuned…

A Riverbed

Earnest Holmes said: Our lives and experiences may well be likened to a river. If we stand on the bank of a river and watch it flow by, we become aware that the river never changes but that its content is always new.

I have found this to be a beautiful meditation. What does it mean to be a river? Are we generally standing on the bank of the river, or are we completely immersed in the flowing water?

To me, Sourcery (or becoming a goddess) is the practice of rising up out of the river and identifying with the banks.

What does it mean to identify with the banks of the river, or more precisely, with the riverbed?

It’s easier to see all that this might mean, if we take a detour into understanding what it means to identify with a pebble in the river.

The life of a pebble is to be washed along with the flow of the water. This can be gentle or it can be violent, depending upon the river and the pebble’s place within the river. But either way, the whole identity of the pebble revolves around coping with the effects of being carried along. From the pebble’s point of view, its main concerns are about smashing into bigger rocks, bouncing along the bottom and, maybe, trying to make sense of being in the river before the end – when it will be washed out into the great sea.

The pebble might spend its journey in a gentle flow, where it can get familiar with other pebbles along the way, even get established in a patch of sand for a long while, with many familiar structures around. Stories of other pebbles violently rolling along, bouncing off rocks and rushing headlong through their short lives may seem remote – even like they might exist in a completely different river.

Each pebble knows, deep inside, that the end is coming. One fine day, all pebbles will find their way to the sea. It might become a great concern of an individual pebble to try to prolong its life, or at least find ways to make it richer or more pleasurable.

The pebbles may band together to try to create structures or rituals that they believe will prolong or enrich their lives in the flow of the river. They may grieve and ache when a familiar pebble friend or lover gets drawn away by the current.

Pebbles may cling to the status quo all the while living in the past or the future (regrets, fond memories, fears or eager anticipation), without ever dropping into the Present. This would be completely understandable from the pebble point of view. In fact, it would appear to be insane or at least unintelligent to not occupy itself completely with the concerns of pebble life.

To identify as a pebble means to be engulfed in all the concerns and ideas of the pebble.

The riverbed and banks, however, hold a completely different point of view, as you can imagine. The riverbed has a much wider perspective and it can see much further up and down stream. It feels itself as the continuity of the river, the eternal nature of water and earth creating together.

It honors and reveres the individual experiences of the myriad of pebbles, but it does not identify as a pebble. It does not feel separate from the pebbles, indeed it knows that they are an integral part of its being.  But it does not have the same concerns; it knows that some pebbles will crash around, and some will hunker down in the sand, but It will not do either. It stands enduringly, like a mountain, allowing the river to flow.

Our Basic Operating System – each Reactor aspect of our mind/body system – holds the point of view of the pebble. [Stay tuned for a LOT more info about this that I will be making available soon,]

To become a goddess, or a Sourceress, we have to pull our consciousness out of the pebble world and into the mindset of the riverbed.

There are many challenging steps to doing this. Each of us has the opportunity to forge our own spiritual path to identifying as the riverbed.

Interestingly, one of the biggest challenges seems to be a deep, existential reluctance to stepping out of the pebble viewpoint. The stepping out makes no sense, and is even considered evil, to pebbles. To a pebble, who cannot understand the deep and enduring connection between it and the riverbed, it appears that when a pebble adopts the mindset of the banks, it goes away and is no longer concerned about the pebble world.

Pebbles even have legends about other pebbles who near enlightenment, turn around to see pebbles still crashing around and suffering, and turn back themselves, to re-immerse themselves into the pebble experience – in solidarity, I suppose. (Kuan Yin, The Prophet)

Anyone – everyone – can step into a riverbed consciousness, if they want. Many people have tried it on from time to time, maybe being able to forgive another pebble for a perceived wrong, or holding a space for another pebble to grieve without diving into grief itself, or finding the strength to allow an uncomfortable situation to unfold and resolve, without trying to control it, or maybe experiencing a transcendent moment in nature.

The Souceress does more than dip into riverbed consciousness. She lives in it. She identifies as a riverbed.

This is not to say that the Sourceress avoids the experiences of pebblehood. Remember, she understands the pebbles and the various pebble life experiences as integral parts of her own existence. She revels in the beautiful, complex variety of pebble life. Yet she is able to experience the mental/emotional world of the pebble while still holding her identity as the riverbed.

Let’s, you and I, meet on the riverbank.

Stay tuned…

Burdens

I’ve had a few times in my life when it felt like things were piling up on me. I’ve always been eager to take on challenges and projects. I like the experience of knocking out obstacles and making things work.

As a young mom, I took on the challenge of creating a hugging, free-feeling, affectionate family, even though I did not grow up in one, and even though I didn’t really have any idea of how to do that or what it would be like.

Later, I took on the job of homeschooling my children. It was not the easy choice. It forced me to re-evaluate everything I thought I knew about education. And it forced me to confront all the ways I tried to escape intimacy and conflict with my children.

When I went back to work, I landed in one of the toughest schools in Los Angeles. And I did it! I managed to maintain my optimism and keep my heart open despite daily encounters with frightful threats to my well-being, and despite ostracism from other adults.

When I started my own charter school, I decided that everything about it had to be different – not just one major innovation, or even two. The program, the policies, the culture of the school all had to be non-traditional.

There are lots of other examples, but the point is that I have a history of, and a propensity for, taking bold leaps into trying to wrestle the world into my image of it.

And there were these other times when I felt like the burdens were being piled ON me by some invisible force. I did my best to stay calm in these circumstances, to not judge what was happening. I felt that it was part of my journey here on Earth to be continually broadening my shoulders in order to carry more. My shoulders became very broad. There was almost a visceral sensation of weight being placed on them. For what? For me to learn from? For me to heal others through?

Was this happening because part of my life purpose was to bear things that others couldn’t? Was this happening because I was being punished? I believed that I was unquestionably becoming a better person through these times, so maybe this was merely a part of the growth process.

I had been raised to think of myself as a sinner, as a lower being who justly deserved punishment for my sinfulness. I thought that these burdens were something I should celebrate, like a medieval flagellant. The more burdens I could bear the better I was in the eyes of God. I tried to be grateful for these burdens and I always tried to find a silver lining in every damned thing. I tried to think of the lessons I was learning and the service I was providing, perhaps, to others in bearing all of this.

Mostly I was successful at this mind game. I was able to forgive, adapt, re-focus and accept. When I was pressed by spiritual teachings to be more loving, more selfless and to surrender more, I tried to do that. And I want to reiterate that I did become a better person for having done this inner work.

Sometimes it got to be too much. I felt I was surrendering to a monstrous god who enjoyed toying with me. I wasn’t willing to give my life over to that sadistic overlord.

As I embraced a deeper understanding of what is meant by the teaching that we are creators of our own reality, inch by inch it got clearer to me that I was the one creating this, that god was just cooperating with me in my delusion of struggle. The question became, why am I doing this to myself?

It wasn’t until very recently that I put these two stories together. Oh! I LIKE burdens and challenges. I LIKE overcoming odds, expanding my capacity for forgiveness, being more accepting.

It was then that I realized what it actually means to be grateful for one’s burdens. It doesn’t mean twisting my ego around to be thankful for torture. It doesn’t mean expanding to accommodate the unacceptable. It doesn’t mean graciously allowing god to toy with me, see how much I can take, teach me lessons for my own good.

Here’s what it means.

As soon as I want something, my prayer is answered. The answer to a prayer might be imagined as an injection of powerful life force energy into my “system,” my mind/body/soul/energetic field – a blessing.

Thousands, millions, trillions of these injections of power have already been delivered to me.

As soon as an “injection” is delivered, it is up to me to do whatever I want with it.

“Want” from an energetic standpoint means “apply energy to.”

My subconscious drive to overcome, triumph, beat the odds, and meet challenges with equanimity, distorts these injections of life force energy into circumstances that require me to have these experiences.

I don’t have to feel grateful for the distortions, except to the extent that they point out a blessing that has been delivered. The task is to appreciate the blessings.

Every burden I bear represents a blessing that I have distorted into that burden. Every dollar I don’t think I have is a dollar that has already been given to me, but that I can’t see because I am choosing to experience the challenge of not having it. Every dollar I owe is a blessing that I have transmuted into the experience of debt. Every fat cell I don’t want is a blessing of well-being that I have distorted into an experience of self-loathing. Every bacterium or spider that I allow to disturb me is a blessing of intimacy and profound interconnectedness that I have twisted into a threat or annoyance. Every time the world doesn’t go my way is a blessing of novelty and variety that I too often tangle into an experience of impatience or frustration.

Today is a new day. If I am quiet, I can feel the falsehoods falling away, like a giant tangle of yarn, gradually sorting itself out.

I am not grateful for my burdens. I am grateful for the blessings I have hidden from myself behind the burdens. Time to play a new game.

Stay tuned….