Faith and the Cash Cab

Yesterday I discovered a new brand of “miracle”. By miracle I mean the possibility of a wildly unexpected and powerfully abundant experience.

I was at the gym running on the treadmill. I was working out at an unfamiliar facility away from home. The gym attendants graciously strolled between us sweaty joggers and offered us cups of water from their well-stocked trays. In front of us were three massive flat-screen TV’s with subtitles, distracting us from our puffing and pain and informing us of the current trends and news.

As I watched the giant screen, the scene changed from the local news to a taxi cab picking up riders in New York City. As the riders entered the cab, magical lights began to shimmer and shine on the roof of the cab and the driver turned to the riders and said, “Welcome to the Cash Cab!”

At first I thought this was a joke or an advertisement for something, but as it turns out, this was a real TV show. The Cash Cab drives through New York City picking up passengers and taking them to their destination. While they are being driven, the riders are asked questions and given money for their correct answers…think “Jeopardy on Wheels…”

As I watched happy passengers go for a nice cab ride in New York City and win cash, I thought how cool it must be to be a tourist in the city, get into a cab and win some unexpected money. I imagined how one man, traveling with his teenage son, might have used the extra money to take his kid to a Broadway show or stay an extra night in a fancy hotel.

Or that the two young women, who took their turn next in the Cash Cab, might have used their money to make their student loan payments or for rent….

What I love so much about the Cash Cab is that is falls into that amazing category of weird and unexpected blessings. I mean, what is the probability that someone would hail a cab, step into an income generating vehicle and receive abundant cash, just for being in the right place at the right time?

This is the nature of a true miracle.

All of my life I have struggled with mastering the difference between hope and faith. Hope, I have been reminded, is not really a good strategy. Of course, it’s a step up from despair, but “hoping” by definition implies that there is still a chance that whatever you are intending won’t come true.

Sometimes we get trapped in hoping versus KNOWING when we struggle with what I call a Belief Gap. A Belief Gap is when you desire a certain outcome but you don’t believe that the manifestation of this outcome is possible. In other words, you want to get from Point A to Point B but you don’t know if getting there is possible (but you HOPE that it is…).

There is a distinct difference between hoping and knowing. When you know that Point B is possible, you can relax, tune in and pay attention to the signs and signals that the Universe provides you so that you take the necessary actions to get yourself to that awesome Point B you’re inspired to be at (pun intended….).

When you’re just hoping, your focus is split, waiting to see if Point B is actually going to happen or if your desires are being carried away on an eternally empty wind. When you’re hoping, because you’re tuning in to see if what you desire is manifesting or not, you run the risk of missing that vital next bit of information that will lead you to the next step in the creation of Point B.

Sometimes we get stuck in hope versus knowing when we can’t seem to see the “how” of a specific manifestation. How many times have you let go of a dream because you can’t “imagine”’ how it’s going to happen?

And how many times has something miraculous and ridiculously unexpectedly good manifested in your life?

Things have to happen in linear order on Earth. It’s the nature of the third dimension. We experience time and distance here. When we try to jump out of order we simply create chaos, especially when we haven’t completely rewired our physiology.

Once you really master your Divine Power and you live out your full creative potential, it is possible to take great leaps of faith. But, if you do not completely, deeply believe that something is going to happen, if you still have underlying fears or limiting beliefs about knowing that something will manifest, beyond a doubt, then do not take action.

Faith is not hope. Faith is pure and relentless knowing. It is an act of unwavering certainty and surrender.

The delicate dance between humanity and Divinity starts in the human brain. The right hemisphere receives Divine Inspiration; the left hemisphere translates it into human action. The right brain conceives the “what”. The left-brain conceives the “how”.

The brain is just an organ, like the heart and the liver. Its function is to think, translate data and regulate the nervous system. Your heart doesn’t have the option to do anything other than beat. Your brain doesn’t have the option to do anything other than think.

When we live in the paradigm of a separate God, we think that we have to come up with all the answers. We have to take our inspiration and figure out “how” we are going to make it happen. As you may have experienced yourself, this can put you under tremendous pressure, especially when you have an inspiration that is bigger than you know how to create.

This is where a lot of people get lost in the creative process. We think we have to come up with the “how” things will happen and we close ourselves off to the constant possibility of miracles.

Thinking is to the brain as beating is to the heart. But the human brain presents challenges to us that the physical heart does not. In the brain we experience not only thinking, but also consciousness. Our Divine Awareness is perceived with the brain and we are given the task of sorting out Divine Thought and human thought, both of which are crucial on the Earthly plane.

Our human thoughts are vital. We need human thoughts to drive a car, put on our shoes, cook and build houses. Our human thoughts are the operating system for the body.

Our Divine Awareness is the antenna or the inter-dimensional interface between our expanded Self, or the Soul, and our human Self.

But, as I stated before, thinking is happening all the time. The brain has to be still for us to hear our Divine Consciousness talking. This is why a habit of daily meditation is crucial. The thinking has to be silenced in order for you to get into the habit of being able to hear your Divine Consciousness. Meditation helps you learn to sort out the different voices in your head.

Imagine this for a moment. Your brain is like a giant chamber. Inside this chamber, you are hearing your Divine Guidance, Consciousness and Inspiration. You are also simultaneously experiencing your old thought patterns, limiting beliefs and subconscious fears. At the same time, your thinking mind is translating all of this activity into possible actions, thinking thoughts about what you saw on TV last night, remembering an old experience and wondering what’s for dinner tonight.

No wonder so many of us feel paralyzed, confused or overwhelmed.

You have to think of your brain as a muscle. In order to build muscles, you have to gently train them to make them bigger. When you first start to go to the gym, you start with small weights and gradually, over time, build up your muscle strength and mass. It takes time and repetition.

Even though the brain isn’t technically a muscle, it operates the same way. You have to really build your mental “muscle” over time. You have to train it to be still, be deliberate, and hold a thought for a prolonged period of time and to know the difference between God-Mind and human mind.

It takes years for a body builder to build up his muscle mass. The process of training your brain won’t necessarily take years but it is a process that has to occur over time. Remember, as you are training your brain, you are also physically changing the nature of your body. You aren’t growing muscles, but you are growing neuropathways.

There is a simple strategy to learning how to use your brain to anchor the high vibration of Divine Thinking and turn it into inspired action.

Step One: Daily Meditation

It is crucial that you adopt some kind of daily meditative practice. There are a lot of techniques out there. I suggest that you experiment until you find one that works for you.

The most important part of meditating is learning to get your mind quiet enough to be able to hear Divine Mind speaking to you. You probably will never be able to fully shut off your thinking mind, just as you may never get your heart to stop beating for a while.

Regardless of what technique you use, enter into your meditative practice with intention. I suggest that you write down an intention statement each morning before you meditate to help you line your energy up with the experience that you would like to have.

Your intention might say something like this:

I intend to use this special, quiet time to connect deeply with Divine Mind and to hear clearly and understand perfectly. I intend to sit in silence and deeply integrate my understanding of my Inner Divinity and to act in accordance with my Divine Wisdom each moment of this day.

Step Two: Clarifying and expressing your desires
God whispers within us through desire. God wants what you want. The blueprint for the Divine is within you and communicated through you with hopes, wishes and dreams. These are the direction points given to us by our Divinity Within.

When you turn away from your dreams and desires, you are turning away from your Inner Divinity and shutting off your access to unlimited re-Sources and miracles.

You have to have dreams and desires. These are the catalysts that inspire growth and expansion.

Step Three: Know that your desires will manifest into form
Faith is the unwavering knowingness that your desires will manifest as part of your reality. The knowingness carries a certain vibration that lines up your consciousness with the reality you choose to experience.

You will allow yourself to experience a desire to the degree to which you believe it is a possibility for you.

When you can exist in a state of certainty and knowingness, then you can allow the natural flow of miracles to enter into your life and then take action accordingly.

Step Four: Take actions that are in alignment with your desires and beliefs
“Act as if” your desires are coming true. And make sure that your actions are leading up to what you want. I see so many people waiting for “miracles” who forget that creation in this dimension is a co-creative process. You can’t just sit back in your cave and wait for the situation to magically show up. You have to do your part.

If you’re going to be a best-selling author, then you better be spending time working on writing your best-selling book, or hire a ghostwriter. If you are planning on having a lot of money, then you better have a real plan on how you are going to save and invest your money when it shows up.

You have to take earthly actions that line up the frequency of what you expect in the third dimension. If you are not making the necessary preparations to receive your miracle, then you may want to re-evaluate whether you really want what you want or believe that it can really happen for you.

Miracles are wonderful works done by the Power of God. If the Power of God resides within us and our vehicle for this power is our human form, then we as humans have to co-facilitate our miracles by getting ready for their manifestation and surrendering to the process of creation.

This is the supreme expression of the spiritual concept of “surrender”. The human mind that is co-creating with Divine Mind operates like a beautiful machine. Inspiration comes in. Desire is triggered. Imagination and emotion take over with delight and the human mind begins to imagine the possibilities.

The envisioning of the earthly possibilities is the translation of Divine Inspiration into human form. Once the possibilities are envisioned then you begin to prepare the way. “Act as if” your vision is coming into form.

And then you surrender. You wait until the circumstances in your outer reality show up to give you the next steps to follow for creation. Our human experience is a metaphorical experience of the Divine. Our outer world is God’s world. Miracles show up daily, even hourly, in our outer reality, if we expect them.

We get inspired with big ideas, often times ideas that we don’t know how to “do”. Let’s say, for example, that you wanted to be a best-selling author, but you didn’t know how to make that happen.

First you begin the process by taking the inspiration and turning it into inspired action. You write a book.

Over time as you are writing your book, you feel and imagine yourself as a best-selling author. Maybe you even pretend a little bit and you create a fake New York Times Best Seller list that you tape on your office wall.

As you are working on your book, you realize that you keep meeting people who are authors and publishers. (Funny how you never noticed this before!) One evening you are at a dinner party at a friend's house and her brother is visiting from out of town. Turns out he is a publisher and has worked with several best-selling authors. The two of you have a lovely conversation and the next morning he emails you and asks you to send him your manuscript.

You send him the manuscript. He’s impressed and wants to see more and before you know it, you have a publisher, your finished book is in hand, you are on a whirlwind book tour and your book is steadily climbing the best-seller list, just like you desired!

In this story there is a gentle relaxation or surrender that happens when you take action and wait with certainty and expectation. Of course, this is only one possible scenario. The cool part about co-creating with Divine Mind is that Divine Mind is waaaaaaay bigger than your human mind.

Although your left-brain is very good at figuring out possible “how” scenarios, Divine Mind truly understands the magic of unlimited possibility. Surrendering is letting go of pre-conceived ideas about “how” your inspiration will manifest. You simply need only to know that it will manifest and all you have to do is get ready for it and pay attention to the evidence in your outer reality.

This process of knowing and surrendering creates a vibration that is in alignment with what it is that you want to experience. The more you hold this vibration by staying in a place of certainty with your expectation, the faster your vibration aligns with the unlimited possibilities that will help you perceive your desire into form.

The marriage between the Power of God within you and your human form creates the unlimited possibility of miracles in everyday life. When you let your Divine Power work its magic, you are an essential player in creating Heaven on Earth and you fulfill your Divine Role of anchoring the vibration of God deeper and deeper into the third dimension.

When you master this process, you open yourself up to experiencing the magic of the Universe and your Divine Power. Miracles will happen to you every day!

(And you never know when the Cash Cab will carry you to your next destination…!)

Love,

Bury Your Worry in the Dirt

It's raining outside and right now, my electric bill and one of my credit card bills is in my backyard…three feet underground in the dirt, getting all wet and muddy.

Why, you might wonder, are my bills buried in the backyard?

Did I conduct some woo woo ritual to eliminate debt?

Did my frustration get the better of me leaving me senseless and enraged with my bills?

No.

It's kind of a long story that started with me experiencing worry.

I was raised by "worriers". I love my parents dearly and they did a good job of worrying about everything. Even now they call me up worried that I'm not taking good care of myself, worried about my financial well-being, worried that my kids aren't getting a good education and worried about the possibility of carbon monoxide poisoning in my house (and to make sure that I have enough carbon monoxide detectors in my home.)

(They also worry a lot about my sanity and my life path, but that is a whole 'nother blog post…)

Worrying is in my genes. All of my memories of my grandmother involve visions of her wringing her hands with worry over everything.

She had a stroke at age 65. For 15 years after her stroke, she was carefree. It took significant brain damage to make her stop worrying.

Somewhere along the line, I learned that worrying was the responsible way to go through life. If you weren't worried about the future, making money, your kids, your neighbors, the news or your career, you weren't being responsible.

And, of course, if you were irresponsible in any way, you were giving your parents something to worry about.

I got good at worrying at a very young age. I bit my nails most of my life until I discovered acrylic fingernails when I was thirty. I chew the side of my mouth and have a hard time sitting still and focusing on one thing when I'm worried. I pace a lot and am very good at waking up several times in the night fulfilling my responsibility to worry about my life.

Over the last few years as I have experienced shifts in consciousness, I have mastered my worrying habit (for the most part).

When you integrate a deep understanding that your true and natural state is abundance in all of its expressions, you realize that you don't have to worry about anything. You are abundant. And abundance continually shows up, often in beautiful and unexpected ways.

But shifting is hard work. As we raise our vibrational frequency and continue to align energetically with our Divine Abundance, it's not unusual to become more and more sensitive to our conditioning and those places where we may still hold beliefs that keep us from allowing our abundance.

We are more sensitive, not because we are weak or vulnerable, but because we are more finely tuned to those places where we need to continue to shift our focus back to abundance. Our intention is to live abundance in consciousness and, obviously, in our third dimensional realities. When we are out of alignment with that intention, we notice!

We have been training for "The Shift" for many years. It is crucial as our souls come together and unify our energies that we ignore our outer realities and stay focused on our inner abundance, no matter what may seem to be going on outside of ourselves.

What does that look like in reality? That means, for example, that when the bills are due and things look grim, you have to ignore "reality" and focus on the abundance that is already there for you, even if you can't quite see it yet.

Freaking out and worrying, albeit "responsible" behavior by old standards, really doesn't work in these situations. We have to practice holding a vision for what we intend, in spite of the outer circumstances.

When we worry, we are basically expressing an unconscious underlying belief in lack of some kind. When you examine what you are worried about, it is always a belief or possibility that somehow there will not be enough and terrible things will happen.

Explore those beliefs and see what needs to be cleared in order for you to come back to an awareness of your natural state of abundance.

From a physiological perspective, worrying triggers the adrenaline "fight or flight" response. When you are fearful or "running", all creative thought shuts down, your connection to Source is forgotten and you go into survival mode. Not only is this tough on your body, especially if you do this on a chronic basis, but it also shuts your mind to creative possibilities and inspirations that can change your situation.

When we worry, we are basically making an energetic statement that we do not trust in the Divine Plan and the Universe. Worrying points our creative energies, our thoughts and emotions, at the worst case scenario and, not surprisingly, worrying can actually contribute to making your worst fears come true.

These are the simple mechanics of deliberate creation.

Letting go of worry doesn't mean you don't "deal" with reality. You may need to call your utility or credit card company and ask them for an extension on your payment. But you do it with knowingness that the bills will get pain, not with fear or shame.

You will be amazed at how simply holding the energy of knowingness that there is an inspired, Divine and elegant solution to your challenges (even if you don't know what it is yet…) creates, well, an inspired, Divine and elegant solution to your challenge.

Where you put your energy and attention is where you get growth and results.

Of course, this all sounds so simple and easy. Just stop worrying, right?

LOL!

I have found that turning your attention away from the worry and back to gratitude and appreciation is the fastest way to get out of the worry rut. If we focus on what we DO have, what we appreciate and all the abundance around us, it's hard to slip into worry and fear.

Not only that, if you place your attention on all the good that surrounds you, you will, by Universal Law, only draw to yourself more abundance. (Focus and attention creates.)

"If you can rid yourself of worry, you will rid yourself of things to worry about.
It is really that simple.
Shift the way you feel and watch what happens."

- Abraham-Hicks

So, you are probably wondering what this has to do with my bills being 3 feet under in my backyard.

Lately I've allowed my consciousness to be seduced by worry. In my meditations, I have been working on releasing my worry. I know how little worrying helps my life.

Well, as you know, the Universe often has unique ways of sending us messages. Personally, I think G-d loves to laugh.

Yesterday I was outside on my back deck talking to a client on the telephone. Ayelet, my 16 month old Star Baby, came running out of the house with a handful of my bills clutched in her chubby little fists. Now, as I was talking to a client, I was trying to get my bills back without eliciting a scream of defiance from her (She IS gifted and "NO" is one of her favorite words right now…).

Not only did Ayelet come tearing out of the house, but Kwincy, my 110 pound lab/Rhodesian ridgeback mix followed right behind her.

As I was gently trying to pry my bills out of Ayelets hands, Kwincy galloped towards the back corner of the yard and began to dig a huge hole. Ayelet, seeing that mud and dirt were flying, immediately followed him to be a part of the digging "party".

As soon as the hole was just right, Ayelet, with all her might, pitched my bills into the hole and proceeded to help Kwincy fill the hole back up. My bills had met their fate, 3 feet underground.

Upon completion of their task, both of the Sneaky Sneakers dusted off their respective paws/hands and grinned with pride at me.

The moral of this story:

Go bury your worry in the dirt.

And if you can't do it yourself, get some good soul friends to help you...

Love,

Karen

My Soul Friends, Ayelet and Kwincy

 

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Forgiveness - The Big Reset Button

I’m Jewish.  As a Jew, I am in the midst of what we call The Days of Awe, the time from the holidays Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur. 

During this time, we focus on repentance, deep self-inquiry and atoning for mistakes we’ve made during the year.

Now, I know that even though this doesn’t really sound like so much fun, I actually enjoy this time of year.  There is something to be said for dedicating 10 days to looking back, taking stock and remembering Source. 

I like to think of these days as one big Reset Button.  Push the Resent Button, start over, new possibilities, new opportunities and a chance to improve and “get it right’.

Obviously, this time is about asking others to forgive you for any wrong-doings you may have committed or regrets you may have in how you’ve treated people. 

But it’s also a time of “unbinding” yourself from your stories, old thoughts and beliefs and, most importantly, victim consciousness.  To me, this is the real definition of forgiveness.

There is a real danger in playing with the concept of forgiveness.  Forgiveness can be tricky.

I know forgiveness is a crucial piece to spiritual growth and evolution.  Many

of us have done all kinds of forgiveness exercises.  I personally have written at least 20,000 forgiveness letters to various people who have victimized me in my 45 years…(okay, I exaggerate a bit…but you get my drift.)

One of my publishing clients, Pat Rainville, author of Forgiveness is an Act of Power, (Empoweringbydesign.com) says that one of the dangers of forgiveness is that we think that by forgiving someone we make their actions “okay”. 

This style of “turn the other cheek” forgiveness is dangerous in that it doesn’t usually honor your self and often results in people re-creating old stories and victim circumstances because the underlying energy isn’t shifted.

Forgiveness is not about condoning what someone has done.  It’s about releasing ourselves from the story of the transgression and setting ourselves free to define ourselves not by what “crimes” we may have survived, but by our authentic identity.

I attended an Abraham Hicks Meetup group a few years back.  I remember the third time I attended the group we were invited by the leader to go around the circle of attendees and introduce ourselves.  The third woman who spoke, introduced herself as a survivor of childhood incest. 

It was fascinating to me that every person after that enthusiastically introduced themselves as survivors of different sorts of victim situations such as incest, rape, bankruptcy, infidelity, etc.  Once someone opened the door to “story-telling”, everyone had a story to tell. 

To be honest with you, I never went back to the group.  It wasn’t that I didn’t appreciate that these people had endured and survived terrible things, but it was energetically challenging to sit in a room of people who seemed to still be so tied to the story.

If you define yourself as a survivor, there is, by definition, something terrible that you have endured and that you probably were victimized by.  Survivors are still tied to their association with the transgression.

As long as you continue to tie yourself to the story, the energy of the story perpetuates itself.  And while the lessons of the story were probably quite catalytic in your own personal evolution, the actual event is over.  If you choose to hang on to the story instead of the lessons and the blessings, you run the risk, by virtue of focus and attention, of re-creating similar circumstances over and over again.

Haven’t you ever wondered how it is that some people just seem to attract the same kinds of tragedies again and again?  Perhaps there is a need for cutting the ties to the story and truly forgiving the situation…

You can immediately end these cycles and create something new and different when you stop looking at the past and stand clearly in this current moment, recognizing that this moment is the only moment that matters in shaping your future and redefining yourself.

The past is over.  And only determines your future if you choose to let it.

Personally, I prefer the term “Thriver” rather than survivor.  I am a Life Thriver, plain and simple.

Of course, it feels good to let go of being a victim of any sort.  But there is another important reason to release any victim stories from your consciousness. 

It’s important for the planet.

We are representatives of the energy we want to see on the planet.  (For more information on this, scroll down and read about the four stages of evolution in consciousness.)  When you open your newspaper, turn on the TV or read your CNN webpage on your computer, notice the headlines.  Ninety-nine percent of the time, there is some terrible headline that involves someone doing something to someone or groups of people being victimized by natural disasters or catastrophes of some sort.

When you really understand the mechanics of consciousness, you realize that the projection of our collective consciousness, the sum total of our thoughts and beliefs, create our collective planetary experience.

We create reality and on a global level, we co-create our world. 

What we think, how we behave, our thoughts and our consciousness is added to the thoughts, emotions, beliefs and actions of others to create a consistent projected collective reality.

We are all unique pieces to a giant puzzle.  When your piece of the whole is carrying the energy of being victimized or victim consciousness of any kind, you are adding to the victim consciousness of the whole.

Now, before we go any further, this is not blame or chastisement.  I am simply pointing out that we are responsible for what we put into the world and what we project into the collective consciousness.

If we want to live in a world without victimization, then we have to eliminate victim consciousness in our own personal consciousness. 

While this may sound big and obvious, you have to also be aware of the sneaky places where victim consciousness creeps in…victim energy can be insidious.

Think about this.  In your outer reality, you are responsible for the creation of every experience. 

Yup.  Every single experience.  It’s Universal Law.

So, for example, if you believe that your business is not doing as well as it could be right now because of the economy, you are engaging in victim consciousness.  You are not a victim of the economy.  You are simply aligned with a belief that the economy is bad and you are manifesting that into your reality.

If you believe you “can’t” do something because of any outer circumstance, including shifts in energy on the planet, karma and the old standby, “It’s just not God’s will.”  Remember that you are not a victim of shifts in energy, karma or even God’s will.  (God doesn’t want you to be a victim.)

I invite you to examine your beliefs on a deeper level and see if you have any beliefs that may be keeping you locked into a victim position. 

Some questions to ask yourself that may give you clues to hidden victim consciousness might be:

Are there any things you feel resentful of or circumstance that feel like they are “not fair”?

Do you have stories about your life that you retell often to the point where it almost feels scripted?  

Are they any places in your consciousness where you define yourself as a survivor?

Are there any creations in your life that make you feel like you are a loser of some kind?

Do you have excuses about why you aren’t experiencing the success or results you intend?

Are there any people or circumstance that you feel resentful of or trapped by?

Fill in the blank:  If only ____________________________________ hadn’t happened, I’d be ____________________________________________________.

This is just a start.  Give yourself the gift of taking an inventory of your consciousness and “untie” the ties that bind you into victimhood!

Enjoy THRIVING!!!

Love,

Karen

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We Are Not Free Until We Are All Free

This blog post may challenge you at ask yourself some hard questions.

Your answers might cause your world to flip instantly (in a good way…)!

For the last 15 months, I have been trying to gather 8,000 people together to hold a single thought in consciousness in order to begin weaving an etheric template for an abundant new world.

My intention is to gather enough people together, at least once a week, to create a shift in the collective thinking of the world in order to speed up the creation of abundance and sustainable peace on the planet.

I have hosted meditations daily, weekly and monthly. I have had as many as around 100 people show up for a meditation and, on several occasions, I have been the only one there.

Last week I had over 200 people register for the mediation and only 4 showed up for the live call.

Now, I know enough to know that if people aren't showing up for my calls, it's very personal. It might not be ABOUT me personally but I am clear that there is something in my own consciousness that is not attracting what I intend to attract.

I ran through a lot of thoughts the day after the last 8,000 Meditation Event. I scrolled the the "Rolodex of Beliefs" trying to find the limiting belief that was keeping me from allowing what I wanted.

Here are some of the thoughts I came up with:

1. No one is as interested in Pakistan (my theme for the last meditation) as they are in the BP/oil spill because there is no "corporate bad guy" so there isn't anyone to unify against.
   
2. People care more about animals than they do about people.
   
3. Unconsciously, we are biased against Muslims.
   
4. No one cares about what I'm doing and I'm the "only one" who sees things the way I see things…(wah, wah, wah…)
   
5. I'd rather be playing with my kids in the evenings that leading mediations for the world.
   

I am really clear that I truly want to be leading these meditations. When I have a mediation scheduled, I am super excited and I can't wait for the call to start. I daydream about the effects of the meditations on the world and I lose time just enjoying the experience of these thoughts.

Shifting consciousness on the planet is my passion. It is part of who I am and my Life Purpose.

So, my excitement tells me that I am doing the "right" thing for me.

But, as I sat with the excitement, I noticed another spot in my consciousness that was kind of begging for attention. As I tried to hold an image of actually hosting a meditation and actually having 8,000+ people be a part of it, I noticed that, even though it was a nice thought, my mind kept flipping back to the more comfortable thoughts listed above.

On a very, very subtle level, I liked the feeling of being misunderstood, being the "only one" and trying to find someone to blame for all the suffering happening on the planet right now. (Selfish corporations, dishonest people, bad city planning and corrupt governments, etc.)

Surely it wasn't MY fault. I'm a Lightworker, right? I only think about good and happy things and if I'm blaming someone, it's only because, well, it's TRUE! Right?

But, the truth is, if we subscribe to the belief that You Create Your Own Reality (Stage Two Consciousness…see last week's blog post) or that We Co-Create Our Reality (Stage Three Consciousness), then we are responsible for everything in the world that comes into our reality and our awareness.

In other words, there is something in our collective consciousness that creates earthquakes, floods and oil spills.

Now, I'm not going to get too heavy into blame. It's not your fault and guilt is certainly going to get us no where pretty. However, as conscious beings who intend to live an abundant life and want abundance for others, we do have an obligation to be deliberate with our thinking and creating so that we can begin to choose a different experience; a different reality.

If we are intending to live in a joyful, abundant, sustainable, peaceful world, the vibrational frequency for those experiences needs to be held by all of us together.

If you want to live in an abundant world, then you have to hold the vibration of abundance.

If you want to live in a joyful world, you have to hold the vibration of joy.

If you want to live in a peaceful world, you have to hold the vibration of peace.

You get my point, I am certain.

It is our responsibility to get very, very honest with ourselves and see if there are still those quiet places in our consciousness that are holding old, familiar and, therefore, comfortable "un-"abundant energies.

Try this.

Take a deep, very conscious, very aware breath in and then out. Now try this again and simply feel in your body what joy, abundance and peace feel like. Don't think about it too much. Just breathe and feel.

Pretty easy, huh?

Now try holding those energies for 10 minutes and while you do that, notice what happens to you. Do you feel anxious or restless? Are you suddenly craving the chocolate ice cream cake in the freezer downstairs? Do you need to check your emails or your Facebook status? Where is your mind? What are you thinking about? How is your anxiety?

If you imagine that your consciousness is like a wind instrument, how long can you consistently "hold the note" of joy and abundance?

Now, just for fun, think about the oil spill in the Gulf or the challenges various relief agencies are having getting aid to Pakistan. What are your thoughts and feelings? Do you feel despair, frustrated, angry or powerless?

Naturally, we will feel these feelings first. Our emotional response helps us clarify what we want. But if we get stuck in these feelings we are only adding to the "mess" in consciousness.

In such times of rapid shifting in consciousness, we have little "wiggle room" in our thinking. We have to continue to cultivate the good habits of focusing on the world we choose to experience instead of lamenting that it isn't here yet.

The world we choose IS already here. It is up to us to shift it from its template form in consciousness to creating it in the third dimension. This can only be done by focusing on what we want.

Another subtle thing we have to be aware of is the idea that somehow, all of these events occurring outside of us to other people and in far-away places are separate from us.

If something is being perceived as a part of your reality, it IS a part of you.

When you read the news and you see an infant crying or turtle dying, because it is in your awareness, it is a part of your consciousness. It is a part of you.

I like the statement, "None of us is free until we are all free." (I could not find a good source for this quotation, so please forgive me for not notating it properly.)

The minute you perceive of a situation or someone as being separate from yourself, is the minute you give away your power to create a different outcome.

All of "it" is all of us.

And if we want to live in a world that is more abundant, healthier, sustainable, peaceful, where corporations act from integrity, where there is food, shelter, freedom, education and the conscious power to choose for everyone, then we have to take responsibility for what is drawn into our awareness and "clean" our consciousness to reflect what we desire.

The most important thing that you can do to create an abundant world, is to be abundant yourself in every way possible.

For the next few weeks, I am shifting the focus of the 8,000 Meditation Events. Instead of working on global issues, I will be hosting meditations about personal abundance. I know that when we know we are fully abundant, we are so much more powerful on a global level!

We can only lift people up to our own vibrational frequency. When we raise our own vibration, we create a greater energy to lift others up.

In addition, I will be offering a special two-hour “Tap-A-Thon” next Monday, September 6 at 8pm Eastern/7pm Central/5pm Pacific.  We will be using EFT and some other belief-shifting techniques to move us all collectively towards an expanded state of abundance.

The cost for the “Tap-A-Thon” is $35.00.  To register, simply click on the Paypal link below:

Love,

Karen

What is all this Consciousness Evolution Thing, Anyway?

T he last 20 years have been marked by, what I think, is unprecedented shifts or evolution in consciousness.


For those of you who have been on a conscious path for several years, you may remember a time when you read a new book, discovered a new healing modality or tried a new technique and thought to yourself, "I must be the only one in my neighborhood doing this…"


Maybe you tried to share these new ideas with your friends and family and they simply looked at you as if you dropped from a spaceship or another planet.

But now, especially after the movies, "The Secret", and "What the Bleep", we've expanded our understanding and our vocabulary about consciousness. (You can even buy the book, based on the movie, "The Secret" at Wal-mart!)

You're no longer the "only" one!


But as you've embraced certain core ideas like the Law of Attraction, positive thinking, meditation and healing, you've noticed that even though you can feel deeply connected and you "know what to do" to create what you want in your life, you seem to have cycles of things working and then not working.


You understand the prosperous nature of the Universe and Love, and yet, you may still be struggling in your own personal relationships and with money.


You're not screwing up!


You're not doing anything wrong!


Where you are is absolutely perfect!


You might just need some new understandings and information to help you make sense of how you are evolving and growing.


There are four stages in consciousness evolution. While we like to think linearly, the truth is all of us go back and forth through these stages of consciousness evolution and it is quite normal for you to experience several stages of consciousness simultaneously.


This is the nature of evolution.


The Four Stages:


Stage One:  Your Reality Creates You
In this first stage of consciousness, we are deeply conditioned by the collective, the world around us.  Our beliefs, our thoughts, our actions all flow from a belief that our creative capacity is limited to creating a reaction to the world around us.

Our creativity is in navigating our way through challenges and situations that we feel powerless to control.  Who we are, what we feel, what we create is dependent on luck, fate and is all determined by a source outside of ourselves. 

For most of us, our conscious evolution journey begins here.  Our goal in this first phase of awareness is to begin to clear our conditioning, old patterns, thought forms and habits that keep us entrained to a powerless mentality.

Stage Two:  You Create Your Own Reality
During Stage Two we begin to remember our true creative capacity.  We learn that our thoughts, our emotions, our mindset, our beliefs and our expectations create our reality.  Using the basic "grammar" of creation, we begin to create something new and desirable in our world.

This is the phase taught to us in the movie "The Secret".  It is during Stage Two that we focus on our personal reality and move more deeply into a state of abundance consciousness.  We learn to focus and control our minds and master our emotions and use both to deliberately and consciously create.

Stage Three:  We Co-Create Our Reality
During Stage Three, after experimenting with deliberate creation, we begin to realize some very important things:

1.   There is a greater force helping us create and sometimes things work out bigger and better than we intend.  Miracles happen to us every day and we give up having to know "how" something is going to happen.  We begin to take bigger leaps of faith with our creative capacity.

2.  Sometimes things don't turn out at all like we intend but there seems to be a Divine Plan playing itself out.  Sometimes we don't know why a creation "fails", but we begin to understand that, in spite of this, the Divine Plan is good and the results are part of something bigger than ourselves.

3.  Our awareness of our creative capacity deepens and we realize that everything in our outer reality is created by us.  The things in our personal reality are personal creations and the things in our global reality are a result of projections in collective consciousness. We co-create our reality with our Divine Siblings.

4.  We come to realize that, as creative beings, if we don't like our collective creation, we can join together with our Divine Siblings and with intention, co-create something different.

This more expansive understanding of collective consciousness and the power to co-create, compels us to join together in the face of challenges on the planets, like earthquakes and oil spills and co-create in consciousness a different and more abundant outcome
.
Truly, this is an exciting stage for us to enter into.  Just go to Facebook or any of these social media forums and see the growing quantity of opportunities for you to join with your Divine Siblings and co-create an abundant New World.

Stage Four:  God Creates Reality Through You
The fourth stage marks a complete return to your natural state prior to being conditioned.  It is a state that is created after all your old beliefs and conditioning is released and is maintained by three key creation tools:

1.   Meditation is vital for Stage Four.  Meditation, in whatever form works for you, keeps your channel to your expanded awareness and Divine Intent open and flowing.

2.  Maintaining a prayerful state is also important in Stage Four.  Each moment can be expressed by gratitude and an acknowledgment of Divine Order and abundant perfection.

3.  A clear intention to allow the Divine to work through you helps keep your energy and attention focused on being present to the Divine working through you.

In the Fourth Stage, you realize that you are a uniquely created being and that your highest purpose in the fulfillment of the Divine Plan is to express the truth of who you are in the fullest way possible.  The Self in its pure, unconditioned state is intended to serve God by manifesting its full potential into form.

Each moment in this phase is a moment in the flow.  You know that you are fully supported and you simply obey the truth of the moment and your awareness if finely honed on the Now.  There are no worries, no fears, no lack, only faith and complete surrender.

A sample prayer for Stage Four might be:

I am an emissary of the Divine.
I am a child of Light.
I am an unlimited aspect of the Universe.
Because G-d is abundant, I am abundant in all ways.
Because G-d is powerful, I am powerful in all ways.
Because G-d is creative, I am creative in all ways.
Because G-d is all-knowing, I am always clear.
Because G-d is omnipotent and omnipresent, I am always in the right place at the right time fulfilling my Divine Purpose.
I pray that each moment, my hands, my body, my mind, my spirit, my Light and my essence be used in the service of the Divine.

A sample intention for Stage Four might be:

I intend to joyfully allow the Divine to easily create through me each and every minute of my day.

We all bop between the different phases, but you will realize that as your consciousness evolves, you tend to spend more time in one particular phase. 

In the last few months, I have seen a lot of my clients hovering between Stage Three and Four. To some of you, it may feel as if you are living in kind of an energetic "gap". 

For many of us, we are so used to "manifesting" that we are unsure of what we're doing if we don't have a "plan" or a vision we are working towards.

If that has been your experience lately, I invite you to relax into just simply being and remembering that your emotions are the GPS of your soul.  Simply follow what feels good and correct and you will be in the right place, at the right time, doing the right thing.
Stage Four is joyful.


Some of us find that our "missions" that we do diligently served in the first part of our lives, has fallen away and we are truly following our hearts, sometimes into experiences that our previous, "serious" selves might have deemed frivolous.  The purpose of Stage Four is simply to BE abundance and to follow the passion....no guilt, no remorse, no worry and, most importantly, no martyrdom.

It is in this fullest state of expression of the Self that we serve the Divine Plan.  Remember, we are hard-wired to be happy, healthy, wealthy, connected and enlivened in whatever way feels correct for each one of us individually.


My intention, here at Joyful Mission, is to help you navigate the changes that come with each stage of evolution in consciousness.


Currently, there are three classes available to help you with your own personal growth and evolution. Each of these three classes is specifically designed to work with the energies of each stage of consciousness expansion:


Prosperity Boot Camp – Helps you transition from Stage One to Stage Two. This course teaches you what I call the "grammar" of Deliberate Creation and is a building block to all stages of consciousness expansion.


Inside the Body of God – Helps you fine tune your Deliberate Creation skills so that you can move from Stage Two to Stage Three and begin to use your skills together with other people to co-create an abundant New World.


Ascension 101 – Helps you understand all four stages of consciousness and continue to move solidly into Stage Three and Four of consciousness. This class is currently only available live. A recorded version will be available by January of 2011.


I hope you'll join me for these fun, dynamic and transformative courses. Taking this courses helps you set a clear intention to stabilize and ground your evolution and your "shifting".


You also get to be in the energy of some wonderful, like-minded people!


If you attend these classes as a pre-recorded experience, I'd love to hear your feedback and your experiences. Please feel free to drop me a note and let me know what's up in your world!


I look forward to continuing to expand these offerings!


Thank you for all that you do to take your place in the Divine Order! You are truly magnificent!


Love,

Karen






 

Suffering, Love and Homegrown Tomatoes

I’ve been thinking a lot about suffering recently. Not the greatest topic to swill around in your brain but I have NEEDED to figure out this weird web of self-generated pain I’ve been indulging in for the last year.

It’s been a great learning journey that came to a conclusion with a baby, two dads, a magical homegrown tomato and a lost necklace. But more about that later…

Let’s start with the fun stuff first.

I’m experiencing love.

I’m experiencing love with a lot of things and a lot of people. I’m experiencing love with my kids, my family, my friends, my work, my brain, my life and, in spite of my resistance, the father of my youngest daughter.

My relationship with this man is a weird and very personal story. But since it is my birthday and kind of the beginning of a new era for me, I’d like to share it in the hopes that it might help you find love, too.

I started seeing this man about four years ago after I issued a personal moratorium on relationships in my life. I had just gotten out of a very painful relationship that ended the way all of my relationships in the last 10 years have ended and I didn’t want to get involved with anyone.

This relationship sort of started out without a whole lot of “relating”, if you catch my drift. Until I got pregnant, very (VERY) much against the odds…

Now, I have been diligently working on manifesting my life partner since my fortieth birthday, five years ago. I have a nice list of all the qualities I’d like my life partner to have. Some of you may have heard me read it out loud in Prosperity Boot Camp (which starts next Thursday, August 27, BTW).

I wanted a metaphysical man who would sit and meditate with me, a man who shared my passion for teaching and my life mission, a man who believed in fate and soulmates…

Instead I got this incredibly brilliant, well-educated, logical, intellectual Jewish man who is 15 years older than me and doesn’t really fit many of the criteria on my list.

I am very frightened of being in a relationship with this man. He is very attractive and many women want him. He has lived long enough to have a parade of “exes” of one sort or another and, given my history in relationship, and the statements he has made about the quality of our relationship, I can’t figure out what he wants with me, other than the fact that we share a daughter. (I know, you don’t have to send me emails about the “obvious”.)

But it’s more than just that.

For all the places where we lack common ground, we also have many places where we stand solidly together, side by side. We both believe in family, are committed to our children and doing the right thing because it’s the right thing to do. We laugh a lot. We do really well playing house together and we’re both very creative. We have an incredible energy together and, at the same time, a lot of simple peace between us and we really love our daughter, Ayelet.

And he likes my writing.

And he thinks I’m a good mother.

Oh, and did I mention that he lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota and I live in Houston, Texas and we commute once a month to spend time together?

We live in separate cities because my fear drove me all the way across the country so that I could be “in control” of our relationship.

All that really happened is that my baby and I have logged an absurd amount of frequent flier miles and I spend my free time with a telephone glued to my ear.

So a big part of my suffering this year has been about being afraid to let go and love (and TRUST), feeling abandoned (even though I’m the one who left), feeling overwhelmed by parenting a baby by myself, missing my guy, feeling guilty when I leave my other children to spend time in Minneapolis (or wherever we end up traveling),feeling guilty for taking my baby away from her father, trying to explain this relationship to my friends and family who just look at me with one eyebrow raised and wondering just what DID my Higher Self have in mind with this pairing anyway????

(BTW, this is the LAST post about suffering for at least three months…new topics coming soon!)

Love scares me. I’ve had some really painful manifestations in relationships that have left me with a crook in my neck from looking back and a lot of fear that if I surrender to love, I’ll just get hurt again. So I enter into love always waiting for the “other shoe to drop”.

A few years ago, a very wise friend of mine told me that if you don’t want the “other shoe” to “drop”, stop looking for the other shoe. One of the things that I have learned recently is that if I want to stop suffering, I have to stop looking for it.

When you stop searching for evidence of something in your life and instead focus your attention on something else, “magically” we begin to see more of what we are looking for.

We are actually “hard-wired” in our bodies to only see what we condition ourselves to see. Think about this for a minute. At any given moment you are surrounded by thousands of bits of information. If you pay attention to all of it, you might go mad.

Your brain has a system call the Reticular Activating System (RAS) that programs your awareness to sort through about 250 bits of information per minute so that you are not overwhelmed by data. Did you ever notice how when you are thinking about buying a particular kind of car that you start to notice that car everywhere you go?

It’s not magic or even a “sign”. It’s simply that your RAS has programmed your awareness so that what you are thinking about is more evident in your outer world. Basically, you can program your thinking to see what you want to see and consequently even influence the kind of experience you want to have.

When I was living in Sedona a few years back, I got to spend a lot of time in my hammock under the stars. One night I got a very clear message in my head comprised of only one sentence:

It’s all Love.

And in that one moment I had this profound awareness that everything, every experience, every person, every situation, basically, all of life was an expression of love. I just had to learn to see it that way.

Marianne Williamson, author of “A Return to Love”, says, “There is no such thing as a neutral thought. Every thought takes us into love or into fear, and whichever one we choose casts out the vision of the other.”

We cannot be in love and fear simultaneously. One has to win. When we embark on an enlightened path and we begin to see the expansive, unlimited nature of the Universe, we also come to understand that love is the basic unchanging nature of life.

In the Human Design System, which I believe gives us the archetypical blueprint for the highest expression of humanity, love and life force are inextricably intertwined. Fear isn’t even a part of the map and is actually evolving out of the system as a place of awareness. (See the Solar Plexus Mutation mini-course.)

The only pain we experience in love is the pain of separation or the perception of separation. Are we really separate or do we just perceive ourselves to be, focus on it and then sit and suffer in the ever-growing gap we create in consciousness?

My friends, Paul and Layne Cutright, relationship coaches and authors of several relationship books, including “You’re Never Upset for the Reasons You Think You Are,” stated once in a teleclass I hosted, that the root cause of all conflict in a relationship is a couples desire to be closer and an inability to manifest that desire.

As with all contrast, our suffering in the perception of separation is simply our Higher Self helping us clarify that we want to be closer and in a loving space. To create more love, we simply have to shift our focus away from the places where we think we are apart from love and look at where we find closeness.

Creation is simply a matter of where you put your energy, attention and focus.

When we get stuck in fear or even panic (not-love) it’s usually because we don’t understand what is happening. Most of us, when we are caught in fear, struggle, resist or try to escape the circumstances that created the fear. We act like bugs caught in a spider web. The more we resist and struggle, the deeper we are ensnared in the web.

If we, instead, allow our response and work to see the experience from a different perspective, we can use the not-love experience as a powerful Point of Evolution that gives us the information necessary to move to a deeper experience of love.

There are many reasons why we get trapped in the web of fear. I’ll list a few but you may have your own:

1.It’s time to move on. You are done with the experience but you aren’t trusting that what is coming next is more in alignment with what you truly want to experience.

2.What you are wanting isn’t in the highest good for all, including yourself and your Higher Self is staging an “intervention”.

3.Your experiences are triggering past painful memories and you are afraid that the past will repeat itself.

4.You are focusing on what you don’t want instead of what you want.

5.You have an identity rooted in your “stuckness” and you don’t want to let it go. Maybe you don’t know who you are without pain, suffering, struggle, etc.

6.You are too tired to make the change. You’re burned out and need a break.

7.You have old beliefs that won’t allow you to believe that you can have/deserve to have/it is possible to have/feel guilty for having…

8.You forgot (temporarily) in the midst of the “earth dream” that you are a Source Being.


As I said, you may have other reasons but basically, they are all rooted in fear and not love. When we see the love, we can experience immediate healing.

Try this for a minute. Sit and breathe deeply and consciously. Let your breath fill your body and just hold the energy of the breath for a minute. As you exhale the breath, imagine that with your out-breath you are releasing all the tensions, fear, anxiety, concern, panic, or whatever may be bugging you.

Now breathe in again and as you breathe in this time, simply think about and feel love entering your body and breathing in pure love in all of its expressions and forms. Just be love.

Isn’t it interesting how such a simple experience of love can erase everything else?

I was recently at a wedding. One of the guests made a toast and compared love to the image of Adam and G-d in the Sistine Chapel, fingers reaching towards each other but not quite meeting. He stated that maybe love was the work we needed to do to actually connect and touch. I agree.

We can stand in the gap and connect and touch simply by shifting our focus. Do we spend our time noting the places where we don’t connect and lack common ground, or do we stand in the moment and savor all those places where we do connect and touch?

Your experience will depend on your answer to that question. (Hint: Life is precious and each moment can pass in heart beat. Do you really want to spend the time we have standing in “the gap”?)

Now, back to a tale of a baby, two dads, a magical homegrown tomato and a lost necklace…

When I was in New York a few days ago, I was traveling in the backseat of a rental car trying to keep my very active toddler happy at the end of a long road trip. I was wearing a necklace my father had given me when I was eight-years-old that was very dear to me. I took off the necklace and gave it to Ayelet to play with. She dropped it and it slid to the floor, or so I thought.

In the morning when I went to the car to look for the necklace, it was nowhere to be found. Her Dad and I tore the car and her car seat apart looking for it but it was gone.

When I was growing up, my Dad traveled a lot and I really, really missed him. He always brought me back a souvenir from his travels, usually a piece of jewelry. I have several pieces stored away to give to my daughters when they get older.

But this particular necklace is my favorite and when I wear it, I always remember how much I missed my Dad when I was little. When I lost it, I realized that maybe it was time to release the memory of always missing my Dad and I adjusted myself emotionally and let it go.

A few days later, after traveling with the car seat from Newark to Houston and putting it in two different cars, I was leaning over to put Ayelet in her seat when, seemingly out of nowhere, my necklace “dropped” into my hand. I was thrilled but kind of confounded at where the darn thing had been hiding itself.

In my meditation that evening, I got a clear message that instead of wearing it as a symbol of my missing my Dad, that I needed to see it as a token of my father’s love for me and I imagined him in the port city of Basra in Iraq picking out a special trinket for me. (BTW, he is still delighted when he sees me wear it.) It is time to release the old memories of separation and remember the love.

(One Dad down, one Dad to go.)

Now for the Magical Homegrown Tomato…Last week, Ayelet and I were outside enjoying our beautiful, tropical backyard in Houston. After roaming around the back of the garden, Ayelet brought me a warm, beautiful, sun-ripened, homegrown tomato.

Now, this isn’t such a big deal except that we have no tomato plants in our backyard and neither do our neighbors. I was, again, confounded about the appearance of something out of
“thin air”.

Later that evening, when I was talking to her Dad on the phone, he mentioned that he had picked the first ripe tomato of the season from his backyard in Minneapolis. We joked that maybe Ayelet had found a portal to her Dad’s backyard…

Now, I am certain that there is some kind of logical explanation for the reappearance of my necklace and the magical tomato. But I’ve decided to let go of my need to know…

Instead, I prefer to think that the power of remembering love vs. separation brought my necklace back to me and that the strength of a little girl’s love for her Dad (and his love for her) was powerful enough for her to blast through the time-space continuum and go tomato picking with her Daddy on a warm, beautiful summer afternoon.

Today is my birthday. Today I commit to a year of finding the love in everything.

I hope you’ll join me!

Love,
Karen


P.S. At the end of my time with Ayelet and her Dad, I made a little stack of stones, three stones representing each of us, and at the base I placed a perfect heart-shaped rock. I thought about taking a photo to mark the moment but I realized that the moment was, like all moments, temporary and profound because of its fleeting, impermanent nature.

My intention is that this “note” will remind you to see all the love that surrounds you, too! And That you won’t waste a minute getting after it! Hop to it! Love in all of its unique and amazing expressions is waaaaay more fun than suffering…

8,000 Meditation Event

Event: August 19 8 PM Central

Happy Mother's Day

Happy Mother’s Day!

Motherhood has been the most incredible journey I have taken in this lifetime. My children have been my greatest teachers, my biggest joys and ultimately, as they stand on the edge of the “nest”, my best friends.

I wonder how I got so lucky?

(It’s okay. I actually figured out the logistics of it…no need to send me emails ;-)

As a new mother for the fifth time at the ripe young age of 44, I am enjoying have a baby more than I ever did when my other kids were small.

It’s not that I didn’t enjoy the others. I did very much. But my mothering abilities have been forged in the fires of experience and I’m wiser (hopefully), more relaxed and better at seeing the big picture.

Last year my oldest son went off to college. My oldest daughter is on the cusp of leaving home, too. I have begun another phase in my parenting and the emotions surrounding this part of parenting is quite surprising.

Truthfully, I grieved when Keegan, my oldest, left home. I missed his ever-constant gentle demeanor and his sunny smile. Those Who Were Left Behind were weird without him. For several months it was as if my family has an un-fill-able hole in it. We had to redefine who we were without him.

And he was lonely without us (and his friends from High School), too.

This semester has been a different experience for him, though. He is taking exciting classes, working behind the camera at a TV studio, writing, creating and very much beginning to live his dream life.

Keegan was always an unusual kid. This was a child who informed me at the sweet age of two years that when he grew up, he was going to be a filmmaker.

Now he is solidly on his path and when I hear the thrill of excitement in his voice, it awakens in me something new as a mother. I see him truly begin to take flight with his life and there is this deep tickle and rush of huge love in my solar plexus that delights at witnessing the final stages of his rapidly departing childhood.

Complete joy and awe at who he is becoming has replaced grief and I can hardly say his name without gushing…almost like it was when he was newborn.

Soon my daughter and then a son, another daughter and eventually my baby will hopefully begin to take their fledgling flights. I hope that I am lucky enough to witness these launches!

I have been a very lucky woman all of my life. I was mothered by a mother who believed fiercely in Family. We grew up in unusual places and my mother had to create an oasis of safety and “home” in the midst of foreign cities and environments, oftentimes on her own while my Dad traveled for work.

She did her job very well. Truly, in my world, home was where the Mom was. The location may have changed periodically but the Mom was consistent.

I am certain that even my more challenging children are “easy” compared to me as a child.

There have been tales told that I was often frustrated, full of questions and never quite “normal” as a kid.

All of the above is probably true.

In spite of this, my Mother believed in me. There were many times when my Mother and I clashed and I suspect she secretly longed for a “normal” child (actually, sometimes she wished that out loud…), but no matter what transpired, my Mother always knew there was greatness inside of me.

She still thinks this is true.

With my new understandings of “The Big Picture”, I now know that the frustrations my Mother experienced were a direct result of her knowing what was possible for me and her witnessing my circuitous route to my greatness.

I am sure she had many sleepless nights wondering just what the heck was going on in my life…

Probably, I’ve even given her a few of those wakeful nights as recent as…well…last week!

The “normal” life has never had much appeal for me…

I am who I am today because my Mother saw greatness in me. Her belief in me fostered that same belief in myself. That deeper awareness of my unlimited Divine Potential that she instilled in me with her Mother-Love is the strength that I have drawn on when I have stumbled and fallen in my life.

Her love has given me the courage to move forward, even when the prospects were grim or seemed hopeless.

From my Mother I learned Dedication and Commitment, and the importance of rhythm and consistency.

And staying dry when it’s raining and always making sure you pack a little extra food, just in case…

Thank you, Mama, for the 44 years of greatness you have seen in me.

I promise, I’ll keep working on it!

Love,
Karen

"Curving Back on Myself, I Create Again and Again" - Bhagavad Gita

The experience of being alive is quite an adventure!

When I first started learning about deliberate creation and the power of consciousness, I was 28 years old. (I’m now almost 45, so you do the math.)

In the beginning, deliberate creation seemed simple. We visualized. We affirmed. We meditated and thought positively with pretty good results.

Lately I’ve been hearing a lot of teaching about how hard it is to change and how conscious evolution and deliberate creation can create chaos and “shifting” and “processing.”

I have read a lot of writing recently about “The Shift” and evolution towards 2012. Many teachers are sharing information about ascension patterns and speak to challenges associated with deliberate expansion in consciousness.

I agree with some of what I’ve read. When we begin to live a deliberate life, our Higher Selves call forth energies that create experiences that help us clarify where we may carry limiting beliefs that keep us from embracing fully the manifestation of our natural state of Abundance.

This experience isn’t a “test”. It is simply artifacts in consciousness that are being brought to your awareness to help you see what you need to correct in order to fully live as Source.

Sometimes the experience feels extreme or exaggerated, but it has to be to get your attention. (At least that seems true for me.)

But, does it really have to be as hard as we seem to be making it? When you first started learning about deliberate creation, did it really seem so difficult?

The Universe vibrates, down to its tiniest particle. We are composed of the same “stuff” as the Universe and we, too, vibrate.

As vibrational beings, it is natural for us to have what I will loosely call “good” experiences or “bad” experiences. (I personally believe that they are all good, but for clarification’s sake, I am labeling them as good and bad.)

(I’m not going to get too much into the nature of the ups and downs of vibrating. If you’d like to learn more, please read my book, “Inside the Body of God” or download my free e-book, “Notes From the Edge”.)

In other words, you’re always going to have rough patches in your life. If you don’t, you’re not growing and evolving.

The trick is learning to navigate these rough patches and avoid identifying with them so deeply that you get stuck.

Okay. So bear with me here. I’m going to get a little preachy. Please know I am coming from a place of deep love and a desire to support. And certainly, I am also coming from my own personal experience of challenge and struggle.

When things get dicey in our lives, it can feel challenging to apply the basic rules of deliberate creation. Our natural tendency is to want to make is complex and complicated. We look for reasons that we are stuck and feeling thwarted in our quest for a “good” life.

I have watched my clients...and, of course, myself...look for past life trauma, subconscious beliefs from old childhood wounds, genetically conditioned patterns, etc., etc., etc.

Lately I’ve been thinking about the statement, “Curving back upon myself, I create again and again” from the Bhagavad Gita.

The “stuff” of the Universe is, well, universal. It’s all made of the same components. The stars and us, birds, rocks, air, water, even light, are all composed of the same basic building blocks at a sub-atomic level.

Creation, because the Universe is dynamic, is never permanent. It changes and, eventually, reverts back to its original form and then is used again in another creation.

The Universe is like a giant Etch-A-Sketch. Shake it and you get a new picture. If you don’t like the picture, shake it again.

As creative beings in physical form, we have control over the buttons on the Etch-A-Sketch. We can shake it, too, and destroy a creation that no longer fits and create something new.

The creation process is pretty simple, although as we all know, not always easy. I think we may be making this whole evolution/ascension process way more complicated than it needs to be

It takes a lot of deliberate practice, discipline and consistency to develop good creative habits. And, like all habits, it takes time and practice to make them a natural part of your life experience.

I’d like to take the statement, “curving back on myself, I create again and again” and break it into two parts.

Let’s talk about the first part: “curving back on myself.”

What does it mean to curve back on yourself?

We are Source beings. We are individuated aspects and representatives of the Divine. You could say that we are holographic representations of the Divine. As beings composed of Universal “stuff”, contained within us are aspects of the entire Cosmos on a sub-atomic level.

But, as humans, sometimes we forget our Divine Heritage. We think we’re stuck in this dense 3-D form, hapless victims of our conditioning, our lives and even our DNA.

But we’re not stuck.

In fact, the science of epigenetics is showing us that we can even change our DNA structure when we make different choices. We are not locked into any condition of life. We can create any situation we choose.

The only thing keeping us stuck is our thinking and our perception of being separate from Source.

Curving back on yourself, to me, means creating a regular habit to connect with the Source within you. Now, as you may know, I’m not a big stickler for rules so I’m not going to say how you need to do that. Find what works for you.

For me, curving back on myself is done by meditation every day. It is during meditation that I can connect with the deeper, infinite aspect of myself that gives me direction for what I truly want to create.

Connecting with Source gives me conscious power over the Etch-a-Sketch buttons of my life.

If you are to act as a Source Being and regularly call on your Source capacity to create, you have to be able to hear and connect with Source within you.

Think about this. If you are a deep sea creature who lives miles under the ocean and has never seen light or breathed air and you want to communicate with a seagull flying over the ocean, you have no way of connecting with each other, right?

When you don’t have an established line of communication to Source within you, it’s easy to feel lost, disconnected or out of control of your life.

If you want to connect with the Source You and draw on your Universal creative power, you have to be able to communicate with that aspect of yourself. You can’t do that if you aren’t in some way connecting on a regular basis and establishing a line of communication.

Let’s look at the second part of the statement, “I create again and again.”

We are never locked in a stagnant state of creation. All things that are created can, and eventually, will be destroyed. Change is constant.

As Source Beings, when we create and our creation no longer serves, we can simply shake the Etch-a-Sketch of our lives and create again. And again. And again. And again.

There are no situations that you are stuck in.

There are no creations that you cannot change, no matter how impossible it may feel to change it.

As we navigate the challenges that life brings to us, (or truthfully, that we bring to ourselves to further our own evolution) it is crucial that we remember to stick to the basics of deliberate creation.

Deliberate Creation is simply the grammar of the Universe.

While it is easy to get lost in the despair, to wonder “why”, to justify and find archaic patterns and to worry about the possible scary shifts on the planet, we must navigate our way through these changes by diligently and deliberately applying the creative principles that we have been mastering for the last few years.

We have total control over how we choose to experience our reality. We cannot afford, especially at this time, to get lost in mental machinations about how or what is going on. While thinking is a fun sport, now is the time to put “pedal to the metal” and ask ourselves, what do we want to be creating? What direction feels good?

And, once we curve back upon ourselves, connect with the Source within us and discover the answers, we have to apply creation principles and begin drawing the reality we choose.

Here are some basic principles to review. Gently ask yourself if you are consciously and deliberately applying these concepts on a daily basis.

1. Connect with the Source within you regularly in a way that works for you.
2. Clearly ask for what you want.
3. Stay focused on the fact that an elegant, even miraculous solution is always available to any and every situation, desire or challenge you may be facing.
4. Stay in a perpetual state of gratitude and appreciation. Find evidence that what you intend is already showing up in your life, even if it’s teeny tiny.
5. Stay focused on the present moment.
6. When old thoughts or beliefs come up, deal with them and then refocus on creating, not healing. You are already healed.
7. Follow what feels good to you.
8. Use challenges as pushing off points to help you get clarity. Don’t define yourself by what you have survived. You are here to thrive, not survive.
9. Stay in the creative flow by giving and serving others. Nothing, I mean, absolutely nothing feels better than helping others.
10. Know that all situations will pass. It’s the Law.

May you enjoy this glorious co-creation of life on this planet!

Keep it simple!

Love,
Karen

'Ready to Find Out Who You REALLY Are?'

'Ready to Find Out Who You REALLY Are?'

'Are You Evolving? Feeling the "Shift"?'

'Are You Evolving? Feeling the "Shift"?'

'Thank You!'

'Thank You!'

The Blessings of Despair

Like many of you, I am no stranger to despair.

These last few months have been very interesting. I have born witness to my own manifestation of despair and boy have I learned a lot about the creation process.

There has been a quiet undercurrent of despair in my life this last year. It all started when I moved from Minnesota to Texas weeks after the birth of my baby daughter. My journey took me a whole country length away from my baby’s father, a move that has broken my heart in a very soft and subtle way (even though I did it to myself…)

There were many wonderful things that happened over the year as well. My days have been full with the joy of having a new baby, life with my family and time with my parents. The winter has been short and warm by my old Minnesota standards and I have a wonderful new house close to miles of hike and bike trails and innumerable parks.

I have a rich and complex life. Maybe you do, too?

In Prosperity Bootcamp we talk about the Law of Focused Succes:

“Where you put your energy and attention is where you get growth.”

As the year progressed, I had a lot of options about where to focus my attention. Some days it was very easy to focus on all the love and joy. When a gorgeous light-filled baby grins at you, it’s hard to feel miserable.

But there were other days fraught with sleep-deprivation or the stress of trying to raise a family of six on my own, run a more-than-full-time business by myself and stay balanced and centered.

On those days my focus was certainly directed more towards the despair.

Feeling crummy and focusing on it only created more feeling crummy.

The worse I felt, the more I avoided feeling my feelings. Rather than diving in and really allowing myself to use my despair as a tool to help me get more clarity about what I’d rather be experiencing instead in my life, I resisted my “bad” feelings.

I could have zipped through the despair, recognized it as a message from my Inner Wisdom, telling me that what I really wanted was to feel supported, nurtured, balanced and closer to my baby’s father.

But no. That would have been simple.

Instead, I chose to walk along the very well-worn neuropathway of Martyrdom and Suffering, going over and over and over all the events that created my despair until I could call up the pain (and then quickly resist it) with very little conscious thought. A cloud of pain just kind of hovered over me all day long.

(You all may now play your violins…)

Of course, as I was focusing on resisting the pain, I created more resistance until I had very little choice but to start really disconnecting from my Inner Wisdom and the Universe.

Not only that, but I was investing so much energy and attention into resisting an experience that, instead of going away, the experience kept getting bigger and bigger.

Isn’t it cool how the Law of Focused Success works?

It’s no wonder we get ourselves trapped in all kinds of self-made sticky situational webs…

This whole mess reached its “high point” just before Valentine’s Day when I decided to have a serious “heart to heart” talk with my guy. I didn’t go the way I hoped, but it did go exactly the way I had imagined, I had been creating it for half a year…

As this conversation went from bad to worse (his cell phone battery died at midnight and he wasn’t able to call back until morning…PERFECTLY CREATED, don’t you think…?!!), I could feel giant, etheric lead doors slam shut on all my charkas until I became nothing but a very logical head with legs. (Not pretty…)

I twisted with numb misery for a couple of weeks. I felt so disconnected from everything, even my kids, and entertained very dramatic visions of having a wildly successful business and being alone for the rest of my life…

Thank God for Inner Wisdom, old friends who kick your butt not matter how logical you think you are and the eternal magic of the Universe (disguised as seductive baby grins…)!

After weeks of whining to some of my friends, one in particular who can etherically “pull my covers” while sitting on a surfboard on the other side of the country, the magic in my life began to slowly reveal itself.

One exceptionall beautiful afternoon I was sitting on my back deck enjoying the warm sun on my body, even though my heart was heavy. In a flash my Inner Wisdom snuck in a brief thought and a light-filled epiphany echoed through my Being.

I was gently reminded that I had been praying to feel closer to my Divine Creator and the magic of the Universe for some time now and that, indeed, in the midst of all this misery, my prayer was being answered.

It’s hard when you’re in the midst of despair to remember that It’s All Good, even the pain. When we are experiencing the pain and identifying with it (I AM…) we can feel overwhelmed and hopeless.

Getting out of pain requires a diligent piecemeal approach. Sometimes we get stuck in pain because we are trying to move into joy too quickly, avoiding the message our pain is bringing us. Such a Giant Leap feels overwhelming and impossible. It’s too big a leap to start with.

While I was sitting on the deck enjoying the sun I decided that I was DONE suffering. And, even though I knew the possibility of joy, I just couldn’t quite get there. I was too dense and heavy with the energy of my suffering. So I started small.

Moving from despair to joy often requires taking tiny steps.

I began by making a mental list of all the things I am grateful for: the sun, my children, warmth, the beauty of the big sky over me.

I certainly didn’t move into joy but gratitude gave me an opening to grow into something that felt better.

Later that evening I headed out for a walk with my baby. As we strolled in the light of the setting sun, I marveled at the way the light hit the tree trunks of the trees lining the hike and bike trail. For 30 uninterrupted minutes I was blessed out by tree bark and the unlimited creative power of my Creator.

The little steps of getting out of pain were the real answer to my big prayer. As I expressed my gratitude for what I was experiencing, my connection to my Creator grew and I began to remember that big feeling of awe and wonder. My pain helped me become more present to the small joys and delights the Universe has to offer.

I remembered how, a few years ago when I was really struggling financially, experiencing deep gratitude for all my financial challenges. Without the challenges, I would never have grown in faith. My struggles taught me to use my creative powers and the lessons I learned are fundamentally a piece of who I am today.

But, I have been conditioned to suffer. While I am grateful for the lessons, what I have also learned is that you don’t have to get to a place of suffering to experience appreciation, joy, connection and gratitude.

Each moment of my last year, I was given a choice. My prayer was to feel more connected to the Divine. My conditioning created opportunities to do it the “old” way. I created despair and suffering as a vehicle to move into re-connecting with my Creator.

Many years ago, when I was a Parent Educator, I used to teach that children don’t have to suffer to learn.

I think adults don’t have to suffer to learn either. But sometimes we forget.

At each of my “choice points” over the last year, I could have just as easily chosen to focus on creating joy, by focusing on all the things that felt “good”. I wonder if I would have felt even more connected had I chosen that path…?

In addition to choosing to suffer, I also shut down and identified with my pain instead of using pain as the compass of my soul.

In Prosperity Bootcamp I talk about how we are not our emotions. Rather, our emotions help us identify how close we are to creating our intentions and our Pure Hearts Desires.

Our so-called “negative” emotions are simply energetic indicators that we are not holding a space in consciousness that is helping us create what we intend. Usually when we are experiencing “negative” emotions, we are either off-target with our thought forms or we are harboring old beliefs that are keeping us from allowing what we truly desire in our lives.

When we are experiencing “negative” emotions, it is simply our Inner Wisdom communicating with us, letting us know that we need to recalibrate our creation process, sometimes simply by asking the question, “What do you want to be experiencing instead?”

Instead of looking for evidence to support my belief that I am not loved, not supported and all alone, I could have searched for evidence to support new beliefs that I am supported, deeply loved, magnificently powerful and I have an abundance of people who love me in my life.

Truthfully, when I look back at this year with my renewed perspective, I HAVE been VERY supported, loved and cherished. But, I missed a lot of it.

It’s important when we are stretching ourselves into new belief patterns that we look for evidence that what we want is already present and growing in our lives, even if it feels like the evidence is teeny tiny. Remember, where you put your energy and attention is where you get growth.

What if I had seen the support that there all along? How different would my experience have been?

I am profoundly grateful for what I have learned. I am grateful for all the love and support I have received. I am grateful for my renewed connection to G-d and the renewed unleashing of magic in my life.

AND, please kick my butt if I choose the suffering path again.

I now choose to know that I am instantly, easily and constantly connected to my Divine Creator and that this awareness is Source of all my Good. I only have to appreciate and energize all that I desire and keep my energy and attention focused on the infinite abundance I AM. I am grateful for all of my life experiences. I am fully supported, deeply loved and magnificently powerful. I am an unlimited Child of the Universe. With this understanding, it is impossible for me to have any unmet needs or desires.

Wooo Hoooo!