Thursday, August 19, 2010
Sunday, May 9, 2010
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
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
Saturday, May 1, 2010
"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
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
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Saturday, March 20, 2010
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Sunday, March 7, 2010
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!
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