A friend of mine, Holly, beautiful, brilliant Holly, said something today that provided a 180 turnaround on just about every subject known to man.  If it’s the only well being card I ever carry in my heart, this would so be it!

It was very simply a statement of gratitude to the Universe or whatever your beliefs:

“Thank you for making my life interesting.”

My heart just sang out with a solid YES, when I first read that from her.  I so know this to be true.  I so know I came here for the variety, for the diversity of choices.  I so know I came here to experience it all.  I have told many a friend I know that before I dropped on over to planet earth, I stood on the non-physical line of what I wanted in this lifetime.  It wasn’t the line that said good looks and brains.  It wasn’t the line for curly hair and a good sense of humor.  It was the line for – give me what you’ve got; I’ll take it all.  The implication being that I’m going for the pure adventure of a lifetime.  No, not the bungee jumping or climbing Mount Everest kind.  The type that stretches my personal and spiritual development.

When I read Rilke’s “flare up like flame and make big shadows God can move in … let everything happen to you beauty and terror”, this is what I resonated with so completely.

A trip to the lawyer tomorrow which had been a previous source of angst now becomes, I get to go to the lawyer, I get to fight for the rights of someone I dearly love.  Thank you for making my life interesting!  I can take that and apply it to any subject I feel resistance on.  Any subject I feel – oh no, anything but hell no, not that.  Any subject I judge as bad or wrong and flip it on its back to reveal what I’ve always known to be true.

Hell yes, thank you for making my life so interesting!

Breathe deep

You are here now

Resting here with me

I am all you ever need

I am the flowing river,

the stars and golden sun,

the still mountains and the swaying trees.

You who have lost your way

I am but a breath away

A simple breath away, always

You want to know the way?

The way in is a breath of faith

You’re not out here all alone

Breathe deep and say: I am not alone.

Life wants to take care of you

Life wants to caress you and

Sing you to sleep

It wants most of all for you to know

the depth of love available to you.

It is always there

And it’s there now

Beckoning softly

Come, come, come

Dance lightly, sweetly toward me

I am here for you to lean on evermore

I am not your child, your parents, your relatives, nor your friends

The hands of Divinity are everywhere constant, limit less.

You, who have suffered, throw off the dark garb and come running to me.

Spend a few minutes with an object, any object, and find God in it, here is where I am.

Let it envelop you and seduce you with it’s own unique God-ness

Now you know you have been seen and heard, come back to this place should you falter again.

©heartsdeesire

Time has a wonderful way of weeding out the trivial.  ~Richard Ben Sapi

Quite true, don’t you think?  This goes along with a question I have written on one of my homemade well being cards:

Will it matter in a year from now?

There are less than a handful of times I’ve come to that question and been able to answer – yes, it will matter.  Even then the truth is, circumstances will change and I will change.  I believe what Florence Scovel Shinn has written – only good lies before me.  Then, what’s the worry?!

So Beth, tell me, what IS the worry?  Hmmm, don’t have one anymore!

Thanks for listening to this quick little interaction in my head!  May all your troubles be small ones and if not, then may you know you are transformed by them.  Life will sometimes take us into the obscure, as yet to be defined or understood places.   Remember, though, the butterfly always emerges from the darkened chrysalis flying openly into the light.  When daybreak surfaces from the cloak of night, we are those butterflies.  And with a tiny flap of our wings, we send ripples of hope across the globe.

It appears that it was all a misunderstanding.
What was only a trial run was taken seriously.
The rivers will return to their beginnings.
The wind will cease in its turning about.
Trees instead of budding will tend to their roots.
Old men will chase a ball, a glance in the mirror—
They are children again.
The dead will wake up, not comprehending.
Till everything that happened has unhappened.
What a relief! Breathe freely, you who suffered much.

~Czeslaw Milosz~
New and Collected Poems 1931-2001

Towards the end of the video he speaks of technology in a way that I applaud.  So many want to slam technology for one reason or another.  Mooji says technology has made the world smaller in a beautiful way, we are becoming more unified and we begin to see that we are One.

Love his perspective, I have always felt that technology has offered a unique means of being in relationship with others.  It takes away from intimate connection or it enhances it, it’s all in how you see it.  I fall on the side of technology enhancing our relationships with each other and therefore humanity overall.

This is not a verbatim highlight transcription but reasonably close to his words:

Something deep in our psyche has always been searching for a joy, stillness, happiness, a contentment that won’t leave, won’t be destroyed, won’t fade.  The opportunity of the human existence is to discover what is eternal inside ourselves because up until now we are only discovering what is transient, what is passing.

There is no vulnerability in the true mind in the true heart.  When you come to the point that you feel that your life is going to burst open, be very present and don’t miss that opportunity.  You feel it as a curse; you don’t see it as a blessing because you identify with a false vulnerability of the self.  ”It” is offering a defining moment to split away from what is unreal to find the real. (LOVE!)  As long as you are comfortable with your sense of identity you will not go beyond it and if you don’t go beyond it you will never come into the truth.  There is a time for a human being to know these things and the time to know these things is when you have the power to go beyond these things. (ALSO LOVE!)

When you feel lost, when you feel confused, when you feel helpless, when you feel like you’ve run out of moves, when you feel like your life is on hold, right there, you yourself, become very, very quiet and empty of your own self because the chance is you will meet God in this moment. (LOVE AGAIN!)  You break all the boundaries, if you don’t hold the hand of your mind.

We are missing what is obvious, what is pure, what is beautiful.  But we don’t have to go so far to find this, because the truth is distance-less, it’s here.  It’s here; it’s only somehow concealed by distraction.  Our eyes move and plant themselves onto transient things.  But if the aspiration is inside a human being to grow, to find the truth, then he will find a way and the way will find him.

Happy New Year.  Happy Now Here.

I still stub my toe on the way to cake.  This was a story we heard from Abraham on one of their cruises.  During this cruise, it was Esther’s birthday.  She’d gone to bed for the night, when a knock came to her door.  Stumbling her way to the door in the dark, she stubbed her toe.  Ouch!  Upon opening the door, to her surprise, there was a birthday cake sent in her honor!

And so came the phrase – I still stub my toe on the way to cake.  It’s a way of saying we are always on our way to cake, we are always on the perfect path for us at the moment, and we just might stub our toe along the way.   It’s a softer, lighter means of making peace with the contrast that every one experiences at some time or another.

It was in my own dreams last night that the stub my toe phrase came back to me.  I had gone somewhere deep in the mountains for a retreat, many of us had gathered there.  The catch was your only way in and thus your only way out, was on foot.

The retreat is over and people try to hook up with others for the long trek back to our own homes.  It’s a circuitous route, easy to get lost and it’s fraught with snakes and wild life, best to not make the trip on foot alone.

This difficult route alone with snakes and wild life seems to be a metaphor for the contrast, the challenges we find ourselves amidst in life.

We are carrying all our belongings on our back.  I am traveling unusually lightly.  Ha, going into this year with less baggage perhaps!  High five for Bethie!  My companions are carrying much more and I think I should take some of their baggage, which is so like me to want to help and take on others stuff in the process.  Yet I shock myself, I don’t take their stuff on.  And as it happens, they begin to unwittingly drop their own baggage as they move further towards home.

Another beautiful metaphor, may we all drop our baggage as we travel home.  Home, as in who we really are, is by its very nature without all the baggage including the measuring stick of how well we’ve done in life, etc.

Next in the dream, we come to a point where we must walk a tight rope and below us is a sea of snakes.  We are crossing the tightrope when a literal paradise of flowers, in every shape and color begins blooming all around us.  The tightrope disappears and we are home again.

I realized then that garden was just like the birthday cake Esther received.  And I saw further that the point isn’t the contrast, it isn’t the challenges.   The point isn’t in stubbing the toe, or walking the tightrope. No, it’s remembering to enjoy the process no matter how challenging it is.  It’s remembering to see the beauty no matter how bad things look.  It’s a reminder that it’s always, always there.

It’s just that we get this tunnel vision that this or that sucks and we want out of it now, pronto, yesterday.  The way out starts with the little gifts, surprises that come knocking at our doorways in a plethora of ways, so plentiful you could not name or count them all in a day.

Consider spending a moment or more lingering inside the blessings bestowed upon you each and every day.

My friend Ahmee wrote this freedom rampage.  I thought it was Abraham’s, that’s how good it is.  Half way through are my additions to the rampage.

I am free to walk this world in peace.

I am free to think nice thoughts about me.

I am free to step into who I know I am.

I am free to eat lightly and powerfully.

I am free to take good care of myself.

I am free to ALLOW ALL OTHERS.

I am free to NOT get all  “up into it, whatever it is, at the moment”.

I am free to be happy, wow.

I am free to think the best of me.

I am FREE to think the BEST of everyone else.

I am free to be a pure beam of me.

I am free to literally not care what others think of me.

I am free to know what pleases me.

I am free to know what I know.

I am free to be strong.

I am free to be clear.

I am free to feel whole wholesome welcomed and GOOD.

I am free to love in the BEST sense of what the word means to me…and a big part of that is allow allow allow.

I am free to start a new journey at ANY moment I choose!

I am free to choose!

I am free to feel safe secure and friendly, to myself and others.

I am free to step up to the plate and choose who I want to be in any moment.

I am free to reach for alignment, no matter where I am!

I am FREE to remember its just a blip on the radar screen.

I am FREE to lighten up.

I am free to look upon myself with ABSOLUTE understanding and compassion.

I AM FREE TO BE UNAFRAID.

I love free.

I love feeling free.

I love knowing I can open to it.

I loved writing this.

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I love free, too!

I love remembering that love is waiting at the end of every road.  How freeing is that?!

I love remembering it’s just a chapter it’s not the whole story.  I can grok a little more freedom in that.

I love the moment of dropping the armor of being in control and then letting myself just relax and allow something greater to take over on my behalf.  It feels SO freeing.

I love believing that everything always works out for me in the end.

I love knowing that only good lies before me.

I love nudging my fearful self with that little question: What if I could?

I love believing in miracles and knowing they happen every single day to every one of us. I type this now and send it across the world in a matter of seconds.  That’s a miracle.

I love letting myself have freedom today.

I love choices.  I love that I can choose on the side of fear or on the side of faith.

I love being tender with myself when I lean on the side of fear.

I love asking myself: what would love do right now?

I love asking myself: what if it’s all alright?  What if I am alright?  What if we all are?

And lastly – I love the freedom that comes from the ridiculous.  So one final word of wisdom, don’t be concerned if you have not reached this level of wicky-wacky wisdom.  It’s fairly high on the enlightenment level to truly attain this, but give it a try (tongue in cheek humor here):

“A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men.”  Now this is the secret to freedom and happiness that trumps all others.  The children know the joy and freedom in nonsense.  Beneath the layers of life and living, WE are those children.

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Days after writing the Champions post, where I said “never lose your muchness”, I awoke to a day when I declared softly: I have lost my muchness.  I forgot my own rule of thumb, never say never.  Never and its cousin, always, rules out another little thing called human-ness.

There I was, feeling alone in the suchness of losing my muchness.  As Emmanuel, once said: “if darkness were my natural home, I would be comfortable there.”  I wasn’t comfortable there and because I am a friend to me, I knew I had to take myself by the hand and find my way back to my light, my muchness.

Some of you may remember Abraham’s reference to having our pencil in the fan.  These days they call it “out of the vortex”.  I still like the pencil in the fan concept.  It’s such a perfect analogy of how I can impede my muchness.  So I developed a plan to turn back toward my muchness.  I call it my Emergency Pencil-in-the-Fan kit:

1.   move about mindfully
2.   whatever negative inner talk is going on, stop and ask what would a friend say to you right now, listen to what that friend has to say
3.   walk with your gaze outward and upward
4.   take 4 deep conscious breaths, up from the toes and exhale back down into the toes, feel yourself grounded to the earth
5.   tell yourself nothing is more important than being in your own corner, a solid friend to you
6.   eat something that had it’s roots in the earth, eat it slowly and mindfully
7.   surround yourself with the structure and support of doing what’s before you to do and doing it mindfully
8.   close your eyes, take one more deep breath, and as you exhale, feel your shoulders drop, drop into the body sense of “I am a friend to me”
9.   remember that whatever you are believing is based on untrue reasoning.  You may not know that now but you will as soon as your pencil is out of the fan.
10. move about mindfully

I made nos. 1 and 10 the same because if I did nothing else on that list, that alone would suffice.  It will ground you in the present moment.  This is what Eckhart Tolle says about the present moment:

“Once you have reached a certain level of consciousness, you are able to decide what kind of relationship you want with the present moment. Do I want the present moment to be my friend or my enemy? The present moment is inseparable from life, so you are really deciding what kind of a relationship you want to have with life. Once you have decided you want the present moment to be your friend… Life becomes friendly toward you… One decision changes your entire reality. But that one decision you have to make again and again and again – until it becomes natural to live in such a way.”

A word about mindfulness movement, several words actually!  It means dropping into the body, aware of every movement you make.  While walking feel each part of your foot strike the surface, note texture of the surface you are walking on, the air moving across your body.  Reach to open a cabinet, note the arm extending outwards, fingers touch surface, texture and temperature of surface.  Hand encircles a cup or a plate, feel each tiny movement.  Note the sounds, the textures, the temperature, smells, tastes, movement of the body.  Practice it before you find your pencil in the fan and you will easily be able to fall back into it when you are feeling wonky.  For more information on mindfulness, I recommend reading The Long Road Turns to Joy by Thich Nhat Hanh.

This is what Thich Nhat Hanh says about the importance of mindfulness:

“… consciousness is said to be a field, a plot of land in which every kind of seed has been planted, seeds of suffering, happiness, joy, sorrow, fear, anger, and hope.  The quality of our life depends on which of these seeds we water.  The practice of mindfulness is to recognize each seed as it sprouts, and to water the most wholesome seeds whenever possible.”

Thich Nhat Hanh also recommends repeating a Zen Buddhist poem while walking mindfully:

“I have arrived.
I am home
in the here,
in the now.
I am solid.
I am free.
In the ultimate
I dwell.”

May we all arrive home, solid and free.

“I could care less.”  It’s an interesting phrase, isn’t it?  Often used as sort of a flippant response to information that you’ve just received.   But the actual words contradict the intention behind uttering them.  In essence, one is actually saying that you *could* care less.  And this is where I begin, in caring too much and caring less.

Within the system of the Chinese Elements, there is the element of earth, yin and yang earth.  Yin earth is the archetype of Mother.  It’s the mother’s job to care, to nurture and to support.  This is a big part of who I am, yin earth, it’s in my core destiny, which is revealed in my birth date via the 9 star ki.  It’s also revealed in the shapes and curves of my particular facial features.

Every element has a front and a back, challenges and strengths.  We don’t get to choose just the strengths, but we do get to choose how we evolve through both the strengths and challenges.

Among the Mother’s or yin earth’s challenges:  caring too much to the point of excessive worry, worst case scenario type thinking, meddling in other people’s right and responsibility to figure things out for themselves, and trouble with just saying no sans the – omg, I said no, what will they think of me now – guilt hangover.  If I’m being completely frank here, welcome to my world!

My girl friend told me she was starting a 30 day process of caring less.  Caring less, is not to be without caring, but to care without the suffering.  This really piqued my interest.  When she feels overtly concerned about something, she tells herself – she could care less about this, and then finds and inhabits the feeling place in the body of caring less.  I would add breathe into the feeling place as if it’s a gentle wave lifting you up and carrying you into that sweet place of relief.

The next morning after she and I talked, I woke up and lay in bed.  This seems to be a time when I most kick into worry, worst-case scenario mode, followed by how-can-I-fix-this mode.  Truth is 99% of my worst-case scenario thinking a) either never comes true or b) is what 12 step calls stinkin’ thinkin’.  It’s just not true, period.  The other truth, if there’s any fixing to be done, unless I’ve got the power to spin the planets today (I checked, I don’t) get out of the way and let something far greater than me, reveal the greater picture.

And that leads me back to what I did that morning of worry.  I said to myself, I could care less, took a deep breath and imagined myself as if I was a camera with my focus up as close as it could possibly be.  Then I brought the focus back, back, back, as far as it could get.  Here, I could breathe even easier.

Another friend of mine once explained it as looking at a beautiful quilt hanging on a wall. Walk up to it and press your nose into one tiny square of that quilt, the beauty is lost in a blur, your nose hurts and you can’t breathe very well either :). Step back several feet and you can see the entire image of that tapestry we call life, clearly.

That tapestry is what’s mine and mine alone to live and experience. It’s as unique as my fingerprint and it has my fingerprints all over it. And something else is all over it, the hands of Divine Wisdom, carrying me every step of the way, even when I think I’m the only one with my hands on the levers of life.

The words below in quotes are by US Andersen and adapted by Kelly Howell from “The Secret Meditation”.  My comments are sprinkled throughout in italics:

“I know that I am pure in spirit and that I always have been and always will be.”

Breathe in, I am pure in spirit.  Empty the breath into a golden pool immersing you in pure spirit.  Feel what it means to say and feel this about yourself: I am pure in spirit.  Honor whatever comes up and breathe with it.  From the time you were a mere “seed”, you were pure in spirit.  This is a Universal Truth that is an unending, never changing, constant. 

“I am one with Universal Mind and I know this mind is perfect and I may rely upon it for guidance in all of my affairs.”

I am not alone.  I was never really alone, though I could pretend otherwise.  When puzzled for answers, I needn’t try to figure things out all on my own.  I can ask for Divine Guidance at any time.  It is always available to me.  The answers come when I rest in the quiet, open, receptive places.  Actually they come no matter what, but I can’t hear them if I’m not in receiving mode.

“I rely upon this power for guidance in all of my affairs.  I know and recognize my one-ness with all things.  I know that all form and all circumstance are the creation of an Infinite Intelligence that is within and around me.”

By relying upon this power, it leaves my mortal mind with nothing to figure out.  Relying on this power means faith and trust are my constant guides.  Beyond mere words, trust and faith, is the umbilical cord that keeps me continuously connected to Divine Infinite Intelligence.  I take action now when the prompt comes from within, inspired action.

“I know my purpose in life is to reach ever upward and outward to expand in knowledge, and love and unity.  I place my future in Divine hands.  I turn over each problem of my life to that great All Knowing mind to which all things are possible.”

“I am merged with the infinite power of love that surges through me.  The limits and inhibitions of my past are gone and each day is a new birth, another step on my journey towards one-ness with God.  I do not seek, I know.  I do not strive for I am guided.”

How can one not be seduced by: I am merged with the Infinite Power of Love that surges through me?  Doesn’t it make you want to drop everything right now, be still and breathe that precious life giving breath and melt into the arms of Divine Love?  Certain now you are renewed forever lying here, resolve to remember this and return the moment should you ever forget.

This I must repeat:

“The limits and inhibitions

of my past are gone

and each day is a new birth,

another step on my journey

towards one-ness with God.

I do not seek, I know.

I do not strive for I am guided.”

I hope you all enjoyed the writing of US Andersen, Kelly Howell and my comments today.  It moved me to tears.  I plan on printing it, so I can carry it around in my back pocket.