Perspective

It's been a tough couple of weeks.  Despite all the self-cheer leading I've been doing, I was walking around with a cloud over my head.  Talking with a friend the other day, I discovered that she, too, was feeling trapped and hopeless.  This echoed what I was feeling, and it occurred to me that we we're probably both approaching a substantial change in our lives. That was good news.

I thought about snakes who shed their skins to accommodate their new growth.  Perhaps we, too, are engaged in that: a period of shedding old habits to accommodate a fresh, new approach. It's a slow and uncomfortable process, but that idea made me feel more content. So often I forget that life is, essentially, a process of change.  Learning to flow from one phase to another smoothly is what I'd like to do; that and remember that sooner or later all things, even the most stuck and trapped feelings, pass.

It was hard work getting to this point, but the Universe was very kind, leading me step by step until I figured it all out. 

At first, I really wanted to find an inspiring message providing guidence and a ray of sunshine on the street like I had so often in the past.  Nothing showed up.  After several days, I became despondent.  Was the Universe ignoring me? Then it struck me!  Of course not, but in the process of looking for a "sign", I wasn't seeing  the staggering beauty and abundance that is truly always part of our everyday experience. 

Heartened, I started focusing on just that.  I practiced being grateful and appreciative for what I have.  As my appreciation for my life grew, tangible gifts started showing up, like this little heart:

Still, incidents that were disappointing and irritating disrupted my new-found tranquility, and I'd slip back into negativity.  It was frustrating to feel so good one day, then feel bad the next. 

And it was humorous to see how quickly I forgot the big lesson about the nature of life; the inevitability of change. Once again, I felt like I'd be stuck inside this emotional seesaw forever.   

Then I found this:

This little green plane reminded me of vacations!  Clearly I needed one.  There's nothing like a trip to help me get out of any rut I'm in.  Then I thought about what vacations do, and especially what planes do: They help you see your life from a whole new perspective. That's exactly the information I needed, and I knew that I could step back from my life without leaving town. 

Because I realized I was taking it all too seriously. 

Sometimes we do that.  We get so immersed in a certain way of seeing ourselves that we often miss how the myriad shifts of this glorious river of life lead us over the rapids, around a bend, and right into a refreshing new perspective. 

It's easy to appreciate feeling good, but I thought I needed to feel good all the time in order to be more "spiritually evolved".  I learned that isn't so, that I need to appreciated and accept even my bad moods. After all, if I didn't experience my stuck and negative feelings, I wouldn't have been led to this important shift in perspective: that we need not judge any of it, the good, the bad, or even the ugly. 

We never know what will lead us into the light. Sometimes it's our darkness. 

Love, Kristine

.   

Stones On Your Path

How often have you sat down to a job, accomplished the task to the best of your abilities, and discovered later that what you had done was not up to snuff.  When you found out, did you get defensive?  Did you blame a supervisor or co-worker for your mistake?  Did you heap blame on yourself?  Did you re-live the error over and over, spoiling every pleasant moment with the thought of your mistake?  Did it effect your sleep and make you cranky enough to effect your relationships?

No matter how you handled the uncomfortable discovery, what you are experiencing is a classic example of a pattern of thought that got stuck in your energy body. Having reactions like this not only effect your day to day life, they effect your health.  They block the pathways of energy that continually flow through your system that renew and invigorate you.  Patterns of thought create both dis-ease and disease.

How do we eleminate them? The first step is to take a clear look at them.

Mistakes make us feel uncomfortable.  Don't run away from the feeling.  Feel it!  Be with it.  Comfort and hold it as you would a child.  Discover its secret longing and the reason for its presence in your life.  Is this pattern of thought there because you use actions to get love and approval?  That's the most common reason for the upset.  "I made a mistake.  I'm not perfect.  I will not be loved."

When you see the outcome of the pattern ("I am not loveable") you can see that it's taken you to right to the big lie: you have to be perfect to be loved. Already, you know that that is not true!  Universal love is unconditional.  Even human love doesn't depend upon perfection.  Anyone raising children knows that!

Feel better?

As you become more practiced in untangling the reasons why these patterns of thought are present in your energy, you feel more at peace and more whole. The result is that you are no longer thrown by these experiences because you are less likely to become ensnared in patterned thinking. You bounce back more quickly.

You won't eleminate making mistakes or experiencing criticism, because mistakes and criticism have value.    They are the "caution" signs on the path towards your goal.  They provide you with the navigating tools that make your life more effective and fruitful. Used wisely, they can help you become the person you want to be.

The trick to negotiating mistakes so that you can using them effectively, distance yourself from them, and investigate and eleminate your patterns of thought, is to not take them so seriously.  See them as merely rocks on your path.  They may make you stumble, but they rarely break your legs.  They are there to encourage you to be a little more attentive to where you're placing your feet. 

That rock you stumble on is truly a gold nugget helping you to be more present in your life. That's the only "perfect" way to be you:  here, now, and beautifully alive!

Love, Kristine

Take a Page from the Page of Wands

Ah, Spring when a young person's fancy lightly turns to, well, just about anything new if you're like the Page of Wands.  He's an explorer of the path less traveled, and pursuer of the newest idea, a visionary and truly creative spirit.  He reminds us of the range of possiblities that are available to us. 
As Abraham says, "Your choices of action may be limited--but your choices of thought are not."
The Page of wands encourages us to think big, think vast, think loose and free!  He wants us to shake the cobwebs out of our brains, do a thorough Spring cleaning of old and outmoded thought patterns, and get busy creating a new life for ourselves.
My daughter and I are (I blush to say it) hooked on "What Not to Wear", a Lifetime program that changes the style of a select woman to "match" who she's become. The hosts of the program assess where the lady is in her life, and whether or not her "look" is in harmony with that. 
It's amazing to see the transformation that occurs just by her changing her clothes.  You can see how stuck in a style a person can get, but once they are encourange to open their hearts and minds to a new way of looking at themselves, they buy clothes that seem to free them.  They become happier, lighter, more confident.  It's not just because they look better, although they usually do.  Quite a bit better.  It's because they've allowed themselves to be bigger then they thought they were.  It's like watching a caterpiller transform into a beautiful butterfly.
The Page of Wands gives us the same kind of wake-up call. 
"Hello," he seems to say "you've been in the cocoon for long enough!  Break on out and spread your wings!"
It can be hard, after all that self-inflicted confinement, to break free of what we think we are and begin afresh,  rethinking ourselves and our abilities without the old holdbacks and habits. 
We're so used to the comfort of discomfort.  We might think that our confinement within a certain way of being keeps us safe, but actually it keeps us stuck.  Not only that, our desire to self-limit is really a cheat.  Not only are we cheating ourselves out of our true potential, we're cheating each other.
As a mother, I know that nothing is more inspiring then watching someone we love grow, evolve, change, and progress.  Babies do it so easily and naturally.
As we grow older, we have a harder time.  We tamp ourselves down to please others.  We worry that if we change, we will no longer fit in with our peer group.
We may not, but there is a new one waiting for us that will fit our needs and our new self more perfectly, where we are encouraged to be our full selves rather than asked to be less than we are. 
The more we live our true selves, the more we'll feel fulfilled, at peace, holy and whole, and the happier we will be.  We'll also create a safe space around us for others to find their freedom as well.  As more and more people let their light shine and become the lights in the world that we all are, the world will become a brighter and lovlier place.
Spring is the perfect time to create heaven on earth.  Go forth and blossom!
Love, Kristine

Who Do You THINK you are?

This week the universe gifted me with I.D. tags; the ones that dogs have on their collars.   Here they are:

It made me think about the nature of identity. 

Dogs don't "know" who they are.  They're dogs.  I bet they don't think to themselves:  "I'm a terrier.  I'm black and white.  I'm gaining weight and need to go on a diet.  I live with some nice people in a good part of town.  I've been to Obedience Training and have a certificate that says I'm a good dog.  And I AM a good dog.  I come when I'm called, unless I'm chasing a squirrel.  I sit, I stay (for a little while) and I'm a good companion."

Dogs are, well, dogs engaged in the act of being dogs.

We are another story. We don't know who we are either, and that's because we believe in our labels.

Often we let them define us.  Our color, our clothes, our income, our education, our religion, race, country of origin, country where we live, people we work with, people we socialize with, etc. etc. all are often used as personal definers.  If we cling too much to our defined identity, we can become rigid and closed off from all the other possible ways of living and being.
 
An extreme example might be a person who says they are a vegetarian, and are so militant about it that they starve to death instead of eating an animal.  They are so tied to a mental construct of what the "right" thing to be is, that they ignore the life events that surge around them that might makes their choice "wrong".  Or, for example, the parents who won't let the medical establishment help a sick child because they don't believe in doctors, and, as a result, the child dies. 

These are very extreme examples, but in small ways we, too, might be sabatoging our best choices at the moment because our ideas about who we are are in opposition to that choice. We are not flowing with life, we're trying to live life based on mental constructs.

We might fall in love with someone of a different race and/or religion, but be unable to marry them because of our, or our families, prejudices. We may agree with a presidential program, but be so vested in our party's beliefs that we ignore our better judgement for the good of our political group.  We may shun another person that we secretly like in order to please the peer group that we identify with and yearn to belong to.

All this is self-sabotage.  When we do this, we teach ourselves that we can't trust ourselves. 
In order to truly know who we are and live our truth, we have to ignore what we've learned to be and follow our hearts to our true nature. 

Lose your ID tags; the ways you define yourself, and find your heart.  Get to know yourself as you would a new friend, and find our for yourself, without outdated identifiers, who you really are moment to moment, now and now and now. 

Ask yourself, "Who am I?"  and answer that question without using some sort of label.  This takes practice, but as you do this you start to feel firmly grounded in the essense of yourself.  When you feel comfortable in your own skin, ask "What does the I that I am at this moment want to do, be, or have.

When you answer the first question, you've truly found YOU.  When you answer the second, you'll experience exactly what it is to flow with life.

Love, Kristine

THINKING ABOUT THINGS

Working as a freelancer, I feel the winds of financial change blowing cold at my back.  If I'm not careful, I could easily give into the fear of losing what I have and begin longing for the security that comes with having lots of money.  I wonder how I can increase the abundance in my life without losing the freedom I cherish.   Will having more mean I have to work harder? Abraham says action is not the answer. In order to create the abundance I seek I need to simply raise my vibration through positive thought.  That's hard work too.
Perhaps I should just trust life and see where this downturn leads me.
I pull the King of Pentacles from the deck.  Talk about perfect!  He is the king (literally) of material abundance.  I study his card and first see the richness of his life.
The King sits on a golden throne above an elegant city.  His garden is fecund and bursting with vegetation.  At his feet, and to his right and left in silver and gold, is the image of the ox, symbol of the hard, focused laborer who tirelessly plows his field day after day until the enevitable abundant harvest. 
Then I notice that the king's back is to the town.  Is he isolated in his wealth and power?  The ivy that grows so lushly on the wall behind him looks, due to the pattern on his kingly robe, as if vines are choking him. Does his wealth keep him where he is, limiting his freedom and flexibility?
Plus, he doesn't look happy.
We think that having lots of money will solve our problems and make us happy, but (old story) it doesn't.  I learned on the Life program (on the Discovery channel) that research shows it's the satisfying and meaningful quality of our interactions with others that makes us happy.
Knowing that money can't buy happiness, or even security, I asked myself what in the world I wanted.  Here's what I came up with:
I want myself, my family and, really, everyone, to live in comfort. By that I mean everyone gets a roof over their heads, enough to eat, meaningful employment, and satisfying social interactions. This sounds so simple, but so many don't have even these basic needs met, much less a decent health care system.
I think we live in a world where meeting these needs, for everyone, is possible. Why haven't we been able to do this so far?  Annie Leonard's "Story of Stuff" has an interesting answer to this question.
In the mean time, life for many of us in this economy is looking grim indeed.  It feels like one of those curves on an unfamiliar mountain road that hides what's coming up ahead. You have to trust that there's more road to come, but your heart is in your mouth a bit wondering what it will be like.  Are you driving off a cliff, or coming to your heart's desire?
Then I realize that, rich or poor, no one ever knows what's coming.  Better to enjoy what you have than worry about not having.  You can never predict what will happen, miracle or tragedy, so just live in the moment, don't worry, be happy.  Difficult?  Of course, but it's really the only sensible thing to do.  The message from the Universe today is "Live your life in eager expectation because a life filled with dread is no life at all."
Love, Kristine

THE TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGING, THANK GOD!

I found another Kindergarten worksheet.  It was an April Fool's "what's wrong with this picture" kind of thing.  There were flying picnic baskets and trees growing lightbulbs and all sorts of unlikely things happening.  I meant to pick it up, but it was floating in a puddle and pretty wet, so I let it lie.

It's been feeling kind of like that these days. So many unlikely things are happening. 

There's the Tea Party, of course.  They're pretty nuts, but in a more complicated way, health care passes, and that's great, but it means that the kids might be paying more on their insurance so their grandparent's health care costs don't go up. Yet most of the kids that I know are having trouble finding a job.  How are they going to afford health insurance in the first place?

And speaking of jobs, we hear that more people are employed, and then we find out that, yeah, one of the reasons it looks so good on paper is that the government has hired thousands of census takers.  Those are temporary jobs, so there really hasn't been much of an improvement at all.

It's been a confusing and devisive and contentious time; and I wonder who we can trust. Once again like bread crumbs leading me to my conclusions, the universe provided these as an answer.

First I found lip gloss, and then, a few steps later, lip balm.

I puzzled over these items for a while, and then I remembered my question: "who can you trust?" Lip gloss and lip balm help keep lips smooth and slick.  Immediately I thought about smoooooooth talkers and slick operators.  I realized that there really is no one outside of ourselves that we can trust.

I don't mean to sound cynical.  I don't feel cynical.  I do feel like critical thinking is essential right now.  We have to strap what we hear to our internal lie detector and feel our way into the truth. 

When a statement makes our world look hopeless, it's a lie.  We know there is always hope.
When a statement makes us angry, it's a lie.  We know that we're not hearing the whole story.
When a statement makes us afraid, it's a lie.  We know that, essentially, all is well. 

Our inner being knows that life is change and flux and flow.  What's here today is gone tomorrow.  Today's tragedy is tomorrow's opportunity.  We have to remember that we are not stuck anywhere.  It's like they say about the weather:  You don't like it now, wait 15 minutes.  It'll change.

Things always change, and that's a good thing.  And fast-changing times like these are perfect venues for creative thinking. I think that we'll be amazed at how the insolvable problems of today will be solved by some amazing person in the future.

So you see, I'm not cynical.  I believe in us.  I believe in our creative power.  Inventiveness is a huge part of our nature.  I believe we can trust ourselves to create the life we're wanting.  All we need to do is trust life.

Love, Kristine