Bella

Last April, a friend of mine drove the thirteen hours from Southern California to San Francisco to drop off a tortoise.  I like them, you see, and my friend doesn't because tortoises hiss.  Easy to see that being hissed at every morning might not inspire a bonding experience.  Especially in situations where the hisser is foisted on one by the care-taker family member moving out.  And they do have a bit of a cold look to their eye.

I don't mind the steely look or the breathy statements, nor the six months it took Bella (renamed in the first week--they thought she was a boy and I would be insulted as well if I'd been named after a teenage mutant ninja turtle) to warm up enough to recognize me as her food source.  And let me tell you, Bella is a foodie.  She is ecstatic about fresh garden roses.  She sucks up dandelion greens like they're pasta, will take an occasional nasturtium blossom, and destroys romaine leaves.

I consider this, and her interest in my socks when she visits in the kitchen, to be signs of her personality blooming.  Which brings me to the point of sharing this fortuitous little event in my life:

There will always be times when things arrive unsolicited on our doorstep.  We can consider them the gods cursing us, or we can dig deep and find the joy and the love in them.  Remembering as well that when we ask for help in that prayerful way of connecting with the light that guides us, we will be given all the help we need.

Wishing you days filled with fresh roses and endless delicious greens--
Bella and Maureen

A Quote

Here's a short reminder from the pages of Clearings: Helping Lost Souls Find The Way Home, written in reflecting on a lost soul looking for a way to seek revenge to right the wrongs done to him:

You can let anger fuel your life.  If you do, it will blind you and steal joy and happiness from you.  That is the price you will inevitably pay.

Lay the anger down.  Let it flow into the earth.
Come back to peace.

Oh yes we can!

I find myself endlessly fascinated by how this creature we know as "human" operates.  Lately, I've been especially aware of its innate resistance to things or actions it perceives as demanding something of it.  This is pretty nuts, considering that anything worthwhile is going to have those initial moments that are nothing but.

I mention this resistance thing because I hope in recognizing that it is a weirdly unavoidable human reaction, we can afford it a lesser place of importance.

So that, for example, we know ahead of time we will be feeling like we simply can't, when we absolutely can do the new and unknown.  Then when the "Oh no I can't!" shows up right on schedule, we let that extra bit of energy and focus it gives carry us right into the doing.

Because we can!

Bellyache

Here's something that could be helpful if you find yourself in a situation where you aren't feeling bad enough to see a doc, and at the same time your belly is not very happy:

Settle in and set up some light around you, starting with the point of light in your center and then letting it bloom out to a comfortable volume.  Focus your attention on your stomach, then:

• Thank it for its service to you
• Express your love for it
• Ask it what it needs
• Sit and wait as long as it takes for a thought to drop in
• Thank it
  
• Tell it what you are going to do in response to its expression of what it needs

It might only want some peppermint or ginger or acidophilis, or a little yogurt.  It might point out to you that what you think isn't such a big deal actually is.  In which case, get to the emergency room.

This conversation with your body part works with all your other body parts as well.  You'll be amazed by the answers you get.

   

Imagination

An imagination is a terrible thing.  I write this in the face of the advice handed out regarding the importance of imagining in getting what we want.  As in, if we can imagine it, if we can dream it, it will come into being.  Very nice.

Very not nice, because while we have this awesomely powerful tool at our fingertips, we have no concept of how powerful it truly is.

I've puzzled over how we have missed seeing what we've got, this tiger we have by the tail, and I've come to the following conclusions:

• We like things to be instant.  Imagining takes time to get results, which means either we give up on the imagining necessary or when we get the result of our imagining, it is so far from the starting point that we do not recognize it.  I once imagined my perfect work environment to be one where I was in a different location every day.  It happened long after I had forgotten about that imagining.  I was assigned seven locations per week, and was so wrung out by the end of the day on Friday that I swore I would never spread myself so thin again.  
• We imagine the details of what we want without looking at the essence of what we are after.  Details alone are not effective at carrying energy.  So avoid imagining things like a blue car with X amount of power and so on.  Imagine a car that has the feeling of what that car will give you as well as type, color, capacity, for example.
• Self talk is a form of imagining.  It is not the universe dumping on us when we indulge in self talk like waiting for the other shoe to drop, expecting the day to not go well, thinking that someone is out to get us, that we will never be truly happy.  It is our enormously powerful ability to imagine in action.  
• Imagining has a partner: gratitude.  I will even say that gratitude is the engine of imagining.  When you sit down to do your imagining, and you'll want to give yourself a few minutes of imagining every day, start with a thank you for all that makes your life wonderful.  Even if the only thing you can come up with is the thought that you are still breathing, and because you are still breathing, there's time for things to get better.

Someone once told me that we earthlings are unique in our ability to be dreamers.  If this is so, I ask that we treasure our gift and use it wisely and well.

Find Peace

Our human tribe will never accomplish peace among ourselves until we learn to be at peace within ourselves.  For if we are at war with ourselves, unable to accept and love the light that we are, we will have no capacity for peace.  When we see the differences of others, it will be with mistrust. We will be as at war with them as we are with ourselves.

May compassion be what lights your way.

Making Room

If we want stupidly wonderful things to find their way to us, and who wouldn't want a lift out of the lists and projects and do or die stuff that many of us find occupying the hours of our day, we have to make room for them.  By widening the angle so there's space in our everyday perception for what otherwise would seem of such lesser importance that we would not notice it at all.  Then, letting what is stupidly wonderful and almost overlooked become our centerpiece.  I have an example:

I'm driving to an appointment that was scheduled weeks in advance and I absolutely cannot afford to miss, on a route that I have timed down to the last ten minutes.  With an extra fifteen minutes built into the travel time.

I run into the worst traffic snarl I've ever encountered.  I can see cars stacked up in front of me for miles.  We are crawling from one red light to another.  We are going to get where we need to be long after we need to be there.  I'm going to be there long after I need to be there.  

And on the radio comes Bolero.  Sinuous, hypnotic, floating above the cars in front of me and beside me and in back of me.  It comes to me that I get to listen to Bolero from beginning to end in the middle of a frantically busy day, guilt free.  Stupidly wonderful!

I could have completely missed out if I had continued to count the minutes passing, not taking note of the music in the background. All that was needed was to widen the angle and make room.

Imagine what might be waiting for you, just as soon as you allow for making room.

Giving

Today, I wanted to come up with the most simple way to give.  One that doesn't involve money or special abilities or very much time.  In part because altruism is a good thing, and in part because it makes our soul feel great.  And when that happens, all of ourself feels great.

And so here it is:

Notice someone in your field of vision.  It can be someone in your thought vision, or someone you are physically looking at.  It can be a human someone, an animal someone, a plant someone.  Send them this message: "I love you."

You won't believe how truly great this feels until you try it.

Higher States

Every now and again, science collides with the experiences of higher states and produces a result that is stunning in it's everyday usefulness.  I'm specifically referring to a recent discovery that brain wave patterns observable in recognized meditators matches the brain waves produced by laughter.

I suppose this bit of news is unremarkable for anyone who has spent time with the ones we honor as great spiritual leaders–they laugh easily. At times, they actually giggle. The meditation state, you could say, being so similar to the other.

Here's the everyday usefulness part of the discovery:

We all have it in us to get the juicy benefits–the peace, the open-heartedness, the ability to be in the flow of the moment–of higher states of consciousness.  Because we are engineered to laugh.

I invite you to take this nugget of guru-ness you posses, treat it with the highest respect and consider it as important a daily practice as a master of meditation considers their daily meditation time.

You'll be glad you did.

Give Me Five

There seems to be a widely-held belief that meditation takes long, uninterrupted stretches of time.  With maybe the word "boring" coming into the picture. So we skip it.

How about if we give it five uninterrupted minutes: 

Long, slow breaths at the beginning (which should be good for about thirty seconds)
Sinking into our body consciousness (20 more)
Finding that point of light in our center (10 more)
Letting be whatever is there to be (3, maybe 4 minutes)
Long, slow breaths at the end (another 30 seconds)

I'm telling you, you're gonna love it.

Dented

It seems to me that we often relate to our emotional selves in the same way we do our cars–we see ourselves as getting bashed up and dented in our interactions.  Then, unlike the way we treat our cars after a collision, we let the damage remain. 

Can you imagine having a bashed in fender and weeping over the loss day after day instead of getting the insurance company on the job to fix it?  That is exactly what we do when we admire the wounds relationships inevitably cause and impress ourselves with what a terrible loss we have suffered. 

"I'll never get over this" successfully stops our inborn ability to heal.  And the wonderful thing about our inborn ability to heal is that we do not have to understand how it works.  We just have to let it. 

The activation process for healing, regardless of how deep and complicated we see ourselves to be, is mindlessly simple.  Make two statements:

• I know how to heal.
• I let myself heal.

Then, let it go.  Do this every time your thoughts head back to feelings of woundedness.  Say them with love and conviction.  

You absolutely, in your core, know how to heal.

Things I Learned From My Father

Here's a few things I learned from my father:

• When crossing a stream, don't look down at the rocks, look straight ahead to the opposite bank.  Same goes with driving.
• If you take the coin the tooth fairy left to be a nickel and it's a quarter, it will still spend like a quarter.
• When whittling, always face the blade away from the body.  
• Do not sing while fishing.  Neither the fish nor the other people fishing will appreciate you. I believe this may apply to public transportation as well.
• It doesn't matter if you don't sing in tune as long as you put your heart into it.
• If you love your garden, it will love you back.  He never came right out and said it, but it was hard to miss.

When I sift out the gist of all of this, it comes out something like this:

Keep your vision uppermost, embrace your gifts, you are responsible for your own well-being, give respect to every being, lead with your heart, don't be afraid to love.
Amen.

Super Capes

I've always been intrigued by the idea of super capes.  Super Man whips his out before he goes into action.  Bat Man has one.  J.K. Rowling gave one to Harry Potter, kids draw them on their super heroes.  Darth Vader would have looked less menacing without his. 

What if, just by imagining, we all could have one.  And the goodies that come with it—excellent focus, perception, gathering our strength and capabilities.  I've seen imagining do some pretty incredible things.  We should give it a try.  Imagine whipping it out like Super Man and letting it settle over us before we go into action.  We might be impressed with the results.

Wonderment

I met this woman once, a friend of a friend, who lived in the garden behind an estate in a small, not quite waterproof trailer.  She had a few friends that she rarely visited and didn't show much interest in adding me to her list.  Odd.  Reclusive.  And happy with her life. 

I had to know how that could possibly be.  So I asked her what it was like, to live there by herself in that trailer.  She got quiet and gathered herself.  Then she looked up, sort of past me, extended her arms a bit and said, "For some people, just being there in the garden is more than they could ever need." 

Wonderment, that's what she had. 

I remember having wonderment.  I was ten or eleven and had new rain boots and a new raincoat with a hood.  If I think about it, I can still smell its newness.  That very week it poured.  Came down so hard it bounced off the pavement.  I put on my boots and raincoat and ran outside into it.  I stomped and splashed and laughed until the cold finally got to me. 

When you're ten or eleven, no one would call you a fool for standing in the rain having wonderment.  Harder to pull off at an age when you should know better. 

Not to say only children should have wonderment—we do not stop needing, or knowing, wonderment.  We are more likely to put it on the back burner, or expect that it will take more effort than its worth. 

Pish!  That's just marketing departments doing their job working at selling us big marvelous things and places and experiences.

We've got wonderment in us.  We just need to let it out.

Impossibilities

Say the thought crosses your mind of how amazing it would be to spend the Summer kayaking in Alaska.  The brain shoots back, "Oh, come on!  Where's the time, never mind the money, to zip off on some fantasy trip?  Do you even know how to kayak?  Impossible!"  All true, you think.  The brain is not lying.  It is hugely true that the time, the money, the skills are not all lined up.  And that is the very thing that puts an end to happy thoughts of kayaking amongst the glaciers.  You are never getting to Alaska.

But you could.  If you don't let the brain's assessment get the better of you.  I have a couple of strategies in mind:

1. Start small with trying the impossible.  Small victories, so you'll be ready when a giant impossibility comes along.  I mean small.  Small like getting up on time, doing at least one nasty chore each day, smiling at the idiot who gets your simple straightforward who could possibly get it wrong order wrong.  You get my drift. 
2. Take your brain to the bargaining table.  Not in an adversarial, my-way-or-the-highway way.  In a compassionate way.  Beginning with some deep, slow calming breathing.  Then thank that calculating part of you, the part I call your brain, for having your best interests at heart.  Let it know you appreciate how hard it works for you.  Now let that part of you that is in love with the impossibility your brain wishes to shoot down, show up.  Ask your brain if it is willing to listen to what that part has to say.  More breathing while it considers the request.  When you get a sense of that calculating-brain part of you, I'll say softening a bit, invite the part that loves your idea to express what it sees as the benefits of doing or having or being what looks impossible.  Now ask your brain if it is willing to stand aside and make room for the possibility of the impossible happening.  Offer it a job: ask it to help with breaking things that need to be done down into small, not so scary steps.  You have now offered your heart and your brain a way to work together.  It may occur that your brain part notices more impossibilities as your project develops.  Let it know that you are always interested in what it wants to show you and promise it you will listen to its concerns so that you can come up with the best possible plan together.  And get to Alaska if that's what you want.

Timers

We, in America, could easily be crowned the biggest time watchers on the planet.  In our own personal space, we have access to info on time passing in at least three ways--our alarm clock,watch, phone, computer.  Now add the clock on the wall, the radio, the TV.  Every form of transit has the time posted for us, our churches ring out the hour.  Schools, places of business have clocks in easy view.  It makes me wonder if the real attraction in shopping and eating out has to do with the absence of time keepers in those establishments.

It has to be anxiety producing, this obsession with tracking our moments.  Seeing no possibility that we're going to give it up any time soon, I'm taking the "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" approach and offering a way to steal a little time for ourselves.  I'm going to call it the ten minute rule:

Select a timer of your choice, and I know every electronic device we own has one.  Or use the wind-up timer in your kitchen if you haven't yet succumbed to living your life by beeps.  Set it for ten minutes.  These ten minutes are yours.  Just for you.  Within your ten minute bubble of time, you are free to do anything, or nothing you choose.  It could be ten music minutes, then breathing minutes, ten dancing minutes, ten reading minutes, ten bike-riding minutes, ten watching the stars minutes, ten sudoku minutes.  All for you, in your ten minute bubble. 

Then, back in everyone's time, things may flow easier, be less crowded, less down to the minute.  Thanks to one simple ten minutes of time just for you.

Empty Tank

This is for those times when you feel hollow inside, empty in a way that feels like you will never be full again, when there are only questions and no answers, when help seems far, far away:

• Give yourself over to the experience of emptiness. 
• With your focus fully on the emptiness, ask for help from the Beings of the Light Communities, not needing to know anything about them.  With only the thought that they are indeed there.
• Not knowing what their solution will be, open to the possibility of their complete understanding and allow, surrender, to the giving of exactly what you need.  So you are no longer empty, you make room for answers to come, you know firsthand help is with you.
• Honor them with your gratitude in whatever way seems right to you.  

Know that you are, and will always be, blessed.