FINDING YOUR TRUTH

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Finding Your Truth

I could have easily titled this blog “Finding MY Truth” but that’s not what this written effort is about. This blog’s focus is to help others in finding their own truth.

In reality, your TRUTH might not be the same as MY truth; but what I’d like others to know is that I compassionately encourage you in your explorations to find your personal truth because I know how arduous that search can be—how rocky the terrain that lies ahead—how tedious the extended journey awaiting you, simply to uncover those deeply-hidden secrets of YOU.

And I also know how life can change in an instant when the winding, mountainous path that you were so confidently traveling suddenly crumbles beneath your feet—tossing you screaming off the cliff and out into space.

Having faced some of that unexpected “air time” myself, I know how shocking it can be when your life suddenly falls apart, forcing you to see how quickly you either learn to fly, or how well you can bounce once you do hit the canyon floor.

Also from my own experiences in personal TRUTH finding (as well as surviving LIFE’s challenges), I know how rare it is to find others willing to offer emotional support or encouragement to get you back on your feet again without a ‘profit motive’ involved. True, we all have to make a living, but there are times when you should compassionately look to help others without first considering what they can offer you in return.

So up front here: I don’t want your money—in fact I don’t want anything from you other than some deep soul-searching to determine what you really expect from LIFE and what LIFE expects from you in return.

If you can answer those two key questions to your own satisfaction, then that’s plenty reciprocal reward for me.

Remember, MY truth may not be YOUR truth, but I know MY truth better than I know yours, so that is likely what I will write about the most and hope you can see parallels or divergences by which to gauge your own truth.

Life is an adventure—one we may never truly understand in this plane of existence—but one we have to navigate all the same. So good luck! As you journey ever forward, stay alert to avoid sudden pitfalls and just watch where you step in general, because it’s one big ‘cow pasture’ out there.*

* (I’m from Iowa: If you think dogs leave an unappreciated ‘pile’ behind in walkways, imagine what a bunch of cows might leave behind during your pastoral wandering.)

Listen to the Clouds and the Wind

For those of us living in this aggravated, hustling-bustling world, just BEING is hard to do. We almost feel guilty when we are not DOING something constructive. I know at times I do.

But I remind myself that my presence here is not dependent on how productive I can be. Rather it is dependent on how present I can become in witnessing the world surrounding me; and the WORLD is far more than human beings scampering about for sustenance, security, or comradery.

The WORLD I love so deeply is nature-based—both infinitely vast and variable.

I’ve often sat out in natural settings and just closed my eyes listening: to trees whose leaves are rustling in the breeze above my head, to the song birds singing loudly and continuously, especially at dawn, and to the squirrels angrily chattering warnings to me about my disruptive presence in their daily endeavors.

But if you sit out on an open plain atop a barren hill, with the wind and the clouds as your only companions, their language is far more subtle; far more to the point made by the Lakota elder in the image above. “Everything is alive and has its own consciousness.”

There is a FEEL to that type of natural unspoken communication—a FEEL that is almost indescribable because when you connect in to nature at that level, you are no longer separate from it—no longer isolated from it and observing it—you now ride the winds wherever they go and you float with the clouds as they build or disperse—amassing or dissipating. You become the landscape you were previously observing—except now you FEEL within you the massive over-riding consciousness that you were once separate from; and you then feel great peace with that knowing.

When you can actually DO that—when you can BE the winds and the clouds, you realize that the Lakota elder was exactly right: “Everything is alive and has its own consciousness.”

And you had just personally tasted the immensity of that conscious awareness.

It’s a very humbling experience. One not easily forgotten.

Refresher on DOING and BEING

Ran across Tolle’s reposting of an earlier entry and felt compelled to repeat it here again mainly because of the elaboration on the “vertical” and “horizontal dimensions” that he describes below. It stirred a memory of a shamanic class where the teacher described the ‘cross of our beingness’ where our vertical axis that connects us from upper world (spirit world) to lower world (the earth itself) is crossed by the horizontal dimension of middle world (our life in this dimension).

We are the mediators between super-consciousness and sub-consciousness expressing their different levels of awareness through a perceived physical medium known as LIFE in human form. And it is through that ‘middle world’ crossing of vertical and horizontal dimensions that we connect the upper and lower worlds together.

Our “doings” in this middle world can reflect the depth of our “beingness” mainly by how high we hold our personal frequencies or by how strongly we can stay connected into upper world. Eckhart calls it the “…the dance between BEING and DOING—not as separate things, but acting together—BEING and DOING as one.”

So to him “The mastery of life is to have a balance of both”—DOING and BEING.

The purpose of recognizing the ‘crossing dimensions’ is this—awakening humanity to our ability to intentionally hold higher levels of consciousness during this LIFE experience because, “As humanity awakens, so too will our powers to create true change on our planet.”

And he means change for the better.

***

From my earlier post: “Eckhart Tolle on DOING and BEING” July 22, 2021

“Eckhart Tolle

Dear friends,

Over the years, many people have asked me about finding their purpose in this world and how this connects to spiritual awakening. It’s a very important question.

Recently we have had events in the collective that have pushed many into states of fear and anxiety. There has been a kind of enforced stillness for the population. Whenever there is an extreme form of adversity, an opportunity also arises.

Our alertness has gone up to the present moment and to what is happening around us. Many are going deeper to become aware of something that cannot be seen but is rather felt. This is an undeniable field of energy, consciousness that makes all sense perceptions possible. That Presence is inseparable from who you are in your essence.

On the one hand, your life purpose unfolds through the activities that you engage in on what I call ‘the horizontal dimension’—or the dimension of DOING. But everybody eventually finds if they only operate on the horizontal dimension, it doesn’t ultimately satisfy them.

There is another dimension that I call ‘the vertical dimension,’ or the dimension of BEING. The mastery of life is to have a balance of both. I sometimes call it the dance between BEING and DOING—not as separate things, but acting together—BEING and DOING as one.

‘Eckhart Tolle Now’(his membership community) is a place for you to learn, practice, and awaken in community. We will look deeply into the skills, the practices, and, perhaps most importantly, the BEING dimension. Remember: the ultimate source of satisfaction in life is to recognize yourself as consciousness.

If you miss that, then no matter what you achieve in life, it is not going to make you happy for very long. We can start now, right where we are. By going within we can discover the place where life is born continuously—the source of creation—consciousness itself.

As humanity awakens, so too will our powers to create true change on our planet.

With you on the path,

Eckhart Tolle ”

The NOW

“If your mind carries a heavy burden of past, you will experience more of the same. The past perpetuates itself through lack of presence. The quality of your consciousness at this moment is what shapes the future.” – Eckhart Tolle

***

You know it’s hard to be a grownup.

So many responsibilities—so many choices—so much “stuff” going through your head all the time. As Eckhart says above, “…your mind carries a heavy burden of past,…” and sometimes it’s hard to let that ‘past’ go even when we know we should.

TIME itself is a strange phenomenon: illusory, yet tangible; measurable in a sense, but yet fathomless in its entirety. If every moment in the NOW is soon passed, then every second ticked off our inner clocks is long gone before we even realized it once existed. It’s pretty hard to stay in the NOW when the NOW is gone as soon as you consider it. But the NOW is what we actually have to deal with, not the past.

I’ve read Eckhart’s book The Power of NOW long ago and feel it is a good source of inspiration and personal reflection toward living life moment to moment within the confines of safety and security.

If your life is far from safe and secure, then your every NOW moment is more likely focused on surviving to the next moment and that makes it more future focused based on your past experience.

But I understand what he is saying about staying in the NOW as “…The quality of your consciousness at this moment is what shapes the future.” True enough for those of us with the privilege of having reflection time.

However back to the ‘being a grownup’ part and how hard it can be. In many ways our past defines us in our present, but only as long as we allow it to do so. Over the course of many decades we can actually reinvent ourselves many times over—I certainly have.

But during that ‘growing older and hopefully wiser’ natural life process, we face choices of whether we allow our previous experiences to adversely affect us or to simply better educate us. Meaning that if you cannot separate your past experiences/memories from the ‘NOW awareness’ of your current possibilities, you are limiting your opportunities for a better understanding of why you are here and what you are to do with the few precious moments that you are given.

If you want your life to make some type of sense (and most of us do), that’s why you have the PAST to compare the PRESENT to for recognizing behavior patterns and cause/effect repercussions of any current actions taken based on what has happened previously in your life.

In an ideal world we learn from past mistakes. In our current world, we often keep making the same ones over and over until we finally recognize the futility of it. So the past informs the present and can guide the future, but only if we stay conscious of the NOW opportunities to choose a different path than the previous ill-informed one.

When you have a past that is fraught with turmoil and trauma, it is that much harder to ‘let the past be the past’ and keep it straight like that in your mind, but it’s not impossible to reach that mind state of staying in the NOW for your intentional consideration of options.

And if you want to better your life with a more enjoyable future then you really must step beyond the limitations you may have unintentionally set for yourself by your previous endeavors or experiences. Be ready NOW to seize the current opportunities for a life you have always wanted but felt too burdened by your past to allow. Don’t limit yourself by what you might have done prior; consider all the possible things you could do or paths ahead that you could travel—all waiting for your first step in that direction.

But most importantly tell yourself this throughout your day—BE HERE NOW! Don’t live in your past because if you do you may miss your current options and therefore limit your ‘better-future’ possibilities.

And if you haven’t already, please read Eckhart’s book on understanding that inner process of better choosing from your current options, The Power of NOW.

***

“If your mind carries a heavy burden of past, you will experience more of the same. The past perpetuates itself through lack of presence. The quality of your consciousness at this moment is what shapes the future.” – Eckhart Tolle

***

SOUL and SPIRIT

“This is my CREDO – my mission. To BREAK the false narrative that we are limited humans, locked in a physical realm. Let’s CRACK that out-of-date egg, step out of the box and experience ourselves as magnanimous fearless cosmic Beings. Watching, guiding, informing all others around us. That this world is not solid, not ‘real’… a temporary experience. As you remember beyond this life, you gain power and freedom.” Alicia Power @ www.soulmentoring.com

I’ve been an Alicia Power fan for many years, following her posts, blog and videos, also her courses. Sitting in her projected energy is an enjoyment to be experienced. I can easily feel the higher-frequency energies surrounding and radiating from her space—even online.

And since I share a similar philosophy about our Earth-based life experience and what lies beyond that, whatever she discusses with online talk-show hosts usually resonates well with me. Most of the time I wish the host would just be quiet and let her talk uninterrupted as the energy flows better when that occurs.

So if you are presently unfamiliar with Alicia Power, check her out and listen to the numerous videos currently available on Youtube @ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCO6QtUarRPB-r78YKVgQBsQ or go to “Deeper Insight”@ https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEB4E151BFDF9A043 for samples.

Mastering Oneself

“If I accept the fact that my relationships are here to make me conscious instead of happy, then my relationships become a wonderful self-mastery tool that keeps realigning me with my higher purpose for living.” ~ Eckhart Tolle (@ Earthschool Harmony)

Eckhart has evidently been reading my personal journal since I keep writing about self-mastery and how close relationships seem to be designed not for harmony and happiness, but for mastering one’s responses/reactions to those most close to you when those same people are less than loving and harmonious toward you.

If you are ever feeling disrespected or inappropriately criticized, sit down, take a deep breath and simply write: “Let the wind blow through you.” That was a phrase I picked up from a Native American anthology on oral story-telling tradition. That story was about a native man who faced many trials and tribulations in life, but learned that the only situation he ever really controlled was in how he allowed those challenges and hardships to affect his character.

Meaning that if he absorbed the harshness of life or wallowed in how victimized he felt over someone else’s mistreatment of him, he then allowed the other person or situation to control his attitudes and reactions; but if instead he faced the situation as ‘becoming like the morning mist lifting at sunrise,’ he allowed the adversity to simply ‘blow through him’—not stop him, and not let those ‘winds of adversity’ affect his original intentions or his life direction—he could momentarily feel the wind’s force in his face but he allowed it to move on past him and into the distance, while he continued to rise with the sun.

“Let the wind blow through you,” while not easily done, is actually good advice. The only person you can ever really control is yourself—IF you can do that, because other people will be as they will be—maybe they are full of ‘good-enough’ intentions but they may also have little self-control to achieve those intentions which sometimes makes for ‘flawed-character actions’ toward those closest to them.

For the most part we are all similar in that respect. Who we think we are may not match how we actually behave with others or with the world in general. But the only real choice we have is to master ourselves to not allow others to control or manipulate us into doing or being the person that we do not wish to be.

This is TRUTH: If you want to bring more harmony and happiness into your life, that task is entirely up to you alone. It is not anyone else’s responsibility to make you happy; and who you hang with or who you share your life with, are also choices that you make. You can do victimization and blame others for your unhappiness if you wish to, but your happiness is NOT their responsibility—it is YOURS.

Take responsibility for yourself—take responsibility for your own personal integrity and for your own well-being, and especially take responsibility for your own actions and reactions.

Remember: Don’t expect someone else to love you and care for you if you aren’t willing to love and care for yourself prior to their appearance in your life. That’s NOT their job—it is YOUR job.

So if you want to learn the intricacies of true self-mastery, form a close, long-term relationship with someone because the interactions between you will reveal far more about yourself and your emotional triggers and issues than it will about your companion’s idiosyncrasies. That I guarantee.

Seeing with the BIG Eye

“The old paradigm of birth to death represents an outdated concept that is woefully inadequate in defining the unfolding reality of expanded awareness. Materialist science is at the end of its days as most scientists are changing their views. The old concepts are soon to be relegated to the same dust bin as ‘the earth is flat’ as we develop a more mature understanding and transcend old beliefs.”

– Dr. Eben Alexander, Harvard Neurosurgeon, excerpted from an interview with “Waking Times” Resonance Science Foundation

We often think about ‘seeing’ as a function of the eye, but we are limiting the true realization of our experience when we do. The eye is a symbol for seeing—we input thru the lens of our cornea where the light waves enter to imprint upon our retina and send light signals through our optic nerves to the brain for interpretation/recognition of what the “eye” perceives in front of it.

But our eyes are only tiny input sensors of the ALLness available to us at any time, so if we perceive beyond the limits of our own eyes, then we perceive with the Great Eye (the image’s center eye) that “sees” ALL.

The “the unfolding reality of expanded awareness” encompasses the incomprehensible vastness of all that is and could ever be.

“The old paradigm of birth to death represents an outdated concept …” is one I’ve proven many times to my Past-Life Exploration clients; meaning that we may cease to BE in this plane of existence for this particular lifetime, but that we continue onward in non-linear fashion as cohesive units of energy throughout eons of earthly/universal existence merely passing from one frequency dimension to another.

On a higher frequency level we have already explored every possible human emotion, relationship, and interactive situation that humans, as well as other beings, could explore, providing a readily accessible log of those vast experiences which reside in the nearly-incomprehensible database known as our Higher Self. (It’s like ‘The Cloud’ that automatically records every computer’s data input/output.)

For instance in hypnosis when I guide a client to meeting their High Self, and then instruct them to ASK their High Self for a previous lifetime experience to review where certain familiar themes or still unresolved personal issues might help enlighten them as to why they are still dealing with those same issues in THIS lifetime, the High Self provides not just one previous lifetime experience—it provides THREE lifetimes that we request, one after another; and It could provide more if we requested them. That’s why I call the High Self ‘the database of all lifetimes: past, present, parallel, and future’ because It holds the data from all lifetimes of hard-won information gathering, including emotions and energies associated with every possible experience.

Even today it truly blows my mind whenever a session is conducted. I simply step into the background and just ask the client for descriptions of what the client is being shown so we can record it for their later review, and let it all naturally unfold—affecting incident after affecting incident because their High Self runs the show; and I don’t even need to know what ‘still-occurring issues’ the client has asked for more clarity on from their High Self since they ask telepathically, not aloud. And the High Self delivers it.

The affecting past-LIFE plays out in the client’s mind and I ask them to describe what they are seeing, hearing and feeling while it does. Then at the end of that life I ask the High Self to tell the client why that particular life was shown to them and what they are to learn from re-experiencing it. Then the client relays to me the info given to them, and we record it.

I then ask to see another lifetime that helps the client better understand her current situation’s issues, and 1-2-3-BANG we are in it, describing where they are and what they are doing. Just like magic. It is absolutely amazing.

So I am a true believer in this statement:

“The old paradigm of birth to death represents an outdated concept that is woefully inadequate in defining the unfolding reality of expanded awareness. Materialist science is at the end of its days as most scientists are changing their views. The old concepts are soon to be relegated to the same dust bin as ‘the earth is flat’ as we develop a more mature understanding and transcend old beliefs.”

– Dr. Eben Alexander, Harvard Neurosurgeon

***

Becoming Someone Else

“When we can’t stop thinking about our problems, our mind and life merge. We become lost in the illusion of the dream.

We could call this a ‘rut,’ but it goes much deeper than that. Along with our actions, our attitudes and feelings become repetitive. And we form the habit of being ourselves.

To change our lives, we must fundamentally change the ways we think, act, and feel. Because how we think, feel, and behave is – in essence – our personality. And our personality creates our personal reality. So, to create a new personal reality – a new life – we must create a new personality. We must become someone else.”

Dr Joe Dispenza – OFFICIAL NEWS & FAN PAGE

***

Had I not just been reviewing all of my old hypnosis and NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) notes from a decade ago, I might have glossed over this older Dr. Joe quote. BUT… since I was still processing the listed techniques and information from the old notes review, I paused to consider how “We become lost in the illusion of the dream.”

Seriously, we ALL do it. We may not recognize it as such, but we ALL have our delusions—some of us just have more than most or at least put more energy into maintaining the delusion over our less-desirable reality. In fact, some of us hold our ‘delusions’ up as sacred, unassailable standards because we are unable to see them as they really are: They become how we want LIFE to be—not how it actually is. And that’s where we get into trouble.

The entire point of hypnosis/NLP is to help people to change their pattern of troublesome behavior that is creating problems in their life between their delusions and realities. Or as Dr. Joe describes it: “To change our lives, we must fundamentally change the ways we think, act, and feel.”

But to do that—to make those changes, we have to recognize what isn’t working well with what we are currently thinking, acting and feeling.

Now that awakening process to how we really see the world around us is not a ten-minute fix by any means. It is a lengthy endeavor of first better understanding how you ‘perceive’ the world around you—how you ‘interpret’ and then ‘react to’ what you see, hear, and feel while interacting with all aspects of your world view; and then it involves setting a determined intention ‘to change’ those basic perceptions/reactions by shifting your thinking about what is happening to you at any time.

Piece of cake, right?

Well that’s where hypnosis and NLP come into play. They help you reframe, reconsider, refocus, and restart what is actually happening in your life—all without using the framework or context of your original delusion.

Since I’m not a board-certified therapist (certified hypnotherapist, yes, but therapist, no), I can’t claim to officially help people in that respect, but at the same time I can at least help inform them about the convoluted workings of our minds when we try to make some sense of our world, but we keep failing to do so because we are stuck in the old habits of perception/interpretation. If you keep inputting the same things in the same ways, you just keep getting the same output.

We have trained ourselves from childhood onwards to recognize certain patterns of causation/reaction when we deal with others or deal with the world at large; and then we naturally fall back into our same old habits of perception/interpretation of what is happening in how we deal with what we are experiencing at the time. The past can certainly inform the future but without shifting our view of the past, our NOW becomes just as tainted and unreliable as usual. Without change of some sort the future looks just like the past.

Meaning: We often see what we want to see. We believe what we want to believe. And we feel how we feel, no matter what our rational mind tells us is for our betterment or our detriment. The real trick of hypnosis or NLP is to help shift that erroneous seeing, thinking, feeling to something that better serves our welfare and our inner peace.

And feeling a deep sense of inner peace is a long-sought-after goal by many. Discovering who we really are as thinking, feeling people is an exploration into the depths of our souls; and that trek can be rife with obstacles and unexpected detours until we allow ourselves to fully open up to our vast potential as compassionate human beings. That obstacle path is one I am most familiar with and can easily talk about.

“To change our lives, we must fundamentally change the ways we think, act, and feel. Because how we think, feel, and behave is – in essence – our personality. And our personality creates our personal reality. So, to create a new personal reality – a new life – we must create a new personality. We must become someone else.”

***

When your life isn’t working for you as is, ‘To become someone else’ and be willing to change your habitual behaviors, are choices we all have to make. But to do that, you first have to figure out what you really want from life, and then determine how you go about finding it.

Or as this blog often claims, you have to make the effort of “Finding Your Truth” to make full sense of your existence here, because if you don’t know your TRUTH, you just keep wallowing in your delusion of it.

Riding the Fox

“And, when we grow up

we must never forget

that hidden, down deep

within us

is our forever inner child

resting, silently

forever waiting

forever hoping

that one day

we shall, remember it.”
Athey Thompson
Seb McKinnon Art, “The Moon’s Daughter”

***

Kaleidoscopic Reflections

When you think back now on the many different phases of your life, do you ever feel like you are staring one-eyed through an optical tube like a kaleidoscope that shifts the images into mirrored shapes and colors as you turn the shaft one way or the other? Turn it one way and you see one reflected thing, then turn it the opposite way and you see something completely different reflected in the tube.

That is what happens over time as we view our personal life. We see it one way for a time; then age and experience shifts our view and we can see something completely different when we reassess it.

Year-end reflections can also do that to you—can change how you comprehend how the past year may have actually affected you. An experience or event that may have seemed to affect you one way when it first occurred may seem quite different after the dust has settled on it and you have the time to look back from afar.

I recommend doing year-end reflections, which are much easier to do if you have kept a journal of daily incidences and revelations to review. But even if you haven’t kept such a log, taking the time to reconsider what all has occurred in your life over the last year and assessing how that has shifted your life in one direction or another, is a good practice to adopt both in terms of your mental/emotional health as well as assessing the clarity of your life’s direction so you can then ‘course correct’ if you need to do so for the new year ahead.

If you aren’t familiar with year-end assessments and you don’t have a log of daily events or experiences to draw from, you can start by asking yourself a few basic questions and then logging your honest answers to them, such as:

Are you happy overall with your current life?
How could you improve your life situation or how could you bring more joy into your life?
What changes would you have to make in your life to have a brighter, more hopeful outlook? Be specific.
How has the past years events, activities, or interactions shown you what works well for you and what doesn’t work so well?
Are there certain people who are important to you? Name them. Why are they important? What needs do they fill for you? (family connection, lover, confidant, coach, socializing partner, spiritual advisor….)
How could those relationships improve? Or is it time for a new relationship?
Or is it actually time to start thinking less about them and more about you? One-sided personal relationships are not very satisfying. And truly becoming more familiar with all aspects of yourself can help you determine WHY your life seems to look one way or the other in that shifting kaleidoscopic tube.
Are you content with your current LIFE direction? Have you personally set career or education goals to achieve, and what is the status of them? Are your social interactions fulfilling you, or are you fairly isolated and feeling alone?
Do you desire more social contact with others or are those current interactions not satisfying your needs? Do you feel that something is still lacking in your life even when you are with other people?
How can you bring a sense of excitement and joy back to your life? Are there new adventures you might try or new places you might explore? Are there cooking classes, or exercise classes, or places to go and explore that might help shift your outlook from your current ‘really bored’ to more anticipatory?
Or how can you better appreciate where you presently are and what you are currently doing in your life? Are you maximizing your locale and your natural resources? Are you taking advantage of all opportunities provided to you?
Are you actively or passively living your life? Can you become more active and more aware of what all is happening around you daily? Maybe you are missing something in your current setting. Familiarity has its drawbacks. When we are very familiar with our settings and interactions we often slip into auto-function mode, and then tune out all other stimuli happening around us. So take a day and stay alert to everything NOT so familiar, and see what you can discover about life occurring all around you that you might normally miss.

***

How we view our lives is always subjective, and our attitude toward LIFE in general can have a major effect on what happens to us both large and small. So spend a little more time getting to better know yourself first, to determine how you want your life to continue forward from here on out.

That initial assessment time might make the difference in how bright and colorful your LIFE kaleidoscope will appear when you turn the viewing tube many years from now.

Moving Though It

“We are not meant to stay wounded. We are supposed to move through our tragedies and challenges and to help each other move through the many painful episodes of our lives. By remaining stuck in the power of our wounds, we block our own transformation.

We overlook the greater gifts inherent in our wounds – the strength to overcome them and the wisdom that we are meant to receive through them. Wounds are the means through which we enter the hearts of other people. They are meant to teach us to become compassionate and wise.” ~Caroline Myss

Art • “Favorite Kind of Saturday” by Olga Erokhina @wanderings

(Found on The Soul Journey with Sarah Moussa )

***

You know this time of year is often hard on some folks who might be missing loved ones and feeling very alone in their grief; or maybe they are feeling lonely in general or confused at what little they actually ARE or ARE NOT feeling about the holiday season or about their closer friends; or perhaps they are even confused about their own lives and where they seem to be in their living process—confused about the direction of their lives—unsure of where they presently are and where they are going in the future.

Basically I just wanted to say: It’s okay to feel that way.

It’s okay to feel exactly whatever you are feeling. You are being honest about it. Pain is real—physical or emotional/mental.

Sometimes we feel what we feel without the need for a rational explanation. It just is. So it’s okay to feel whatever you are currently feeling, but if you linger in that feeling for days or weeks (or longer), that’s when you get into trouble. That funky feeling becomes a mind-state that is harder to shift out of.

Now about the quote above: I’ve been a Caroline Myss fan for decades, and if you’ve ever heard her videos or audios, you know immediately she is a no-nonsense “Get yourself together!” kind of teacher who does not tolerate slackers or whiners. I like that about her in general. She is to the point, crisp, and sometimes a bit brutal in her assessment of how we should view our lives. A student expressing victimization or openly feeling sorry for him/herself will not remain long in her class. She just won’t put up with it.

But the thing is that in her sharper critique of how to better handle your life challenges, she knows how to shift your perspective out of that funk you are presently immersed in. She knows how to broaden your view on WHY you are here and WHAT you are meant to do with your precious life WHILE here in this life experience.

Therefore to her (and to many, including myself) she views our wounds not as curses or tar-pits in which our feet are hopelessly stuck, but as educational ‘opportunities’ to maximize learning more about ourselves through the experience and learning more about LIFE in general.

In other words, yes, you may feel like the world is swallowing you whole right now BUT if you can stop for a moment and see what this emotion/situation/experience is really showing you about your own resiliency or about your determination to climb out of the tar-pit, or about your flat-out refusal to be beaten down into the dirt by the hardships you are currently experiencing, THEN you can see the VALUE of this particular ‘testing ground’ that your higher spirit has evidently placed you in at the moment. Through enduring the inescapable difficulties facing you, you may be discovering aspects of yourself that you had not previously realized. You are a lot stronger than you give yourself credit for being. You truly are tougher than the challenge and capable of surviving the nastiest of the nasty, if you just keep going and don’t quit until you are through it. You got this!

“We are not meant to stay wounded. We are supposed to move through our tragedies and challenges and to help each other move through the many painful episodes of our lives. By remaining stuck in the power of our wounds, we block our own transformation.

We overlook the greater gifts inherent in our wounds – the strength to overcome them and the wisdom that we are meant to receive through them. Wounds are the means through which we enter the hearts of other people. They are meant to teach us to become compassionate and wise.”

***

For all of us, LIFE is one big challenge. Find a way to meet your challenge and move through it. You’ll learn to better trust yourself during the process.

And that is the biggest reward you could ever receive for your unceasing efforts: Learning you have the capability to handle anything that life throws at you. Because you do.

Gifts

‘Gifts’ are one of those malleable concepts that may take time for us to personally realize because sometimes they may seem more like curses.

At first our natural talents or proclivities may seem intrusive to us or even unwanted, or perhaps on a positive side they seem mystical or surreal in a sense, but not a sense that others welcomed when we were near them. So we learned to keep quiet about those ‘gifts’ so as not to draw undesired attention or insults and attacks from people in our lives.

Those odd sensory phenomenon that may seem so magical to us in our solitude, may draw strange reactions from parents and friends, forcing us to keep quiet about our ‘natural gifts’—until we run across others who relish their own ‘natural gifts’ and can better help us accept our own.

I’ve taught Usui REIKI for a couple decades now, and the biggest ice-breaker turning point in class participation comes early on—just as soon as I tell the class that “REIKI may enhance or awaken your hidden psychic abilities.”

Then BOOM! Backs straighten in the chairs, hands shoot up or voices instantly start declaring personal stories of psychic experiences. And when I had previously asked each one WHY they were attending the class with not a one saying “to enhance my psychic abilities,” I NOW hear that this new revelation gave them instant recognition of WHY they felt they needed to take the class besides the obvious energy-healing aspect. Perhaps they didn’t know exactly why this class was so important to them prior to my saying what I did, but NOW they definitely knew why they were really there. Fascinating.

Once that “your psychic gifts may be enhanced or revealed” revelation is made, everyone starts jabbering with each other—instantly freed from self-doubt or the fear of being judged.

For me it is both funny and enjoyable to witness the entire class suddenly relate together and gel, so I always make the statement early on in the class to help everyone to simply relax with each other—that’s when they all realize that ‘you’ve just found your new peer group.’

Why I’m writing this now is because I noticed this morning that James Van Praagh posted this message below, and I got the nudge that maybe I should share it here for others to run across—folks like the students in my previous REIKI classes who may be feeling uncertain or burdened by their own ‘natural gifts’ that keep intruding into their daily lives with no explanation for why it is occurring.

For me as a child, I was always intuitive and empathic (could feel things) but I was not so much psychically gifted to see or hear things; however with others in my REIKI group of friends, many of them had those psychic gifts (seeing and hearing) as children and their parents tried to discourage them or told them to “shut up about that,” so for you who are parents or for folks who once had parents with similar viewpoints, I just want you to know that the world is finally acknowledging your natural abilities, and they aren’t really ‘bad things’ after all.

It just helps to know you aren’t alone in your situations, and that even our gifts need to be refined and honed to use them well; and to not allow them to adversely control us. It’s one thing to be more psychically receptive—an open frequency channel to receive input from others; but without establishing controls or limits to our psychic receptivity, too much undesired input can lead to something resembling schizophrenia.

Van Praagh is a well-known psychic and offers training in honing your abilities.

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“Helping Your Sensitive Child Thrive

How old were you when you first became aware of your psychic or mediumistic abilities? You might have heard voices, had an imaginary friend only you could see, or sensed the presence of relatives who had passed on years earlier. Perhaps you had strong feelings about places and people that you couldn’t explain. If you were a child when this happened, chances are you didn’t know exactly what was going on! Hopefully, you had a supportive, sensitive adult to help you navigate these experiences. If so, you probably grew up to be someone who embraced their gifts and followed their intuition. If not, you might have found yourself scared or in denial about your spirit connection. A parent, teacher, family member, or friend can make all the difference in the world when it comes to nurturing a highly sensitive, spiritually gifted child. James Van Praagh

Read: https://vanpraagh.com/helping-your-sensitive-child-thrive/ “

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Defining the Self

The previous post was on the “SELF as Master,” meaning that in this context the SELF here was referring to the God-force SELF—the ALLness—the Everything.

But even the ‘ego-self’ that most of us struggle to control, is a bit more diverse than saying it means ‘pure ego’ which also has its own range of implications. There is a certain negative connotation associated with the term “ego,” and yet without any ego—or any sense of self—we can easily become manipulated manikins to whoever pulls our strings.

I was once trying to describe self-realization and self-actualization concepts to a clinical psychologist friend where I said the self-realization goal was to eliminate our personal egos, and she replied that this was very strange because she often spent hours trying to help her more subservient clients to develop a stronger sense of their own ego—to stand up for themselves—to better protect themselves from aggressive controlling partners. So from her viewpoint a certain amount of personal EGO is necessary to survive in the world.

And when I talk about ‘self-realization’ I’m referring to GOD-force SELF—making it more like the all-capped “SELF-realization” where the focus is on realizing that we are the Master SELF incarnate in this life experience, and that we are still, and always will be, connected to the Great ALLness no matter what we do or where we go.

But when Maslow for instance talks about ‘self-actualization’, he is referring to your truly maximizing who you are as a human being capable of releasing your untapped creative and intuitive greatness. Some examples:

—The Dictionary on Self-Actualization: “the realization or fulfillment of one’s talents and potentialities, especially considered as a drive or need present in everyone.”

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—“What is self actualization in Maslow hierarchy of needs?

Self–actualization refers to the need for personal growth and development throughout one’s life. It is the highest level of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which was developed by psychologist Abraham Maslow. Once you are self–actualized, you’ve met your full potential as an individual.” (www.simplypsychology.org/self-actualization.html)

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So to fully comprehend WHO you are and WHY you feel significant to this existence, it helps to consider the personal ‘ego-self’ in relation to the ‘Great-SELF’—the God-force SELF; or self-actualization in relation to SELF-realization—i.e., self/SELF.

And whereas for many of us, the goal is to tamp down our personal egos and be less self-focused (which often means we are demanding that our needs be placed above all other’s needs); our existence here in a physical body requires that we protect and utilize our human body to explore this life experience, therefore personal ego was intended to help us do that. In that respect, ego is not such a bad thing as it is necessary for basic survival.

What it all comes down to is the classic conundrum of “Where do I end and you begin?”

That’s a hard question to answer, because for me personally I’m not sure there is an actual ending per se for any of us.

Maybe our problem is that while we are here in the Earth-plane, we have such a restricted perspective of what ‘the end’ means to the physical body; whereas in the higher planes of energy existence there is NO end or ending, only multiple variations on a ceaseless theme whose purpose is increasing conscious awareness.

This so reminds me of the old Isaac Asimov short story on discovering the Creator of the Universe: “The Last Question.”

If you haven’t read it, I won’t spoil it for you.