FINDING YOUR TRUTH

This Aperture’s View Today

While this is not what I had intended to write about today, it must be what is internally pushing hardest to appear here now, so there you go. Similar to Popeye’s favorite slogan, “I writes what I writes.”

It’s like that Alan Watts quote, whatever has the strongest desire to transmit at the time through this Universe’s Filter called ‘ME’ will appear on the page:

“In other words I seem, like everything else, to be a center, a sort of vortex, at which the whole energy of the universe realizes itself, comes alive. A sort of aperture, through which the whole universe is conscious of itself…” Alan Watts

Well this morning’s ‘catalyst for contemplation’ was my listening to a speaker talking about ‘Ascension Symptoms’ and realizing that she was actually describing much of what I had been personally experiencing lately—the sudden unleashing of old memories, the fresh feeling of impactful energies long ago released, the unexpected recurrence of old trauma thought-triggers, etc.. You know, the FUN STUFF that we often try to avoid at all costs—causing the meteoric rise in addictions over the past year with the increased desire to numb-ourselves-out from this chaotic world around us.

So since I don’t ‘do’ addictions or numb-outs, I’d been wondering what was happening energetically in the collective that I couldn’t seem to pinpoint—I mean beyond the usual: the awful group negativities and spewing volcanic angers over nearly EVERYTHING; and even the annoying adolescent social-tantrums of adults who really should be beyond that now.

I mean seriously—aren’t we better than this?

But then I heard a different perspective on this ‘acting-out phase’ that we ALL seem to be collectively embroiled in, and I thought, “Okay, …maybe I can see that. This does makes a type of sense to all the senselessness.”

What she was talking about was the reemergence of ‘cellular memories’, which sounds like a physical thing, but it’s more so an energetic thing, and as such it extends beyond this lifetime, because in truth we are primarily energy-beings stepping into a physical body exterior for this particular level of learning.

In a sense we are our own Avatars.

And this particular ‘Avatar’ had been experiencing first-hand knowledge of what the speaker was describing, so I decided to hear her out.

She said we’re in a reckoning right now—a ‘reckoning time’—where we must admit, acknowledge, and own our worst aspects—our ‘shadow stuff’—both personally and collectively.

Most importantly, you don’t ‘own it’ to wallow in it—you own it to recognize the unhealthiness of it and to then compassionately ‘let it go’—to release the negative energies and influences of it—to disconnect that unhealthiness from your being.

You look closely at your shadow with greater understanding that in one sense it might have been an earlier ‘educational experience’ in self-awareness, but it was and is an experience whose usefulness has long since past. So now we can admit our previous mistakes and perhaps even apologize to those we may have hurt during the process of making those mistakes that hurt others (or ourselves); and then we can release those still-festering-inside-us shadow patterns to a higher Source light for energy transmutation (a process of distilling out impurities and recycling the energies).

She said it is a time to ‘let go’ of the old and move into new patterns of BEING.

Okay, I can get behind that, but what ARE those “new patterns of BEING”?

In order to restructure your ‘living experience’ for this lifetime in this plane of BEING, HOW do you hit the “reset button”?

Now this is where I might lose you because she talked about shifting your frequency high enough and holding it there long enough ‘to choose a NEW higher-frequency timeline’ for the remainder of your life. And why would you want to do that?

Well if you are pretty tired of shloshing through mud puddle after mud puddle every day of your life, and you can suddenly see a higher road around and away from all that mud, would you take it? THE NEW timeline is the path more ‘mud-free’ than your current one; meaning it has fewer ‘challenges’ (called “learning experiences”) with less negativity on the path that you follow.

And I’m certainly no authority here on this, but I am familiar with the concept through previous training and as I currently understand it, what we choose to experience in LIFE adheres to certain ‘frequency zones’, meaning that there are ‘levels of learning’ that provide more direct physical experiencing (more hand-to-hand-combat type to explore baser emotions) and levels that provide a milder, more intuitive and cerebral experience to explore the higher emotional states like love, compassion, and empathy.

Whatever ‘level of learning’ that you experience depends on the frequency that you can hold as an energy being. It alludes to that “Law of Attraction” theory—the frequency that you personally hold is the frequency that you attract to you—the frequency that resonates best with your energy body.

So when you can raise and hold your frequency higher to choose a Higher Frequency Timeline, you experience less turmoil and fewer lower-frequency challenges; and you will instead experience more higher-frequency explorations into the more subtle qualities of LIFE.

So we’ll see I guess—I’ll test it out and if the process works for me, I’ll pass it on to you.

Sometimes it’s hard to get your head around this particular “option” when you’re so busy just trying to side-step the mud.

Defining Your Identity

“Who ARE you?”

Can you truthfully answer that above question?

I’ve identified myself so many different ways during all the phases of my life that I’m not sure how I would have answered that question during each of those growth phases, because to me IDENTITY has more to do with how we think of ourselves and less to do with what others might think of us. It is less about the roles that we play (or have played) in life and more about the content of our inner being—our core values, our life perspective, and how we view our relationships/interactions with all others.

Identity-wise in general, other people can call me by my standard recognized moniker—meaning my name—and that is one way of identifying me in a crowd of others; or the Social Security division of the federal government can identify me as a specific string of numbers; or my cat can identify me as the two-legged moving-mass that fills his food dish or shares HIS recliner; or my friends can identify me as …well, I’m not sure how they would identify me depending on their mood or mine at the time.

So IDENTITY is a tough concept to pin down, let alone fully understand.

But for this post I want to focus on ‘self-identity’. So when I ask: “Who ARE you?” I actually mean ‘How do you consider yourself?’

Are you a good person or a bad person?
Are you a loving/giving person or a hate-filled/selfish person?
Are you proud of yourself or are you ashamed of yourself?
Do you always build yourself up or do you tend to tear yourself down?
Are you generally optimistic in your view of LIFE or are you overall pessimistic on LIFE in general?
Are you active and eager for new ideas, new opportunities for growth, and new learning situations, or are you more sedentary and resistant to NEW ‘anything’?
Are you basically happy with your LIFE and with yourself, or are you ….not so much?

You can see where I’m going here. What spurred those comparisons above was this:

While browsing this morning’s media outlets, I was half-listening to a ‘self-help speaker’ talking about trying to help her clients conceptualize the difference between DOING and BEING—especially where feeling ‘shame’ is concerned. She asked the client if she was “ashamed for something she had done” or was she “ashamed for WHO she was”? (She coined the difference as: “I FEEL ashamed for doing that…” or I AM ashamed of myself…”)

Can you see the perspective shift there?

What we occasionally DO in LIFE is not necessarily WHO WE ARE as a person. When the emotional residues of SHAME/GUILT for ‘something harmful that we might have done to others’ infiltrate our psyche and persona, then we turn a ‘behavioral mistake’ into fodder for ‘self-loathing’, and THAT can be a hard thing to reverse-engineer out of our mental programming.

What did I say a couple posts ago? “…I still like to believe that people are basically ‘good’ before something/someone turns them more toxic and self-focused…” Well, that applies here as well because:

WHO WE ARE is not WHAT WE DO.
And WHAT WE DO in this LIFE’s gladiatorial arena, is not necessarily WHO WE ARE as people just trying to survive in this challenging dimension of existence.

Of course we do unkind things to others, some unintentionally and some not. And most of us may have regrets for some of the things that we’ve previously done, but that doesn’t make us bad people.

So don’t turn that previous behavioral mistake into your ‘self-loathing mantra’ for how you view yourself.

Define your identity more so by charting your increased self-awareness and your expanding perceptual growth, and less by mentally rehashing your past mistakes, because sometimes we simply have to forgive ourselves for being so momentarily stupid when we do slip up.

And as painful as it might be, that is often how we learn LIFE’s most important lessons.

The Birth of Empathy

“’For every event in life,’ says the Dalai Lama, ‘there are many different angles.’ There is, perhaps, no greater route to joy than this. Taking a ‘God’s-eye perspective,’ as Archbishop Tutu says, allows for the birth of empathy—the trait that creates joy not only in the one, but in the many.

Empathy opens the door to togetherness, and keeps us from building walls around our individual selves—walls that keep out so many potential friends and allies.

Realizing and accepting the validity of different perspectives turns ‘I’ in to ‘we’. The anger and frustration that comes of living a life of ‘I,’ makes sustained joy nearly impossible. Humans are social creatures in an interconnected world—there is no escaping our fellows.

Opening up to the lives and perspectives of others, and being willing to experience their suffering and hardships, reminds us that we, too, are not alone in our own difficulties. In nurturing perspective and allowing ourselves to see the world in a larger way, we open up the door for joy to come into our lives, and for us to open up that door for others unlike ourselves.”

From “The 8 Pillars of Joy” – Bishop Tutu & His Holiness the Dalai Lama

( https://www.beliefnet.com/…/the-eight-pillars-of-joy.aspx )

The Things We Tell Ourselves

“Every fragment of self-talk is a little story in the head that goes around, and then you look at reality through the lens of the little story.” Eckhart Tolle

I didn’t title this “The LIES We Tell Ourselves” because sometimes those replaying thought-monologs aren’t really ‘lies,’ but are more likely residues of our optimistic ‘wishful thinking’ on the good side, and our pessimistic ‘the world is out to get me’ thoughts on the bad side.

Sometimes we can be so needy for personal contact that we delude ourselves into believing that the situations or the people that we encounter are more beneficial and meaningful to us that they actually are—or we buy into the ‘I know everyone has my best interest at heart’ personal fallacy for all associations and relationships. (Hey—I’ve been there. I still like to believe that people are basically ‘good’ before something/someone turns them more toxic and self-focused.)
Sometimes we are so cynical and battle-worn that we go in the opposite direction and inadvertently sabotage ourselves and any future relationships by leaning toward the belief that ‘ALL people are naturally deceitful and you can’t believe what anyone tells you—ever’. (And yes, there is also the more experienced and ‘learned’ part of me that now reacts to any new acquaintance with a self-imposed ‘neutrality;’ or in effect doing a pre-strike non-sequitur: “Uh-uh. I don’t just hand out my trust and acceptance to anyone expecting it, let alone demanding it from me. First SHOW ME who you are—then I’ll believe it.”)

But no matter which tendency you lean towards in your own personal world-view of relationships and group settings, what in effect occurs is that whatever we often tell ourselves about ourselves (or about our lives in general) becomes the filter through which we assess the rest of the world around us. (In a way it’s a bit like the difference between viewing yourself through the ‘victim’ vs. the ‘survivor’ perspectives; while it might seem like a very subtle distinction between those two ‘self-belief’ attitudes of woundedness, it’s the basis for how that person’s body then ‘interprets and responds’ to all future interactions, i.e.: Are we ‘open and engaging’ with others, or do we naturally ‘tense up’ around them—ready to ‘fight or flee’ at the slightest facial twitch that we encounter?)

When “… you look at reality through the lens of the little story” that is spinning in your noggin about whatever situation that you might be currently facing, then it will be very hard to form a non-biased opinion on what the true options for you might be in that situation.

I am a firm believer that opportunities in LIFE are less about being suddenly blessed with ‘Good Luck’ and ‘Good Fortune,’ and more likely about better recognizing the broader scope of what your choices might be in any situation before actually ‘choosing’ one; but in order to adhere to that ‘broader scope’ mindset requires us to constantly self-monitor WHY we think what we do when we are faced with two or more options. And that takes considerable ‘self-awareness’ to master it.

We have to ask ourselves, ‘What is driving my decision in one way or the other?’

What is your TRUE motivation for this particular choice—not just what you might be telling yourself at the time?

“Every fragment of self-talk is a little story in the head that goes around, and then you look at reality through the lens of the little story.”

So when you DO view your reality through the lens of that ‘self-talk story,’ what are you really telling yourself about who you are and what you value? Is your decision made primarily ‘love-based’ or ‘fear-based?’ Is it for an ‘immediate reward’ or a ‘longer-term reward?’

And most importantly: ‘Are there other options here that I’m not considering?’ Then ask yourself: ‘ WHY can’t I see those other options?’ Or, ‘Why don’t I WANT to see them? Am I blocking them out for a particular reason? If so, what IS that reason?’

These are tough questions to answer. I know.

It takes a lot of work on self-awareness to identify that inner story we tell ourselves about our lives.

But it’s well worth doing.

Transformation

To describe ‘transformation’ is like asking a butterfly to write an autobiography tracing its journey from egg larva to crawling caterpillar to the colorful ‘winged-goddess-in-perpetual-motion’ of today.

THAT complete structural metamorphosis epitomizes ‘transformation’ in so many ways—biochemically, physically, and behaviorally; because the living being that it once was is suddenly no more, and what it has become instead is quite different.

In many ways we expect a similar metamorphosis of ourselves—to take whatever raw materials LIFE (and our biological parents) gave to us at birth and then alchemically ‘BECOME’ something far greater than our initial potential might have suggested for us.

Our earliest intention might have been to TRANSFORM ourselves into the “magical creature” that we as children once believed that we could be. We just had to figure out how to do that.

Was that a realistic attitude, and was that magical transformation likely?

I don’t know the odds on either count above, but I do know that self-determination has far less to do with your bio-chemical/genetic makeup and far more to do with how strong your willpower and your endurance levels can be—how far can you push yourself toward accomplishing your distant dreams or goals?

Can you make yourself ‘transform’ into a higher version of yourself, capable of maximizing your fullest potential for greatness?

Of course you can.

But how badly do you want that transformation to happen and how willing are you to drive yourself toward that distant future with single-focused determinism?

The butterfly has an advantage over us in that respect, because it has no option but to follow its genetic programming for stages-in-life changes. But for those of us in the human species, it’s more a matter of individual CHOICE to make such a life-changing transformation.

Can it be done? Sure—of course.

Can YOU do it?

Well maybe that’s a matter of how badly you want to change your life in some way.

Never assume someone else is a lost cause or doesn’t have what it takes to change their own life for the better. Incentive/motivation and personal determination are the key ingredients for a major life change. All it really takes is the burning desire to transform ourselves and the unwavering persistence to accomplish it.

An actual example: During my young adulthood, I’ll never forget a gangly, socially-awkward, local kid—constantly ridiculed by the bigger bullies because he was all height—all skinny arms and long legs, and visually dependent on tape-repaired, horn-rimmed glasses that he had to constantly push higher on his slender nose. This constantly ‘peer-battered’ kid who once he turned 18-years of age suddenly bucked his parent’s wishes for a safe, boring future on a local industrial plant’s assembly line, and instead joined the Marines.

A year later he returned to our area in his crisp Marine ‘enlisted-service uniform’ as a composed, self-assured and confident young man standing tall and strong in his own self-defined abilities and calm demeanor.

His complete physical and behavioral transformation was absolutely jaw-dropping and admirable. He had somehow become who he had most wanted to be—a respected Marine; and his mere presence commanded attention and admiration for such a complete metamorphosis from his once-awkward youth.

Would I have ever believed back then that ‘Brad’ could have transformed himself so dramatically? No.

But Brad believed it. And that made ALL the difference.

Self-help Techniques for Healing PTSD and General Life Trauma

After rereading the previous posting I thought it might be helpful to mention again the techniques that I’m most familiar with to help deal with our own PTSD and lingering emotional trauma energies that we can’t seem to move past.

In no way do I dismiss anyone’s emotional/psychological trauma residues. I’ve dealt with plenty of my own so I know how life-altering they can be when you are stuck in the throes of their full effect. But what I DO want to provide is a few ‘self-help options’ that worked for me while I climbed out of my own dark hole to come back into the light of day.

This extensive quote below was from my posting on June 29, 2020 called “Beyond the Walls of Belief”. In it I list some books and techniques that actually helped to ‘bring me back’ to a semi-normal life again from the pits of my worst despair and torment.

O’Hanlon’s book is very good and an easy read; and the techniques that he mentioned, particularly the Eye Movement Desensitization and the Tapping techniques helped me the most to process the unresolved trauma stuck in my mid-brain that kept the worst of my horrific experiences constantly fresh and perpetually affecting my life.

That ‘breath energy-release technique’ I still use daily to counter any emotional buildup—like anger, resentment, fear, etc.. It helps far more than you might think it would. Hope these techniques help you in some way.

***

From “Beyond the Walls of Belief”, June 29, 2020 :

“…I mentioned previously I would list a few techniques that are ways to release fear and anger energies, or to better deal with unresolved trauma issues, or to just get a better handle on our lives in general—things I’ve learned over the years or mention some books that might help to read….

One of the most amazing books I’ve run across is the Connirae & Tamara Andreas book on Core Transformation: Reaching the Wellspring Within. It’s a great read on how to transform our personal beliefs—particularly the unconscious ones that run our daily scripts on how we view our lives. It’s one of those drill-down exercises on getting to the heart of the matter of how and why we are doing whatever we are doing in our lives.

Another good info source on how to view and treat trauma, comes from Bill O’Hanlon, called Quick Steps to Resolving Trauma. Lots of good material to consider in that book, and it’s an easy, to-the-point read on how to view traumatic experiences—‘how to successfully move through traumatic experiences and come out the other side of them’ sort of read.

From O’Hanlon as well as others, I’d read about EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) which were effective techniques developed by Dr. Francine Shapiro for releasing stuck trauma energies/memories from the mid-point of the brain so they can be fully processed by the higher brain. It involves a form of bilateral brain stimulation where you bring up the uncomfortable situation/memory and then move your eyes quickly left-to-right-to-left, etc. back and forth for 15 to 20 times, which forces the brain to shift the stuck energy out of the mid-brain region and reduces the emotional impact of the memory. It is very effective, especially on many forms of PTSD. Another good book on this is by Jamie Marich, EMDR Made Simple.

O’Hanlon also mentions ‘Tapping,’ which I’d heard of through other sources as well, and similar to the bilateral brain stimulation of EMDR, has similar ‘lessening the emotional intensity’ effects of memories and emotions. Here’s a book that I have on it: TAPPING IN: A Step-BY-Step Guide to Activating Your Healing Resources Through Bilateral Stimulation, by Laurel Parnell. PhD. It’s pretty straight forward and easily followed.

One helpful technique that I use repeatedly (sometimes daily) is the energy-release statements combined with 3 strong exhalations to blow out the intense energies and emotions. Sounds too simple to be effective, but it really is helpful to shift a strong emotion that has a grip on you like sadness or anger. You simply say, “I release the energies of ______ (fear, anger, resentment, sadness, anxiety, guilt, etc.), over this situation with __________ (name the person or situation). I release those energies now. They do not serve me.” And blow out hard 3 times. Keep doing it until the emotion lifts or you are in better control of it.

And one last thing I will mention on this subject: What I’ve found with my REIKI clients is that people tend to hold a certain intense emotion/energy in specific locations of their body (likely depends on what was physically happening to them at the time that this emotion first cemented itself into their body). And that unreleased emotional energy can over time create physical issues like intense pain or illness in certain body parts.

When I had a client who held pain in a certain area of their body, and when I was working energetically over that area, I would often get visuals in my mind of a possible unresolved issue with someone or something, so I would ask the client if this particular person or situation I was seeing meant something specific to them because the source of their pain seemed to have some direct correlation to that person or thing.

If the client could recognize the correlation and could do the energy-releasing statements and blow outs, I could often feel the energetic block release from that location, and then shift out of their body. So the body tends to hold emotional trauma as well as does the mind.

These are a few techniques that I’ve discovered over the years that have helped me personally as well as helped my clients. Hopefully they can benefit you as well.”

***

Woundedness

Yes, “wounds”—we all have them—physical, mental, emotional, and even spiritual.

We all have felt the sting of rejection or humiliation in our lives, or we still have unresolved issues that stem from previous childhood or relationship traumas. That inner wounding aspect is simply an unpleasant but necessary part of this experience called LIFE.

If we are caring people at all, it isn’t that we can avoid being “wounded” by others in our lives. The real trick for us is to NOT let the ‘wounding’ itself define us as to whether we are worthy of even existing in this world; because the circumstances or situation of the ‘wounding incident’ are meant more so to simply challenge us to see how quickly we can learn to more creatively respond to those unpleasant emotional/psychological confrontations. And likewise how well we learn to behaviorally adapt in whatever way is necessary to then rise above the lingering residues of that particular LIFE challenge.

This is part of our LIFE curriculum while in this plane of existence. It’s WHAT we do—it’s WHY we are here: to fully experience the highs and lows—the good experiences and the bad ones that LIFE offers us.

Yes, it’s likely that we’ve all known love lost and emotional devastation. Or we are at least very familiar with having our dreams dashed or our hopes for a ‘better life’ dissolved away in the wash cycle of the moment’s harsher realities.

But those deeply-felt ‘emotional wounds’ that we hide somewhere inside us are often harder for others to detect than physical wounding unless you are intently looking for them in someone else’s reactive behavior and/or in their social-interactions.

And speaking quite frankly here, in today‘s world how many folks go around looking for someone else’s tell-tale signs of being severely psychologically traumatized or of having been emotionally abused?

I mean it isn’t that we’re all so intentionally insensitive to another’s pain. It is more likely that we’re all just dealing with our own “stuff” at the time and didn’t take the effort to acknowledge someone else’s unpleasant emotional residues when they suddenly arose in that moment.

That may sound a bit defensive or even cynical of me, but this isn’t meant to be offensive in any way—it is simply a realistic and pragmatic attempt to address what I see occurring in our current world; and even in some of my peripheral friends at times. You know, sometimes we can take things a bit TOO personally.

Example: This morning I’m just browsing through my Facebook page and see yet another post from a person I follow on ‘how oblivious and cruel people can be to unseen emotional trauma in others’—meaning, particularly in that person posting it.

And while patiently reading through this because I am a peripheral friend, I’m thinking, “Well, yes, perhaps that overall ‘blatant ignorance and uncaring attitude about others’—and particularly about YOU in this case, may be true; and yes, perhaps most folks we encounter aren’t that concerned about our personal mental health especially IF it doesn’t affect/involve them; BUT…..WHY are you posting this publically for YOUR ‘followers’ unless YOU want sympathy for the woundedness that you still carry; and WHY are trying to make others feel shame/guilt for treating you so callously, especially since that ‘oblivious and cruel’ person probably isn’t even on your ‘friends list,’ so he’ll likely never see this?”

In other words—why make the rest of us ‘witness’ this cry for sympathy and acknowledgement of your old wounds?

While there isn’t much else I can say about my friend’s public condemnation ‘on the insensitivity of others’, I do want to state this:

There are times in LIFE when nothing goes right and everything seems stacked against you. And if LIFE subsequently knocks you flat one or more times during this process, then you may struggle a bit, but eventually you must stand back up as best you can and face the world again.
There will be unfortunate moments in LIFE when those you care most about will disappoint you—hurt you—or flat-out demolish what was left of your self-esteem. Cry if you must, but never stop believing in yourself. You are the best friend you will ever have—the one you can always rely on the most. Never forget that.
When it seems that all the good-breaks in LIFE go elsewhere and what’s left on your doorstep are crumbs or cast-offs from someone else’s good fortune, then start thinking about your life differently—start looking in different places for opportunities to test your resourcefulness—to let you excel in LIFE with a positive attitude and a strong work ethic. It’s truly hard to find someone in today’s world who isn’t afraid to work hard, get sweaty/dirty, and get that difficult job done—and done well. Be that person! You will be in constant demand.
When you feel like your LIFE no longer has meaning and your friends have all abandoned you, then maybe it’s time to meet new friends. Maybe it’s time to volunteer to help others in some way. Maybe it’s less about feeling sorry for yourself in your own predicament and seeing how unbelievably bad others really have it just to survive day to day. Nothing like a little ‘reality check’ with those even less fortunate than you are to shift your own attitude to recognizing the abundance that you may already have but didn’t previously consider.
And finally, eventually you will learn that much of LIFE is based on being ‘relative’ to what you see, feel, know, and do. Advantages in LIFE are often relative to your current situation and how you intentionally view them. It’s all about PERSPECTIVE and how you ‘frame things’ in your life. What is important to you? What means the most to you? Could things be better for you? Sure. But they could also be a whole lot worse, so make the most of what you have and keep moving forward day by day toward that vision of how you want your life to be. Never give up. Never give in. And never stop pursuing your dreams.

‘Woundedness’ is just a word that describes a ‘weak spot’ in our current mode of daily operation—physically, mentally, emotionally, or spiritually. We may never make sense of the reason for the ‘wounding’ itself. All we may ever know is that the ‘wounded area’ may still hurt because the initial pain never really left us. Sometimes that ‘wound’ may seem as fresh as the day it actually occurred; and other times it just nags at us when we try to move forward in life—a constant reminder of our vulnerability.

Perhaps the real problem here lies more in how we view ourselves. Are we the perpetual ‘victim of a bad situation/incident’ that occurred sometime in our lives, or are we more likely the still-living survivor of a difficult time for us that occurred in our past, and that’s where we left it—in the past.

LIFE doesn’t encourage us to be its ‘victims’ because victims don’t last long in the real world out there. Evolution in LIFE is all about being a ‘survivor’.

So to my Facebook ‘friend’ mentioned earlier, I would suggest that she get some professional help to move out of that ‘victim’ mindset she seems to be still clinging to, and move intentionally into the much healthier ‘survivor’ mindset. It’s the only way to truly move forward with your life, for her or for any of us.

We can do this because it’s what we ALL have to do. We learn to ‘survive,’ before we can thrive.

The Vortex

Tao & Zen

“I seem, like everything else, to be a center, a sort of vortex, at which the whole energy of the universe realizes itself.. Each one of us, not only human beings but every leaf, every weed, exists in the way it does, only because everything else around it does. The individual and the universe are inseparable.” ~Alan Watts

“I like to experience the universe as one harmonious whole. Every cell has life. Matter, too, has life; it is energy solidified. The tree outside is life… The whole of nature is life… The basic laws of the universe are simple, but because our senses are limited, we can’t grasp them. There is a pattern in creation.” ~ Albert Einstein

Artwork: Spiral Speaks by Sam Brown Art

https://www.fineartnewmexico.com/sam-brown

(Just passing this along…..)

Nature-Speak

The Garden Of Pensiveness

“Mother Nature is always speaking. She speaks in a language understood within the peaceful mind of the sincere observer.”
~ Radhanath Swami ~ Art by Johanna Wright

The beauty of language lies in the interpretation of it. So how do you translate meaning from a bird’s lilting song or the haunting rustle of leaves in late October?

How do you ‘feel into’ the musty heaviness of freshly-tilled earth or the sweet aromatic scents of a thousand wildflowers waving in the summer breeze?

I know exactly what Radhanath Swami refers to here, and yet the depth of his message diffuses through spoken-word translation.

So I suggest that the only way to fully understand nature’s primordial language is to immerse yourself into it and learn first-hand the Earth’s indigenous roots of Nature-Speak—with ‘indigenous’ here meaning not a group of people, but an originating energy of the Earth.

However it is often the indigenous people of many lands who are the best translators of Earth’s most poignant messaging; likely because they have truly listened to it the longest.

Whispers

For some time now I’ve been contemplating how to describe my ‘flowers theory’ of how Nature or ‘Spirit through Nature’ communicates to all other life on the planet.

For example with flowers in general, there are the ‘geometric aspects of petal distribution’ that I’ve previously mentioned. There are the ‘wide variety of colors’ aspects per plant and how powerful that a color (a particular light-wave frequency perceived by the photoreceptor cones of our retina) can be.

Then there are the ‘flower-size-per-plant’ aspects; and because I usually go more for the magnificent, large blossoms images, this picture was one that I initially passed over, then came back to review for some unknown reason, then passed on again, then was drawn back to it until I finally got the ‘message’ that the image was suggesting to me: “Whispers”.

Whispers?

With large blooms of vibrant colors we are awed by how gorgeous the flower is—how magnificently it is often petaled—how symmetrically the flower’s petals are dispersed and aligned, because flowers as a whole are often bright, bold expressions of nature’s shouting to ‘other-life-in-motion’ to “Stop and look at this!” (Or to at least ‘Stop and smell this—because you might like it.’)

But when only considered visually, with these smaller petal clusters on slender stalks or on ground covers, nature is more so ‘whispering’ her messages to other life forms—whatever those messages really are, of which I have no idea other than “LOOK AT THIS!”

That ‘capturing other life form attention to the importance of the plant’ part, is one aspect that I think I do understand.

And likewise, those insects or avian species that feed from these vibrant natural expressions of love and life—who exist solely because of the plant’s flowers providing them the nourishment that they require, may view them differently and more essential to their continued existence than we humans often consider them.

So maybe for just a moment during your normal busy day, you might glimpse a distant waving-in-the-wind wildflower or perhaps even chance upon a lowly dandelion peeking through the sidewalk crack, and reconsider for a short moment the value or worth of their presence on the Earth here with the rest of us; and then imagine how stark our lives would be without those beautiful expressions of nature’s love and devotion to us all.

Or in another sense, what are the tiny flowers in the image above whispering to you?

Called or Uncalled

This quote was hand-carved over the archway to C. G. Jung’s study: “Called or uncalled: God is present.”

Which as Ken James, Ph.D. described during his session of the Jungian summit is to consider that whatever calls us to our supposed ‘purpose in life’ is always around us, ever-present; we just may not notice it being there for a very long time, until when we actually awaken to our true sense of life purpose.

Or in another sense that God Consciousness, or Grand Consciousness as I refer to it, is continually around us, embracing us, engulfing us, even if we fail to recognize it as such, because: “Called or uncalled: God is present.”

Overall for his part in the summit Ken James was elaborating on “Synchronicity and the Personal Journey” and how we tended to immediately interpret and declare in our minds all events, situations, experiences in our lives as meaningful to us or not before we even allowed them to completely unfold and to show us how significant they might actually be to us.

In a broader sense we make life-defining judgments primarily from the ego perspective about how we want our lives to progress or to advance, rather than allowing our intuition (our higher connection) to guide us in the most beneficial and natural direction for our true soul growth.

But no matter which direction we do choose in life, our lives will play out in that one chosen direction for only so long before we may start to feel a dissonance with that path direction. Then if our ego continues to ignore the discomfort, ‘hints’ may arise around us that might suggest we try a different direction in our lives; and if we still ignore those ‘hints’ then our Higher Self can become more insistent to capture our straying life focus and can create more obvious ‘turmoil’ in our lives until we finally stop and DO pay attention to what is happening to us at a deeper level—to how we are resonating (or not) with our current life situation.

Meaning: Do we feel harmonious with the direction we are heading or do we feel dissonant with it—out of sync, off the beat, uncomfortable enough to want to ‘change the tune’ in some way?

James says that we should try to stay more non-judgmentally aware of everything around us, and to stay more in harmony with what life is freely presenting to us rather than disregarding the sudden synchronicities that may pop up before us daily.

Those ‘synchronicities’ are far from being coincidences—they are instead our soul’s intentional ‘stagings’ for enhancing/shifting our stagnant or our stressful life experience in some way to help us more beneficially learn from our situations/relationships and to ultimately advance our consciousness.

In truth while we may think that we must search high and low to discover our true calling in LIFE, all we actually need to do is to simply be quiet enough to hear it as it calls to us.

The Jungian Online Conference 2021

Hm-m-m, maybe I am more Jungian than I realized. I’m currently listening to James Hollis, Ph.D., and he is already talking about most of what I write in this blog…about Finding Your Truth: determining who we are, what we stand for, and WHY we believe that we are here at this time, and how we share that with the world around us.

“If what I’m doing is not meaningful, then why am I doing it?…Something in us knows what is right for us, we just have to find it and listen to it.”

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I’ll give you the 1^st speaker’s video, James Hollis, Ph.D., but it will only be FREE for another couple hours. However others will follow for another two days to view within 24hrs for free.

Day 1 | Session 1 — The Call & Purpose — Jungian Summit

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“…Despite our best intentions, sooner or later, we find ourselves in an emotional swampland. Exploring these swamplands help us to identify where we need to grow up, where we might be stuck in our lives, and where we need to act on what we believe to be true.
In this talk, James Hollis describes how we can make sense of our experiences by way of discernment and resonance. We have to sort what’s going on inside us, the present voices, and we need to recognize when we are unconsciously driven by our psychological histories. We have to sit with it, pay attention to what resonates in us on a deep level, and do what is meaningful for us. Relevant questions that we can ask ourselves are ‘Why am I here?’ and ‘What is wanting to enter the world through me?’

During this session you’ll discover

How the internal guidance system supports what is right for us,
That our ultimate calling is to be in service to our soul, and
Why courage, patience, and taking risks is part of our journey.

About the Teacher

James Hollis, Ph.D., is a world-renowned Jungian analyst in private practice in Washington, D.C. He has written and published extensively and his works have been translated into numerous languages around the world. He is a core faculty member at Jung Platform.”