Thursday, November 26, 2009

Thank you


"If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, 'thank you,' that would suffice." ~ Meister Eckhart

Thursday, November 19, 2009

Sometimes...



"Sometimes we have to lose what we have to make an opening for what is to come."


All I Have Seen....


"All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen."


~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Saturday, November 14, 2009

Grace


...an affirmation from the Unity Church...

I am supported by the unconditional love of God.

Mistakes are a natural part of learning--just as falling down is a natural part of learning to walk. But when I make a serious mistake, I may find it hard to forgive myself for what I have said or done.

I cannot make amends if I remain stuck in a cycle of self-blame or criticism. Instead, I remember that God loves me unconditionally. I take responsibility for my actions, and with God's grace, I do my best to resolve the situation. This may require a heartfelt apology, a change in my behavior or another step. I trust God to guide me to the best response.

As I open to the grace of God, I am able to forgive myself and accept God's unconditional love.
Now I commend you to God and to the message of his grace, a message that is able to build you up.--Acts 20:32

Friday, November 13, 2009

True Healing

"True healing is not the absence of disease, but the presence of insight. What story is being told by our behaviors, symptoms, and illnesses?"

Christine Jette - Tarot Shadow Work

Thursday, November 05, 2009

Keep Showing Up....



Keep showing up, looking deeply, and asking questions....


by Me

The Upside of Stress

by Gary Zukav
Copyright © 2008 by Gary Zukav. All rights reserved.

Change is not stressful. Resistance to change creates stress. It creates stress frequently and sometimes continually in millions of individuals – stress in the form of anger, jealousy, resentment, despair, and many other painful emotions. The global economic downturn/meltdown/ implosion/catastrophe has temporarily transformed the myriad diverse experiences of resistance to change in billions of individuals into a global shared experience of resistance to a change that no one wants.

It is, metaphorically speaking, a spiritual laser. A laser transforms light waves, such as those radiating from a light bulb,into a single beam of phase-coherent light. The global economic dysfunction has transformed countless simultaneous experiences of resistance to change in billions of individuals into a single phase-coherent experience of stress. We all feel it and we all attribute it to the same cause – the economy. This massive shared experience obscures the underlying cause of all stress – resistance to change.

Foreclosure, job loss, declining investment and home values, disruption of plans to retire, educate children, buy a home, or move are each stressful – changes that no one wants, painful experiences of stress that, shared simultaneously by billions, generate a painful collective consciousness of resistance to change. As stressful as resistance to these changes is, it is not as stressful as resistance to the ultimate change that no one wants and all will encounter. We are all on a journey toward death regardless of how much we resist it, and most of us spend most of our lives resisting it. That means that most of us spend our lives distracting ourselves from the work of bringing our full potential into being and enjoying ourselves.

The dynamic is the same whether the change appears minor, major, or ultimate – resistance to change, not change, creates stress. Every stressful experience – whether it is resistance to a divorce, failure of a business, an illness, economic dysfunction, or death – is an opportunity to heal an interior source of your pain instead of focusing your attention on the external circumstances that appears to be causing it. If you look closely (experience attentively) you will discover that every pain of resistance to change is familiar, an old agony returning yet again, activated by yet another external circumstance. In other words, the sources of your painful experiences, including resistance to change, are internal (not external) and are older than the circumstance that appears to cause them (such as losing your job, or the thought of losing your job).

Healing the interior causes of your pain and cultivating the interior causes of your joy is the creation of authentic power. It begins with directing your attention inward to your interior dynamics instead of outward to exterior circumstances. Every painful experience of stress can help you, if you choose.

That is the upside of stress.

Wednesday, November 04, 2009

Fortune Cookie Fortune


"The small steps you take will ultimately bring you great fortune."

Moving from Stage to Audience

....from Be the Person You Want to Find, by Cheri Huber

The practice of passive awareness, awareness without a goal, shows me my blind spots, the places where I thoroughly believe the stuff that goes through my head, the unexamined nonsense that runs great portions of my life.

I am in a relationship and my partner or spouse:
is usually late
is inordinately tidy
is tight with money
isn't affectionate enough
is too lenient with the children
sulks instead of talking
___________________ (add your own)
We struggle until I finally get to the place where I am just going to be aware and see if I can know what is going on. This is ruining our relationship and a part of me knows it's silly that a relationship could be ruined over something like this. So I watch, I pay very close attention.

These are the kinds of things a person might see:

I notice that I feel chaotic when this is going on. I feel out of control, disrespected. "You know how much this means to me. If you loved me you would ________. But you don't, and so it is obvious that you don't care about my feelings, and you don't love me."

As I watch, I begin to realize that these things are not true. It's all conditioning.
Feeling chaotic is conditioning.

Believing that tidiness/punctuality/discipline/talking/___________ is superior is conditioning.

Concluding that you don't love me because we have different standards is conditioning.

Feeling disrespected because you won't do what I want you to do is conditioning.

And, ultimately, having an attachment to one side of ANY issue is conditioning.
And at the deepest level, I realize that my conditioning is my responsibility. It's what causes me to suffer. It's not actually anyone else's beliefs or behaviors. It's not how the world works, or how life is. It's my conditioning that makes me suffer, that causes me to close my heart, that gives me problems in relationships. At the deepest level I know it is my responsibility to deal with this.

How do I "deal with this," you might ask?

I see that the sensations in my body, the thoughts in my head, and my emotional responses to the sensations and thoughts

are all conditioned -- I learned ALL of it.

I walk in and the house is a mess...

I watch the sensations arise and realize they don't mean what I have thought they mean. (Ah, looking for someone to blame)

I feel the emotions arise and know I don't have to act on them. (Ah, sadness; ah, anger)

Many of you are thinking, This is all very nice, Cheri, but what do I do?

The exciting news is that

when you no longer believe your conditioned responses, you are free to do or not do anything.

Suddenly, you have options. The whole world of possibilities is open to you.

And as we say in Zen, keep paying attention.

Sunday, November 01, 2009

No Prayer Goes Unanswered



No prayer — and a prayer is nothing more than a fervent statement of what is so — goes unanswered. Every prayer — every thought, every statement, every feeling — is creative. To the degree that it is fervently held as truth, to that degree will it be made manifest in your experience.

Conversations With God, Book 1
Neale Donald Walsch
Page 12