I wrote to Barbara Brodsky confessing that I was not feeling drawn to the Deep Spring Center for Meditation fall program and expressing some confusion and concern. Aaron incorporated to clarify, and I listened to the audio last evening. This morning, I read the transcript Barbara sent to all of the Dharma Path students.
Immediately after reading that, I opened Aaron’s Thought for Today:
I had many teachers, including Jeshua. Each one served a purpose, but each one was temporary, even the greatest teachers simply pass through to remind you of something of which you need reminding, something you already know but had forgotten. When you have awakened to that, that teacher passes, and then the next teacher will come.
Then I logged onto Facebook and see a post by Pamela Johnson on her page: Supernatural Love and Life After Death. She writes: “It breaks my heart to see so many people, literally thousands upon thousands (more like millions according to Alan) grieving the loss of a loved one when I know they are literally standing right there next to them….”
I am free to be the best me I can be… an exciting future awaits me, and I boldly take my place in it. I am ready to live my life to the fullest.
You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.
~ John 8:32
I don’t get a commission from Facebook, and I am not in denial of the downside to this platform, but people can figure out how to access the best without the rest. One friend named a page after her dog and that allowed her to log on and read/see posts about her grandchildren.
Pamela and Alan Johnson will have a book out next spring, but I wish every one who wants to be free NOW could see all of the post that I read this morning. I took these screen shots. You might have to save the photo and enlarge it to be able to read it, or just soak in the truth.
You will know the truth, and the truth will make you Free!
Will Rogers says if you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. That is very valuable to remember!
The twinges in my low back started on Sunday, in anticipation of going to Joel’s overnight to take Zeus, Joel’s male cat, to the vet for de-matting of his fur (under sedation).
Zeus with his severely matted fur.
Zeus needed to have nothing to eat after midnight, and no water after 6:00 am, and he needed to be at the vet office about 7:45 am. The overnight made the most sense, but I could feel the tension building. By the time I left for Kalamazoo, my low back was so ouchy, I was not sure that I would be able to carry my laptop into the house.
As it turned out, I may as well not have brought it because when I got into the bedroom in the lower level, I realized I had no Wifi available. At 8:15 pm I crawled in to bed without any of my usual distractions: no music, no email, no videos, no podcasts. Just an aggressively affectionate McGee who was letting me know August 2021 is a long time from November 2019, the last time I had shared the downstairs overnight with her.
It was more challenging than I had imagined to get an 18-pound-formerly-feral-and-terrified cat into the “Pet Taxi.” I began barking orders like a drill sergeant. Fortunately, Joel had been in the army, and he was able to assist. I could not have done it without him….
The entire drive was punctuated with mournful meowing. It sounded just like Zeus was saying, “OUT…. OUT…. O-U-T….”
Admittedly, Zeus was not alone in his stressful emotions; I also cried during his check-in process.
Just before 2:00 pm, I spoke with Dr. Christine Williamson. She is amazing. She said Zeus did great, and she commented on what a wonderful guy he is. She did not do a full lion-cut, but was able to trim out all of the severe matting and leave his fur intact on the rest of his body.
Here is Zeus with his new hairdo.
While there, they did routine blood work, and everything looks good. His glucose level was high, but that could have been from stress. Probably a good thing they did not check my glucose level….
If the definition of “dogma” is a principle or set of principles laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true then I wonder what we call the state of not seeing anything as incontrovertibly true? Perhaps that is the disappearance of dogma….
I have been listening to Kelvin Chin, who was a test subject in the first medical studies on meditation in the U.S.— conducted by Boston cardiologist Herbert Benson, MD in 1971 (published in Scientific American, 1972). One of his teachings is about what happens when we die. What he teaches produces an effect on me. Until recently I had never heard of Kelvin. Now, I feel compelled pay attention to what he is saying.
When our daughter, Stacey, was visiting us here in Michigan we watched Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby. Very adolescent, mildly offensive, the NASCAR superstar Ricky Bobby (Will Ferrell) must pull himself out of the depths of despair and restore his honor on the racetrack. We had heard a lot of the lines from the movie, but now we have heard Ricky Bobby praying to 8 pound baby Jesus.
The time with Stacey was a lot of fun. She had a Michigan perfect weather-week. We rode bikes. We walked downtown at sunset. We ate. They drank. We laughed. We cried. The week was also a lot of work. Soul work.
As Stacey and I were shoulder-to-shoulder for hours assembling two 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzles, not all of our talk about Jesus was as laughable as Ricky Bobby’s 8 pound Baby Jesus. Both Stacey and her mom are obviously experiencing a spiritual crisis of sorts. Growing pains… As Stacey implored me to not take her faith away from her, I spoke the gospel truth, “I don’t want you to give up your faith. I would hope you will go MORE deeply into your faith, beyond the surface level where some are inside the circle and some are outside, to where your faith is an act of inclusion not exclusionary.”
We discussed how mystics of different traditions describe a common “reality” that seems to be summed up as the mystic and all of reality are One. The purpose of our individual spiritual growth is to achieve that oneness in our everyday experience, to transcend limited identity and re-identify with the all that is.
“Can you help me understand how a person who has never taken a flu shot, who teaches that germs don’t cause illness, that our own immune system is designed to keep us healthy came to the conclusion it is best to take the vaccine?” she queried.
“You have to see my world view to understand that,” I responded. “I don’t experience myself as separate from anything. I don’t buy bottled waters because I see the miles of toxic waste poisoning the ocean. I saw the face of my friend, who is a doctor (she and her husband are both doctors) having to decide who gets treated and who does not. I felt the pain of family not being able to be with their loved one who are dying. For me, my heart was so filled with this collective pain, I could not even experience a “personal” point of view. I don’t want to get the virus, I don’t want to give the virus. I want to alleviate as much suffering as I can. Any small personal inconvenience or possible risk was nothing compared to what I experienced as the impact on the whole.”
I went on to share that I had the benefit of personally knowing an epidemiologist who was intimately involved in all of this. He isolated. He masked. He and his wife got the vaccine as soon as possible. I had the experience of knowing a man whose son and daughter-in-law were living abroad working with an international team of scientists to develop a vaccine (knowing this sort of pandemic was inevitable). I had the benefit of the experience — if you would call it that — of losing a good friend and ministry colleague to Covid. She was in the hospital for pancreatitis in March when we went into lock-down. I heard her voice. I felt her fear. I know of the helplessness of her daughter, her grandson, and her husband as they were unable to be with her.
My experience meant I could not make a choice to knowingly risk that suffering for another.
You cannot un-know an experience. All of my experience shaped my choice.
A day or so later, as she was getting ready for bed, Stacey asked me to give her again the Reader’s Digest version of how I arrived at my conclusion. I could feel her desire to go beyond the understanding of her own heart to the ability to articulate that world view to another.
We talked about moving beyond our own effort and inviting nonphysical support in everything we do.
We shared how vulnerable it can feel as you let go of beliefs that have supported us in the past.
I told her if someone had been able to have this kind of conversation with me I may not have had to step outside of the Christianity I loved to continue to develop spiritually.
Kelvin references the different types of near death experiences of individuals quite simply: “Everybody interprets it through their own belief system, their own filters.”
My own near death experience occurred August 12, 1962. 59 years later, to-the-day, it seems I am still processing that all now.
Kelvin says after we let go of our physical bodies we recognize not just loved ones from this life who have already physically died, but also identifiable energy beings (old friends) from previous lives. Many previous lives…. and many old friends….
While out riding my bike I noticed how little “belief” I have access to at this stage of my experience. “I don’t know” could be an appropriate mantra. Maybe I would add, “And it does not matter,” but, of course, that might be a belief!
Stacey decided she would welcome help from a “Santa” Jesus.
I sent her this image to remind us both of the gifts of our disappearing dogma.
The other evening we were talking about our favorite childhood book/s. Mine was The Boxcar Children. It is a story about four orphaned siblings who must find a way to fend for themselves or risk being separated.The children have a grandfather they have never met, but they are afraid he is mean because he did not seem to like their mother. An abandoned boxcar, near a stream, is luxury compared to sleeping inside a hay stack all day! Working odd-jobs, the children use hard work to cultivate self-reliance until they must seek medical care for Violet, at risk of losing their independence.
After much process and some candid conversation with my dharma sister physician friend, Stacey decided to get the Johnson & Johnson vaccine while she was here. It was convenient. She, admittedly, still had some reservations.
As she was waiting for her shot she said, “The first person who thanks me for getting the shot is going to piss me off.”
“Then let me be the first so you get it out of the way. Thank you.” We both cried and hugged.
When she sat down to go over the paperwork, I said to the woman, “She is doing this for her mother.”
The woman glanced at me, “Are you her mother?” When I said I was, she turned back to Stacey and confessed, “I did it for my dad.”
I am not exactly sure why Henry, Jessie, Violet, and Benny were so memorable, or why I can still FEEL the safety of their boxcar. The relief they expressed upon discovery of a safe place to call home was familiar to me as a child. Having grown up with an alcoholic father, I know that feeling of longing for a home in the core of my being.
Although I loved to go visit friends, overnights often turned into feelings of homesickness. I sometimes feel that even as an adult.
One website addressed “cosmic” and “Lemurian” homesickness: Sometimes you feel trapped in your life, in your body, separated by your skin from the truth of the world and the people around you. Lonely and disconnected. You gaze skyward, knowing home must be up there, somewhere. You long for the feeling of your soul’s most familiar surroundings.
Yes, that is the longing I had during the time Covid (and politics, and religion….) created the feeling of homesickness.
Home means an enjoyable, happy place where you can live, laugh and learn. It’s somewhere where you are loved, respected, and cared for. When you look at it from the outside, home is just a house. A building. Maybe a yard. But on the inside, it’s a lot more than wood and bricks. The saying “Home is where the heart is” says it all.
Home is also where your memories lie. Home is where I got my head stuck under the couch. Home is where I fell in the goldfish pond. I remember sleeping in the playhouse, falling down the stairs and climbing up the apple tree. Without memories, most people wouldn’t be the people that they are today.
Just like memories, home is also where your hopes and dreams are.
The dharma talk was direct. You don’t have to be a Buddhist to practice the precepts. The precepts are practical. I vow to harm none. I vow not to take what is not freely given. I vow not to misuse sexuality. I vow to refrain from false speech. I vow to refrain from intoxicants that can lead to heedlessness. The dharma teacher summarized it as I do not harm myself in thought, speech, or actions and I do not harm others.
He continued to clarify how it is not just guarding against not hurting self or others, it is also about helping. It is not just about not taking what is not freely given, it is about generosity. It is not just about avoiding suffering, it is also about experiencing joy.
I wrote in my journal: Today is a flip-the-calendar day, and today Stacey (our daughter from Tennessee) arrives.
I drew an Osho Zen Tarot card, asking specifically about the risk related to the Delta variant. Stacey is not vaccinated. I drew 9 of Rainbows: Ripeness, and the message seeps into my soul, “Only if your meditation has brought you a light that shines in every night will even death not be a death to you but a door to the divine…. you become one with the ocean…. and unless you know the oceanic experience, you have lived in vain. Now is always the time and the fruit is always ripe…. There is no such thing as wrong time.”
Reading from “A Midnight Clear” by Katherine Patterson in The Big Book for Peace found in the Little Free Library a few days ago, I meet a young boy who was experiencing fear after the nuclear bomb was dropped on Japan, until he meets a homeless woman who is likely sick and dying and learns from her how he, too, can “be not afraid.”
Recently I sent those words from the corpse prayer as written by Jarem Sawatsky in Dancing with the Elephants: Mindfulness Training For Those Living With Dementia, Chronic Illness or an Aging Brain (How to Die Smiling Series, #1) to a friend.
Be not afraid…. I embrace sacred life…. I embrace sacred death….
A flood of tears come. All the feelings from so many years. All of the emotions from this path of pandemic. Iask the guides and helpers to help transform loneliness (absence of the other) into aloneness (presence of the self).
Am I concerned about my un-vaccinated daughter coming for a visit? Yes. Am I afraid for her? Yes. Am I afraid for me? Yes.
Be not afraid…. I embrace sacred life…. I embrace sacred death….
P.S. I said to John last night that it would be so wonderful if she told us she had gotten vaccinated, but I welcome peace NOW that is not conditioned on someone or something else. There is no such thing as a wrong time.
Will she get Covid? Will I? The future will reveal itself. If this is my time to die, can I embrace the sacred death? If this is my time to live, can I embrace the sacred life?
I put the pen in my left hand and let spirit write:
You know there is no dead. The leaving of the body is just a step on the path.
You know the ocean-ness. You have always known that.
It is eleven days until August 12.
(August 12, 1962 — at age 12 — I had a near-death experience.)
From the online information about The Big Book for Peace, by by Ann Duren and Marilyn Sachs: Peace — the issue of our times — affects everyone, but especially children, who deserve and wish for a peaceful future. Now over 30 of the best-loved authors and illustrators for children have combined their talents in a big, wonderful book for and about peace.
“Trust yourself. Create the kind of self that you will be happy to live with all your life.” Golda Meir said that and it is something you live moment-by-moment.
I am navigating this by noticing all of the places where I feel responsible for something that I do not have control over. Perhaps this is a UNIVERSAL application, but the way it has revealed itself for me this week in in 3 situations.
(1) A friend who is getting her house ready to sell.
(2) Joel’s cat, Zeus, who has matted fur that needs attention.
(3) The fall Dharma Path classes, for which the links do not work properly.
I realized these three were/are all revealing the same habit energy of feeling responsible, wanting to fix, and having an emotional reaction to the feeling helpless.
Referring to number 3, I wrote to my fellow students: Note — I am only the postal carrier delivering these messages. I do not have access to fix the technology issues, nor do I have any more information about the classes than you do at this time.
I asked the others to have patience and to support my doing the same.
This morning I stopped in to see Mary Anne’s set up. Mary Anne is one of three Monarch Mavens I know and love. The previous day she had to put her bridal veil into service to cover the container until she can get to the fabric store to buy more netting. What a beautiful labor of love.
Aaron speaks so beautifully to all of this:
Thought for Today
You move into the experience of ‘oneness’— the essential oneness, the identity with God — which is different than unity.
Then you start to know the true divinity of yourself and All That Is. You are that divinity and have always been.
From that experiential understanding of identity with God your whole moral system is shaken up. You cease acting from a place of doer, from a place of ‘should’ or outward moral imperatives. Your choices of action are based on the simple fact that there is nothing here that is not God, so you may not harm any of it. To hurt another is to hurt myself and to hurt God. It then becomes unthinkable to do harm. That is why moving towards this experience of identity with God is so important, because until then the earth will need to be run by moral dictates — shoulds and shouldn’ts, commandments. And there are always going to be those who break commandments.
Eventually, your Earth will evolve to a place where all understand their oneness, and the commandments will no longer be necessary.
It is clear to me that I am filtering all of these experiences through the lens of what Jeffrey Olsen describes in the aftermath of an auto accident that took the life of Olsen’s wife, and younger son. An accident which resulted in Olsen’s “near-death” experience that forever altered his view of the world. This is what the attending ER physician, Dr. Jeff O’Driscoll, had to say:
O’DRISCOLL: I sensed a divine presence in the room. And then I noticed a light. In it was the form of a woman, floating above the patient’s bed. She had flowing, curly blonde hair and was dressed in various shades of white. Her form was almost transparent, and the look on her face was serene. She looked vibrant, otherworldly—I knew innately that this was the man’s wife. The divine presence in the room was allowing me to view her eternal soul.
She smiled at me, as if she’d known me forever. I sensed her immense gratitude toward the doctors who were working to save her husband. She looked directly at me and back at her husband, then back at me. Her eyes were intent.
Do you want to understand?
Do you need to know what happened?
Are you trying to figure our what went wrong?
Do you persist in asking “why?”
When we are not peaceful, we cannot understand.
When we are afraid or upset, our thoughts are distorted.
When we are hurt or angry, we think through our judgments.
Emotions confuse and come to faulty conclusions.
The understanding comes when our minds are open.
Understanding will unfold as we know more.
Being open and willing is key to real understanding.
Wisdom will not be available in closed minds.
May the world as I experience it today (and every day?) be a place where all understand their oneness….
Ultimately,
direct experience is key
to fully realizing how
we are all connected
through the binding force
of unconditional love
and its unlimited ability to heal.
~ Dr. Eben Alexander
author of Proof of Heaven and Living in a Mindful Universe:
A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Heart of Consciousness.
It has been an AMAZING week.
Sunday, July 18, 2021, I joined an evening Zoom meeting of International Association of Near-Death Studies (Greater Boston IANDS). At a few minutes before 8:00 pm, the woman hosting the room said she needed to log off to join another group in Hawaii. Spontaneously, she invited any of us to join who might choose to.
What do you have to lose? I went.
I met Pamela Johnson, who says about her husband, “After he passed, Alan returned from Heaven to tell me that we are meant to continue to live and work together. He has helped me navigate this otherworldly journey from the day he left. I now see him clairvoyantly, hear him all the time (he’s very talkative LOL), and much to my delight, I FEEL Alan’s energy and his love viscerally. I have never known a love like this, it’s better than when he was in a body! Truly! ❤ This experience has healed my grief to the degree that it’s practically gone.” Pamela says their book, Supernatural Love and Life After Death, should be out in the spring. Meanwhile, you can find her on Facebook.
Meeting Pamela led to my attending a three-day online summit with some other remarkable individuals who shared their near death experiences, and told how that experience forever altered their view of life, and death, and life after death, including their work in the world. The first speaker at the summit was Dr. Eben Alexander and Karen Newell! From Dr. Alexander’s website:
About My Experience:
“My coma taught me many things. First and foremost, near-death experiences, and related mystical states of awareness, reveal crucial truths about the nature of existence. Simply dismissing them as hallucinations is convenient for many in the conventional scientific community, but only continues to lead them away from the deeper truth these experiences are revealing to us. The conventional reductive materialist (physicalist) model embraced by many in the scientific community, including its assumption that the physical brain creates consciousness and that our human existence is birth-to-death and nothing more, is fundamentally flawed. At its core, that physicalist model intentionally ignores what I believe is the fundament of all existence — consciousness itself.”
Many of the members of our Grief Journey group meeting here in St. Joseph for over 20 years have had similar experiences of this continuity of consciousness….
Our group changed our normal meeting time to join Pamela Johnson on Facebook last evening. Afterwards I admitted that I am finally able to honor the NDE I experienced in an auto accident with my dad when I was 12 years old, and I now recognize the miraculous way that experience shaped my perspective of and work in the world.
A neighbor whose husband passed last August told me early Saturday morning that she is “doing worse now” than when he first passed. I told her about anniversary energy and invited her to join our group on Sunday. She left voice mail saying honestly that she wasn’t ready. After our time with Pamela, in spite of numerous experiences herself, one member of our group expressed not being there yet, saying, “I still have too much anger.”
This morning as my fingers move over the keyboard, I am remembering many of the summit speakers. Robin Landsong experienced two near death experiences when she was abducted at age 8, taken to Zimbabwae. raped and killed.
Jeffrey Olsen’s NDE occurred in an accident which took the lives of his wife and younger son. His story includes the doctor who saw Jeffrey’s wife there with them in the emergency room! Linda B/G had this to say about their story:
Wow! What an amazing story! I listened to an interview with Peter Panagore and got on his website and signed up to receive his emails. Here are the links:
Listening to Rinpoche teach “Ten Percent Happiness” and quote a sufi master speaking of our true tender-heartedness toward all humanity: What’s heaven? Love in your heart. What’s hell? Lacking that.
What if ALL of these people who have had near-death experiences have shared the glorious truth of unconditional love as our true nature? Safety and peace and love and trust is available to us all NOW. What if this truth is more real than all of the distortions we have believed that kept us sad or scared or angry or depressed or hopeless or helpless?
I do not know if you are ready for REALITY. I do not know what it will take for my neighbor or my friend to be READY.
The most interesting question for me is simply to ask of myself and of YOU, “What do you have to lose?”
“In doing something, do it with love or never do it at all.”
— Mahatma Gandhi
My husband, John, violated a long-learned rule of relating when he said “WE” would do something that I would never have agreed to do.
What am I to do now?
Gandhi’s point is to not do it unless you can do it with love.
I did it with love when I was honest with John: It was not wholesome for you to have committed me to something without asking me first.
Then, I did it with love when I was honest with myself: I had to either do it with love or not do it at all.
The “IT” in question is detailing a house here in our manufactured home community for a friend. She has essentially already moved to be near her children and grandchildren. She hired someone to do the painting, but that did not go well for a variety of reasons. Partially, it did not go well because she had previously painted without proper information or experience.
For some of it, there is no easy solution.
Here is the before-and-after view of one corner in the master bedroom. It is amazing what a truckload of Fast ‘N Final Lightweight spackling compound can do.
It is very good karma to lovingly clean up messes you did not make!
I am reminded of our helping one of our friends move out of a house that our other friends were moving into.
I am reminded of the closing of Holistic Alliance in 2005 when we had 6,000 square feet of space to be emptied out and cleaned, making way for the new owner.
As we were there working on the house, one of our neighbors stopped in to see how it was going. She said how fortunate our friend was to have someone who was willing to step up and lend a hand. I reminded her who our friend is. Our friend works for our local hospice. She paved the way for John’s mom to get hospice care when needed, and then for his brother, Jim, as he was dying with lung cancer. Our friend had also assisted the neighbor’s husband.
Yes, it is a clearly “compounded” mess. As I mused about all of this, I could see that I have left messes (physical and emotional) for others to deal with. We all have.
And admittedly — even with all of our hard work this week — we have not been able to make all things right. Doing that will fall to some other at some other time.
Obviously, universal implications….
And, while I could not do a great job of everything, it is my intention to leave things better than I found them.
“When you are on the right path,
invisible hands will come to your aid.”
~ Joseph Campbell
Imagine my delight to log onto a Zoom meeting of Greater Boston IANDS and see Dr. Bernie Siegel It is no exaggeration to say Bernie is/was my first conscious step onto the path of awareness as self-healing tool, and thus a long-time idol.
Geoffrey Hayes, our pastor at the time, loaned me his copy of Bernie’s book, Love, Medicine and Miracles, which I read at our small travel trailer on Pitcher Lake Campground, in Dowagiac, Michigan. This was a period of my life during which I was experiencing daily chronic pain. It was revolutionary for Bernie to suggest I ask myself what that pain allowed me to do or be or have that would otherwise elude me.
The answer?
REST!
The synopsis of Bernie’s life-changing words of wisdom: Find another way to give that gift to yourself and the symptom/s may subside.
I became aware I had been in the habit of pushing myself through tasks.
The chronic pain gave me “permission” to rest.
This week, I gave our kitchen cabinets a much-needed fresh coat of paint. That meant taking off all of the doors, doing a light sanding, removing and cleaning all of the pulls and hinges, painting the doors, reinstalling the pulls and hinges, and rehanging the doors. Whew….
Not having a basement or garage,
I set up my work station in the great room!
The morning after the doors to the upper cabinets had dried overnight, I was awake early. They had to all be rehung for me to have room to paint the lowers.
I figured out a way to stand on a step stool, put one leg up on the counter top, aim the hinge on the door perfectly over the corresponding hole on the cabinet frame. I could use that leg like a third hand, and pick up the screw and screwdriver with my other two hands.
I now call it my prehensile leg (a term referring to an animal’s limb or tail capable of grasping).
Hanging the cabinet doors (and aligning them properly) certainly had a learning curve, but by the time John got up, the uppers were all hung and I had started painting the lowers.
Noteworthy: I have never previously hung a cabinet door.
That brings me back to Joseph Campbell’s opening quotation, Bernie Seigel’s message, and my current awareness: I cannot say I hung the doors alone, nor all by myself, or even without another human being helping. Each step of the way I was consciously inviting and, more importantly, receiving help.
And the kitchen looks so fresh and clean!
Bernie’s wife passed about 3 years ago. On the 4th of July, his family was visiting. Bernie could not find his cell phone. They tried calling the phone; they looked and looked. No luck finding the phone.
Shortly after his son had left for home, the son came back, saying, “Mom told me where your phone is.” Way out in the back yard, Bernie’s phone was on the chair, exactly where she said it was.
The kicker of this story is that they had not been out there!
I have written about a sense of beyond-personal capacity many times before. Many others share this recognition. We can benefit by being intentional in encouraging others to ask for and receive these types of non-physical support.
I will save how Bernie made me quit my job for another post and close with his words:
“Learn from the wisdom of others and enjoy your life experience. Remember the Bible ends in Revelations, not Conclusions, and graduations are commencements not terminations.” ~ Bernie Siegel
Hearing Gary Zukav express something absolutely obvious — fear is excruciating — is the roadmap to living from authentic power which is our highest purpose as humans.
Gary adds: Authentic Power refers to our ability to create positive energy and heal any issue through the power of love.
Whereas our normal idea of power involves control and manipulation of other people, authentic power reverses this idea to assert that the true sense of power always originates within oneself. When you become centered and align with your own states of inner joy and love, you are able to tap into a source of inspiration and creative genius that few people have known. ~ Gary Zukav
A friend reached out recently asking my advice for his finding a doctor who would respect his desire to safely titrate off mood-stabilizing medication. I responded, “It is the same process as finding anything else we think we want. Get clear on your intention to live from your highest purpose. Ask for and expect to receive divine assistance. Soften resistance around this or anything else. Let awareness guide the way.”
If you act on an intention with fear, you are going to create painful, destructive consequences for yourself (the same as you’ve created before) because this experience in you didn’t just come about with this partner, this business partner, this neighbor, this roommate, this classmate. You’ve experienced it before.
And you’ll experience it again as long as you continue to escape the pain of it by changing the world. ~ Gary Zukav
Almost daily someone is implying that we need to take action against something dreadful. We need to demand equal rights for the LGBT community; we need to protest to protect the environment; we need to demand equality for race, gender, religion. We must stand up for all of these rights.
Wholesome action is, well, wholesome, but Zukav points out that acting on an intention with fear is definitely not wholesome. In fact, taking action that is motivated by fear can create painful, destructive and even excruciating consequences.
The Noble Eightfold Path, an early summary of the path of Buddhist practices leading to liberation consists of eight practices: right view, right resolve, right speech, right conduct, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right samadhi. Samadhi is calm-abiding meditation, where one intends to not follow the constant flow of thoughts, to not focus on them.
Recent news: a friend hospitalized following an intentional overdose of anxiety medication; escalation of a teenager’s mental and emotional chaos surrounding child-hood sexual trauma; a mothers recent discovery of her daughter’s anger at not having been protected from early childhood sexual trauma.
Excruciating news.
Injustice, abuse of power, corruption, dishonesty and despair is commonplace. These are all manifestations of fear, therefore it does not help to meet any of it with more fear.
Zukav makes it clear: There’s nothing wrong with following that. The universe isn’t oriented in terms of right and wrong, or good and bad. It is oriented in cause and effect – there is a cause, and for every cause, there is an effect, and if you participate in the cause, you will participate in the effect.
Today’s Daily Aaron Quote:
There is no thought for today!
Perhaps a reminder from the Universe that if we participate in the cause, it is not possible to not participate in the effect, so being a universal human with authentic power is totally the right action…
Note* Here are links to the two Zukav talks these comments come from:
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