Acceptance is Key

Acceptance is key. Acceptance doesn’t mean that we like everything. It means that we accept the challenges, accept the realities that surround us and accept our own responsibility for ourselves and our actions.

Acceptance is the opposite of denial, avoidance and resistance. You can feel the difference in the energies of these. Acceptance feels open. Denial feels fearful and closed. Acceptance allows the world that surrounds us to be what it is, to show us its truth. This truth is infinitely precious. We didn’t incarnate on this planet to deal in easy falsehoods and surround ourselves with people who tell us what we want to hear and nothing else. We came here to be in the thick of it all.

To me, acceptance is our willingness to love life, to love the world, to love God. Acceptance is our courageous stance as we proclaim, “Yes.”

We don’t whine about how it isn’t what we’d like it to be, at least, not often. We accept it as it is and this is HUGE. This acceptance is vast and deep and grand when you really think about it.

On the one hand, resisting reality and saying, “No.” On the other hand, accepting reality and saying, “Yes.” It feels completely different to be in acceptance rather than in resistance, avoidance or denial. It feels like unconditional love.

It feels like courage to me, to be in total acceptance. So that when we say, “I love,” we don’t just mean, “I love when it suits me. I love when I see what I expected to see. I love when I see what mirrors me and makes me look good. I love when I see what is pleasant and comfortable. I love when I experience an easy love, an easy moment.”

It feels like the utmost courage to say, “Whatever it is; I accept it. It is what it is. I see it. I feel it. I work to understand it, not so much with my mind, but in my heart. I do not wish it away.” This is compassion. This is the way that God sees the world.

It feels like grace to me, this acceptance. When we place ourselves in complete acceptance, we place ourselves in grace. We place ourselves in heaven on Earth.

It isn’t always easy. It isn’t always comfortable. Therefore, like so much else, it is a practice. We choose it. We choose acceptance. Yet we slide back into resistance and avoidance here and there. When we do, we notice it and bring ourselves back into acceptance. After some practice in this way, we come to feel uncomfortable when we are NOT accepting. It feels off-balance and unnecessarily difficult to resist and deny the perfect moment that we are always in. And so we learn and grow and become more and more aligned with the frequency of joy, which knows no resistance to what is in the moment.

Trust

Trust is absolutely essential to this practice of tuning our frequency to joy. This practice is in fact a consistent call to trust. Trust yourself. Trust the world around you. Trust God. Yes. Trust God.

When we are out of trust, we drop our frequency into worry, anxiousness and even fear. We fret about what just happened and what may happen. We fall out of the Now.

Our worries are always based on the past; we fear that our experiences will repeat themselves in ways that we find unpleasant and destructive of our peace and security. We fear losing our security. We worry about augmenting it. We do not trust that we are well, that we are exactly as we should be for our own highest good. We do not trust that we are exactly where we should be right now. We work and plan and work some more to control our situation and then we worry about losing control of it.

All of our need for security, for control and for reassurance comes from our fears based on what we have experienced in the past. We don’t know and we can’t know, what will happen, but we worry based on what has happened before. So, when we worry about what will be, we are actually basing that worry on what has been. We are living in the energies of the past.

Trust eliminates all of that worry and fretting. Stepping into trust eliminates the power of fear to push us off-balance. It is not rational to trust. It is a choice that we can make, based on our own sense of what we choose to be in the Now. Do we choose to be in a feeling of trusting or in a feeling of worrying. It is a choice made with free will. And let us be clear that worrying is no more rational than trust is.

Just because something happened in the past that felt unpleasant or painful, that doesn’t mean that the same thing will happen in the future. Worrying about what has not yet happened and may never happen is not rational. It is something that we do though. We tend to allow the worry to build up in us unconsciously. We ‘slip’ into worrying and out of trusting.

I don’t know anyone who likes to be worried or fearful. Yet many people are. For some, it fills their lives. In a sense, it is what they become. I feel for these people because I have experienced fear and anxiety and I know how awful these feelings are, how they can overwhelm us, colour everything so that we become defined by them. Yet there is an alternative.

When we trust, we tend to do so consciously. We choose to trust. Don’t look for reasons to trust. We do not know what will come to us. We do not know what we will experience. We do not know what we will become. We can either trust that all will be well, that all that we experience serves us in some way, or we can worry about it.

We have a third option as well, which I’ll explore a bit more later on. That third option is to simply accept that we don’t know what will happen, what it will feel like or what it will mean for us. We accept life and life’s experiences.

Trust is a frequency of optimism, of hope, of faith. Worry is a frequency of fear and the insecurity that accompanies fear. Acceptance is a frequency of non-resistance. It is essentially neutral.

Trust is a choice that we make from our hearts. We trust because we choose to experience being in trust.

Have you ever fallen in love with someone whom you barely knew? Trust feels like that. It feels like The Fool in the tarot deck - stepping off of his cliff edge and into the unknown with never a care for what will become of him.

I choose to tune my frequency to trust whenever I feel myself slipping back into worry because I prefer to experience trust than to experience worry. I take a deep breath and choose trust. I invoke trust by saying its name.

I inhale. I fill my lungs with air and my bloodstream with oxygen. I say to myself, “Trust.” The worries fade away.

If real fear comes up in me, rather than just the habitual worries of the mundane world, I take the time to delve into its source. Why am I afraid? What am I afraid of? I answer those questions and the fear melts away like late snow in April. For more on this, I refer you back to what I said earlier about facing our fears.

Trust feels like love. For when we love someone, we entrust our love to them.

Trust feels like peace. For when we trust, we let go of our struggles to control what is outside of us for the sake of increasing our security. When we trust, we no longer need to control and so that struggle is released. When we are no longer struggling, we are at peace.

Trust feels like unity consciousness. For when we trust, we remove the barriers of separation that we have built up to protect ourselves. When we trust, we let go of our defenses and allow our essential unity with ALL to come quietly in to our consciousness and transform us.

Trust feels like ease. For when we trust and therefore release our defenses, our barriers of separation and our need to control, what we are left with is a sudden sense of ease. Our bodies become more relaxed. Our minds become quiet. Our hearts rejoice in our newly discovered openness to the world.

What I have found in my choice of trusting is that trust feels like heaven on Earth. It is, like so much else, a practice. It is a conscious choice that we make in the moment, and then again in the next moment and then again a little bit later on. And we do this over and over again until we come to a time when we are almost always trusting, almost always at ease, in peace and feeling loved and loving. Then, when we slip into worry, it feels jarring and unpleasant and we simply and easily choose again. We choose trust.

      

Filled With Love

I am filled with love today, so that everything around me is perfect in my sight. Everything around me is perfect in its scent and its sound. Everything is whole. Everything is complete within its being. There is no need. There is no lack. There is no want.

This is heaven on Earth.

Autumn returns again to these mountains. And the sweep of seasonal change and becoming is perfect and complete within its own rhythms. We too are exactly where we should be.

Joy in the World

It's a wonderful time to get out of doors and spend some time amongst the trees, grasses and gardens that surround you. Steep yourself in the peace that is the world of nature; you will not regret even one moment that you spend doing so.

We tend to busy ourselves so much with so many indoor details that we forget just how good it feels to be outside. When we do go outside, we are often on our way to another building. A world of incredible beauty and peace is available to us. It doesn't cost a penny and it never fails.

Go outside, even if only for a few minutes, and take a few deep breaths. Immediately you will feel the peace and simplicity of it wash over you. It is not only that the joy in the world can be felt there, but that it makes room for the joy that is in you to emerge. The two meet, in an effortless embrace, and you, composed largely of water - water being the most joyful substance on Earth - are then filled with joy.

I have neighbours who say to me, "I'll go for a walk if someone goes with me." So I go for a walk with them. But if the truth be told, I'd just as soon go on my own for a walk. I prefer, oftentimes, the solitary expedition into the natural world because it is precisely the non-human aspect of the natural world which I am there to feel and enjoy. If I am accompanied by another person, I am more aware of that person than I am of the world around me. If you are comfortable doing so, go out into the natural world on your own and spend a little time there just being, just feeling, just taking it all in.

Often we go out of doors to move our bodies. We run, walk, bicycle and hike. We golf or garden. It's good to get moving. Yet, there is a stillness in the world of nature that can be deeply sustaining to us. It calls forth an answering stillness within us. And this stillness is only truly met when we are still. Sometimes I go out into the world and I sit somewhere for a time. I sit and sit and if I could, I would sit there forever, because the stillness there feels like heaven on Earth to me. I lack nothing, as I sit there, out in the natural world. An inner stillness invites me to breathe more slowly, more deeply. I am slowed. I am deepened. And the peace within me at such moments fills me with joy such as I can only wish all other human beings to feel. It is beyond words. It is beyond time. It is vast and limitless. It is not to be found within our homes, although we can bring it indoors with us when we come, silent from the great solemnity and wonder of it, back inside.

There is such joy in the world around us. It lives in the living things with which we are surrounded. It meets our own joy, sometimes hidden, buried by all that we have to do, surrounded, besieged by all the demands that we place upon ourselves. It meets our joy and calls to it and it takes only a moment, only the briefest pause before you get back into the car, or open the front door.

Take that moment. Breathe deeply. Feel the joy that is inherent in the natural world that surrounds you. Know that it is yours; whenever you turn to it, it will be there. Rejoice therefore.

Make a Joyful Noise

Sing. Dance. Move to the rhythm. Tap out the rhythm. Drum the rhythm on a Native American drum or an African drum.

Sound it out because the rhythms that come out when we sing and dance and drum really move us in ways that are exquisitely joyful.

I have always loved to sing and dance. At the age of 50, these joys seemed so far from me. I resolved to do something about it. I created a weekly activity session of dancing, drumming, or toning at the Sunshine Center in Sutton village, down in the valley below my mountainside home. After a few months, it became a monthly activity, rather than a weekly one, but to my delight, it is still happening on the third Sunday of every month. People gather to feel the rhythms, make the rhythms and move to the rhythms. It feels great and does a world of good. It gets the blood flowing and the joy glowing.

We begin with dancing to recorded music. The music begins a bit slowly. We ease ourselves gently into the dancing. Slowly we move our bodies and warm our blood. The music gains in rhythmic intensity and I usually end up picking up a pair of rhythm sticks and hitting them in time with the music as I move around the large room.

Oh, it feels so wonderful to be able to move freely to some great dance music and to add my own feel for the rhythm to the sounds!

We dance until we are breathless and sated. Our bodies feel grounded, joyful, warm and calm. The music slows and we cool down a little bit. Then the recorded music stops and we get out our drums.

We drum simple beats and everybody joins in. There is never any worry about how it sounds or whether it meets some standard. We just do it. There are sticks which can be struck against each other to make a nice sound and rattles and shakers too for people who don't own a drum. So even someone who has never drummed before can participate.

There is never any judgement in these activities, which I call In the Moment. And that is the freedom of it, that's the joy of it and that's the feeling of incredible safety and love in it. We support each other by asking absolutely nothing of each other. Come as you are. Be as you are while you are there. Leave changed!

When we are drumming, we simply enjoy being in the moment. We move and sway. We sound or sit silent. The choice is always ours and is a free and clear choice from within us. That is the beauty of being in a safe space to play with sound and rhythm.

The rhythms, as we drum, inspire us to move in our seats and to tone and sing whatever notes come out of us. We feel moved and we move each other, sitting in a circle together and sharing the moments as they weave through our beating hands and sounding voices.

We do this for some time. It never feels too short and it never feels too long. It is perfect being in the Now.

Singing groups also meet this joyful urge in us to sound and breathe and sound again. I am so glad to have an opportunity this autumn to join a singing group. I've already met with the group briefly and we sang a little bit. Oh! It felt so good!

I think that it is the deep, sustained breathing that we have to do when we sing that takes us into such a feeling of well-being. We know, medically speaking, that highly oxygenated blood improves our health and wellness. Breathing deeply oxygenates our blood, so singing is good for our health! But breathing deeply in a sustained way also brings a sense of deep peace to us. It's biological, but it has an impact on our spiritual aspects as well.

Singing, dancing and drumming feel so good and have such a positive impact on our physical bodies, it seems strange to me that more people don't take advantage of these expressions of joy and gladness. Having a safe and comfortable place to do these things is such a gift, too! That's why I began the In the Moment activities and the more places that offer such activities, the more people get to enjoy doing them, the better!

The benefits of these rhythmic expressions go even further. Our emotional state is eased, our stresses are given room and time to be released and our minds are quieted by the singing, the movements, the beat in the Now. I am so glad that I get to do these things, right here in our little village.

People in cities usually have a variety of these kinds of things to take part in. There are all kinds of dance styles and drumming groups these days. For me, the most important thing is that you feel safe in all of your being and doing in that space where you move, tone, sing or drum. And if there is nothing that you feel drawn to in your area, create your own! You can use your own living room to move to a beat. You can hit two wooden spoons together to the rhythm coming out of the radio or computer or mp3 player. You can sing in the shower or in the car - a great place to sing!

I used to think that dancing was something that people did when they went out for the evening. So dancing was associated with the consumption of alcohol, wine or beer. It was a courtship ritual. Girls danced with boys and boys danced with girls, and nobody hit a drum unless they were in the band. Now that's all changed. When I dance, I drink lots of good clean water. I join in with the music without any self-consciousness, moving my body any way I choose. It's tremendous fun!

Dancing, singing and drumming fill me with joy in the moment and it carries over into other moments and gifts me with a more joyful life. What a great way to tune your frequency to joy! These are largely non-verbal forms of expression. They are ancient and yet highly appropriate to our culture and society.

I love these activities and I urge you to participate if you are not already doing so.

Make a joyful noise! Move your body and raise your frequency! It's simple. It's fun. And as often as not, it doesn't cost a penny.

YIPPEE!

Play

I define play as any activity that is done for no apparent reason and for no desired outcome. So, playing Scrabble isn't play if you are determined to win, yet digging a hole in the ground can be play if you are digging the hole for no apparent reason and no desired outcome. You might just want to see how far you can get, or explore the worms down there.

Children engage in play often and well. I would argue that play helps children tremendously as they set about exploring and experiencing their world. Adults tend to forget the random quality of play. It is spontaneous, has no purpose other than the activity itself, and immediate. That's why, when a child says, "Come play with me," and an adult says, "Maybe later," the child feels frustrated and denied. In play, there is no later; there is only now.

Play returns us to being for the sake of being, doing for the experience of doing. It frees us from the always just in front of us outcomes for which we seemingly toil. And the activity may look like play, but actually be something very different. The activity may look like work, but be play to the person doing it. Play is self-sufficient, self-centered and self-referrent. It seeks nothing outside of the activity itself and the moment in which the activity is engaged and engaging.

Climbing a mountain is play if you don't mind at all whether you reach the top or not. Cooking dinner is play when you don't mind at all how it is received or when it is placed on the table ready to eat. If you are doing something because you feel like doing it and you don't care what happens with it, you are playing.

Play is freedom. When I am playing I feel free. You can play pretend, but play doesn't have dip into the realms of fantasy. It can be busy exploring the reality above, beside and below us.

One day last spring, after a heavy rain, I went out in my rubber boots and my rain coat. I had a shovel and the notion to see what I could make out of the flooding stream that ran down through the woods just south of my house. I played with it for a long time. Time disappeared while I was digging and messing about with old dead leaves and mud and the slipping, sliding water. I made a little stream bed to channel the flow. When a later rain storm breached the banks of my channel I was delighted. "Breach!" I yelled loudly to the darkening sky. I was not attached to any outcome for my earlier activity with the mud and leaves and stream. I was exploring, trying things out, learning about it. I was playing.

Playing is an activity of profound joyfulness. When we play, we explore what is there, what is happening, how things behave when other things happen. We discover and invent. Most importantly, we don't mind what happens. We don't mind what happens. We are and we do and we enjoy being and doing.

A person can spend almost every single moment of their day in an attitude of play, of not minding what happens, of being and doing and enjoying being and doing. Why don't we do more of this?

I remember, in school, being told that I had done something 'wrong.' In play, nothing is 'wrong,' it is just different than expected, perhaps. I differentiate playing a sport, a musical instrument, a game that has winners and losers, from actual random and self-inspired play. I think that we are taught not to play, because we are taught that we have to do things in a certain way, otherwise they are done 'wrong.'

I find, more and more, that when I am in an attitude of playful enjoyment of what I am being and doing, I am tuned naturally to the frequency of joy. The qualities of joy are there in abundance. There is acceptance, enjoyment and appreciation for what surrounds me and there is exploration and attentive experience of what surrounds me with no thought for any outcome other than the immediate response to my activity.

I place a muddy stone there and the water swirls and curls around it and flows over there instead. Hmmm. Interesting!

I cook some rice in lemon juice and water instead of using regular water and then I taste it. Hmmm. Interesting! Hmmmm! What would happen if I added pepper? Lemon pepper? Basil? Hmmmm.

What would happen if I made a beaver dam of sticks and muddy leaves to stop the flow of water? Hmmmm. Let's find out.

Faced with a big, difficult task, I became stressed and anxious. I had to deal with a sea of mud and the imminent autumn rains and no rain gutters on the house because we decided they were too much trouble to clean out every year and because the ice and snow would clog them. Floods of water pouring off the roof of the house into the mud were splattering my nice new siding with dirt. I kept stepping in puddles. Arghh!

I didn't know what to do and it was a real problem. Oh, and I had no budget for any work or materials to improve the situation. Zip. Nothing. I hadn't thought about it and was caught short after paying for all the big machine site work and the construction of the house.

I decided that the only way that I could deal with it without becoming really stressed, like, anxiety attack stressed, was to play with what was there in a spirit of exploration of the various potential solutions to my problem. "Relax," I told myself, "It's bad, but it can only get better."

There were some loose stones left over from when the site work was done. They lay in an inappropriate spot, but not too far from the house and slightly uphill from the house. That mattered to me, because I decided to move them. I raked them into piles and then shoveled them into my wheelbarrow and thus moved them to the side of the house where the rain water had made a muddy mess. I laid the stones there and spread them out to form a covering. The next time it rained, the water washed the stones clean and they shone blue-grey. Hmmm. That looked nice.

I did the same thing to the other side of the house where the water came off the roof in the same way. Then, I found pretty rocks, not too big, all over the newly cleared property and brought them in and made a sort of Zen rock garden along the side of the house. Hmmm. I liked that and it kept the soil from making mud everywhere. Hmmm.

The winter snow and ice brought a halt to my explorations of what could and would be done there. In the spring, I continued to play with it, changing this and moving that. Eventually, having saved some money for the purpose, I purchased some pretty river stones from the local excavator and brought in more large rocks. Then I brought in some good garden soil and some plants and mulch. Now I have a really wonderful rock and plant garden there by the side of the house and I did it bit by bit and only as I felt enjoyment in doing it. I played with it and enjoyed the play, which looked like work to some. It stretched my muscles, my creativity and my patience and it was great fun.

As I contemplate the entire project of landscaping this property, I have to keep reminding myself of what I achieved with the work at the sides of the house and, more importantly, how I achieved it. As I did that work, there were some things that I tried that didn't work so well, or were too labour intensive for me to continue. There were times when I had to stop because of the weather or time constraints and it looked pretty awful - unfinished. I accepted it all completely because I was playing with it. I knew that if something didn't work out, I could try something else and it didn't matter, wouldn't matter. I remind myself that it can be a grace, a joy, a playful encounter with this property, rather than a struggle, a job, a hard, long work to get it done. As a gardener, I know that some things take five years to come to fruition so that we can look at them and decide whether we like that outcome or not. Five years! Some things take ten years, twenty years. So, it's not really about the final outcome. It's about trying things out. I knew a man who said that if you hadn't moved a plant at least three times, to different parts of the garden, it was probably in the wrong place. That was a whole different way of looking at the process than thinking, school-girl like, that I had to get it 'right' the first time. 

I remind myself that I can play at just about anything that I do. It is an attitude that can be applied to anything. We do this thing because we choose to do it. We do it with an attitude of open exploration and interest in what happens, but we don't mind what happens. We will respond to what happens. If a big rainstorm washes out my flowerbed (it did), I move the flower bed and replace the washout with rocks that can withstand the force of the water and will glow in pearly grey and slate blue afterward. I enjoy the to and fro of the dialogue that I am having with the rain and the stones, the shape of things and how they are moved by time. And we learn from what happens. We grow. We experience.

Imagine not minding what happens EVER. Imagine being always in that attitude of open acceptance and discovery. Buddhists call that 'beginner's mind," and hold it in high esteem, for it welcomes all that is and all that happens with complete acceptance and interest. "Hmmmm," it says, "Interesting. Let's try this, then."

I took a course in college from a very wise man, a priest with a rebellious and questioning streak in him. His name was Father Menke and the name of the course was, "Man in Pursuit of Playfulness." We studied Greek and Roman myth and various philosophical variations on the theme of man's endeavours to understand the world and open-minded courage in the face of the unknown and the unknowable - which is the next moment, always, and then the next after that. I wondered, though, where playfulness came into it. I wondered why Father Menke chose the word 'playfulness' for the title of this course. I think I know the answer to that question now, 35 years later. Playfulness is a freedom such as we all dream of in our deepest and largest moments of truth. Playfulness is brave, loving, deeply wise and wisely accepting.

It begins with a momentary choice to let go of the fear of getting it 'wrong.' It ends with indescribable joy and freedom.

Play. Play at playing. Play at playing at play. Pretend you already know how.

Tuning Your Frequency

People talk about grounding themselves and centering themselves. I remember a time when these concepts were really new and strange. Now just about everyone seems to have a sense of the value of centering ourselves and grounding our energy. I'm really glad about that because centering and grounding are wonderfully helpful ways to begin to be aware of our frequency state. We say that we feel 'off-center' or 'imbalanced' in our energy. It doesn't feel very good and that is our first clue that our frequency state is not necessarily where we would have it be, in terms of what it is 'tuned to' or where / how it is vibrating.

It's not easy to explain about frequency, but I'm going to try.

The other day, I was full of energy and quite joyful, but restless. There was a waxing moon and that might have had something to do with it. Things around my place have been going really well lately and that might have had something to do with it also. I had slept well and felt 'full of beans' as my mother used to say. Normally I don't pay much attention to drama going on around me. Sometimes there are conflicts and people are upset and I don't even notice because it isn't mine and I'm not interested. My frequency state just doesn't resonate (think of a vibrating guitar string) with the drama and so I barely notice it and pay no attention to it if I do notice it. But the other day, full of restless energy, I noticed a drama on a message board that I frequent online and I dove right into it with glee. It was meeting my frequency vibration very closely, although I wasn't angry or upset as some of the people posting onto the message board seemed to be. I was strongly drawn to that drama on that particular day because it met my frequency.

Most of the time, we are not aware of our frequency unless it begins to impact our ability to do the things that we want to do or feel that we have to do. If I am filled with a calm, expansive energy, a frequency of deep peace and love for all the world, perhaps after a long meditation session, and my husband comes into the house filled with restless energy and an emotion of frustration because he struggled with a faulty machine in his workshop for hours, we don't click at all and my frequency, beloved by me, becomes a problem in terms of my choosing to be fully present and able to 'hear' my husband's complaints and frustrations. My ears will hear regardless, especially if he raises his voice, but I won't be able to meet him where he is if I am in a frequency state so very different from his.

My goal, in tuning my frequency, is not to always be in the same frequency as my husband or the other people around me. Yet, I do choose to be aware of my frequency state and how it resonates with theirs. I'll give you another example. I spend time every weekend with my elderly mother at the assisted living facility where she lives. The time that we spend together is really important to her, and she doesn't respond easily to upsets or changes to our usual routine. Yesterday, I went to see her and as I parked my car and got out of it, I realized that one of my car tires was flat, or nearly so.  I didn't want this occurrence to impact my visit with my mother, but it had to be dealt with. So, I tuned my frequency to trust that all would be well and calm assurance that our visit would be almost exactly as it always is - lunch together and then two games of Scrabble. A couple of phone calls at the beginning of the visit took care of the problem and we were able to have our usual two games, although the visit ended a little bit later than it normally would have.

I could easily have slid into a frequency of nervous worry, lack of trust, anxiety and upset. That is a very different vibration of a very different guitar string than trust that all would be well and calm assurance that my mother's needs would be met. I made the decision consciously and just took a deep breath and tuned my frequency to calm assurance and trust.

We can, and do, adjust our frequency when we are faced with a big problem, a crisis. When a family member is suddenly very ill and we choose to be 'the strong one,' we tune our frequency to calm assurance, trust that all will be well, patience with less assured family members, etc. We do this quite consciously, knowing that it is a helpful energy to bring to the situation. So we center ourselves, reading our own energy and noticing how we are being in our bodies, in the moment, and then we ground our fears and anxieties down into the ground, releasing them as they do not serve us. We breathe deeply to calm our bodies and slow the beating of our hearts, and then we tune our frequency to one of trust and calm, even in the face of fearful situations of uncertainty. Breathing deeply helps us to maintain the frequency that we have chosen for ourselves.

Our frequency state impacts our emotional responses and our emotional responses impact our frequency state. When we consciously and decisively tune our frequency, we impact our emotional responses. When we do not, our emotional responses impact our frequency state. I can get up in the morning and say that I'm going to have a great day, but if things keep happening to upset my equilibrium, delay my plans or thwart my intentions, I may not have such a great day after all. My emotional responses might impact my frequency state so that I end up out of joy, out of peace, in strong resistance to the events of the day, angry because it always seems to happen to me, playing a victim role and deeply resonant to the frequency of resistance and opposition. Unless I can tune my frequency to acceptance and peace with what is, even when it doesn't conform to what I had planned to have it be, I will be upset and out of balance, off-center and in resistance to the world around me. If I can tune my frequency to joy even in the face of these events that have upset me, I will be in appreciation and acceptance, love and gratitude, joy and peace and my emotional responses will change accordingly.

So how do we do it? How do we tune our frequency? I liken it to flicking a light switch or tuning a car radio to a different station. We become conscious of our emotions, reactions, frequency. We choose differently. We center ourselves, ground the energy that needs to be released, without blame or shame, and then flick the switch to a different frequency, one we have known and enjoyed before. We don't have to be, for example, grateful for something specific. We know what gratitude feels like and we tune our frequency to that. We turn that radio dial until our frequency is more to our liking. As I did yesterday with my flat tire and my mother's needs, we tune to patience and trust, or compassion and love, or calm self-assurance.

It is a turning to. It is a conscious choosing of the vibration that we will emit. And yes, it impacts the people and events around us, like any other vibration does. Most of all though, it impacts us, and it does this immediately.

Try it. Try tuning your frequency to gratitude, or patient trust, or appreciation for all that surrounds you. I'm behind in my day's work now, having spent time writing this when I should have been doing five other things. I tune my frequency to trust that it will all work out well. I take a deep breath and get on with my day.

Blessings