Darkening Skies

Oh! I'm delving into images of darkness. I'm doing this only to bring to you an understanding that the darkness is not evil or bad. We do not need to fear it.

All around us, these days, are messages of darkening and disaster. Economic news is filled with fear and uncertainty. Political news is filled with conflicts and conspiracy theories.

I watched yet another video presentation about how dark and conspiratorial the world is. There are a lot of these messages out there, on the internet, which is to say, in our collective consciousness stream. I honestly can't remember the name of it ... oh, the name was something to do with Obama being a deceiver of some kind. Obama the deception.. something like that. So, I watched this whole long video and after I had finished watching it, I decided for myself what I believe, what I know of the world in which I live. And I think that we all have to do this, almost daily now, surrounded as we are by all of these messages of darkening, disaster, conspiracy, etc. We all have to decide what we believe, what we know, what we choose to focus on, what is important to us, what matters.

And what I decided as I sat in my living room after watching this film was that what I know is that there are 7 billion people on this planet and that 99% of those 7 billion people are filled with love as much as they are filled with anything else. Everywhere, people are kind, generous of spirit, helpful, loving and creative, not all the time, but often. Everywhere, people are coming up with interesting and positive changes and ideas about how to live and be in the world. And that matters to me. That is what I choose to focus on.

The news media don't make much money these days by telling us how great we are, how amazing the human race is, how evolving, moving, changing, becoming. The film-makers don't get much of a rush from dwelling on the slow, but sure, unfolding of love and kindness in this dawning of a new age. They get much more zing for their mediated messages of disaster and fear.

So keep that in mind as you surf the waves of human consciousness on the world wide web. Remember to be discerning and to consciously choose your own reality. You do this everytime you focus on one thing instead of focusing on something else. Since your focus and attention, intention and conscious choices make the world you live in, determine your reality, create your situation and surroundings, both energetically and materially, you might want to be as conscious about these as possible. Focus, attention, intention and choices.

Darkening skies bring winds and rains to sculpt and move and grow the new from the detritus of the old.

I'm focusing on the beginnings inherent in all of our endings.

Debt Crisis

I've never thought that spending money that wasn't mine was a good idea. I've never been comfortable with debt. I'm one of those people who carefully budget and save my money until I have enough to spend on the project that I'm choosing. For example, as I landscape around my new home, I am saving money each month through the winter so that in the springtime, I will have money to spend on plants and other supplies for my garden.

I live simply and I live within my means.

I love everything, so I never feel 'poor' because I am surrounded by a wealth of being, of beauty, of all that is in abundance. I can't adequately express the depth of my joy at simply being, not having... being.

Having said this, I just this morning read an article about Estonia. Facing a financial crisis in 2008-2009, they implemented an austerity budget on themselves. It wasn't easy for them, but they are coming out of those years with very little public debt and signs of growth in their economy. As a nation, as a society, they believe that you shouldn't spend money that you don't have. If you can't afford something, you should do without it, or save your money until you can afford it. If your income is low, you should look for ways to increase it. They are not 'in crisis' and they are not 'in the news' because they didn't get themselves into a huge hole of debt from which they were then unable to extricate themselves.

The Goldman Sachs of this world come across, for me, like loan-sharks with metaphoric baseball bats, threatening to break the legs of those who can't repay the loans that never should have been made. But it takes two to create a loan, lender and borrower. Shakespeare said it, "Neither a lender nor a borrower be." Good advice, in retrospect.

With no debt, I am free. My husband and I counsel others on how to reduce their debt so that they too can be free.

So, my view of the debt crisis is that it is a great opportunity for people to come to deeply understand what being in debt means for them. If we demonize the 'bankers,' we fail to take responsiblity for our own well-being. We blame it all on those evil and greedy ones. We are responsible for our own well-being. It is not bankers or politicians who are responsible for my well-being, my health and my happiness. I am responsible for these things.

And when we demonize and blame the very wealthy, we also lose a great opportunity to practice unconditional love and to bring ourselves to accept even those Goldman Sachs executives and others who appear to oppress and rob us.

Let us breathe deeply and see the divine in all things.

Let us choose freedom and move forward in the knowledge that it is we who provide it for ourselves.

It's Very Simple

You don't need to resist, oppose or stand against anything. You only need to choose sovereignty for yourself.

You don't need to hate war, you only need to love peace.

Whatever you resist right now, you will see more of. So instead of resisting what you do not want to see in your world, try tuning your own frequency to what you do want to see.

Joy.

Love.

Acceptance and open-minded tolerance of all for all.

Happiness in the moment.

Playfulness.

Music.

Harmony.

Co-operation.

Co-creation.

Be what you would like the world to be.


Here is a view from my front door.

Blessings!

Lu

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.