Is there anybody out there?

In the dark of the year

2008-11-12T17:16:00.004-08:00

I endeavour to conduct my professional life in a way that’s in keeping with my values of respecting the time, energy and intelligence of my clients as well as a belief that what we practice in the world will return to us threefold. This is called the ‘law of threefold return’.

Experience tells me that word of mouth is the best form of publicity for the sorts of services I offer. If my clients value the service I provide, they talk about it to their friends, family and colleagues. I have always believed that the best form of promotion is the recommendation of a person who has had first-hand experience - especially when it comes to something as personal as counseling and coaching and readings.

No junk-mail from me!
What this means to you is that I deliberately avoid bombarding you with advertising and promotions, reserving gently informative emails for the rare occasions when I have a special offer. Instead, I try to remain true to the same spirit of service that drives my practice, by posting my blog and hoping that the subjects I write about will be of use to my clientele, past, present and future. Further, I hope that the blog will keep you thinking about your emotional and spiritual health, and of course that you will think of me when and if you decide that you would like some professional support.

It’s getting darker out there
Which leads me to the ‘dark of the year’ which is already upon us. This is the time of year when we become more ‘inner’, and paradoxically, when we are often the most busy in our whirlwind outer lives. In honour of your ‘inner self’, I encourage you to plan some time during the dark of the year to slow down and shine some light on the places in your soul that need a little gentle attention, or even a major clear-out.

A better world is on the horizon
I am feeling encouraged by the outcome of the US presidential election because I think that it represents a freedom cry that will rally those of us who are weary of our current dysfunctional global systems and give us hope that we can actually change things for the better. There are those who say that this present time is similar to the 60’s with Martin Luther King and the huge levels of social change afoot at that time, but I believe that we have come even further than that, and that we are within sight of the land of which he dreamed. Not that we’re there yet, but we have it within our scope!

To get to our long-dreamed-of place of equality, peace and prosperity for all, we are each going to have to reach deep within our souls, encourage our best selves to come out, and make our own unique contributions. Now is not the time for the sort of cynicism that protects us from disappointment, no matter how many times we’ve had our hopes dashed in the past. We’re in the final lap of the race and we need to harness what’s left of our courage and pull out all the stops.

I believe that every single one of us makes a difference and that the time to make that difference is NOW. There’s a wonderful book by Dr. Seuss, his last one, called Oh, the Places You’ll Go!, given to me by a very dear friend many years ago. I find it a constant source of inspiration. It talks about the courage it takes to walk into the unknown. It says the following about being scared to go on:

But on you will go
though the weather be foul.
On you will go
though your enemies prowl.
On you will go
though the Hakken-Kraks howl.
Onward up many
a frightening creek,
though your arms may get sore
and your sneakers may leak.

At the end of the book, he asks if we will succeed and his answer is:

Yes! You will indeed!
(98 and 3/4 percent guaranteed.)
KID YOU’LL MOVE MOUNTAINS!

Take the plunge!
What mountain do you need to move? Or do you have a dear friend, or colleague who is struggling with mountain ‘removal’? I will shamelessly promote myself here as a great person to help with mountains - when you get to the point of wanting to identify yours, or if you’re actually ready to roll up your sleeves and get to work - I’m your woman! So today I’d like to leave you with that thought... Make a plan, take a step, commit yourself. We can move mountains, but it takes personal courage. We can do it!

Information/energy and change

2008-09-22T00:39:00.005-07:00

Channeled Message Number 8

Lucca: Are you coming through from a different level than the other messages I’ve posted on my blog?

Channeled Message: Yes, indeed. We are of a ‘higher’ level than you spoke through last time. We are of a different ‘department’ and a slightly ‘higher level’, although that does not translate as ‘more important’ as it would on Earth. ‘Here’, as you refer to it, we are non-temporal and non-spacial. When you make a request and have a certain intent, one that matches with what we are able to provide for you, we are ‘connected’ and can ‘elucidate’ for you as you require.

Dear Ones:

... Imagine a reservoir that holds the waters collected from the many streams of your higher geographic regions. You have dams that hold back the water and let it through as it is needed. The need is partly driven by the water available from natural sources and partly by the needs of the communities served by the reservoir.

This analogy suits our purposes for this message. All of you form the ‘community’ that is ‘served’ by the ‘water’ supply. The ‘water’ is the energy/information that 'serves' to elucidate all of you as you struggle to make sense of the developing events in your world. Energy and information are the same thing to us. Energy is a vibration that moves the cells in your individual and collective energy fields so that you can ‘remember’ what you came into this particular incarnation to learn and create.

As you have a greater desire to understand, your personal vibration contains your intention and we pick it up. This is instantaneous and happens constantly in your day-to-day lives. Some of you have agreed to come to Earth to aid in the transmission of this information/energy and it is you who open the sluices on the ‘dam’ and allow the information/energy to pass out of the reservoir and into the river. Each individual also has the ability to receive the information directly but many of you do not believe you can.

As information/energy, the metaphorical ‘water’ passes into the river and heads downstream, where it eventually comes through the pipes and taps into your individual consciousnesses. Each individual’s ‘tap’ is different and so you will each receive and process the information/energy in the way that works best for you. For some of you this will be in the form of dreams, daydreams, or inspiration. For others, you will read it on the Internet, in a book, magazine or journal, or even watch it or listen to it. Still others will hear it directly from another person who receives it in one of these ways. No way is better than any other.

The information/energy will affect your life according to what you need and every person has different needs according to their agreement as a soul. No matter who you are, you have a purpose. Some of you have yet to become consciously aware of what your purpose is. For instance, some of you are teachers, others are healers, some are communicators/messengers, and some are artists, etc.

Differences & similarities
In your Earth world, many of you are conditioned to be comparative, competitive and critical. Although these qualities can have their uses, in Earth's current, rapidly changing circumstances, these qualities can hinder your ability to value your own processes and needs, and focus instead on how you compare to others.

We say to you that no individual is ‘better’ or more ‘valuable’ than any other. Not even great leaders. No way of drinking ‘water’ is better than any other and no purpose is ‘higher’. You are all different and designed to be so. Your collective strength is in your infinite number of differences as well as your infinite number of similarities. These weave the fabric of human existence and you are often blinded to one, at the expense of the other.

Change
As you read this, Earth is engaged in a process of transition from one vibrational level to another. It has reached a point where you can now see the changes more clearly than you have been able to in the past but you have been moving in this direction for a long time. The way in which you experience of this vibrational change depends on why you are here. If your life purpose is to participate in the change, you will go with it. If you are here to experience resisting the change, that is what you will be drawn to do. Neither is better - just different.

The majority of the souls on the planet have come for this experience of the shift. But - and this is important to understand - ‘reality’ can encompass both outcomes; change to a ‘higher’ level of vibration and a continuation on the same level. There will be a migration of souls depending on their choice. Some of you will go to the station and take the train and others of you will see it off.

That is a question for which you are all creating a collective answer. You are experimenting with unity and duality. They can dance together or there can be conflict as one is the focus at the expense of an understanding of the place and value of the other.

Unity & duality
You can understand duality and unity as being within your self, your community, the planet and the Universe. You call these playing fields the microcosm and the macrocosm. You are an individual and a member of the global community at the same time. You think and you contribute to the global body of knowledge at the same time. You are both a drop of water and a part of the ocean.

These analogies might seem vague and frustrating to some of you and yet they are the best way for us to pass on information/energy. You will each interpret in your own way and thus find in the analogies what you need. Each of you will respond to the vibration of this message and use it in the way that best suits your purpose. Seeming synchronicities in your life can be the very best ways for you to discover your own truth, and your unique creativity is a way for you to make use of it by integrating it into your life.

There will be more on this subject but this is enough for one message.
Greetings and peace

It’s time for change

2008-09-01T18:34:00.004-07:00

I hope you’ll excuse my not channeling this week, and the length of today’s blog. I was really inspired by the political happenings in the US this week and it seems to me that there is a spirit of hope suffusing the continent.

I was watching parts of the US Democratic National Convention on television this past week and not because I have ever considered myself an especially political animal. I had the sense that I was watching an event of historical importance. The last time I had this feeling was when I stayed up very late to watch a man walk on the moon.

Hope springs
To me, what’s happening in the US isn’t about Democrats or Republicans; rather, it is about the end of the old and the beginning of the new. When Obama first showed up on the political radar of the US, I was dubious about his ability to overcome the corrupt political machinery that is politics today - in every country. I had been feeling overwhelmed with hopelessness.

Alienation
The husband of a friend of mine is a German politician. Four years ago I was visiting them in Germany and he and I were left at the dinner table one evening while the rest of the family cleared up the kitchen. I found myself telling him that I had had very little to do with politics in my adult life, and that it wasn’t because I didn’t care or that I was lazy, but because I felt betrayed, alienated by the system and hopeless.

The political system doesn’t feel transparent to me. There seems to be massive levels of corruption and arrogance, and little that goes on after the election promises have been made seems to bare much resemblance to what the people around me care about. He looked at me. I think he heard me but he didn’t say anything. I don’t know if what I said made an impression on him. But it might have. He was, in my world, the first politician I had ever been able to talk to, face-to-face.

Someone might be listening ...finally
Judging by what Obama said in his speech in acceptance of the Democratic party’s nomination, he and his party are listening. I think that’s why he’s getting so much support, even from traditional Republicans and Independents. I don’t think we’re all being snowed yet again - I fervently hope not!

Maybe this is when critical mass becomes so important. It takes the final straw to get enough public feeling - and it was feeling that I saw being expressed in that huge stadium in Denver - to counteract the arrogance of the power brokers in the existing American electoral system. Paying lipservice to what people want and then going your own sweet way once you get into office, and blatantly rigging ballot-counting, and lying to the whole world in order to go to war, and taking away citizens' guaranteed rights and freedoms, can only last until enough people wake up and say, “Hey, wait a minute. You’re not listening to us and you’re supposed to be representing us”.

I met a local Whitehorse politician and his family at a social gathering when I was up there in May and I had the feeling that he was and is listening. I hadn’t expected it and was encouraged to believe that maybe something is changing in modern politics. I felt, in my heart, that he has a sense of integrity.

Re-empowerment
We’re only impotent as long as we believe we are. Once we take our power back and realise that the people who vote outnumber the people who pay for candidates’ campaigns, we might exercise our power by using it. I say ‘we’ very deliberately because, although I am not an American, I am under no illusion that their economic system doesn’t run ours and those of the rest of the world. I believe that we are all watching the Americans turn their system around and will be empowered by it - enough to demand the same at home.

Dominoes
I am optimistic enough to believe that political change can come. There are mutterings about a Canadian federal election this fall and it seems to me that Harper, our current Prime Minister for those of you readers who are not Canadian, has been sleeping very close to Bush’s cronies; something that I find very worrying indeed. I’m not impressed by the current opposition either.

Obama, who seems to be a different kind of political animal, appeared to come out of the woodwork, so-to-speak. He was there in the Senate, but not an obvious candidate for president. I hope the same is possible in Canada. Maybe we don’t necessarily need a leader with a lot of political experience, as long as the person is smart enough to surround herself or himself with quality advice and information and has the ability to make tough decisions, defend them and follow them through. We need leadership and communication instead of familiarity with toeing the line of the power brokers in our nation’s capital.

Hard work and sacrifice
I heard Obama say in his speech that every citizen was going to have to participate and that the changes weren’t going to be easy, for him or the public. I think people balk at making sacrifices when they don’t trust their leaders; when it looks like the leaders aren’t sacrificing at least as much as they are. That’s when they feel cheated, duped.

Personally, I’m not looking for the easy route. I’m looking for the route that makes sense in the long run. I’m just tired of flip-flopping governments, and parties, blaming the other party every time someone proposes a course of action that means we might have to make some sacrifices in the short term for some pay-offs in the long term. I don’t want empty rhetoric; I want sanity.

Democracy ... endings and beginnings
I believe this US election is the beginning of the fall of the old empire, which will mean the beginning of a new era of involvement and responsibility. Enough of us will model the behaviour required to make it work, encouraging others to believe that it’s possible to have real representation in governance.

I think that the principles behind democracy are sound even though they have never been fairly applied. Our economic and sociological power structures have got in the way. Maybe the Greeks and Romans weren’t enlightened enough to be more inclusive but we have no excuse. We have the past to teach us what happens when we don’t look after all of our society equally.

We’ve had inequality when land ownership was a criterion, and sex, and race, and language, and still money. It’s time to sort out the unfair influence and corruption of Money-as-God, and get on with applying the original principles of participative democracy.

Teaching involvement and responsibility
In my opinion, our kids need to see citizenship at work in their everyday lives, in all its complexity. I’m clear that for most of us, our political education hasn’t been thorough enough, at home or in school. Our society can teach and model citizenship and prepare kids to be active citizens. Young adults should be outraged at any infringement on their rights and privileges as citizens. They should expect to be consulted and to vote. Voting should be a rite of passage; more so than learning to drive. It’s as important as physical exercise and good eating habits. The welfare of our country, and indeed the world, depends on it. They don’t all have to become politicians but they need to learn how to be informed on the issues that affect their lives, and know how to hold their political representatives accountable for their promises and decisions. Politics isn’t about any outside ‘them’; it’s about ‘us’.

I hope this election has the makings of a peaceful revolution.

Love is all there is

2008-08-23T17:55:00.003-07:00

Channeled Message Number 7

Dear Ones:

When you seek the divine and your connection with the divine, you are seeking to participate in the love that makes up the fabric of the Universe. At present, many people on Earth are experimenting with meditation for the first time, or are returning to it after a time away. Many of you want to know what to look for that will tell you when it’s ‘working’, or how you will know that you have been successful.

Let us explain to you that there is not just one ‘right’ way to meditate. Meditation is a practice which allows you to shift your focus from the hubbub of your everyday life to the inner quiet that is the centre of your being. This is a place where you ‘just are’, a place of ‘allowing’. When you connect with this place, you come into contact with the part of yourself which has no beginning or end, that has no sense of time at all. It is in perfect balance. It does not need, desire or promote. It allows you to attend to your ‘being-ness’.

All of your spiritual belief systems have words for this, including suggested practices, histories and wisdom, accumulated over time and designed to help believers to connect to themselves and to the abundant love that makes up the Universe. Keep in mind that these are aids and not prescriptions. Use them if they help but don’t feel that you are meditating incorrectly if your way is different.

You will know you are doing what you need to when the state you reach helps you to feel loved and loving. If quieting your worldly inner chatter is difficult, as it often is in your busy world, you can try giving the love that you would like to feel. Participate.

Many of you can reach a state similar to that of ‘meditation’ when you do things that make you happy and use your talents. This could be playing an instrument, being in nature as you are when taking a walk or gardening. It might be dancing, painting, flying or even cooking. If this is done in a group, you might experience the delight of being in harmony with others - or you might be alone. It doesn’t have to be a life-altering feat, but this state of equilibrium will alter your life.

Having said that you can be doing something, we caution here that it is not necessary for you to do anything. When you pass a person on the street, or sit beside them on the bus, someone who catches your attention, for whatever reason, send that person a loving thought. Appreciate them as fellow beings in the Universe. Know that they too have their part to play and that they play it to the best of their ability at any given time, just as you do.

When your heart and mind are full of loving thoughts, peace and appreciation, there is little if any room left over for fear. Fear is what causes constriction of your energy flow, hoarding of resources, suspicion of motives and the collapse of economies. It makes you want to run faster, do more, have more and share less. It makes you nervous, irritable and out of sorts, and more likely to look for solutions outside of yourself. In this fearful state, you tend to forget that you have your own answers to your own questions and that you don’t need to give your power away or make deals to get what you need - which is love.

You could call ‘loving’ a state of grace, which is essentially what you enter when you’re meditating. No matter whether you’re in a taxi cab or a Buddhist temple, when you’re in a state of grace, you’ll find it easier to make sense of life, love yourself and everyone else, and have enough time and resources to do what needs to be done.

Peace

Here's a link to a weekly photo by Neil Wakeling in Scotland. I just love his photos and he always has an inspiring quote to go with the picture.

Tuning into the transition process

2008-08-11T16:00:00.003-07:00

Channeled Message Number 6

Dear Ones:

We ask you to remember that you are not alone. The sun comes up on your day and you release those of us who have been with you in the night. This has always been so, but lately it is even more so, as we come closer to the time of recognition. You may ask, ‘recognition of what?’. Recognition of who you are, each and every one of you, and therefore recognition of who everyone else is in your world; each in their own splendor and in their own right. From where we sit, in the world of energy that is beyond most of your ‘normal vision’, we see you each as the most effervescent, joyful and uniquely talented beings. You/we were all made that way. The difference between us and you is that we have awareness of this and you are just coming to this awareness now.

The shift
These are changing times for you and you can feel it. Messages are being sent to mediums and those of you who are open to the knowledge, in order that you may pass it along to everyone you know who needs it. We who have committed to helping you, sit on the other side of an energy shift. We say it is a shift because once you know it is there, and have the ability to see from our perspective, it doesn’t exist for you any longer. It is a shift in perspective.

What is physically happening is that you are increasing your level of vibration. Many of you on the Earth plane have been able to do this temporarily, for instance during meditation, but you are now moving your awareness and energy to a level where you can live in it instead of just visiting. If you are not one of the 'helpers, then you are in the process of being helped. In which case, it is equally important for you to know what is happening.

How it feels
The reason we are telling you this today, through Lucca, is that you will be feeling the effects of the energy shift and many of you will not know what it is, or if you do, you won’t know what to do with it when it becomes uncomfortable. Lack of knowledge often results in fear and we wish you to be as free of fear as we can help you to be.

As she writes this, Lucca is feeling some of what we describe. This is in order that she will understand it herself. She does not usually feel the discomfort because she spends part of her time (for ‘time’, you may read ‘attention’, as it is not really time as you understand the term) in our realm and part in yours. She is one of the many beings on the earth at this time who are helping you to make the transition as gracefully as possible.

Not the first time
She, and many of you who are reading this, have already made a transition such as this in Earth’s history. We could have said ‘unrecorded history’, for you won’t have found records of the transition that you would recognize as such, but the events were indeed recorded. The records are in a form that you do not yet know how to access in the ways of which you are aware at this time. In the case of those of you who have already experienced what we describe, you are here to both help and experience, this raising of consciousness (energy levels), on a mass scale. The hope, which is virtually a certainty at this point, is that planet Earth will be able to participate in what is variously called the ‘Inter-Galactic Federation’, as a full member.

For example
Imagine, if you will, that you have decided you would like to join an organization to which you have not belonged before. You have heard about it and have decided that this is a group that may share your values and aspirations. Just to be sure, you reach out to the group and ask if you can attend a meeting or two. The group considers your request and invites you to attend as a guest, showing you around and answering your questions; helping you to experience anything that will help you to make your choice more easily.

Because this group operates in another dimension (energy level), you can only visit with their assistance. You will also need the group’s assistance to remember your experience, once you return to your normal world. Your memories cross the divide in the form of dreams, inspiration, art, and intuition.

If your visit confirms your original desire to join, you will again approach the group and ask if you may begin the process of becoming a member. This is a group which is open to all, but you will not immediately be ready to participate fully. You must learn the history, operating paradigms and philosophies. This is similar in your terms to becoming a citizen in a new country. In short, we have to teach you how to be here.

It is not a matter of ‘sneaking across the border’ because you literally cannot survive in our ‘energy field’ unaided, if you do not know how to vibrate at our rate. Each being vibrates according to what they do, how they see, how they think and how open they are to love, faith and trust. Anything that does not vibrate fast enough (high enough) will fall out of synch and snap back into the old level. There is no expulsion process; there is just ‘the fall’. If you choose, you can try again.

On our side, we wish your whole planet to be able to make this move permanently. This means eradicating fear. Fear does not exist as a state of being for us. But that topic is for another message!

Adapting to the Earth
For those of you who operate in our world as well as yours, you have had to adapt to living on planet Earth, some of you have worked at this over many lifetimes. You had to become an Earth citizen and make the appropriate adjustments to Earth’s existing energy levels. You will often have felt that you didn’t/don’t really belong, or that there is something just beyond your grasp. You may have dreams that don’t make sense when you awake. You may have a clear knowing that there is a way of living that is peaceful and full of grace, where conflicts are resolved without violence and where love, health and sharing are the norm. This is because you already know these ways of being.

Symptoms
If you have felt any of the following :

frustration at being ‘stuck’ at a level that feels overly simplistic;
as though you are feeling emotions that aren’t yours but you don’t know where they originate;
that ‘something’ is just around the corner but you don’t know what it might be or how to prepare for it;
disbelief and sadness at the levels of deception and manipulation that are coming to light on the world stage;
a growing awareness of the numbers of physical ailments that seem to be systemic rather than specific, and for which the medical profession has no ready answer;
discomfort in the work/profession you have chosen but not knowing what to do instead;
at a loss as to what to do with children’s expectations of the world in which they live - suspecting that they may inherently know something you don't ...

... then you are already tuning in to and experiencing the transition process between your current dimension and the one that is opening to you. To return to the analogy of joining a new organization, when you have been oriented and helped to prepare to make the transition, you will be given the choice about whether you still want to join. Joining means committing to our creed and agreeing to live within it and participate in our governance, for in the Inter-Galactic Federation, everyone is lovingly held responsible for their choices and their actions.

Loving guidance
Please know that the planet Earth is being lovingly and firmly guided through the transition process between the three-dimensional world in which you now live, and being a newly initiated member of the next dimension - a fledgling member - and that you will be given all the necessary assistance in order to become a successful and flourishing member of the Federation. The time is near.

Peace

Focus on what you want

2008-07-29T01:03:00.004-07:00

Channeled Message Number 5

Dear Ones:

Humanity is beginning to manifest what it focuses its attention on. The vibration of the earth is increasing which means that everything is happening faster. Add to this the increases in your personal vibration level, which is the result of your individual learning, and you have an increased ability to manifest.

Your responsibility is to make sure you are clear about what you want and that you try to stay positive. Fear about present situations, or about future undesired scenarios, will focus your energy on what you DON’T want instead of what you DO want. Now is the time to trust your inner knowing. Don't worry about whether what it says is realistic or reasonable.

Are you not sure which of the thoughts or messages whirling around inside your head are helpful to you? Here are a few pointers ...

Your inner knowing, or intuition, or gut feel, or Higher Self, speaks to you in positive language. It doesn’t threaten. It doesn’t give dire warnings. It doesn’t give you ‘tests’. It isn’t cruel or impatient. On the contrary; your inner knowing is kind but firm. It is patient, although it can be abrupt at times. It is supportive and loving. Although it may produce thoughts, inner knowing doesn’t originate in the head but in the heart.

You might ask whether you can talk to this inner knowing. Indeed you can. Every thought you have is received and responded to, but the more conscious you are of this thinking/desiring process, and the clearer you can be about your requests, the more positive will be your experience of your life. Your requests for information, or for help, will be answered in the best way for you, and at the best time, and this may not fit with your conscious schedule of wanting it right now.

Therefore, ask for what you want, and then move on with your day. Trust that all is well and will be well, and remain curious and alert. You will get what you need at exactly the right time. Be ready for it when it comes and don’t send something away before you consider whether what you’re rejecting might be what you asked for, but in an unexpected package or from an unexpected source.

Peace

Re-choose each day

2008-07-21T00:33:00.002-07:00

Channeled Message Number 4

Dear Ones:

Humanity is feeling overwhelmed at this point in what you collectively refer to as ‘time’. We remind you:

As you think, so are you.

Your fears are very much to do with time. You fear what will happen to you in your ‘future’, if you do not do/say/take care of certain things in your ‘present’. Let us explain to you that there is no ‘past/present/future’; there is only ‘now’. If you ‘choose’ to be afraid now, then that is what you create for your past/present/future. You must ask yourselves if what you are doing/saying/being right now is what you would like to create in your life, no matter what the time reference.

If you don’t like the way your life is today, then change your behaviour right now - not tomorrow, or this evening. Put down the chocolate or the cigarette or the beer. Move your body by taking a walk, even if it is only around the house or the block. Do something that is what you do want. This is more powerful than any resolutions you may make about what you will do tomorrow or next week.

Procrastination is a way of missing your life. You have power right now. If you are afraid, then do something that gives you concrete proof that you are not your fear. Change your experience, even if what you do is small. Act as though each day is a lifetime. When you arise each morning, you are new, and when you retire you are passing into the space between experiences, where you can recharge your energy and gain a fresh perspective, so that you can arise again, new, the next day. You have a film called Groundhog Day that deals with this very theme.

Many people say at the end of their lives, “If I only knew when I was young what I know now, I would make different choices.” Consider that each day you know something that you didn’t know the day before. Thus you have the opportunity to re-choose each day and make yourself again. No matter if your changes to your life are big or small, everything matters. You can enjoy the you that you create each day.

What reality would you like to create for yourself today?

Peace

Consider that you are a pearl

2008-07-07T00:38:00.003-07:00

Channeled Message Number 3

Consider that you are a pearl - perfect in every way, even if you are not an orb without blemish. Everyone is perfect, even in their imperfection. You do not look at a gnarled tree and see it as less than perfect and so should you not look at yourselves and see anything less than the miraculous pearls that you are.

Does this mean that you should cease to ‘improve’? Indeed not. But look at it as experimenting with your reality instead of correcting what is ‘wrong’. Considering yourselves as flawed and in need of correction sets you up with negative energy. You will tend to punish yourselves if you do not ‘succeed’ or give up hope if you don’t accomplish what you had anticipated. You are beginning to understand that ‘stern taskmasters’ do not get the desired lasting results.

Instead you can look to your guides, in body and out-of-body, for nurturing, love and the compassionate holding of the boundaries of your experience. If not for a boundary between what is and what you can become, you would not recognize change. The best teacher doesn’t beat you if you experiment. Instead the teacher shows you what happened this time and offers alternatives that could produce different outcomes. The choice is always yours.

It is our intent to empower you to fully explore your own potential, with the proviso that it is NOT NECESSARY. You are still a pearl, even if you don’t ‘do’ anything. It is our observation though, that on a soul level, even ‘doing nothing’ is actually 'doing something’. A passive choice is still a choice and must be honoured as such.

It is the nature of the soul to experience itself in relation to itself and others. This is the unique opportunity of duality. Do you go to a fair and not experience the atmosphere or the rides? If you so, why go at all? If you were to block it out and ‘do nothing’ while you are there, that is in itself an interesting choice!

In conclusion, please regard yourselves with lively curiosity instead of stern expectation and disappointment. The more you can do this, the closer you will come to seeing yourselves with the compassion and delight with which we see you.

Peace

Beginning your day

2008-06-29T19:57:00.003-07:00

It seems that there is another channeled message for us today. I am always grateful when one is available and send my thanks out to all of you who are drawing this information to you and allowing me to be the conduit, especially since I benefit from it as much as you do! Here is message No.2 ...

Setting your day in motion

How you start your day is similar to the way in which a book starts. The author has to set the scene and get you interested. If this isn't done well, then you can't follow the story or you just put the book down. Today is as every other day in that you always choose how you will begin and how you will interpret what you see and experience, before you return to sleep again.

Take a few moments when you start your day to calm your mind and ground yourself. Stretch and drink water. Feed yourself or look after creating healthy food for when you will eat it later on. Are you left with any feelings or images from your dreams of the previous night? If so, imagine them into your day, especially if you have requested help with anything, or if you have prayed before retiring the night before.

Many of you will be tempted to jump out of bed and run into the day. This leaves part of your 'self' behind instead of ensuring that all of who you are is fully present. There are disciplines in the world that refer to this as mindfulness. Bring your attention to what you want to be and create and learn in the day ahead, and set your intention for how you would like this to come about. This will also help you if you are dreading your day and therefore procrastinating getting out of bed.

Try to imagine that you can’t run out of time as you know it. Tell yourself that you will have the time to accomplish everything that needs to be done in the day. (needs to be done!) Many of you will try to accomplish things that don’t need to be done - things that do not support your higher purpose.

The Universe tries to help you to edit out what is not necessary for your soul's growth. Know that you will always find the time for what you want most. It is what you will attract. Be ready for us to help you by providing the opportunities you seek during your day, and then take advantage of them with a smile in your heart.

Peace

Channeled message - Dark Corners

2008-06-23T01:59:00.004-07:00

There are times when I write from what I’ve been thinking about during the week, or what has been going on in my life, or the lives of people with whom I’ve come into contact. There are other times when I sit at my keyboard and write what is channeled to me. Today is one of the times for channeling.

The information I channel comes from a group of entities. More than 20 years ago, I asked them who ‘they’ were. They explained that they speak in one voice; this being the ‘I’, or ‘we’ that they use in their messages. They refer to themselves as entities whose collective intention is to help me, and us, with our spiritual development along the paths we have chosen as individual souls and as a human collective on earth. Depending on the subject matter and the intended audience, the individual entities who comprise the group will change - as will the number of entities.

Here is their channeled message, for the first time here on my blog...

It is Time to Look in the Dark Corners

It’s time for all of you on this ‘little blue planet’ to have a good, long look in the dark corners of your psyches, and thoroughly examine what you find there. You all have these corners. Some of you have made forays into this shadowy world already and have had a stab at dealing with what is there. Others of you are aware of its existence through your peripheral vision only. You knew you would need to look one day but you hoped you could get away with ignoring it for a little while longer. And finally there are those of you who would like to think this corner isn’t there at all. I suspect those people are not likely to be reading this blog!

We assure you that the support you need to deal with what you find in these dark corners is always available at exactly the right moment. You might find that it doesn’t come from where you expected, but that should not be a deterrent. Be open to accepting help from wherever you find it. It will ‘feel right’ and that is all you need to know. Fear is the only enemy to your healing and you need not be afraid if you can trust that you have all the help you will need.

As you look at the world around you, you will be aware of many chaotic and challenging situations facing everyone; for individuals and for large and small groups, including nations. This is because a metaphorical ‘jack hammer’ is being applied to the fabric of your social, economic, physical(including geological) and energetic systems. In order to walk forward into a more sustainable, peaceful system, you will have to set yourselves free from the old one. This is easier if the old systems have been loosened up so that you're not trying to break free with a solid piece of concrete sitting on top of your life.

You have been seeing your lives through the lenses of specific belief systems. Many of these are so accepted that you don’t even know you hold them - they have become invisible. It is time for you to test these beliefs and see if they still apply. You believe in what you see as the rules of life and you use them to negotiate your way along your paths; indeed this is a system that has worked for the duration of your recorded history.

Your cultural upbringing has taught you some of these rules, For example, you believe that a certain set of behaviours will garner a particular set of consequences - sometimes so much so that you haven’t personally tested them. And you have extrapolated other rules from your personal experience. A simple example of this might be that you believe that if you challenge your partner, he/she will leave you, or you might see yourself as a cruel and unsupportive person.

Looking into the dark corners of your psyche will require that you be brave enough to review the rules of the fabric of your life. You’re going to have to say to yourselves, “This isn’t working. I don’t like this outcome. So maybe I can reassess why I’ve been seeing my life the way I have, or doing things the way I have.”
Let us say clearly that for the moment you can allow yourselves not to have to do anything. Just look. Be on the look-out for tools that can help you - books, films, support groups, overheard conversations, interviews, blogs, formal and informal studies, and even novels. We want to emphasize that you do not have to feel you are risking life and limb. Take small steps - but take them just the same!

The group of entities that represents the ‘we’ of our message to you is comprised of all the guides and highest-level over-souls for every one of you who will read this blog. Rest assured that you are being seen and spoken to directly. Time and space are not what you believe them to be and energy always attracts like energy. As Lucca has been fond of saying for years, there is no such thing as coincidence.

Peace

This week - ladies who search

2008-06-16T00:59:00.003-07:00

For about seven years, I have been doing mini-readings for a delightful group of women here in Vancouver. Some of you have been to these sessions but for the benefit of those of you who have not, this week I thought I'd tell you a little about how it works.

Short readings let you try it out
In this particular case, my longest running group of this kind, one of the women hosts the evening and her friends come along for the socializing, hors d'oeuvres or take-out food, as well as to have a mini-reading done. In this case, I work in another room and the ladies come in to see me one at a time. We do 20-30 minute sessions, depending on how many are attending. There is a limit to how long my voice holds out so I can usually only do a maximum of 9 20-minute readings in an evening.

Group synergy
In other cases, I have done each person in the group with everyone else present in a circle. The disadvantage to this whole-group approach is the lack of privacy but the advantage is that the whole group gets the benefit of the wisdom imparted to the others in the group, as well as what is directed to each person specifically. When I do the whole group together like this, I find that there is a group synergy, and often a theme that is particularly helpful to everyone. No one is alone with their joys, sorrows or challenges and group members tend to be supportive of one another, even if they have never met before.

In a group setting, how 'public' does it have to be?
Some participants are concerned that sensitive information could be revealed in front of the rest of the group and they may feel this isn't appropriate. I've noticed that the phrasing of this sort of information tends to be such that only the person who is meant to understand will know what I mean. If the person chooses to share it with the rest of the group afterwards, they can, but they don't have to reveal anything if they don't feel comfortable. Participants are amazed at how much other people's messages mean to them.

Not sure you want to try it?
Sometimes there are new members at these group sessions and they aren't sure about whether they want to have a reading. When I do individual readings in another room, newcomers have until the end of the evening to decide. Some like being able to hear the people who go before them as they relate their experience and reactions. If they like what they hear, they may opt in. If they don't, there's no pressure. It has also happened that some folks come for the socializing and don't want a reading at all. That has always been fine with me. It has been my experience that some people will come back several times before they feel the urge to have a reading themselves, or they may never. It has to be the right place and the right time.

Seeing a group picture
Group sessions can be particularly interesting and useful when I do them with people who are part of a team or organization. I can often see patterns in the behaviour of the group that have not been articulated before. Bringing these to the attention of the group can do amazing things to validate the efforts of the individual group members and to resolve blocks or issues within the group that may have been preventing them from performing optimally.

For example...
I did such a reading for a working team in a municipal office in Sweden. One team member was seen as the nay-sayer in the group. He was described as raining on everyone's parade. In his eyes, he was the voice of caution and the only one who was willing to point out the pitfalls of projects that could sometimes seem overly optimistic. By the end of the reading, the group felt able to express their frustration with what they saw as unnecessary negativity and he, in turn, was able to express how thankless and alienating it was for him to be the lone voice of dissent. By the end of the reading, they were able to agree that the group would take over some of his cautionary role so that he wouldn't always have to be the one who pointed out the pitfalls of new ideas. I was able to intuitively reveal the problem that no one else had dared voice for fear that they would be misunderstood.

Mini-readings can give you a chance to taste what it feels like to work with me. Many people book a longer session at a later date where they have a full hour to themselves and can go into more detail. It's an gentle way to sample the goods, so-to-speak! If anyone is interested in booking a group, or wants more information about how the process of a group reading works, please feel free to get in touch and ask me for more information.

What are we really doing here?

2008-05-25T23:32:00.004-07:00

I mentioned last week what I think I'm doing with my life and now I come to think about it, it's a question I hear a lot when I'm doing readings:

What's my purpose in life? How do I find it? And how will I know when I've got it right?

I refer to this as finding our 'purpose string', just because the phrase has a nice ring to it. I was talking to a friend the other day who says that when you're doing 'the right thing', it feels right, whether it's your job, volunteer work, or a hobby. You lose yourself in it and time seems to disappear. So how come we don't all feel that way?

I've struggled with it too. Sometimes I try to march myself up a path that isn't the right one. I can report that when I do that, it's always a hard slog. But I have to admit that doing what feels 'right' isn't always easy either. It's just that when it's 'right', I feel it's worth the hard work. It seems to be a 'gut feel' sort of thing.

How do I describe a 'gut feel'? Sometimes it's easier to describe what DOESN'T feel right. Then we can compare it to how it has felt in the past when we were doing something that felt good. And if our heads don't recognize the difference, our bodies usually object pretty loudly to the 'wrong' thing. One person I know said that he had ulcers. Another said it was migraines. Still another described insomnia.

My body doesn't usually get as confused as my head - my gut, in particular, has never steered me wrong. It reports loud and clear on what it thinks of the situations into which I place myself. I've learned that I ignore these votes at my peril. I've noticed that some of my physical reactions can be instantaneous, such as: yawns; temperature changes; ringing in my ears; sudden, stabbing headaches; nausea; tears; fumbling or clumsiness; muscle cramps; and even sneezes.

If I ignore these sudden changes, then my body symptoms can intensify and stick around for longer. I've had my back go out, skin reactions, allergies and chronic problems that affect digestion or circulation.

Actually, what I've learned most of all is that my body is a democracy and I have to listen to myself as I would to a constituent in my community. If I don't listen, the requests become more persistent and affect more of me - just like in a community. Pain or illness can be both a protest and a teacher. If I don't understand the initial message, it comes in more ways and/or gets louder, until I pay attention. Body and spirit need our attention and if we ignore either of them, we'll hear about it, eventually.

So, my answer to the question posed to me so often is this: pay attention. I have thought that our bodies might be like a scientific experiment. We try a little of this job search and see what happens to our body symptoms. Then we try a little of something else and see what happens then. Sometimes trial and error is a good way to learn in life. It might be the closest thing we have to a User's Manual.

A psychic with a tool box

2008-05-19T21:59:00.003-07:00

Just before I left my last full-time job in the business world in 1990, I remember talking to my Reiki Master in Toronto. I had just completed the second degree of Reiki and was burnt out after completing almost a year in the third dysfunctional corporation I had worked in since my graduation with a management degree nine years previous. I observed to her that I wasn't sure why I had ended up in business school, much less working in the business world for almost ten years. It certainly wasn't what I had hoped to do when I grew up. Then I answered my own question by saying that it was because I was going to need to understand first-hand what the people from that world were experiencing.

Eighteen years have passed since then. During that time I have: retrained and practiced as a psychotherapist; learned enough about setting up a small business and creating a computerized business model, at the knee of a seasoned entrepreneur and teacher, to be able to write a practical set of 13 how-to workbooks on the subject; co-taught conflict resolution and relationship skills in a workshop setting with a knowledgeable partner in Europe; and pioneered as a life coach when there wasn't even a term for it yet.

During my hiatus from writing here, I have been considering how I identify myself. I have asked myself what is at the core of my belief system. I conclude that ultimately I believe we are souls experiencing a physical life in three dimensions, with all the joys, sorrows, frustrations and possibilities that that can offer. I think it's challenging to operate here on this little blue planet, in our limited but mind-blowingly complex physical bodies.

I believe that we humans are at a crossroads where we have the opportunity to redefine how we live together. Do we do it with joy, compassion, responsibility and sharing, or with fear, greed and mistrust? It's pretty simple really. We can go one way or the other, and having chosen, our choice will determine the minutia of how we live each day. The overwhelmingly large questions such as global warming and war, will come down to our seemingly little choices each day. As within, so without.

I'm here to help individuals and groups to find their 'purpose string'. Many of us lose track of who we are and what we're doing in our lives. We may be doing all the things that we think we ought to but I always come back to asking: What gives your life meaning? I believe my job/vocation/talent is in helping people to hear the voice within themselves and exploring ways to honour what it tells them. And I do it using my psychic ability. I'm a messenger.

Don't get me wrong; it isn't that I know how you should be living your life. A good psychic, like a good therapist or coach, won't tell you how to live your life or make your choices for you. My job is to help you see yourself, and appreciate yourself, and honour yourself, so that you can live the most authentic life possible.

I see myself as a 'psychic with a toolbox'. No, not a wrench or a hammer! My kit includes healing skills, psychotherapeutic skills, business skills and life skills. I pull them out if they're requested or required. But first and foremost, I have almost 50 years of experience in using my sixth sense to understand and pass along messages to those who come into my sphere looking for help. I am my own tool. Have intuition, will travel!

You're not 'cheating' if you need some help to clear the noisy debris of negative self-chatter or the needs of others, so that you can hear yourself singing out what you really need. For many people, their consultations with a psychic are a closely guarded secret. They're afraid that they wouldn't be taken seriously if anyone were to know that they consult one. But take it from me, many more people do it than you would ever think! I hope the time has come when it's considered to be a smart move to consult anyone who will help you to marshal your own resources, on the occasions when you need some additional perspective on your own life.

You can look forward to future posts about how you can do just this. I'll discuss how I do what I do and what it can do for you. If you have questions you'd like me to answer in this regard, please post them here by leaving a comment and I will address them.

Hiatus

2008-04-20T22:02:00.003-07:00

Hello all. I've decided that I'm going to take a hiatus for a while. After posting almost every week since last June and after missing these past few weeks due to a nasty cold germ, I've decided to take some time to think. Sometimes I feel the need to consider my direction and focus, and this is one of those times.

You can expect me back again in the middle of May. Thank you so much for coming back to read my blog each week and I look forward to writing for you soon.
Lucca

Global currency

2008-03-24T16:07:00.003-07:00

I continue this week with my thoughts about the book I've been reading called The Dream Manager. I've since finished it and have embarked on creating a list of my dreams - since I am my own best guinea pig!

Matthew Kelly suggests categorizing the dreams on your list. Although categorizing isn't a bad idea, I didn't find his particular 12 categories all that useful to me. I imagine though, that if I write down 100 dreams, the way he suggests, then I will be able to review them and find some themes that are relevant for me. I'll have to see as I do it. So far, I have noticed that I got to about 20 dreams on my list and then I was stumped. I stayed with it though, as he suggested, and found I was able to pick up again, but with a different flavour. I was having to dig deeper. I finally had to put my pen down because it was well past when I needed to be asleep. I'm at #67 and I will finish it today.

My next step will be to live with the list for a while - reread it, tweak it, add to it. Matthew suggests keeping your dreams in a book bought for this purpose, and dating new additions. We need to keep it front and center so that it doesn't get lost in the flotsam and jetsam of day-to-day life. I took advantage of serendipity today and worked with one of my clients to get a list started. It will be interesting to hear someone else's reaction to the process.

While I was reading the book, I was considering the organizations in which I have worked over my career, and how much this might have helped them. As I have said many times to many people, and at the risk of repeating myself, I have never liked the concept that human beings should keep themselves separated into compartments - one for home and one for work.

Oh, I agree that I wouldn't be an effective surgeon if I were operating and thinking at the same time about the fight I had with little Janey this morning about whether she could have an unsupervised sleepover. That goes without saying. What I object to is the idea that one doesn't affect the other, positively and negative. We know about the negatives but perhaps the positive aspects don't get enough attention.

I can't tell you the number of times I've been teaching supervisory skills when workshop participants have spontaneously blurted out in the group that the skills they were learning would help them in their marriage or with their kids. And if an employee gets better at strategic planning and budgeting at home, it has to be that they bring those same skills to work. A 'team' at work is your family or neighbourhood at home. Similarly, good listening skills apply anywhere.

Think about how much more productive we are at work when we have a supportive partner at home; someone who listens to us, believes in us, and helps us to cope when life gets hairy. Conversely, there are times when life falls apart at home and we need the support of our work team to get through it and out the other side. Death and/or illness in the family, or divorce, are just a couple of examples. You can say to someone that they shouldn't bring their divorce to work but we are now recognizing that it's more effective to acknowledge that we are coping with adversity or change, and provide some help so the person can get through it. Nowadays, we have employee assistance programs for this.

Let me get back to the idea of dreams though. When you ask employees to share their dreams at work, they bring more than their skills and their life challenges; they bring their hopes and aspirations. This is positive stuff. This is what inspires others, including the customers. Matthew recounts an interesting by-product of the dreaming process at work, when he observes that colleagues were getting a tremendous sense of satisfaction from helping one another to achieve their dreams; big or small. They started keeping track of one another's progress and offering encouragement and even resources, and then celebrating the successes.

When I'm my best, or progressing to be my best, in either my work or my home setting, one impacts the other. Once recognized, we can capitalize on it. People who are optimizing their lives, in whatever way is right for them, have better self esteem, they make better citizens - both corporate and global. It's win-win for everyone. Matthew says in the book, "Appreciation is the strongest currency in the corporate culture." Let me expand that sentiment to life! And what better form of appreciation can there be than helping someone to articulate and go after their dreams - work or personal? Talk about ripples on a pond!

It's such a simple idea and the ramifications are so grand. I can see now that I've been waiting for someone to articulate an idea like this and set it in motion. It makes me wonder, as with all good ideas, "Now why didn't I think of that?"

Books fall off the shelf

2008-03-16T23:36:00.003-07:00

Sometimes I walk into the library and books 'fall off the shelf and into my hands'. Not literally, usually, but metaphorically. Last week it was a little book called The Dream Manager by Matthew Kelly. I suspect, when I stumble across books in this manner, that there is something important in them and it would behoove me to pay attention. (Likewise when someone sends me a book - but that's for another week.)

The author of The Dream Manager is saying that successful businesses, in fact successful organizations of any kind, are going to have to look at motivating their members/employees to stay with them in the near future, because the available pool of talent is going to become thin on the ground. Their survival will depend on it. He says the following in his introductory chapter:

It has been forty years since Peter Drucker observed the single greatest error and deception of our accounting system: people are placed in the liability column on the balance sheet. Machinery and computers are categorized as assets and people as liabilities. The reality, of course, is that the right people are an organization's greatest asset. We may have acknowledged this truth in theory, but we have not allowed it to sufficiently penetrate the way we manage our organizations, and indeed, the way we manage the people who drive them.

The fly-leaf describes the book as:

A business parable about how companies can achieve remarkable results by helping their employees fulfill their dreams. ... Beginning with his important thought that a company can only become the-best-version-of-itself to the extent that its employees are becoming better-versions-of-themselves, Matthew Kelly explores the connection between the dreams we are chasing personally and the way we all engage at work.

I am still reading the book and so I can't fully comment on it yet but I am intrigued by the idea of investing in people's efforts to make their dreams a reality. It was my experience in the 80's that the world of business was obsessed with short-term gain and not particularly interested in the welfare of it's employees, treating them as raw materials used up in the process of production, to be disposed of if they didn't fit the mold, or if they were 'used up'. Conversely, if the employee was valuable enough, the company would negotiate to pay more in order to keep him(usually a him). If not, well, they were expendable. My fear is that this is still so but I haven't tested it recently to find out.

Beyond getting our basic needs met, I don't think that people working in organizations are as motivated by money as we've been led to believe. I acknowledge that it is a factor but I watched a lot of talent walk out of the organizations for whom I worked. Unless they felt they were being grossly under-compensated, their reasons for leaving had more to do with their values and whether they were treated with respect.

Twenty years ago, from my perspective in the organization's HR department, I could see that employees were the business' greatest assets but that they weren't being treated as such. I felt like a lone voice in the wilderness. Once I started to work as a therapist, I was in a position to gain more insight. Many people felt trapped in jobs without personal meaning. The lucky ones were able to get out but even they soon found that the next job had similar issues.

That's why The Dream Manager, and the fact that it is being read so widely, is encouraging for me. It gives me hope that we can make workplaces more creative and meaningful. We spend such a huge chunk of our lives at work. It would be invaluable if it could be a place that engendered satisfaction and growth instead of resignation to the status quo.

I was having coffee with a friend today and we were talking about passion for our dreams and what such passion feels like. I have noticed with my clients that when they talk about what makes them passionate in their lives, they light up. Their eyes sparkle and they get more animated. It is a joy to watch. It's even contagious! And those people who have not yet identified what their passion is tell me they feel flat and that something is missing in their lives. then the challenge is to help them to find it.

I knew a man in England who gave a speech on the occasion of the retirement of one of his plant employees. After the speech, he went up to the man to wish him well and to ask him what he thought he was going to do when he retired. It turned out that the man had been a band leader all his adult life and that retirement meant that he could do it full time. This was clearly his passion. Who knew? Certainly not the management. It had never occurred to anyone that anything could be more important to him than his job - that it might have been just a means to an end. And if the employee had not had that band, he may not have been able to stomach his repetitive job for all those years.

I believe that my passion is what makes me who I am - uniquely me among all others. It is through my passion that I express my life force, often my talent. It challenges me, gives me joy and a sense of deep satisfaction. I can work at it when I have no energy left for anything else in my life. It gives my life meaning. I believe I bring my passion to my efforts to attain my dreams. Perhaps it's even what fuels my dreams.

I'll leave you with this: Have you given any thought to your dreams lately? Can you articulate what they are? Do the people nearest and dearest to you know what they are? Does your boss? Have your dreams been slumbering in a forgotten corner for a while? What would it take to dust it/them off and give them some attention? It might be worth it. And if you manage other people, you might want to ask them what their dreams are. You may be surprised. Who knows what passion and creativity might be unleashed!

Remember what felt right?

2008-03-10T00:33:00.002-07:00

I had a long discussion today with a great friend of mine about how you know when you're doing the 'right thing' in your life, or making the 'right' decision. We were hearkening back to various crossroads in our lives, when we took a road that changed things for us, and how that felt at the time.

We both felt that when we weren't sure about whether a choice was right for us, then it actually wasn't right. The 'right' choices, such as the ones we had just been discussing, that changed the course of our lives, seemed easy to us at the time. The triggers, or flags, or invitations to action at these crossroads, looked like coincidence, and we followed up on them without giving it all that much thought.

I was reminded of this the other day when I was remembering how I had felt when I was clearly doing what was 'right' for me. There was flow. There was a sense of ease. I'm not saying that it wasn't challenging, but I had the motivation to meet those challenges and trusted that I would somehow make it through to the other side.

When I compared that feeling, to the feeling I have when I am considering something that I'm not sure about, there is literally no comparison to be made. The two don't feel anything like one another. I have often heard the saying, "If in doubt, don't", which I think is true, but I think it's more involved than that. If I'm plagued by doubts, then it isn't the right choice for me, because if it were, I would probably blow off the doubts and do it anyway.

Another part of this decision-making process, unscientific as it may seem, is that 'right' choices seem to come from my heart and not my head. I may 'make up my mind' but I feel the rightness of it with my heart. If it doesn't feel right in my heart, I find myself falling back on rationalizing, making lists and formulating arguments, for and against.

I surely know this with my clients. I can tell by the language they are using, whether their heart is behind the choice, or they are talking themselves into or out of the decision. When the arguments get convoluted, or they are trying to convince me, they are most often trying to convince themselves; or rather, trying to convince their heads.

With my clients though, I have the advantage of being able to watch their body language, whereas I'm not always aware of my own. Clients will often shake their heads no, while they are verbally answering in the affirmative. You've probably noticed this with people you know. The movement may only take a nano-second. You might not even be sure you saw it; almost like a flicker. But that is the body giving away the person's truth, even if they aren't aware of it. In my experience, bodies don't lie.

When I point this out to people, some are angry at me for giving voice to the part of themselves that they had thought to have safely overridden - a part that isn't acceptable and might be dangerous. Others are relieved that I am giving space and time to the side of the argument that had not been allowed to speak. Often this response is accompanied by spontaneous tears for having hit home with the truth.

And so my rule of thumb is ... compare how you feel when you are uncertain, with what it felt like when you did something that you can now tell, with the benefit of hindsight, was right for you. My friend an I agree that when a choice is right, the synchronicities line up like well-choreographed and rehearsed dancers, with the addition of just the right shot of adrenaline and inspiration.

You might be inspiring someone!

2008-03-02T23:58:00.005-08:00

Many years ago, when I was in my late twenties, I had a friend whom I met through the psychic classes I was taking at the time. She was a little older than I was and had been working steadily since she was a teenager, without a break. When I met her, she was working in the hectic world of advertising. Sometime during our course, her marriage broke up, prompting her to take a look at her life and what she really wanted. She decided to take some time out of her career and reassess, going back to school and taking some classes in women's studies for a while.

I remember being impressed by the courage it took to walk away from her job and take care of her own needs as a person. I was still not earning very much and had no safety net to fall back on. I believed that what she was doing was completely out of the question for me and yet I was somewhat envious of what she was able to do. I doubt if she had any idea at the time that I was watching her.

A few years later, after a job change that left me disillusioned and exhausted, I decided to leave the business world, move across the country and subsequently, to get some further training in a related field and change my career direction. It was a scary thing to do and, looking back now, I can see that I had this friend's example in mind as I walked off the edge of my world.

She didn't make me do it, didn't even suggest it, but the fact that she had done it and survived, even blossomed, led me to believe that it could be done. My reasons for doing what I did may not have had anything to do with hers but I saw someone do something that I considered to be courageous, even if she didn't think that of herself as she did it, and based on my interpretation, I went ahead and did what I needed courage to do.

If I were to have the chance to talk to her today, she would probably be amazed to hear that I responded to her choices the way I did. Sometimes we are so busy trying to keep life and limb together, fighting our demons and summoning the courage to face each uncharted day, that it doesn't occur to us that we might inadvertently inspire someone else along the way. Wouldn't it be nice if we could know it at the time?

Talent in your pockets

2008-02-24T22:08:00.003-08:00

The other day I heard someone say of Erma Bombeck, an American popular author who had a long career as a mother, homemaker and author regarding same, and wrote of the era in which I grew up, that she had the following to say about how she saw the end of her life.

I paraphrase here...

She said that she wanted to arrive wherever she was going at the end of her life (heaven I think) and have God ask her to empty her pockets, asking her if she had used up all the talents and opportunities that she had been given to work with. She wanted to be able to answer that she had used up everything and had nothing that she could return unused. I hope I got what she said right, but even if I didn't, this is what I took from what I heard.

The concept really hit home for me. I like the idea that we might be given raw materials to work with and that our job throughout our lives might be to use up everything with which we arrive, leaving with empty pockets, having lived a full life.

So I gave it some thought. What did I arrive with in my pockets? What talents do I have? Do I recognize them? Have I used them as much as I might, or am I hiding any of them where no one can see them, let alone make use of them? So far as I am aware, I think I use my talents, big or small.

And what about opportunities? Have I taken full advantage of the opportunities that have come my way? Have I shared them? I'm not quite as sure of this one as I am about the talents I have. I suspect that I may have been scared on some occasions, although no specific situations are coming immediately to mind. I recognize that opportunities sometimes look like risks to me - risks that are too big.

How about you? Are your pockets empty? Are you finished yet or do you still have some things stored away in your pockets that have yet to see the light of day, before you are asked to empty them out and reflect on what you haven't used? Hmm.

Pollyanna-ism

2008-02-17T23:47:00.003-08:00

I'm still reading the book called The Intention Experiment and am interested in it, not only for the information it contains but because of the thinking it has inspired me to do. Today I was reading about how to prepare myself to send my healing intentions out to a person or situation. There is a list of 9 points.

• Enter your intention space.
• Power up through meditation.
• Move into peak focus through mindful awareness of the present.
• Get onto the same wavelength by focusing on compassion and making a meaningful connection.
• State your intention and make it specific.
• Mentally rehearse every moment of it with all your senses.
• Visualize, in vivid detail, your intention as established fact.
• Time it right - check what the sun is doing, and choose days when you feel happy and well.
• Move aside - surrender to the power of the universe and let go of the outcome.

I was drawn to the fourth point which is designed to encourage a sense of universal compassion. It starts with focusing your attention on your heart and ends with directing your loving thoughts to the object of your intention. The author spends some time discussing monks, yogis and healers and making observations about how they prepare to meditate and what they can do from such a state of being.

Having done healing work myself, I have had some first-hand experience of what this feels like. I can't say that I am the best mediator in the world but I do know what it feels like to focus on the person to whom I am sending healing, or on whom I am placing my hands. Many of the healers talk about 'getting out of the way' so that the healing energy can pass through them, using them as a channel.

To me, this goes hand in hand with opening my heart and entering the place where I feel love for the person who needs healing. In fact, I can honestly say that most of the time this is true with any client with whom I work, whether the person is a therapy client, a coaching client, looking to have a reading, or in a workshop setting.

While I am working with that person, a change takes place inside me and I shift into a neutral and accepting place. It is quite simply the best place, the most effective place, from which to work. I can't say that I do this intentionally; it seems to be a by-product of the work. I think that it happens when I set my intention at the beginning of a session or workshop.

For as long as I can remember, I have been an optimistic person. One of my bosses once commented, in some exasperation, "Are you always so happy?" Although he was referring in part to my being cheerful, he was also commenting on the fact that I would look for the best in situations. The answer to his question was: not always, but most of the time.

I have on occasion been told that I am Pollyanna-ish. It isn't usually said as a compliment and the term came to mind today as I was considering the state of positive expectation that I often feel when I am working. It has been a long time since I heard the story so I looked it up on the internet. I haven't read the book called Pollyanna but I did see the Walt Disney film when I was a child.

Here's what Wikipedia has to say about the book's influence:

The novel's success brought the term "pollyanna" (along with the adjective "pollyannaish" and the noun "Pollyannaism") into the language to describe someone who is cheerfully optimistic and who always maintains a generous attitude toward the motives of other people. It also became, by extension – and contrary to the spirit of the book – a derogatory term for a naïve optimist who always expects people to act decently, despite strong evidence to the contrary.

Pollyanna was an orphan who went to live with a bitter and angry aunt who gave her an attic bedroom, with nothing to give it any comfort. She was strict, cold and withholding, as I recall, and yet Pollyanna found things to be happy about. She called it the 'Glad Game' and taught everyone around her how to look for something positive in every situation. When she had an accident and lost the use of her legs, the town gathered around to support her because what she had taught them was so valuable.

I liked the story and could relate to it, not because I was always so much like the heroine, I surely did my share of moaning and moping as a child, but because I liked the idea that someone could influence the world for the better. I remember being surprised when I was teased for liking the film and subsequently I have kept my opinion to myself, even to this day. Well, in this blog I am 'outing' myself as a person of optimism. Maybe it's the first step towards healing the world.

The laboratory of life

2008-02-11T01:05:00.000-08:00

I'm back on the topic of The Intention Experiment, the book that I'm reading - still. I'm reading a little each day and so it's sitting with me as I go about my life. This is one of those books that gives me hope because it shows me that the scientists are busy proving how I can do what I do. That's happening in their labs.

In the last couple of weeks, I have begun to look at my life through the lens of the experiments discussed in the book. I suppose you could say that my life is my laboratory. Most of the time, I experiment using myself as the guinea pig and then read the books that discuss it later on. Sometimes it happens the other way around but not usually.

The author, Lynne McTaggart, says that all matter transmits and receives impulses from all other matter, right down to the molecular level and even the sub-atomic level. (I paraphrase here) The idea is that everything is affected by everything else at the deepest possible level. I understood it when I read it, but not well enough to be able to describe it in detail here. Maybe I'll be able to by the end of the book! Suffice to tell you the gist of it and let you read it for yourselves.

One of the things that interests me is that scientists have proven that plants can not only pick up and respond to human intentions, but they can transmit, or broadcast, their response to those intentions so that other plants can pick them up as well. They don't even have to be in the same room with one another; not the human or the other plants. This was documented using equipment that was designed for lie-detector tests.

Scientists have also been experimenting with individuals directing healing intentions toward patients with cancer, AIDS and other diseases. They have proven that it makes a difference, and not just in a few isolated incidents. What we think, really does make a difference. For anyone who feels hopeless and thinks they don't make a difference in the world, I recommend they read this book so they can see that what they think and intend has a far more immediate effect than casting their vote every four years.

I'm not at all surprised to find proof that we're connected at such a basic level; in fact I have been sure that this is so since before I can remember. I have been acting for years as if it were true, even though I didn't have 'scientific' data yet. (I admit that I have always trusted that one day there would be proof.) I believe that this web of 'living connection' between all matter comes into play when I work with clients. It has taken a lot of experimenting and practice to pick up energy on this level, and it's sometimes more of an art than a science, but it would appear that we are developing some scientific evidence to validate it.

On a sillier level, for years I've been warning spiders before I vacuum near them, telling them that I'm was coming and they had better ski-daddle or they would be sucked up, but that I didn't plan to do them any harm. I've been talking to my plants, sometimes out loud and sometimes in my head, telling them that they're growing stronger and healthier. Loony? Maybe, but not dangerous to society, so I figure it's worth playing around with.

When it comes to the things that I know won't do anyone any harm, I indulge my beliefs. That's where my life becomes my own laboratory. I think we can all experiment. Far from doing harm, we can probably do some good. If other living creatures, including people, can sense my intentions, then it can't hurt to think well of them when I pass them in the street, and smile at them. It's as easy as spreading the common cold, except that it's spreading good energy instead.

Pollyanna-ish? Yup. It sure feels good though, when someone passes me in the street and smiles at me, for no apparent reason. To take another tack, if I direct jealous, angry or mean thoughts at a person, or an animal, or a plant, it impacts them on some level. Haven't you had the experience of just knowing that someone is thinking ill of you, even when you couldn't prove it, and then had this suspicion confirmed at a later date. Sometimes we're being paranoid or making unfounded assumptions, and it's always a good idea to check out assumptions before acting on them but ... sometimes you're right, and this may show you how you know.

I say this not to encourage you to go around accusing people of having convicted you in their thoughts, but to caution you against doing that to others. To me it reinforces the value of checking things out through straight and respectful communication instead of letting suspicions fester and malevolent intentions grow.

So, in conclusion, I think we're all connected in more ways than we know. I think it's as much science as gravity is. Eventually, we will teach this in grade school too! And, if we're all ultimately connected, then in harbouring harmful thoughts towards you, I'm really also causing harm to myself. Food for thought, if you'll pardon the pun.

Good intentions pave the way

2008-02-04T00:25:00.001-08:00

In the late 80's, when I discovered that I had the ability to read the energy of people and objects, I was concerned that I might mislead people. I didn't want to say or do anything that would cause anyone any harm and so I was reluctant to use the gift that was emerging at that time. I wondered how I would know if what I picked up was valid.

One day at around that time, I was sitting in meditation and I asked the question that had been bothering me: How can I use my gift without causing harm? To my surprise, I received an immediate and very simple answer. A clear voice in my head told me to always set my intention to that effect - in other words, each time I worked I was to ask that my work with the person or group be for their and my highest good. I was advised not to under estimate the power of intent.

As soon as I heard the message I knew that I had a profound solution to more than just the question I was asking that day. It occurred to me that setting such an intention was a good idea for every aspect of life. From that time forwards, I have always set my intentions this way when I work.

Lately I have spent a lot of time pondering the world around me and especially the amount of unresolved conflict I see every day. My work is changing again, as it does periodically, but I can see that many people's work is changing. Not knowing what is ahead for us is frightening and causes us stress. We can prepare to some degree for the things we can anticipate but what happens when we come to a place where we don't know what's ahead and can't predict?

I'm still reading the book about the Intention Experiment (see the sidebar) and it has reminded me of my old solution about the power of intending something - anything. Webster's Dictionary defines intention this way:

intention

Main Entry: in·ten·tion
Pronunciation: \in-ˈten(t)-shən\
Function: noun
Date: 14th century

1: a determination to act in a certain way : resolve
2: import, significance
3 a: what one intends to do or bring about b: the object for which a prayer, mass, or pious act is offered
4: a process or manner of healing of incised wounds
5: concept; especially : a concept considered as the product of attention directed to an object of knowledge
6 plural : purpose with respect to marriage

I've always used it in the sense of the first and third definitions but when I looked the word up, it caused me to consider that the meaning could be broader than that. When I do healing work, I ask that the healing sources available to me be made available to the person who needs the healing. That is a prayer of sorts, although I wouldn't say that I pray to any traditionally defined God. I believe service is offered in the same way. I have loved to be of service since I was very young and I think that when we are of service to a person or a group, our intentions are to be of assistance.

The fourth definition interested me as well: "a process or manner of healing of incised wounds". I hadn't thought of intention as being a healing word but here is the definition, in addition to my thoughts about setting my intention when I do healing work.

And then there is the final definition, regarding intentions as they relate to marriage. Marriage, as we see it, may be one of the most intention-defined actions of our lives. When we set out in matrimony with another human being, we are filled with good intentions. In fact, we consider them to be so important that we make them sacred and ask our nearest and dearest to bear witness. We might do well to repeat them to one another every night before we go to sleep - to remind ourselves of what we hoped for and intended for the daily outcome.

Finally, I remind myself that intention is a sort of mindfulness. A friend was talking about the 'slow movement' the other day and I am reminding myself as I write this to slow down and be more mindful of my intentions as they relate to how I treat myself, and not only those around me.

Today I intend:

to do no harm to myself or the people and creatures with whom I share this planet
to share positive and healing energy as I move about in the world
to use my optimism and vision to create wonderful opportunities
To help people to hear their own inner voices and to walk their chosen paths

Faith, trust, hope

2008-01-27T23:15:00.000-08:00

I found myself encouraging a client this week not to give up on her dream. She is a talented and dedicated teacher in an educational system that is outside the mainstream system. She and I agreed that the original intention of the founder of this particular educational philosophy was that the schools be small, and rooted in the communities in which the students and the families live. Unfortunately, this is not the norm. Most of these small schools have a hard time surviving and, operating as close to the knuckle as they do, they are constantly searching for resources, volunteer help and enough money to give the teachers a living wage. It's an uncertain and stressful life but so worthwhile as a living alternative to an increasingly stressed public school system.

Once she had gone home, I found myself thinking of all the change-makers whom I know and how challenging it is for them to ride in the visionary section of the bus of life. It takes a unique sort of person to hang in there long enough to see the changes of which they dream. Such a person must be dedicated to their vision, stubborn as hell, self-motivated and and almost hardwired not to let go. Even with these qualities, it's often a lonely ride and they eventually get tired. And frequently they run out of resources.

Our communities desperately need these individuals for our long-term survival; not in the present so much as in a future, around the bend where we cannot yet see. Some of these people will be recognized and maybe even rewarded within their lifetimes, but most of them plug away doing their small but essential bit, with no acknowledgment and little desire for it. At the most, one day in the far off future, someone might say of them, "Oh yes, odd duck; she was ahead of her time."

This client and friend is one of those people. She honestly doesn't see herself as anyone exceptional. She just wants to make enough money to earn a living, and for there to be enough support for the school so that it can stay afloat and allow her to continue teaching, doing what she is so talented at. Right now, she is feeling close to the end of her rope - financially, emotionally, energetically and creatively.

She isn't alone. Some of us obviously live an alternative life. You can point us out and wonder how we do it. But some of us are closet 'alternative-ists'. We secretly root for the people who are brave enough, silly enough, or perhaps free enough, to be able to take the risk it requires to go against the norms of our society, but we don't broadcast our sympathies. Collectively, I think there are far more of us in this world than we know about - both the obvious variety and the closet ones.

I've heard it said that these odd-balls who live or work on the fringe are disparaging of the people who aren't doing what they are, but I don't think this is true - at least not unless they are feeling at the end off their rope. Some vocal activists might come out with strong messages urging people to change, (or else there will be dire consequences) but there are many more people who just want to keep quietly experimenting in the hope of one day reaching their ideal. The projects might not all succeed, but remember that Edison had far more 'failures' than successes. You have to break a few eggs to make an omelet (sorry to be trite).

So I was encouraging my client to keep the faith, simultaneously realizing that I could have been giving myself the same message. Faith, trust, hope, call it what you may, we need it or we'll give up. Our mad social scientists won't be able to keep plugging away and in so doing, keep the light burning to show the path for those who will be trying to find a better way in the future. So if you come across one of these odd ducks - these change-makers - help them out if you can, but spare some encouragement for them at the least. They're ahead of the curve and those of us who notice them are their safety net. For those of you who already do this, you have my heart-felt appreciation.

Maybe I'm not 'just lazy'

2008-01-19T22:06:00.001-08:00

I've been party to more than half a dozen conversations in the last six months about laziness - most of them where people have referred to themselves as, "I guess I'm just lazy". I was talking about it with a friend the other day and it got me thinking about how it works with me. When this comes up with clients, my standard response is that I don't think that labeling ourselves as lazy is entirely accurate.

I can't honestly say that I've met many people in my life, if any, who are lazy by nature. In fact, I believe that we are only what we refer to as 'lazy' when we aren't motivated to do what we, or society , says should be done. If we're avoiding something, then I suspect we're avoiding it because there's an aspect to it that scares us or at least doesn't feel right.

Sometimes, instead of saying we're lazy, we say we can't be bothered. I wonder what that phrase, 'can't be bothered', really means. If something 'bothers' me, then it makes me feel badly; it's irritating to me. Maybe I really mean that I don't want to be bothered by the task. Furthermore, I might not consciously know why. It's semantics, I know, but defining what it means to me may be revealing of what's going on subconsciously.

When I have been labeled lazy in my life, I could, and still can, immediately conjure up the heavy feeling in my body. My limbs feel like they're weighted down with lead. My stomach almost feels full. I feel tired and my brain goes fuzzy. In fact, it feels like my brain just won't work, like when the bushing went on the gear shift in my car and I just couldn't get it into first gear.

This doesn't feel lazy to me. What it actually feels like is resistance. And looking at why I'm resisting is probably more productive than feeling guilty for being 'lazy' or feeling resentful about being pushed. I'm a person who is naturally interested in the world. If someone comes to fix the furnace, I want to watch the process and ask questions. I want to know who was on the phone and where you're going. I've been called nosy for just these reasons. How can someone who is that nosy be lazy - about anything?

No, I think that what we call 'laziness' could be a passive form of resistance. The body and the psyche say, "Nope. We're not doing this. It isn't right. Can't talk about it. End of story." I think it indicates some form of internal conflict. If I really felt, inside myself, that not doing whatever I believed I was supposed to, was acceptable, I would just go on and do something else. But if I felt that I should do it and I'm not comfortable with my reasons for not doing it, or I felt that I would end up in a fight that I couldn't win, then I might shut down and seem what is easy to label in myself as lazy.

I think it's worth our while as individuals to take a look at what it could be about the task that might not feel right to us and why. I think this is especially important for parents, spouses and bosses as well. Getting irritated with the employee, disciplining them, or even shaming them, isn't likely to move the impasse and will likely give you heart burn. Equally, self-criticism won't make me want to do what I'm avoiding and will just make me feel worse.

If I can get underneath why I don't want to do a particular task such as looking for a job, challenging someone who is bothering me, learning something new, or changing a habit, then I might be able to challenge my own assumptions and change how I see the task. It may turn out that I don't need to do it in the first place, or maybe I can do something to combat the fear or discomfort. I might need another skill. It's possible that my reluctance could have to do with what I feel capable of, or a fear of failure. Once I can see it for what it really is, instead of putting it down to 'laziness', I open up more options for dealing with it.

So here's my closing metaphor: If I'm trying to untangle a great, big snarl of yarn so that I can knit with it, yanking at it isn't going to get the snarl unknotted. What may be more effective is to gently tease it apart, loosening the knots - and then to take care not to put it back where it was, thus preventing it from becoming snarled again.

The next time you find yourself tempted to say 'just lazy' about yourself, be kind and take a second look. Ask yourself what's really going on and see if you can find what's undermining your motivation. You might be surprised!

Being the most 'you'

2008-01-12T23:09:00.000-08:00

I've said this many, many times but I think it bears repeating:

Your job on this planet is to be the most authentic 'you' that you can possibly be. Sound easy? Not a chance! I think we have to spend a life-time figuring out who we are.

We do it in a whole bunch of ways, as different as we are all unique. Some of us make mistakes - tons of them. You can imagine that if we learn from our mistakes, the more you make, the more you learn. Do it in bulk. Many of us are pros at this. The downside is if you don't learn and keep making the same mistakes. But if you do learn: wow, a Ph.D in wisdom!

And then there are those of us at the opposite end of the continuum who are afraid to put a foot wrong. Maybe we won't learn from 'out there' mistakes but, we might learn something else. Staying out of the line of fire might give us opportunities to learn on the inside instead of the outside.

But I suspect that most of us don't make any resolutions. We're just trying to live our lives as best we can, and get on with the demands of the day. And then, BOOM, splat, there arrives an opportunity to be the most 'us' - to choose to be true to ourselves or betray ourselves by trying to be someone else, or please someone else. Most of the time, we might not even know what we've done.

How could that happen? I've thought about it. For me, I think it happens when I forget who I am. Funnily enough, I find it's easier to remember who other people are than who I am. Perhaps we're taught to be externally focused and to define ourselves through the reactions we get from the people around us. It's the 'how am I doing?' reflex. 'Do they like me?', 'Will I get the promotion?', 'Will I get the what-a-dufus look behind my back?'. We learn early that kids can be cruel and some adults not much better. The lessons can be hard and reach far into adulthood.

Some of us spend time and energy seeing a therapist, for months or years, figuring out how to re-frame what happened to us in our childhoods and then deciding whether or not reacting to our current world from our unconscious childhood world-view, still works for us. It would be ideal if we grew more self-confident as we grew older, and some of us do, but some of us still have those pesky fears that sing in our ears, trying to keep us safe and comfortable.

There's nothing wrong with safety and comfort, as far as it goes. A few years ago, I was feeling at a loss and having a hard time making a decision. I caught myself trying to decide how I 'should' react. Nothing felt right, no matter how I justified each possible choice to myself. As often happens when I feel blocked and stuck, I turned to sitting quietly with a candle lit and endeavouring to find my 'inner' voice. I wasn't bargaining for what I heard. I paraphrase here in the interest of brevity:

"You aren't on this planet to behave as other people would, nor to have their talents. You are here to be the most 'you' that you can possibly be. It's the only thing that no one else can hold a candle to. The world would be meaningless if we were all cast from the same mold. You act in your best interests when you follow your own blueprint and not someone else's."

It was an answer but it still required some work on my part. I had to be really honest with myself about what I wanted, needed and had to offer - popular or unpopular. I'm still working on defining the essence of who I am but I think I'm clearer than I was those years ago. It's a work in progress but I know it's worthwhile.

A little communi-tea

2008-01-06T23:11:00.000-08:00

I have a wonderful friend who, years ago, sent me a vine wreath for Christmas. It hung horizontally from a red ribbon, like a frizbee. From the bottom of the wreath hung twelve small, felt stockings, about three inches long, each a different colour. There was one for each of the twelve days of Christmas, beginning on Christmas Day and going until January 5th. She filled each little stocking with a small gift, all with an overall theme. I was absolutely delighted with this gift, more because of the thoughtfulness than because of the gifts. My friend had one of her own which gave her the idea to make one for me.

The next year, she suggested that I return the wreath to her so that she could fill it again. I suggested instead that I send her gifts for her stockings and she could send me new ones for mine. And so began our own little tradition of filling tiny stockings according to a theme. It has become quite a creative challenge to find a theme, with twelve parts to it, and get it in the mail in time for Christmas. The pay-off isn't just in opening the interesting little packages; it's in the giving.

This year my theme for her was tea. I found twelve different teas, wrapped them in 1-ounce packages and sent them off. Next I started researching about tea. I thought I would put a 'factoid' about tea in an email each day and send it off to her, so that she could enjoy a little information with her cups of tea. My research project grew and grew and became an education for me, never-mind her!

What I expected was to find out where tea is grown, how it is harvested, how to make the perfect cup of tea, even about tea pots and cups and saucers. What I didn't expect was to find out about how tea has affected world economics and politics. It is the single most consumed beverage in the world. It helped prevent water-born diseases from spreading because the water had to be boiled. It contributed to the Opium Wars in China and the "Boston Tea Party" in the US. In some parts of the world, it has even been used as currency, being more valuable than little disks of metal. Tea is light, it travels well, keeps for a long time, quenches thirst, imparts a physical and mental pick-me-up, doesn't have bad side effects, and the leaves can be used more than once.

But what I wanted to highlight today is how drinking tea is a ritual that fosters community. Because we need to boil the water, prepare the pot, pour the milk or cut the lemon, we have to take time. Whether we are communing with ourselves or with others, we take a little time - something that I mentioned in my Christmas blog. For me, tea is more than just a drink, it is a pause.

I suppose everyone does something different in their 'pause' but for me I can associate tea with most of the daily and momentous events of my life. I guess you could say that it's a gentle addiction. I have gone without it for periods of time in my life and, although I miss it, it's physically not bad to get over. What I miss more than the substance of the leaves is the ritual. And the ritual can take place almost anywhere. Although tea houses are on the rise, or re-rise, as they were the places to see and be seen in England in the 1800's, we can practice the tea ritual, in any of its forms, at home or in public.

The Japanese have made it an art form. To really do the Japanese tea ceremony 'right' you would have to take classes, which are offered in just about any major urban centre, to those who are interested. What's really sacred here is not so much the tea as the relationship between the person who makes and offers the tea and the person, or people, who drink it. To my mind, it's about the sacred act of nurturing relationship and therefore, community.

In my life I have solved problems over a cup of tea, brain-stormed, deepened friendships, shared sorrows, waited, celebrated, met people for the first time, done deals, nursed sick tummies and head colds, and just plain old quenched my thirst. It gives 'put the kettle on, would you?' a richer meaning!

2008 ... A change in perception

2007-12-31T21:56:00.001-08:00

This is the Chinese character for change: dangerous opportunity. It's the perfect symbol for the coming year! This is a longer post today, as befits the start of a new year. I hope you find it inspiring.

Life can throw a lot at us, sometimes more than we think we’re capable of dealing with, and often there isn’t much we can physically do about it. Those are the times when we feel impotent and the feeling is so disempowering that we may be tempted to give up.

I raise the point because my intuition tells me that 2008 is going to be a year of change. As with the genesis of all change, the first stages occur beneath the surface. A friend of mine planted potato seeds in her garden last summer and was getting impatient and concerned when the spuds didn’t seem to be growing. This is typical of most of us, especially when we’re hoping for and even expecting change and growth. When we can’t see it, we begin to wonder if anything is really happening or if we’re doing something wrong. And who among us hasn't had those passing thoughts in the past year?

Well, I think global change has been germinating for quite a while and it will begin to break surface (to use a submarine term) in more obvious ways in the coming year. Some of you have voiced to me that you’re wondering if we should expect changes to our physical world, or if it will be political and/or economic.

I think the changes are going to be in the realm of information. I have felt for a while now that ‘the truth will out’; it will be revealed to us. I’ve mentioned before that truth and lies have completely different energy; that of lies, twisted back on itself to form a sort of inverted spiral. On an energy level, I can feel a lie, and so can most psychics. I would go as far as to say that most people can but not all of us can identify what we’re feeling when we feel it.

The truth about Enron, or at least some of it, has come out. As with all lies, one lie requires another to cover the first, and before you know it, you have a whole fabrication of lies. When one is discovered, it doesn’t take too much digging before the others begin to come to light. An environment is created where the public begins to doubt the formerly accepted status quo, and expand the doubt into many other seemingly related areas. The fear is that if they could be duped once, then about how many other things could they still be in the dark? They start to look askance at everything they once trusted.

A profound level of mistrust arises, creating a crisis of faith encompassing more then just the original lies. By association, we mistrust all the people in the affected organizations, all the same or similar positions and professions in other organizations, the laws themselves, and not just the individuals and organizations who broke the trust in the specific, publicized incidents.

It is said that trust is a given until it is broken and then it takes a very long time to earn it back. The effect of any sort of lie is to erode the very fabric of community, where trust forms a crucial element of the bedrock upon which we build our relationships, for the purposes of commerce, government, education and family.

When I say that we’re going to see a year of change, I mean that it will come about on every level mentioned above. I don’t suppose it will be limited to just the corporate, political, global or family levels. I think we’ll also find it amongst the world’s religious leaders; local and on high. We’ll find it in our education systems, the scientific community, the medical community. In fact, I don’t think there is an area that will be immune. The fact that it will appear to be everywhere is what will cause the crisis in our hearts and minds.

I mentioned earlier that in feeling disempowered and mistrustful, we may be tempted to give up or become cynical. I encourage you to guard against these for a few reasons which I will outline below.

Firstly, not everyone has been lying, or creatively bending the truth, or even lying by omission. There are many individuals who witnessed some of what has been sanctioned and in some cases even demanded by the organizations in which they were members, and they may have felt gagged. Standing up and challenging the lies may have been tacitly or blatantly discouraged and they may have feared for their jobs or even their safety. These individuals, and I believe there are far more of them than we know, may be mightily relieved when the truth comes out. You may be one of them.

Secondly, I believe we have the tools and the creativity to deal with the fallout from these revelations, even if the results look like a mess. We could be tempted to throw the baby out with the bath water but we should think this through before we do anything precipitate. Our constitutions are principled documents, encouraging us to be idealistic while at the same time recognizing that we’re human. The common problem lies in the interpretation of our guiding principles, not in the principles themselves. Our boat may have sprung a leak but that doesn’t mean that we don’t know how to sail, any more than it means that there is something wrong with the principle of sailing. And, to continue the metaphor, even if sailing isn’t the best way to get where we need to go, I believe we have the global resources and the creativity to find another way.

Thirdly, we may have to look at the events that have led to our feelings of hopelessness, and ‘reframe’ them. By that I mean that the events about which the truth will come to light will quite often be about what happened in the past. When that is the case, there is nothing we can do to change what has already happened. What’s done is done. What remains within our power however, is to change how we look at it. Learning from a past mistake or betrayal, and seeing it for what it really is, is the first step in making sure that we don’t repeat it.

Vowing to never trust anyone again will not be useful. Rather, we should be more judicious in what evidence we require before we trust and in how involved we are in the follow-up. Perhaps we have been lulled into trusting so much, or scared into focusing our attention elsewhere, whether it was by our elected officials, educators, clergy, corporate leaders, etc., that we absolved ourselves of responsibility for due diligence. For that we must take responsibility and endeavour to make changes in our future behaviour.

Fourthly, in this era of apparently vast quantities of information, so much specialization and so many so-called experts, it is easy to feel overwhelmed and unable to determine what is actually the truth. Who do you trust and how can you be sure? I believe there is only so much homework we can do and then we have to rely on our instincts.

No, I’m not advocating that you retire your brain. I do suggest that we have been overly reliant on our brains, to the exclusion of our ‘gut’ sense of what is right. There are many times I’ve heard people say, ‘that doesn’t seem right’, or, something smells funny about this’. If it doesn’t seem right, it might warrant further digging on your part, or at least your postponing your decision until you get more information (the job of the brain). Don’t let yourself be pressured into having to make a decision right now when it doesn’t feel right (the job of the gut).

And lastly, in the coming year, you may know right away that you are a leader and just what you should be doing to help correct a given situation. You may have been biding your time, waiting for the sense that the time is right for you to do what you feel best suited to do. I say, go for it!

On the other hand, you may be a supporter and you just haven’t felt there was anyone to support yet. To you I say, when you find the right person, support them! Neither leading nor supporting is more important or more valuable. Both are necessary. You’ll know when to move by ‘feeling’ for the truth. The truth feels different than lies. Viscerally, you will know which feels right.

So, in these times of change, when so many about us will be afraid, disenchanted or angry, and when the ones who have been illegally and immorally co-opting our power, are trying to use fear to convince us to continue supporting what they are doing, hold on to your centre and open your heart. Know who you are and use your heart to FEEL for the difference between truth and lies. Don’t panic, get cynical or give up your right and your responsibility to make informed choices. Think positively. We have the systems and the solutions already, if we will just look for them and support them.

So, bring on the change! It’s time. We have been manipulated by fear for a long time and we’re ready to take up our power, integrate our brains with our hearts and make some different choices.We can live in a better world and there are those among us who have the blueprint and the passion. We just need to recognise and support them while we find our own paths.

I wish an inspiring, passionate and positive 2008 to you all. May you remember who you are and have the courage to stand for what you believe in. Let us remind ourselves of our true potential and live it, one day at a time.

Nothing is something

2007-12-23T01:45:00.000-08:00

I've been giving some thought to 'doing nothing' lately and I've come to the conclusion that it is vastly underrated. The subject of 'nothing' may seem a little strange at this time of year, when we are all so busy, but I think that it's topical. I've decided that I should strive to be neither a human 'doing' nor a human 'being' but rather a 'be-doing' - the best of both worlds.

I stepped out of the formal world of business more than seventeen years ago because, after nine years, I was spent. But I didn't just step out of my job; I also stepped out of the 'busy-ness' I had been so hooked on for so long. I can see now that I thought that being busy made me important, made me look like I was needed and valued. I started the habit in high school where it helped me cope with feeling completely alienated and alone, and I just kept going with it into my twenties. By the time I reached 30, I'd finally had enough. Whatever it was supposed to be doing for me, it wasn't working and I knew it.

At thirty years old, I moved to the other side of the country and started afresh. I went back to school, worked part-time to keep the wolf from the door, and in the process I found a way to still myself for short periods, the way I had when I was a child. I found me again. I can't say that I loved everything I found when I looked inside but it prompted some soul-searching. Looking back at that time, I can see that I needed space; some 'nothing-time'.

Although it was somewhat scary to be without work for the eight months that I was, and somewhat threatening to my identity, it was also gloriously freeing. I let go of scheduling and I could go to bed when I was tired and wake up when I was refreshed. I could walk outside, or read a book, in the middle of the morning or afternoon. I stopped dreading Mondays. I no longer got angry when it rained on the weekend. I felt I could breath freely again. When I left my job, I had been as tightly wound as a kid after ice cream but not as happy. It took me months to unwind, but I did, and I am richer for it.

As I look around me lately, I think that many of us are as wound up as I was, and not always to good effect. We're so busy we don't seem to be able to make time for the things that really matter in the long run - family, deep friendships, learning, service, fun and rest. Keeping food on the table is important but is that really what ALL the busy-ness is about? Honestly?

These days, the buzz word we hear is 'stress'. We have to 'manage' our stress levels while still finding ways to get everything done. At the end of the day, 'doing' seems to be how we're measuring ourselves. We've bought into the idea that 'doing nothing' is wasting time, and with death looming on the horizon all our adult lives, that's close to a sin.

I was looking at a friend's artwork the other day and we were talking about having white space in the composition. Whether it's deliberate or accidental, life as well as art needs a space on which to rest the eye. Chefs know this; there has to be an element in the best designed meal where your pallet can rest, or your taste buds get overwhelmed and the most beautiful flavours are lost.

I believe life is the same way. There needs to be a certain percentage of our day/week/year when we take time. The exact duration, frequency and way of taking it will vary according to each individual, but I believe it's more than just necessary; I believe it's imperative. If we don't take it, life turns into an unexamined, undigested blur, sometimes even a lump, as we run without pause from one activity to another. And don't tell yourself, "but I take a holiday!", if your holiday is as frantic as the rest of the year and you have to 'catch up' when you return!

Sometimes I think we've lost the art of 'nothing'. Even the acts of examining and thinking are still 'something'. When I was in school, if I got caught staring out the window, I was chastised. Staring out the window on school time, or work time, was and is unacceptable. But outlaw it as we may, the healthy student, or worker, will find a way to take it, even if we don't know we're doing so. Some part of our psyche knows that we need it - crave it. The shame is that we most often end up feeling guilty about it.

Doing 'nothing' is like the fallow field that rejuvenates itself for a season. It's the sabbatical that we seem to think only professors need. It's day-dreaming and reveries. It's watching the clouds scud across the sky or birds at the bird feeder. It's watching the rain on puddles and the snow on the windscreen. It's listening to adult conversation ebb and flow around you when you're a kid and not needing to participate. It's staring out the window on a plane or a train and not needing to do anything in that moment. My generation knew how to do it when we were kids. Along the line, I think we've learned to devalue it.

So here's my suggestion for the week ahead, in this frantically busy time of the year, with so many demands, obligatory social functions and so little time: make some space to do 'nothing' - whatever your version is. It may be challenging but do it anyway. Find a space, however small, to 'un-do'. Savour it. Recognize it. Value it. And then see if you wouldn't like to build it into your life more regularly. Consider it a present to yourself. If you're someone who can do healthy 'nothing', then good for you. Keep doing it and model it for us.

I wish you a little morsel of 'nothing' this Christmas season. If, like me, you're more Pagan than Christian, then enjoy the first coming of the light. If you're into the Christmas celebrations, I hope you enjoy the camaraderie and the sharing of goodwill. If you're of another persuasion and have to put up with the negative side of this time of the year, I wish you patience and earplugs, or an invitation to join in our annual craziness. Bless you all.

Hope and a better world

2007-12-01T01:39:00.000-08:00

At this time of the year, in the Northern Hemisphere, I become pensive, especially regarding the state of my world and the larger world around me. I gave up watching and listening to the news many years ago because I found it profoundly disturbing to take in the pervasive levels of fear that seem to coat each item presented in the name of awareness, for the public to consume. And still, the major news of the world sifts into my awareness anyway.

We have three weeks until the tide of light turns and the days begin to lengthen once again. I actually welcome this dark time of year, as I do the long days at the opposite end. Both bring with them the opportunity to purge in different ways. In June, I long for the chance to celebrate the life that surrounds me and expand into the lightness of being that comes with sun and growth. In December, I crawl into my cave, dream my dreams and set my sights on the freshening of hope.

I realize that I’m a little ahead of the game here but I thought that we might need some time to think about this, before the tide of light shifts. I’ve been reflecting this week on how sad I feel when I look at the state of the world. A friend of mine has been sending me articles that remind me that not everything that goes on in the world is reported in the media, and that we must steady our sights on what we strive for, rather than allowing fear to encourage us to lose hope.

Believing that dreams should be made practical in order to manifest, I have set myself the challenge of creating my wish list for a better world. If I were to have the world I could be proud to call home, what would it look like? Here’s what I’ve come up with so far. This is a longer posting that I usually write so I hope you will bear with me and take this away as fodder for thought. I recognize that I’m being idealistic and we’re not there yet; that’s the whole point.

Peaceful
My world would be at peace. I believe that constructive conflict in moderation is healthy. It shows us what matters and what is not yet as we would like it to be. However, I don’t believe we’re meant to live in constant anger, nor carry revenge from one generation to the next. It is harmful to the heart, the mind, the body and our communities. It forces us to expend energy and talent on finding ways to defend ourselves and/or defeat the identified enemy. There are surely more valuable things on which to expend our creative energy.

Confident
This may be fundamentally linked to my first point but let me make it anyway. I would like every child to grow up knowing that they are valued and unique. Let us measure them by their talents and interests, and encourage them to explore these as the basis of their ongoing contribution to their community. Let us treat them with respect so that they will continue to respect themselves and their fellow human beings. Let us celebrate their mistakes as a way for them to learn how to correct themselves and make different choices next time. If we all had more self confidence, maybe we would be less likely to live in fear.

Interconnected
I’d like my world to be like a web, where everyone is connected to everyone else through the forgiving tension of the web. By ‘forgiving’, I mean that the web has elasticity and doesn’t break as soon as it comes under stress. I would know that I matter because whatever I did in my corner of the web would immediately be felt by the rest of the web, and vice-versa. A web such as this would make borders obsolete. I believe that borders are designed to protect power and that the desire for protection is the result of fear.

Transparent
A transparent world would be like everyone having telepathy. There’s no point in lying if your thoughts are transparent. No doubt we would have to learn some strong interpersonal skills to deal with the fallout from having our thoughts on public display, but I believe it’s possible. Incorrect assumptions could be dealt with immediately. Public figures would have to tell the truth. Everyone would have to be more self-aware and responsible.

Learning as a way of life
With the amount of information available in our world and the rate of change that we experience, I believe that learning has to be recognized as a way of life. Teachers have always walked among us and should not be relegated to institutions, with low recognition. We are all teachers when it comes to what we have a talent for and are passionate about. Learning is not something that we only do at school and information shouldn’t be treated as a commodity for those who have the money to pay for it. In my preferred world, we would learn as we felt the need and teach as we had the talent.

Money as energy
I don’t pretend to have the answer to the problem of the equal distribution of money in our world but I confess that I do not like the way it works at the moment. I had exposure to an ‘alternative economic system’ when I lived in Scotland and I liked it. It had potential to be more equitable than our current system which seems usurious to me. Units of barter in an alternative system could be treated as energy that ebbs and flows over time. What’s important is that we keep the units moving, through each person’s spending and earning, and not that we accumulate more than we need or that we go into deepening debt. In my ideal world, people’s worth would be measured by their unique talent and their contribution and not by their bank balance or accumulation of things.

Beliefs that enrich
I see other people’s beliefs as part of the mosaic of humanity and not as a threat to my way of life. Language, culture, religion, food and ritual all make our world a richer tapestry. I would hate to have a homogenous world. On the other hand, belief systems that are intolerant of others’ rights to believe differently are not compatible with the idea of an interconnected web. Ultimately, we will have to come to a global consensus about values that we can all live with, that are mutually respectful and tolerant, otherwise we will not survive to live another day.

Our health and that of the planet
This ties back into our being interconnected. I believe we should treat our bodies the way we treat the planet and our planet the way we treat our bodies. We may have a self-aware brain but that doesn’t give us the right to destroy the natural balance of the planet. In fact, I think it brings a unique responsibility to keep things in balance and not doing so will be to our peril. Finding ways to cure diseases is no great feat when we engineered the conditions that created the diseases in the first place. A healthy body is a balanced body and the same goes for the planet. We have the talent, the ingenuity and the will to clean up the planet and our bodies, and keep them that way. My ideal world is a balanced one.

* * *

I think that’s as long as I can stretch your attention for this week. I hope what I’ve written here inspires thought. Nothing I’ve mentioned is rocket science. It probably isn’t even complete, but I hope it’s positive. It is my fervent wish that there are many more people than just me out there, who see opportunities to create positive change for our future. I hope that there are people working on it as I write this. Blessings on them, whoever and wherever they are. I may not know what they’re doing but they do. I hope they know they aren’t alone. I hope someone spreads the stories about what they’re up to so we can all be inspired and reassured as we approach the solstice time this year.

Finding our path in life

2007-11-25T00:27:00.000-08:00

What do people generally want to know when they go to a psychic? Not surprisingly, I find it's similar from person to person, and even from continent to continent.

Love life
Job and/or life purpose
Family and loved ones
Health
Financial security

But what happens before we get to the psychic? Some people head for the psychic as soon as they run into a glitch but in my experience this isn't the norm. For many people, a visit to a psychic is a last resort. We usually try to figure things out on our own. It's only when we feel we've exhausted all other avenues that we decide we have nothing to lose.

I think this is one of the reasons that we feel so emotional when the psychic sees just what we're up against, without us having to articulate it. We feel seen and understood, when often that isn't the case with other people in our lives, either because we feel we can't reveal our vulnerability or because we're not even sure how to define it ourselves.

It has been suggested to me that these same people only want to know about their future, and not the present or the past. While I think that may be true in the abstract, I don't think it's true in the particulars. I think most of us would prefer to understand what's going on for us in the present, and how we got there, so that we can find our own way into the future. It's only in the absence of understanding what's going on in the present that we feel blocked and hopeless about the future.

The famous Dr. Seuss expressed this very nicely in his last children's book before he died, entitled "Oh the Places You'll Go". I think it applies equally to adults. In it he says:

And when you're in a Slump,
you're not in for much fun.
Un-slumping yourself
is not easily done.

You will come to a place where the streets are not marked.
Some windows are lighted. But mostly they're darked.
A place you could sprain both your elbow and chin!
Do you dare to stay out? Do you dare to go in?
How much can you lose? How much can you win?

And IF you go in, should you turn left or right ...
or right-and-three-quarters? Or maybe not quite?
Or go around back and sneak in from behind?
Simple it's not, I'm afraid you will find,
for a mind-maker-upper to make up his mind.

He suggests that this is when we end up in the 'Waiting Place'. And when we come out of that place, we can find ourselves in the place where we're playing games against ourselves. That's when it gets lonely and scary. Actually, I think he describes beautifully what state people are in when they search out or stumble across a psychic.

They could be:

in a 'Slump', or
not know if they should 'turn left or right', or
in the 'Waiting Place', or
playing games against themselves.

But whichever it is, I think they usually need reassurance that they aren't crazy or deluded, and/or they need another perspective, like putting a new frame on the old picture so that they can see it in a new light.

So you may feel you'd like someone to take over and make the choices for you, or just tell you where you're going to end up, but I'll bet that if someone tried to take the reigns out of your hands, you'd fight to get them back again. I've had several clients who say they wanted to know what the future held for them and when I told them what I saw (which was only a probability in any case), they fought me. It wasn't the 'right' future, the one they had envisaged, although they didn't know that until 'it didn't fit'.

We say we want to see what choices we have but sometimes we can't see the fork in the road because we're preoccupied trying to figure out why it isn't where we expect it to be. It's frustration and hopelessness that makes us want someone else to take the whole thing out of our hands and make it all right. Our foreheads get sore from banging them against the proverbial wall and we just want to see some light. So is it as easy as just asking someone, like a psychic, to tell us what to do?

Ah, I doubt it! Life is sometimes the slog of a march on a road with no markers but I think it's also equal measures of dance, which does not proceed in a straight line. Neither can we expect life to be all one or the other. Too much of either would be really tedious!

I think it's a shame that we're programmed with so much fear... Are we doing enough? Are we doing the right things? Why did this happen to me? What if I don't make the right choice? A pinch of serendipity, an ounce of magic, some patience and a dollop of hard work; that's the recipe. And sometimes you need to reach out for some reassurance or another perspective. It isn't 'cheating'. Then, "Oh the Places You'll Go!"

The good Doctor says, at the end of his book:

And will you succeed?
Yes! You will indeed!
(98 and 3/4 percent guaranteed.)

Lies, lies, and denial

2007-11-18T01:29:00.000-08:00

There is an energy around a lie that is different from the energy around the truth, or the truth as we know it to be. Several of the readings I've done in the last few weeks have raised the topic and so I have been giving it some thought. As I get older and more experienced with people lying to me or to others around me, I find my awareness increasing around when it's happening in the moment; as opposed to seeing it in hindsight. I may not always know what the lie is, or why the person is lying, but I think I can often tell when it happens.

I think denial is a kind of lying to the self. I've come to the conclusion that it most often comes from an inability to face the truth, or what we fear is the truth and what it might mean, perhaps because we feel we are helpless before it. This would mean that very often we lie out of plain old fear. It seems to me that fear is so powerful that the person who is in denial can refuse to see what is pointed out to them, even when the evidence is overwhelming.

How does one get through to that person? Is it even possible? When confronted with lies and/or denial, I find myself hanging on to the hope that one day the person will see what the lies really do in their life; the pain it causes, the further lies to cover up the original lies, the betrayal. We tend to hang in and hope that the boss, family member, or friend will say, "Maybe there is something to what you're saying. Let me have a look at it and I'll get back to you." I hear people saying that they would be happy just to be able to open some dialog. Or they get too frustrated and they give up and walk away.

I'm coming to understand that such an admission of the possibility of letting go of the lies is much more difficult than we might imagine when we wish for it. I suppose it depends what we imagine is the underpinning issue that is causing all the fear. For instance, if the person in question were to believe that he or she is basically a flawed and unworthy human being, and that they would be completely abandoned if anyone were to find out, then that belief would form the cornerstone of their behaviour around everything. It would be the seminal denial and every lie they told would spring from that fear and be designed to protect themselves against ultimate abandonment.

By the time someone came along and pointed out just one little lie or one form of denial that was part of that fabric of lies, acknowledging it would be tantamount to letting someone take the end of the ball of yarn and pull on it. It could unravel their self image and their whole life could fall apart. For them, it might have to be all or nothing in terms of defending the lies. They couldn't allow anyone to touch any part of the web without their whole self image being put in jeopardy.

For some of us, our self esteem is solid enough that we can take a look at what comes our way without it disturbing the bedrock of our identity, although it might still be uncomfortable or even painful to look. Perhaps those people in our lives who are lying or are in denial see that basic confidence in us and believe that we wouldn't understand how they feel. They might feel that such a strong person has 'all the cards', certainly in the confidence department, and they have fewer cards, or none. The other person has power; they don't. The other person is resilient; they're vulnerable. The other person has nothing to lose and they're at risk. It wouldn't seem like an even playing field to them and therefore not safe enough to take such a huge risk as to uncover themselves, even to themselves.

Those people with strong, basic self confidence might try showing their vulnerability, believing that this would demonstrate that they have fears as well, but even that may not work. It's as though even that disclosure is something that you can only make if you're confident enough. And you can't pretend to be less confident than you are; that would insult their intelligence.

The realization I'm finally coming to is that there very often isn't anything you can do, except love them and leave them to get on with their path in life. Even if you're naturally more confident, or even if you've worked hard on yourself to get there, you're still human. You'll misspeak at times, and lose patience, and feel angry. But banging on the door of the person who's in denial is only going to give you a sore hand.

Occasionally, with some people, you might be able to get through. We tend not to have as much emotional baggage with people outside our families and maybe it makes it easier to resolve conflicts with them than it is closer to home. We tend not to be as invested and so are less likely to take offense or get so scared that it's beyond our ability to find a solution.

Having said that, there are times when most of us get triggered by something that pushes our hot buttons and makes us reactive. I had one of those this week! I've done a lot of work on myself over the years, enough to be able to see when it was happening and to pull back and reconsider my reaction– this time.

What I hope is that there are enough of us who are willing and able to take the risk to face what we fear and do the work of rebuilding our confidence, to the point where we don't feel that denial or lying are our only options, so that way down deep inside ourselves we will be confident that we can somehow find our way through the fear and conflict and out at the other end.

In the meantime we need to remember that, sometimes it won't be within our ability to affect the situation directly. That's the key: not within our ability. We do have the power to work on improving our abilities, all of us. But whilst we're doing that, sometimes we'll have to wait and trust that there will be someone, somewhere, who is in the right position to help that person we care about, even though it might not be us just yet.

Kindergarten and the 'Blue Line'

2007-11-09T19:20:00.000-08:00

Conversations around me have been turning lately, and with a degree of hopelessness and cynicism, to the present state of the world. This includes the looming American presidential election, the investigation of ex-prime minister Brian Mulroney's investment dealings with a shady German 'businessman', the state of our global environment, the effects of the current drop in the value of the US dollar, teachers molesting students, gang-style murders in our province, and the list goes on.

Division, deception and suspicion seem to be dominating our news and it makes me so sad. How can it be that we still have not learned that we need to share, that we need to clean up after ourselves and that killing doesn't beget anything other than more killing, no matter how good our intentions? There's a folksy writer living on a houseboat in Seattle who wrote a book called: All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. (Robert Fulghum, Ivy Books, New York, 1986) In it he reflects on some of the things he has learned in life, summarized in this list:

Share everything.
Play Fair Don't hit people.
Put things back where you found them.
Clean up your own mess.
Don' take things that aren't yours.
Say you're sorry when you hurt somebody.
Wash your hands before you eat.
Flush.
Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.
Live a balanced life–learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.
Take a nap every afternoon.
When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together.
Be aware of wonder.

This isn't a remedy for everything that ails us but I think our world might be somewhat simpler if we tried to live by these maxims as a starter.

Bearing in mind how young we are in kindergarten, I'd like to share with you the words, with permission, of my young friend. He's nine years old and I really like his way of looking at the brotherhood and sisterhood of humanity. Sometimes the young are our best teachers.

When I was little I used to think one thing: I thought that everyone was connected in our family by a blue line. Blue is the colour of the sky so it's very hard to see these lines, but sometimes on gray days you can make out little blue flake molecules if you look really hard. This blue line is connected for miles and miles and miles, even to Australia and beyond. And every person in the world is connected to his family through these lines. I believe that this line can never be cut. the air in the world is squished around us because part of it is the blue line because that blue line is connected to every single human being everywhere. Every time a person dies the line fades to a really light blue, but it is still there.

Petitioning the Universe

2007-10-29T23:53:00.000-07:00

I'm in the process of reading a book by Elizabeth Gilbert called Eat, Pray, Love. (see the sidebar for what I'm reading) Elizabeth is a New York Journalist and, in Chapter 9, during a long car ride, complains to her friend about how long it's taking for her divorce to come through. It had been taking an extraordinarily long time and she was wrung out.

She said to her friend, "I don't think I can endure another year in court. I wish I could get some divine intervention here. I wish I could write a petition to God, asking for this thing to end." She then went on to explain to her friend why she thought that she couldn't/shouldn't ask for specific things from God but should instead pray for the courage to face whatever occurred in her life with equanimity.

Her friend's response was as follows:

"Where did you get the idea that you aren't allowed to petition the universe with prayer? You are part of this universe, Liz. You're a constituent - you have every entitlement to participate in the actions of the universe, and to let your feelings be known."

So Elizabeth wrote a petition to God and asked for what she wanted. She humbly made a case for getting rid of one more conflict in this world and said that it would increase the general health of the whole world, letting two more people become free and healthy. (It was a great letter but I'll let you read it in the book.) She signed it respectfully. Then her friend suggested that she should add (symbolically sign) the names of all the people whom she thought would support it. They listed them for an hour as they drove, including her parents and others, alive and dead, as far-flung as Mandela, the Clintons and Gandhi. Then she was exhausted and fell asleep. She was woken by her cell phone ringing. It was her lawyer to tell her that her husband had just signed the papers.

Did I mention that this book is non-fiction? As unlikely as this story sounds, I believe that when we ask for what we want, we should be prepared to get it. Yes, this could be a coincidence. Yes, she might be stretching a point - although I don't think she is.

To write a letter/petition to God or the Universe, I think you have to get very clear in your own mind about what you want and why. Wishy-washy petitions don't usually garner support and we'd best keep that in mind when formulating them.

What do you want? Who will benefit and why? Keep in mind that you can't pull one over on the Universe or the all-knowing-one because, well, he/she/it is all-knowing. You would really look unworthy if you lied about deserving something, or lied about what you really wanted it for, or how many people it would benefit. Even if you don't believe in God, and you're writing to yourself, lying isn't likely to move you closer to what you want. At the very least, you should be honest with yourself.

It seems to me that getting clear is really half the battle. If you can spell out what you want and not have any doubts about it, then you've set your intention clearly enough to manifest what you want or need - especially if it really is in the best interests of your soul and everyone else's. And, in the worst case scenario, if you still don't get what you're looking for, petitioning can't do any harm, can it? It's not like you're using up three wishes.

All this left me wondering how I would phrase a letter. What do I want? How much do I want it? Why?

The 'holding tank'

2007-10-21T23:07:00.000-07:00

My world went through quite an expansion when I left home to go to university in the late seventies. I met many new people from many walks of life and learned about other people's lifestyles, belief systems and histories. Many of the people whom I met during those first years away from home are etched in my memory. I remember having one deep discussion in particular, in my dorm room late one evening, with a new-found friend. We were getting to know one another's views on life and in the process I realized that I was using a technique that I had not, until then, put a name to.

Fear of new concepts
I use this technique to this day. I thought everyone used it until I talked to this new friend and found she didn't. Let me explain. When someone, or some experience in my life, introduces me to a new concept or a new piece of information, especially one with which I am not completely comfortable, I put it into what I described that night as a 'holding tank'. During our discussion, I introduced to this friend just such a new and, to her, uncomfortable concept, and she immediately rejected it - out-of-hand, I thought.

I was surprised that she refused to even entertain the idea and that she was so vehement in her rejection. We had hardly even had a chance to discuss it. When I asked her why she wouldn't even give the concept some thought, she said she already had and that the idea I was suggesting wasn't possible for her. I thought maybe she had thought about it in the past and rejected it, but no, I was the first person to suggest it. She was rejecting it because it felt too unsafe for her to even sit with it while she considered the ramifications.

A holding tank
It was as she explained this that I was able to see my 'holding tank' system for dealing with the unknown. For me, it's a bit like putting an idea into an isolation chamber while I give it a good sniff and figure out what it would mean to my belief system if I took it on board. I can then talk to other people about it. I might research it. I can compare it to what I have always believed in the past, to see if the new concept makes more sense than how I have seen things to date.

Because I have somewhere to put any potentially life-changing concept or piece of information, I don't have to immediately make a decision about it. This system gives me the grace of time. Generally-speaking, I have noticed that if someone pushes me to make a decision faster than I am ready to, I am much more likely to say no, just to be on the safe side. Since rejecting change out of hand might not be in my best interests, I have developed this system to help me process the potential ramifications of the change, whatever it might be.

Entertaining the 'guest' of change
Over the years, I have often referred to this idea when working with clients. For it to work, we have to be able to make a little compartment within ourselves, within our belief systems, where we can 'entertain' a concept as we would an unknown guest in our house. We might only let this guest come as far as the front porch, at least until we determine how comfortable we are with it. Researchers are familliar with this process. They call it setting up a hypothesis, which has to be tested and then validated before it is accepted as fact.

In order to do this, we have to be aware of ourselves as 'people who hold beliefs' and be confident that those beliefs can change without us completely losing our identity. Gaining such an awareness requires a certain degree of objectification of our thought processes. It requires a 'meta' viewpoint. For me this has always been a natural way to see aspects of my beliefs and my behaviour, and the world, but I realize that this isn't always so for everyone.

Some people can take such a meta-position naturally, without even knowing that they do. Others can be introduced to this process and, with some practice, can gain increasing levels of confidence and skill. Still others may never feel comfortable with it, preferring to whole-heartedly take the plunge into change, devil take the hindmost, or instantly reject the change as being too dangerous, or 'not me'. These are different styles; each with their own benefits and drawbacks.

Helping myself grow
I'm happy with my system because it gives me the space to explore with some sense of safety- real or imagined. Perhaps I'm overly cautious and could live a more adventurous life - some might say this is true of me. But at the moment this system suits my personality and allows me to be a little braver than I might be without it. It helps me to deal with being in my own personal 'edge territory' and potentially grow into a greater awareness of my potential self - which was last week's subject.

Contemplating the 'edge'

2007-10-14T00:03:00.000-07:00

In the last couple of months, I have found myself frequently referring to people being 'on the edge' and afraid to step off into the unknown. I've had conversations with many of them but there are many who aren't in a place where they can talk about it yet.

I'm not talking about being so uncomfortable that you want to commit suicide. I'm talking about having the feeling that where you are isn't completely comfortable any more, at the least, or is possibly even downright uncomfortable at the worst. We could call this, 'edge territory'. Any of you who have worked with me have probably heard me refer to this place.

Foggy Land
Edge territory is the the foggy land between the you with whom you can identify and the as-yet unknown you. As we get older, life teaches us more about ourselves. You could say that it increases our window of self-awareness. But all of us have a blind spot. That's the part of ourselves that is still undiscovered. It's hard to deliberately do something about this because a blind spot is, well... blind.

The biggest challenge about increasing our self-awareness and decreasing the size of our blind spot is that we're really not identified with it. We experience it as 'other'. A teacher of mine once said that we often have emotional allergies to the qualities that we see as 'other'.

'Other'
My personal favourite was the 'selfish' person. It was so easy for me to point out anyone who had the slightest scent of what I saw as selfishness. 'Selfish people' were 'them' and I was part of the 'unselfish people'. Once I had this 'allergy' pointed out to me, I could see the nonsense in my perspective, but it took a while! In reality, we all have every quality. Before I could accept that I had this one, I had to reframe it as 'self-ful-ness'. Being selfish is actually a neutral quality. The positive and negative aspects just depend on how we express it.

Exploring Our Wholeness
We may choose not to identify with part of our emotional wholeness, or not express it, but all the emotions are there. For many years, I thought that I wasn't an 'angry person'. In fact, I prided myself in not being angry. I started seeing a therapist in my early thirties and began to see how I expressed, or leaked, my repressed anger. I was under the impression that it wasn't acceptable to be angry, let alone express it.

All the reasons behind why each of us repress certain qualities in ourselves could fill a book. Suffice it to say that some of it is gender-related, some cultural, some to do with the era in which we were raised, and much to do with our life experiences. But lest I mislead you, being afraid of certain emotions or qualities in ourselves isn't the whole story of 'edge territory'.

Reframing
Let's go back to feeling uncomfortable. I was talking to someone at coffee the other day who knows exactly what she wants to do, and she's not doing it. She was under the impression that it was just that she couldn't get organized and get off her duff. We played with the idea that it's related to a responsibility that she has been carrying for years. The need to carry it has all but gone now but she suspects that she might be holding herself back because she's afraid that the need to carry the responsibility could suddenly return. Very simple, but it hadn't occurred to her. If this is in fact true, she may have more options than she had thought, in terms of how she steps out over her personal edge.

Courage and Change
What's 'over the edge', so-to-speak, is unknown and therefore a bit shadowy; ranging from uncomfortable to downright terrifying. One thing is certain; venturing into this place, alone or with support, always brings growth, excitement and change. So, whether we're afraid to go for a dream, or make a long-overdue change, or explore our blind spot, or just own another part of our wholeness, carpe diem!

Love and friendship

2007-10-06T12:54:00.000-07:00

It's a time we call 'Thanksgiving' in my part of the world, a time that is really quite Pagan, if you think about it, as it comes from giving thanks for the bounty of the land after the crops have been harvested for the winter. Everything in the market always looks so appealing at this time of the year that it gets my inspirational cooking juices flowing.

While I always feel particularly aware of Mother Nature in the autumn, I am feeling grateful on this holiday weekend for friendships. A friend of mine hasn't been feeling contented with her looks lately and I was reassuring her that she looks fine. Sound like a platitude? I think it might have to her, although I meant it.

I meant it because I don't look at people I care about with the same eyes as they use to look at themselves. I've been wondering about that. Why don't I look at them that way? I often find myself narrowing my eyes at my reflection in the mirror and getting hypercritical. Why do I do it to myself and not to them?

Perhaps it's because we fall in love with our friends. Yup - that's what I said: 'in love'. I don't mean that we want to hop into bed with them; just that wanting to spend time with someone, listen to their joys and woes, isn't just about being 'kind'. I think we're genuinely in love with some aspect of their character, their persona, their talent. It might be something that we wish we had and believe we don't. It might be some shared passion, sense of humour or cause. Whatever it is, we love it.

And just as with the partner we choose to commit to in life, we may not love everything about them. Being in love doesn't always mean being blind, especially if you've known the person for a long time. You can still get irritated or impatient with them, but overall you love the package, or you wouldn't stick around. Of course I'm talking about healthy friendships.

There are plenty of unhealthy ones around; the ones who become the big screen where we project our disowned power, our unacknowledged weaknesses, our need for whatever we feel we are not, or aren't allowed to be. Maybe you could call those the dysfunctional friendships that could do with a friendship equivalent of divorce.

As I give thanks for my friends, past and present, I suppose I must consider this latter group as well. Even if they aren't presently in my life, they too served me, if only in the negative sense. Either they taught me something or I taught them, probably a little of both. At least I hope that's what came out of it.

I was googling (funny how that's a verb now) some old friends the other day and found a few. One was a girl who lived across the street from me in Montreal. I think I only knew her for about a year and a half, although in child years it felt longer. Even though we were a year apart, we walked to school together and swore to be one another's bosom pals.

I found a picture of her on the web, and even found her email address, but I hesitated when it came to what to say. Do I need to say anything? Maybe it's better for that friendship stay intact in my past, uncomplicated by who we have become. I loved her then, in the way that a child loves their bosom pal. That apple has already been polished.

I have some friends with whom I feel special, like that polished apple. When I have visited with them, or spoken to them on the phone, I feel like a more beautiful, more splendid, or talented person - my best self. I feel accepted, celebrated, a worthy contributor to their well being, uplifted. Perhaps this is the everyday equivalent of a standing ovation.

I wish we all saw ourselves through the eyes of our best friends. Perhaps we would be more contented with ourselves. It's certainly cheaper than drugs and even better than vitamins to keep us healthy.

So, on this Thanksgiving, I give thanks for the wonderful balm of friendship.

Just what is it that you do anyway?

2007-09-28T23:12:00.000-07:00

The other day, I found myself explaining to an acquaintance just what it is that I do. I thought it was a legitimate question. After all, I'm not a doctor or a lawyer or a fire chief. Most people would not have heard of what I do, and even if they had, they still might not be sure what it is.

I've heard the question quite a few times lately and so I imagine that trotting out my stock answer isn't what the Universe has in mind for me. I find that we're not usually asked to repeat something if we don't need to go over it again and catch something we've missed. Therefore, I answered this woman's question very carefully.

Many of you have worked with me in the past and so you may know one or several aspects of what I do. I have explained each aspect before and I think I have the descriptions pretty tight by now. I am, variously and in combination, a therapist, coach, management and communication skills trainer, psychic, healer, medium and writer. And while I am all of these, they don't really define the essence of what I do.

I suspect that it isn't so much what I do that needs capturing so much as it is who I am. When I graduated from school with a management degree under my belt, I looked for a vocation that would allow me to use who I was, with only limited matches. At twenty-two years old, I was still trying to think conventionally and I didn't fully understand who I was.

Now, at closer to fifty than forty-five, I am much clearer about who I am, and therefore what I do. Firstly, I think I'm a diagnostician. Here's what I said to that acquaintance I was telling you about... No matter where you put me, I soak up the environment and try to make sense of it.

I use every tool at my disposal. I call it my kit-bag. Think of me as an intelligent sponge. I soak up the environment and process it. In the best-case-scenario I can discern a pattern that means something to someone around me. In a family setting, an office, an organization, a relationship, a classroom or across the world, that could mean that what I pick up provides a different perspective, an insight, a challenge, some recognition or in some cases, just a starting place for figuring things out.

In my kit bag is who I am; all the skills I've acquired and practiced, all the experiences I've had, all the experiences I've listened to, all the books I've read and all my talents. We all have them - talents, I mean. I believe we are meant to use them. They are our 'unfair advantage' and we're meant to share them in whatever way we can.

The really minimalist thing about what I do is that I don't need any supplies or infrastructure. All I need is me and my senses. And the person or group with whom I'm working. That's why I can work in a coffee shop, a park, a plane or an office. Information is information. It doesn't matter if it comes in the form of words/sounds, body language, energy, prayers or pictures. Ultimately, everything has a feeling to it.

That brings me to the second part of what I do ... I talk, or write, and watch for feedback. Sometimes it feels a bit like translation because not all of what I 'pick up' when I'm in 'sponge mode' translates easily into language, but I do my best. I'm clear that I don't have all the answers. My job is to assist. Synergy and synchronicity are key ingredients. I never know what I'm going to be assisting with, from day to day. That's what makes my life so exciting, and interesting.

Back in the days when I didn't really understand what I was doing, when I thought I was a management trainer in the hospitality industry, I was asked by my then out-going boss to give her some feedback on what she was like as a boss, and what I thought she could improve upon. I took this request very seriously and went away overnight to consider carefully just what I should say to her that would be useful in her new job.

We had lunch the next day and I gave her my feedback. Now, given what I have been doing for the last twenty-five years, I realize that what I did for her was a psychic reading combined with observation. The poor woman probably didn't know what hit her. Don't get me wrong; it was professional, respectful constructive and thoughtful. But it was also very accurate and somewhat disconcerting. I honestly didn't know what I was giving her.

Nowadays I work with more awareness stemming from having lived for another twenty-five years. I've learned to expand the parameters of what I call 'work'. The woman who asked the question of me the other day was explaining about a team-building intervention in which she had participated at work a short while ago. I've conducted those in my time but I'm clear that while I'm a good trainer, it's not the best use of my skills.

This is what I do where I have an advantage:

1. soak up 'vibes' and make observations
2. find a way to communicate them
3. listen to the feedback and refine the observations
4. help the person or group to make a plan, if needed, and assess their progress

Once a person or group has figured out what they're working on and why, the REAL issues, that's half the battle won. The rest can be accomplished with skill and logistics. I'm not afraid to work 'outside the box' and my ego doesn't require that anyone even need to know I've been there. I read a web site the other day where the author referred to this as a secret adviser. I call it Private Counsel but that doesn't really do it justice. It's just a tag.

Do you think this answers the question?

A blue line

2007-09-23T23:04:00.000-07:00

I'm late posting this week because I was involved in a memorial celebration for a friend of mine who died this past July. About two hundred and fifty people gathered for a few hours this sunny September afternoon, at a stately old house on the grounds of the University of British Columbia.

Friends, family and colleagues came from far and wide to participate. It was like a gathering of the clans. Some people were of the same family, or branches of the same family, but the rest of us were members of the human family.

Over the last ten-plus-years I have come to know my friend Geoff, his wife Fleur and his son Aidan. They own the house in which I live on the garden level. Many of the people who were at the celebration today have come and gone over the years I've lived here and I have met and come to know them. Geoff was diagnosed with cancer about a year and a half before he died and many of those people, and more, came by the house to see Geoff and to support his wife and son. They were almost all there today.

The ones whom I had not already met I had heard stories about. The afternoon was not long enough for me to be able to put names to faces and talk to all of the people whom I felt I already knew. I will have to trust that there will be time in the future, although, if there is one thing that Geoff's illness reinforced for me, it was that we should not put off until tomorrow what is important to do today. Carpe Diem.

Geoff's mother's partner and a friend of Geoff's with whom he used to play hockey worked on different stages of a computerized slide show of photographs of every stage of Geoff's life. Many things were left out because forty-seven years are hard to compress into a short presentation but there was enough there for most people who knew him to be able to smile through the tears in recognition.

I was one of the people who spoke and I went up last to read something that Geoff had written last winter and had asked me to read. Coming on the heels as it did, of his brother and sister's comments and those of a University friend, I could see so clearly how this last piece was one strand of the tapestry of his life. In fact, I was acutely aware that this is so for all of us, no matter at what age we depart.

Ultimately our life is summarized by all the people who share our life's experience, who inspire us, who warn us by word or deed not to proceed in a particular direction, who challenge us as well as those who come together to mourn our passing. Even those who couldn't make it today share in this tapestry.

As I listened to those who spoke, and many others whose comments I heard or overhead as we circulated afterwards, I heard so many different perceptions of Geoff. Each individual held select pieces of the many facets of the person he was; early in life, in his married years, as a hockey player, as an architect, as a journalist, a photographer and as a friend. The more I heard, the better I felt I knew him, even after his death. Not only did we all come together to celebrate a life lived, to mourn a man lost, but we form a living web that will continue to add depth and breadth to the man who lives on in all the people who knew him.

I would have called this the 'ripples in the pond of life' but his son put it so much better. I wish I had the actual words in front of me but my memory will have to suffice for now. Aidan is nine and his contribution today was to say, among other things, that he thinks that we are all connected to one another by a blue line. It's the colour of the sky so you can't always see it, but it connects all of us to one another. Essentially we're all one.

I couldn't have said it better myself. Somewhere out there Geoff is still connected to us all through love and a blue line. Gone in some ways but not gone in all ways. I believe we are all connected by participating in one another's lives and by witnessing one another's joys and sorrows. We create one another, even after death.

Purpose string

2007-09-14T19:40:00.000-07:00

I tuned in to a young woman's energy the other day. She has been feeling exhausted and unwell. The doctors haven't been able to find the cause and she and her family are feeling worried and frustrated. Without looking for any information, I suddenly picked up one line and it was:

"She has lost her connection to her purpose string."

My sense was that she experienced some sort of trauma and her connection to her purpose string was wrenched. Sometimes I receive information that contains a concept which I haven't heard of before and this was one of those times. As a term "purpose string" is so clear and quite delightful. So much so that it made me smile in recognition. Even though I've never heard of it, I feel I know exactly what a purpose string is.

I imagine it going all the way up my spine and into the sky and the Universe, and that if I tug on it, something on the other end will tug back. It feels reassuring, as if I might need a reminder about why I'm here and it is always there - like spell-check.

If I didn't have a purpose string, then I imagine I might not be very well grounded. I might lose sight of who I am and how to navigate through my life. How would I know what is right for me? I began to think about all the times when we make pivotal decisions in life and what we need as a reference point in order to make those choices. What do I study? Who do I want as a friend? What city should I live in? Who should I marry?

One thought leads to another in my thinking processes and as soon as I began to think of pivotal decisions, I corrected myself and considered that big choices are based on thousands of daily choices. Surely a purpose string would influence many of those as well. I pick up a book to read based on my interests, which are connected to my purpose in life. Friends and potential mates could be drawn to me based on who I am, my interests, my values and my choices.

I wondered if a computer without an operating systems might make a good metaphor for life without a purpose string but I had second thoughts about that. An operating system isn't a blueprint for what to do with the computer. It just gives you a tool to access data. The 'data', or the purpose, comes from a part of ourselves that has access to the bigger picture of our lives whereas the day-to-day part of ourselves can sometimes get lost in minutiae.

I don't know if what I sensed about the young woman was correct. Time will tell but she has led me to think about my purpose string and what it means in my life. It provides a touchstone that informs my choices and gives me comfort when I'm not sure where the turns in the road in front of me will lead. If I lost it, I would feel as though I had been cast adrift in a boat without a rudder, not knowing where I was going or how to get there. I might be tempted to navigate with an external compass instead of my internal one.

I suspect we all have a purpose string but I need to talk to some more people about it to find out more about their experience.

Edgewalking

2007-09-09T01:04:00.000-07:00

An Edgewalker, according to a book by that name just written by Judi Neale, is defined this way:

They're the first people to volunteer to head up a new business unit, lead a cross-company initiative, or take on an overseas assignment. They're the glass half-full folks, who are constantly thinking "out of the box," forging alliances with colleagues in other departments, seeking out new solutions to old problems, and anticipating challenges on the horizon. And in today's increasingly diverse workplaces, they are often people who have pursued unusual educational and career paths, traveled widely, and speak more than one language. Judi Neal has a term for these people: Edgewalkers. Literally, an Edgewalker is someone who walks between two worlds.

I haven't read the book yet but it seems to me from her web site that the author is focused on several different roles in the workforce. I find I'm more interested in how Edgewalkers might behave in society in general. My term for them has been 'deviant bees'. I feel that I am one; either a deviant bee or an Edgewalker. I really like the term Edgewalker though. (Find out if you are an Edgewalker by completing Judi's questionnaire)

I see them as the people who walk the edge between the known and the unknown in any community. You could be one in your profession, in your community, your family - in any group really, where the known is trying to grow into the unknown. A friend of mine has always been great at trying out new things that are available on the market. I admire that trait in her and sometimes wish I had it. It see it as an adventurous quality in her whereas I tend to wait until something has been around for a while, until I get used to seeing it around and someone else has tried it, and then I decide that maybe I'd like to have one.

I think I walk the edge in other spheres though. My sphere is the spiritual/emotional side of life. Sometimes I feel that I'm so avant-guard that what I'm looking at doesn't even have words to describe it yet. I like being in that weird territory, even though it isn't always comfortable. I'm willing to risk people not understanding me, or even ostracizing me in some situations because somehow it's worth it. It's where I live. It's home in some strange way.

I don't imagine that true Edgewalkers try to be what they are. It just happens because of the way they look at the world. I don't even imagine that you could recruit people to be a part of that group. You either came wired that way at birth or you didn't.

Judi says on her web site that she thought there were very few Edgewalkers in the workforce and that they need to be more appreciated but she got a flood of feedback from people at her talks saying that they felt that she was being biased towards the role and neglecting others. To her surprise more people than she expected thought they were Edgewalkers, many of them just in some areas and not others.

In the course of my research, I came across a group in the US called BlogHer. These are women bloggers, blogging about everything under the sun. I found one a few days ago and I'll link you to it here. This BlogHer was talking about what she refers to as the 'S-word' in business. 'S' being spirituality. She carefully defines it as 'not religion' and says that businesses would do well to acknowledge that it is important to a number of employees, and even customers. I'm paraphrasing but my take on it is that businesses will ignore it at their peril.

When I was in the business world in the 80s, and even in the 90s, if you mentioned anything spiritual, you immediately and automatically lost credibility. Many of the issues I work with are related to what we see as spirituality, although I don't think they are truly limited to that area. It's just a catch-all label for a bunch of things we're not yet comfortable talking about in the world of work. Business ethics and personal integrity, values, fears about illness and incapacitation, death, birth, marriage, friendship, self worth and meaning; I think all of these are very much related to our spiritual outlook in life. They may also relate to our religious beliefs and practices but not only to those.

This 'S' area, for lack of a better term, is what interests me. How does it affect how we work and what we work on, with whom and how well? I don't think human beings work optimally without meaning, and meaning is derived from many things. Just wanting more money in order to buy more security and more material things seems a mean and limiting expectation of what motivates us.

I'm hoping that we're going to get fed up with being on the often fear-ridden, material treadmill and seek something with richer meaning. I hope that we demand more of our jobs and our relationships at work. Given how much time we spend there and how influential our work environments are on our lives, I hope that we can do better than we have been doing. I suspect that there are a growing number of people who are getting fed up, or we wouldn't have so many home-based businesses, children being home-schooled, or even people retiring early in order to do something that holds more meaning for them.

I celebrate walking on the edge, in whatever capacity we do it. I found a post card years ago that read:

If you're not living on the edge, you're taking up too much space.

Paying it forward

2007-08-31T23:45:00.000-07:00

I was reminded the other day by a friend of mine that service is where we start when we don't know how to get to where we want to be. If you don't know how to get there, help someone else to get to where they want to be and watch it snowball (as we say in Canada). Somehow it shifts you into a higher vibration of energy, a more optimistic place. You'll end up getting the help you need as well.

My childhood was the learning ground for what I know about service. I learned it from my mother and a few key people in my community. I didn't think about service as 'service' when I was a kid. It was just what I did. Helping other people do things made me feel good and gave me an opportunity to get to know them better.

It wasn't a 'cool' thing to do when I was young. I was called 'little-miss-goody-two-shoes' at school. I didn't like the teasing but I guess it didn't bother me enough to make me stop doing what I was doing. I was sensitive but I was stubborn. In one of my early jobs I was even told by a head-hunter that I was too altruistic. I thought I knew what the term meant but he was using it as though it were an insult. I had to go home and look it up to be sure I hadn't misunderstood.

My trusty Webster's dictionary says that it means:

1. unselfish concern for the welfare of others; selflessness
2. Ethics the doctrine that the general welfare of society is the proper goal of an individual's actions: opposed to egoism

I wouldn't call myself selfless. I have as much interest in things turning out well for myself as anyone else. However I do believe that if we look after society as a whole, it will be a better place for each member of a community. I don't remember having to learn that concept as much as I remember learning what it was called after the fact.

I find that helping other people just plain feels good. Perhaps we live in a society where people don't help one another as much as we could, perhaps because we are living at such a fast pace and feel we don't have time. One of my friends says that we are all one on the cosmic level anyway, and we have to treat one another that way. She's serious about this; she doesn't just pay lip service to it. She's in a wheelchair and she still finds ways to help people.

Themes come up in my life sometimes and there have been several reminders about service lately, and not just from the friend I mentioned earlier. The other day I met a young immigrant couple when I was out for coffee. Their history was interesting. The man escaped from Iran many years ago and declared himself to the United Nations as a political refugee. He had to leave his family and the life he knew behind, starting over in Canada with no English. He wasn't looking for sympathy - far from it - he was just responding to our questions about how he came to be here. But his is not the first story of escape I've heard in the last little while.

Each story I hear tells of complete strangers who came to the aid of the escapee at some key point in their journey. Granted, there were also plenty of people ready to take advantage of them, but there were also people who made considerable sacrifices out of the goodness of their hearts. Those acts of kindness can make the difference between surviving or being caught and shot.

His wife has only recently arrived in Canada from Turkey. She's a surgical nurse and is getting her English up to scratch and converting her qualifications, both of which are taking much longer than she had hoped. Her being a new immigrant reminded me of what it felt like for me to arrive in Scotland and only know one person. Admittedly I spoke the language and that made things considerably easier but I had to start from the beginning with networking and making a community for myself. I will always remember the people who made the transition easier for me, just like the people here in Vancouver who gave me a place to stay when I first arrived here seventeen years ago. They were very kind to me and I will be forever grateful.

This evening I was at a friend's house helping her to pack her life into a van. She has just found herself a job in a new town and is moving this weekend. I had said I would come over and lend her a hand but she was surprised when I actually followed through. The other people she had asked had not. I've been in her shoes many times. I know what it feels like to be left in the lurch as well as have generous help and I'm putting back into the pot what I took out many years ago. As I have heard so many times: we don't always get to help the people who helped us, but we can help someone else instead.

A wonderful film I watched recently coined the term 'paying it forward'. An eleven year old boy was given a social studies project to come up with an idea that he thought would change the world and make it a better place. This boy decided that he would find three people who really, really needed help but who hadn't asked for it. They had to need something that he could do for them and that would be a stretch for him to do. It couldn't be something that would be easy. It had to involve some personal sacrifice. It had to really matter. Then he had to help them out. The only request he would make of them would be that they do the same for another three people. He thought that if people would take his idea seriously and would do it, it would spread around the world.

The idea gave me goosebumps. If we could all do that, I believe it really would change the world. We could all be personal angels. It's so intimate, so real, so personal, and makes us feel so alive. Doing something because you feel you have to isn't the right energy. Doing something because it's the right thing to do and it feels right, that's what makes a difference in this world.

I've been on the receiving end of such generosity and it makes me spontaneously cry, because it touches my heart. We don't have to do it all the time, or for everyone - just when the spirit moves us. The fringe benefit is that we get back what we put out. But watch out because you never know what form it could take!

Outer experience matching inner truth

2007-08-26T00:59:00.000-07:00

I've just received an astrological update from a guy who lives and works in Australia. I've been reading his full moon and new moon updates for a couple of years now and find them very insightful. They are not astrological charts in the sense of having a 'birth chart' done but rather they are discussions of the general circumstances in which we all find ourselves at the moment.

I admit to not being very astrologically savvy. At best I can say that I understand some of the underlying principles. However, I do appreciate some astrological guidance in the form of his weather reports. Several of my friends also read these letters and I'm always amused by the fact that we get different things from them. I guess we hear what we need to. Isn't that so with life in general?

This month's letter was informative for my personal process which I won't go into here but I will note one thought that has stayed with me. I believe we have come to a time when we have the opportunity to make our outer experience match our inner truth. Let me explain what I mean by this.

I'll begin by going back more than twenty-five years to an example from my own experience. I started my career in the business world although at the time I was a bit surprised. I wasn't a kid who grew up knowing that I wanted to be a business woman. In fact my dreams were never about any ordinary profession on the check-list of what to be when you grow up. However, from the time I was old enough to know what the paranormal was, I wanted to have something to do with it. I didn't know how but that was what interested me.

Through a set of seeming co-incidences I ended up in business school and then working in the hotel industry. The only thing about it that made sense was that I was in the Human Resources department and so was essentially dealing with psychology. About two years before I left the business world, I enrolled in a six-month course designed to help me explore my psychic abilities. It opened a door that I went through and never looked back. I was still in the business world but I never said a word about what I was exploring. I believed I had to split myself in two because it was not acceptable to reveal that side of myself in my work environment and maintain any sort of professional credibility.

I stayed in that split state, living a conventional life during business hours and an esoteric life in my private life, for about three years. When I changed careers and studied psychotherapy, I took the opportunity to step out and acknowledge what I was doing and learning psychically. Although it felt like a huge risk at the time, it was an enormous relief not to have to hide parts of myself and I noticed that openly incorporating my intuition into my work made me better able to help my clients.

Since then the 'long-bony-finger-of-the-Universe' has continually challenged me to deepen the synthesis between my inner and outer world. I don't think I was incorrect in my assessment of what would be acceptable in the business world all those years ago; I just think that what I had deemed unacceptable in the 80s and 90s has been changing over the last few years. Not only is it changing but I believe that using our intuition is going to become a survival tool.

It's becoming ever clearer to me that we are not here on this planet to play it safe. That doesn't enliven us or help us grow. I've noticed something interesting; whenever I learn something in my personal life, I am almost instantly called upon to turn around and teach it to whoever is standing close behind me on the ladder of life - lest I be deluded or insecure enough to believe I am all alone in my experience! It's like passing a bucket in an old-fashioned fire line, from the lake to the burning building. So let's assume that one or other of you might be behind me in the line... here's the bucket I'm passing along.

I am learning that I am being called to be the most 'me' I can possibly be. I am not here to be just like everyone else. I am not here to conform, or look pretty, or be reasonable, or make more money, or be famous. I'm here to be uniquely me and by doing so, to encourage others to do the same. When we don't embrace all of who we know we are, there is a very real and persistent angst gnawing away inside us. I believe the angst comes as a result of the dissonance we feel when we try to keep some essential part of ourselves under cover, or under the radar. I'm coming to the conclusion that it just takes too much energy to pretend we are not something that we are. Compare that expenditure of energy to what is released when we let our 'me-ness' out into the light of day and revel in it.

To be sure, it is at first a bit scary, but I am recognizing that I need my outer experience to match my inner truth. It's a journey that I take every day, one step at a time. I'm gradually finding out what my inner truth is. It's a process. It reveals itself a little more each time I think I've figured it out. It's not a destination; it's a journey. I can always tell there's another level to explore by what it feels like inside me. If I am denying some aspect of my inner truth, I feel uncomfortable. You could even say it's an adventure in getting to know myself and then introducing that better integrated self to the world.

I leave you with these questions:

In what way are you being invited to match your outer experience with your inner truth?
What aspect of who you are do you suppose is calling to you?
Where is the edge over which you are frightened to step but which is strangely compelling?
How might embracing it enliven you and broaden your horizons?

You don't have to leap right away! Awareness is always the first step so invite your 'opportunity' out for coffee and get to know it a little better.

Stand up and be counted

2007-08-17T22:02:00.000-07:00

Reading the book that's currently on my bookshelf, Shake Hands with the Devil by Romeo Dallaire, I have been thinking about all the little things that we do, or don't do, and how those choices shape the world. At first I was feeling quite despondent, probably as a result of how hard the author had to fight to get anyone to pay attention to the genocide taking place in Rwanda. I can read the book now but all those people died in the interim and we can't bring them back. I've been noticing how helpless many of us are feeling just now, about everything from local traffic flow to global warming, and wondering what the solution is.

In my typical fashion, I am reading several books at once and one of them, already mentioned here, is It's the Thought that Counts by David R. Hamilton PhD. He and many others suggest that we actually create our reality through what we think. If I were to apply that concept to empowering myself as well as to the daunting things like global change, then I imagine that the big changes in the world can only come about through increased individual empowerment. Waiting for an existing 'powerful' organization to do something about these changes doesn't seem to be doing it.

You and I feel more empowered when we think differently about ourselves and our impact on our world - when we believe we make a difference. I think that self esteem is really at the root of self empowerment. If I don't think I'm worth anything, then I certainly won't believe that I can have any impact on my fellow human beings, never mind on the planet. If, as I also believe, we are all connected in a giant and elegant web of energy, including thoughts, and if I feel better about myself and as a result I believe that what I think matters, I am more likely to call my local member of parliament and express my views.

I could even start with something smaller than that: I could start by acting as though I matter. That would mean that by riding my bicycle to the park instead of taking the car, I do make a difference. Maybe I won't make that much of an impact all by myself but a million of us making one choice like that a month - that makes a difference. And it's only ONE choice.

I don't mean my blog today to be about ecology, although it's a worthy topic. I'm really trying to say that we need to get out of the 'who, little ol' me?' syndrome. If I matter, then one person's life lost in Rwanda matters too. If I have the right to speak up and voice my opinion at a dinner party, then I also have the right to speak up at a local community meeting. Voices in chorus are easier to hear but we can't have a chorus if everyone is afraid they can't sing.

I watched an interesting documentary on television the other night about a micro-lending scheme run by an enterprising young couple in San Francisco, www.kiva.org. They have made contacts in a community in an African nation. With a representative there, they were able to set up a system whereby people in the vilage who need money to start or grow their business, can present their need/proposal to a committee of their peers sitting in the shade under a tree.

The whole business community of the village gather to vote on whose proposals are deserving of funding. The details of the successful requests are then posted on a web site administered from San Francisco. The next stage involves interested lenders in the so-called first world who have a few dollars they would like to use to finance one of the African community members. They can browse all the proposals and then make one or more contributions to projects they deem to be worthwhile. When one lender, or in some cases several lenders, have fully funded a project, the borrower is informed and the money is forwarded to the rep who puts the cash into the hands of the borrower.

The lenders see an on-line photograph of the borrower and their project. They can follow the borrower's progress and are eventually paid back according to their repayment agreement. So far, at the time of the documentary going to air, there had been 100% repayment. There are many advantages to their system but I was captivated by the personal connection and immediacy of it.

You don't need to be a multi-millionaire to help someone on the other side of the world and you get a sense of personal satisfaction, of empowerment, when you can make a real difference in the life of another human being. There is no middle person to take a cut. The full amount goes exactly where you thought it would and then multiplies around the community.

I don't really know why we have to go halfway around the world to do this, except that less money goes further there. But I'm sure there are plenty of opportunities for this sort of enterprising aid right in our own backyard. Helping someone who needs it opens the heart and makes us feel needed. We matter. We are in touch with our own humanity.

Tom Friedman who writes for the New York Times said in his new book that he believes that Americans won't begin to make progress in their challenge to become more ecologically proactive until the government legislates a tax/cost for carbon emissions. He believes that Americans will only act in their own self-interest, which is measured by the impact on their wallets. The micro-lending project would suggest otherwise.

I was once 'accused' of being too altruistic but I have always felt that there are some things we should be do just because they are right. I don't believe that the whole world operates on nothing but the profit motive, as much as some would like us to believe this to be so. Some people, many more than we might think, have been sitting at home and quietly wondering why we keep doing what we have always done, even when we can see that we're heading for a train wreck. Perhaps they feel so disempowered that they don't believe that their voice would be heard if they spoke up.

If I matter, I have to sing my own song and hope there are others who will join in. What makes you feel strongly enough to stand up and be counted?

Re-finding centre

2007-08-10T23:54:00.000-07:00

Today I would like to remind us (you and me) that we are divine creatures (did you ever doubt it?) each with our own divine purpose - even if we don't always know how to describe what that may be. If, as I believe, we create in this world from what we think, then we had better get with the program and think positively. It's hard to be divine when we're buried under fear and negativity.

I've noticed quite a few people lately who seem to have been knocked off their centers, and I can include myself among them. Always alert to 'signs' from my 'higher self', I sat down and read an article that a friend had just sent me. It comes from SOLARA's surf reports which discuss the energies they say we are currently experiencing in our lives. Interestingly, it started out by describing something very similar to what I had described to someone in a conversation the day before, so I'll quote a little piece of it:

"During the final days of July and the first few days of August, everything came to a seeming halt. It felt as if the track we had been riding upon for a long time was suddenly dismantled. We could travel no further on the old track and had to wait until the new titanium express track was ready for us. ..."

Among other things, the article reminds us go inside ourselves and find our center/core once again. Not bad advice. Not that it means we don't need to do anything else of course, but it's a good place to start when we wobble off-centre.

I thought I'd experiment so I conjured up my childhood freedom of expression and sat down with crayons and paper to draw what I think my core being looks like. This wasn't the me who walks the street in shoes and a hat. This was the me that I come back to when I have to choose a direction in life. I've noticed that either/or sorts of decisions are not so difficult for me. The ones I find more troublesome are the ones where the road seems to have evaporated before my very eyes and I have to decide whether to stay put or set off in some direction across what looks like a desert - not a palm tree or water hole in sight.

Next I drew a graphic representation of what I'd like to have in my life. Pictures force me to get away from words and therefore to focus on the grander scale of things and not the minutia. I'm at a point where I would like to generate some new clients so I drew a picture of me working. I called it 'be-doing' because I think it should combine being and doing - since I'm a human being and not a human doing AND I like to be doing something that gives me satisfaction.

It was successful because I have to say that I felt more centered once I was finished. As a result of this process I decided that it was also a good time for me to remind myself of some of my life-long guiding principles. They might not be exciting because many of them are tried and true but here they are:

do unto others because what goes around comes around and because you can't ask to be treated better than you treat others
leave things as you find them, or better
always do the best you can with what you have
share
do no harm
express gratitude for the blessings that come your way
graciously accept help when it is offered
speak the truth as you know it
be open to learning
respect yourself and others
there is no such thing as coincidence so be curious about it when it seems to appear
you never know what good things are around the corner
we never encounter anything in life without being given the resources to deal with it as well
we have everything we need to know within our grasp - we just forget that we do
we are all connected to one another so we are truly our brother's/sister's keeper
we are much more than will fit into our tiny earth bodies
at the end of our time here, we can't take things with us
we are never alone
helping others is a great privilege
we are what we believe
the world is full of opportunities
energy cannot be destroyed
linear time is an illusion
love heals
we attract more of what we put out - often multiplied
everything is perfect, given the right perspective

I don't mean any of these to be schmaltzy. To me they're very practical. I see everything on this list as its energy equivalent (physics &/or Universal laws). You might think of more to add to the list but this is good for starters. Well, I feel better already.

Endings and beginnings

2007-08-03T23:23:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine died on July 21st. He was in the prime of his life and there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to his being plucked from our lives so early. In my parlance, I would say that he had work to do elsewhere and we were lucky to have had him for as long as we did, however I recognise that that doesn't necessarily provide much solace for his friends and family who are struggling with the loss.

This is the first time in my life that I have witnessed the gradual letting go of life and while it was emotional, it was also a privilege. I forget sometimes what a taboo there is about talking about death in our culture. I never learned to speak of it in a hushed voice and indirect references, in large part because my mother didn't. I have to keep reminding myself to walk gently when around those who are more sensitive. In my own strange way, I have always felt close to the people I've known who have died. I summon them up when I feel in need of their input. I suppose you could say that I have an active meta-life that includes the dearly departed. In that respect I am somewhat unusual.

When it was getting close to the end, my friend's wife said to him that births and deaths are miracles and should be treated that way, or words to that effect. I agree with her sentiments. To witness either one is a wondrous event. I've always thought that where we go when we die must be the same place as where we come from when we are born. When a babe is born, we don't imagine that he or she is coming from a horrible place, so I've always thought that we should be comforted to know that those who die go back there again when they leave our company.

I hear over and over that death is frightening because it is a journey into the unknown. We say that no one ever comes back and tells us what it's like on the other side. As far as a physical body is concerned, that's true. But I'm not so sure it's true of other means of communicating. This is perhaps where we cannot survive on science alone, which doesn't know how to prove where a 'non-scientifically-verifiable' message comes from and therefore won't give it credence. Myths, folklore and religious traditions are full of messages from beyond the grave but they can't be scientifically proven.

I have often been the intermediary for some of these messages from 'the other side' and I have to admit that I'm not particularly interested in proving their veracity. I'm satisfied that they are authentic and so I focus instead on what the message does for the recipient and leave the rest to the scientists among us. It appears to me that quite often there is unfinished business when someone dies and there is some urgency to the messages from people's departed friends and family.

When clients come to me asking to speak to someone who is dead, I usually find that I can make contact just by asking for it. The nature of the contact is as unique as the people were themselves. One woman's mother sang a line to a song - quite humorous if you know my singing voice! Sometimes the departed give advice, sometimes they answer a question and sometimes they just reassure the the client that they are safe and happy where they are and not to worry. Interestingly, many of the departed ask for forgiveness. It would seem that they can see things from their new vantage point that they couldn't when they were alive.

Participating in this process is emotional and exciting if you don't believe that anything exists beyond the physical plane. However, if like me you believe that the earth plane is just one of many options, then what I do is still a privilege but quite matter-of-fact. Even people's pets have been known to come through, and not just good old Aunt Maisie. I think that people have been seeking reassurance about their loved ones' departures, animal or human, for as long as we have been around on this planet. I see it as quite natural to be concerned and to miss the one who is gone.

I have a friend who lost her husband to a heart attack about twenty-five years ago. She is herself a healer and so at least familiar with realms of 'otherness' but to this day she is annoyed with her husband for not communicating with her once he was dead. I hear this a lot from clients in both therapy sessions and readings.

I often wonder if the dead aren't communicating with us in such a 'usual' way that we just dismiss it as too 'ordinary', as if the contact should come with a clap of thunder to make it extraordinary enough to be from the other side. Perhaps when the dead person comes into our thoughts, that's a form of contact. I suspect that the dead would not want to frighten those they leave on this side and so would keep the contact withing the realm of the expected. It may be a fine line for them to walk: too ordinary and it risks being dismissed as 'just my own thoughts', and too extraordinary and you frighten the person into thinking they are losing their marbles.

My job, when I am involved as the intermediary, is often just to hold the container that keeps the contact between realms safe. I can tell the client that this experience isn't crazy. I have to say that often there is some sort of confirmation of who is on the other side so that the client knows that I'm not just making it up. Conversely however, sometimes there is no message from the other side, or no new message from the other side.

I worked with a family a few years ago who needed to be told the same thing over and over because they didn't want to accept it. The deceased wanted them to know that his death had been part of his plan and was on schedule, and that he had other commitments waiting for him. He said he was fine where he was and that it was his time. The family were afraid that he had rejected them and left them behind. They wanted to know why, if this was part of a plan, he hadn't told them that it was going to happen. He kept trying to explain to them that he hadn't known in that earthly way but that it was scheduled in the bigger, spiritual plan. That may be more of a consolation when time has healed the immediate wounds a little more and not fully appreciable in the grieving moment we were in. It appeared that the message needed to be delivered at that particular time because I was available then and they trusted me not to mislead them.

Considerations of births and deaths and grand plans leads me once again to the concept of time and what it really means. If we lead many lives, are they concurrent as I believe or consecutive, the way history records them? If they are concurrent, then do the choices we make in this life affect history, and how? On the comical side of things, I have a picture in my head of a bevy of monks running around with their parchment and quills, rewriting history every time someone makes a choice that influences another lifetime. It's mind-boggling and I will leave that topic for another time.

I just hope that my friend's family and friends are able to find peace with his passing and that, wherever he is, he is enthusiastic about the next stage of his soul's existence. Go in peace my friend.

Thank God for taste buds

2007-07-28T01:34:00.000-07:00

I love food. Not just for the taste but for the smells and textures and colours. I've just been watching a local programme on television that was spotlighting 'Westcoast' restaurants in Vancouver. They interviewed the chefs and the food critics alternately. My mouth was watering and there is nothing in my fridge that holds a candle to what I was watching being whipped up on the screen. One of the chefs said he wished he had 'smellevision', as he wafted steam at the camera.

It's not that I don't like to cook - au contraire! It's precisely because I do like to cook that I like to eat out. It's inspiring. I like to get inspiration from the menu items and then I like to order the things I wouldn't make at home - just because I wouldn't make them at home. It's a hard choice to make though. Do I collect ideas for things I can cook myself or do I eat what I can't be bothered to make at home? What a delicious dilemma.

And it isn't just the food that I like. I like the ambiance, the people-watching and the whole experience - when it's done well. When it's disappointing, there's no worse waste of money. Different restaurants satisfy different needs in me. Some are for comfort food and a cozy atmosphere. Some are to inspire me creatively. Others are for the buzz.

I have a few musts: the seat must be comfortable; the staff must be knowledgeable and friendly; the food must be tasty and hot, as well as being what they say it will be; I have to be able to hear my eating companion; the food has to be good value for money, and that doesn't mean quantity; and the restaurant has to be clean and well-lit (not bright), including the bathrooms. My pet peeve is when they don't tell you that there are fresh tomatoes in the dish and it comes loaded with them. They may think it's a bonus but, as you know, it isn't to me.

If the restaurant offers wine by the glass, so much the better. I can't usually take advantage of anything more than two glasses but I do like the choice. I'm not really into pretty cocktails with umbrellas but an interesting feature drink can be a good thing - even if its a beer.

I have to say that the selection of restaurants has increased and improved immensely since I arrived here in 1990. I keep a list of ideas, just so that my mind hasn't gone blank when it's time to make a recommendation. I just have to be able to find it when I need it! A little scrap of paper on my desk isn't helpful when I'm out for the day.

Lest you think I only like to eat out; no sir-ee! Eating in is great as well. I just wish my little 'hoosie' was a tad bigger. I can work with a small kitchen - less space to cover - but I'd like a bigger spot to put the table and chairs - and hide the dishes. Other than that, cooking is a creative treat for me, even when I cook for myself, but especially when I have someone to cook for. I've got a lovely selection of cookbooks and have to cull them periodically. There are currently two new ones waiting to be cracked.

Food is such a great way to commune. When I work with clients, especially when I am 'living in', we eat something at the completion of each piece of work. Taking food and drink into the body is a way of integrating the work into our cells. It's why people have been eating at celebrations and ritual events since before we can remember. Every family can tell you of memorable family events that took place around meals - both wonderful and disasterous, leaving us replete or with indigestion.

Got any dinner dates planned?

A convergence of understanding

2007-07-21T02:13:00.000-07:00

Dr. Richard Tarnas wrote a book in 2006 called Cosmos and Psyche. This week he was speaking about the book at the Vancouver Public Library and I went with a friend to hear him. I didn't know anything about him except that my friend's friend had thought he might be interesting. The title of the book and the blurb on the web site sounded intriguing and I had vaguely heard his name before - so we went.

I read an interview about the book on beliefnet when I got home and they quoted Richard regarding the value of astrology as it relates to our cosmology. In his talk he explained that the book is somewhat revolutionary in academic, scientific and philosophical circles because it is giving credence to astrology, a subject which has almost universally been ridiculed in those circles in the past:

The existence of correlations between the planetary cycles and human life makes it possible for both individuals and societies to understand better what archetypal energies are at work and at what time. This can help us be more skillful and aware as we engage in the activities of life. It's like knowing the weather report before going out into the ocean to sail or surf. It helps to know where the winds and waves will be coming from.

But there is also a deeper advantage: Modern civilization pays a high price for living in a universe that it believes is random and spiritually meaningless. Nature is not honored but is instead exploited for short-term benefit. And a purposeless universe creates a sense of deep spiritual emptiness inside, which people try to fill with endless consumer products, so that the industrial technology producing those products is cannibalizing the planet. But as we know, you can never get enough of what you don't really need. A new vision of nature and the universe as ensouled, as spiritually significant, would give a better ground for both moral responsibility and a sense of spiritual belonging.

You can check out the web site if you'd like to read more. It was affirming for me to listen to what he had to say this evening. At the end, I said so to my friend and he said that he would have thought that there wasn't too much in what he said that I didn't already know. Overall, I think he's right about that - at least about the conclusions, not the details specific to his areas of academic expertise. What was affirming was that it was coming out of his mouth and not mine.

When I named this blog 'Is there anybody out there?', I wasn't expecting the answer to my question to come so fast nor so graphically. Not only is 'someone out there', but one of those someones is publishing his thoughts in a well-researched and clear fashion.

At the end of his talk Dr. Tarnas concluded that he thinks that humankind is involved in a giant experiment. It is as well, in his opinion, that we disregarded the value of astrology when we did, at least in mainstream society, because it allowed human beings to discard the restrictive ideas of predestiny and consider ourselves masters of our own destinies. Now that we've had a go at that perception, and seen the pitfalls (hopefully), we can come back to the overarching, mythical aspects of astrology again, in order to appreciate what being individuated means within the context of an intelligent, caring cosmology that gives meaning to our choices.

He explained how he sees our western culture as being without intentional initiatory experiences for our young. I'll quote him again from another article on the same site:

If all our youth are uninitiated, then of course all our adults are uninitiated too. When one turns on the television, virtually everything one sees is designed for the adolescent mind, of all ages: Pow! Zap! Boom!, explosions, aggression, superficial sex, incessant change, shiny surfaces, ceaseless growth, the new, the fast, the ever youthful, the momentarily exciting. There is no sense of the deeper meanings, the profundity of life, and that our actions today have enduring consequences.

The reason our culture does not provide such an initiation, however, may not just be that it has somehow simply been forgotten, or foolishly abandoned its traditional wisdom, and myopically asserted a mechanistic material world with no deeper spiritual purpose or significance. While true as far as it goes, this explanation does not do justice to a possibly deeper process that seems to be unfolding. For the very absence of initiatory rites of passage in our culture appears to have effectively created a kind of closed container, a psychic pressure cooker, an alchemical vessel that is intensifying the archetypal energies into a collective morphic field of explosive power. Perhaps the fact that our culture does not provide rituals of initiation is not simply a massive cultural error, but rather reflects and even impels the immersion of the entire culture in its own massive collective initiation.

I believe that humankind has entered into the most critical stages of a death-rebirth mystery. In retrospect it seems that the entire path of Western civilization has taken humankind and the planet on a trajectory of initiatory transformation, into a state of spiritual alienation, into an encounter with mortality on a global scale—from world wars and holocausts to the nuclear crisis and now the planetary ecological crisis—an encounter with mortality that is no longer individual and personal but rather transpersonal, collective, planetary. It is a collective dark night of the soul, a deep separation from the community of being, from the cosmos itself. We are undergoing this rite of passage with virtually no guidance from wise elders because the wise elders are caught up in the same crisis. This initiation is too epochal for such confident guidance, too global, too unprecedented, too all-encompassing; it is larger than all of us. It seems that we are all entering into something new, a new development, a crisis of accelerated maturation, a birth, an entrance into a profoundly different way of being in the cosmos.

I hadn't looked at it as a transpersonal experience before and it was worth going to hear him for that thought alone. I have been casting about for a long time now trying to figure out what is going on with a great number of the the people with whom I have contact. IThey seem not to be interested in engaging the process of introspection. It has felt to me as though this is not specific to any individual but rather generally true of the mainstream of our society.

Dr. Tarnas' talk gives me hope again because if people are uninitiated, I think they are unlikely to be interested in introspection. The uninitiated psyche might be so busy sorting out how to enter the adult world and determining who they are in it - initiatory issues - that they are too busy to have time for introspection. Perhaps the desire for introspection comes with having enough maturity to see a reason to reflect.

I don't think we can be so categorical as to say that everyone is uninitiated. Conscious initiatory rites are somewhat rare but there are some people who have been initiated by crisis, although I wouldn't wish it on anyone. Of these, some get stuck in crisis without any redeeming initiation as the by-product. They are the walking wounded and therapists deal with them daily. Crisis-as-initiation seems to me to be a fairly hit-and-miss approach to what should be one of the building blocks for creating mature adults. Far from using our elders as the guides for initiating our young men and women, we have been marginalizing them and making everyone in society afraid of their impending elder years of wisdom.

As we were walking out of the library at the end, my friend's friend who had suggested the talk shook her head and said to us that Rudolph Steiner had been saying many of the same things at the beginning of the last century. I'm sure he isn't the only one and we could all add to the list. I'm choosing to see the glass as half-full though and I think that perhaps there is a convergence of understanding coming from many different disciplines. When a perspective's time has come it seems to sprout up everywhere, and many people claim ownership. I'm just relieved to see that the time has come.

I shall come back with more comments when I've found the time to read the book and not just respond to what he talked about tonight which is, after all, a brief review of a much deeper topic.

Spiritual bungee jumping

2007-07-14T00:16:00.000-07:00

I had an idea many years ago for a t-shirt design. It was to picture a black line drawing of a scared, skinny guy standing on the edge of a cliff with a huge elastic tied around his ankles and his hands together, as if in prayer but standing out at right angles from his solar plexus. His hair is in disarray, his knees knobby, his feet without shoes, and his eyes are bugged out. Under his picture it was to say, "spiritual bungee jumping". I had this idea in 1988 when I did my first degree of Reiki. I guess you could say I've been sitting on it for a while.

I never drew it because I didn't have the artistic skill to make the picture look exactly the way I could see it in my head. So it has stayed in my head even though I have described it to people many times. We so often talk about the physical, intellectual or emotional 'jumps' in life but we rarely talk about the spiritual ones. They're important though. I could argue that they are the most important. They are, after all, the ones that the sciptures of all the major faiths of the world are concerned with.

Perhaps 'spiritual bungee jumping' encompasses all of the others by using them as a metaphor for the great leaps of faith that spiritual exploration requires. Take an initiation rite as an example. It involves a physical, emotional and sometimes intellectual task where an individual comes face to face with themselves and their limiting beliefs, and meet the challenge. Anything can be a 'spiritual bungee jump' if we choose to frame it that way.

One thing is for sure and that's that the jump takes courage. Life is full of challenges, great and small but it isn't just the great ones that require courage. That's because the definitions of great and small are in the eyes of the beholder.

Here's a thought to sit with and ponder: What great 'spiritual bungee jumps' have you taken in your life? Or is there one that you've been sidling up to, flirting with? Are you ready to jump yet? What do you believe it would do for you if you jumped? What's holding you back?

But never mind the ones you haven't taken yet. Let's see the glass as half full ... have you celebrated the ones you have taken?

Would you live your life differently?

2007-07-07T02:17:00.000-07:00

What makes a choice we've made, a mistake? I watched a film the other night about life choices as viewed by a woman on her death bed. She was lamenting past 'mistakes' and came to the conclusion that you can't make mistakes and so you shouldn't live in fear of making them.

I've been saying for a long time, to anyone who will listen, and especially to myself, that 'everything is perfect', which I think is just another way of saying that we don't make 'mistakes'. It goes along with my saying that 'there is no such thing as a coincidence'. But that's for another day.

What I took away from the film is not only that we can't make mistakes, but that if we had chosen the 'other road' it would have been 'right' as well. What we choose is what is for us. It is our reality from that moment on. If we lament it, then we're not really living it. Doesn't that put us in some sort of Never-land? You're not living the life you didn't choose and you're not really committed to the one you did.

To lament a choice is to open wide the door of your life to doubt. It's to constantly ask, 'Did I do the right thing?' It drags us back to the point of choice, where we are suspended until such time as we come to terms with what we did choose. Watching the character on her death bed, grappling with her fears, I wondered whether we have to wait until we die to find peace, or if we can consciously resolve these doubts at an earlier point, leaving ourselves free to enjoy life.

And we could consider what happens if we don't choose. What if life seems to happen to us and we feel we have no choice? I'm pretty sure that if I don't make a choice, that is also a choice. I think you can be so afraid to choose that you let life choose for you - but it's no less of a choice for all that.

We get the tool of free will on this planet and it is our greatest opportunity and our greatest responsibility. To choose is to exercise our prerogative as human beings to participate in the experience of duality; this way or... that way. Which will it be?

And here's a mind-bender! What if every time there is a choice to be made, one part of our being makes one choice and another part makes the other choice, branching off endlessly to infinity? What if we can split as often as we make decisions and we're not as finite as we think we are? We have no proof that we can do this but we have no proof that we can't either.

Wouldn't that be the ultimate waste, if you lamented not taking one of the options when all the time another part of you did make the other choice and lived out the consequence of that choice? You would literally be ruing something that didn't happen! It would be such a waste of time and energy. If we knew this were so, we could make our choices without being afraid that we had missed an opportunity. I ask myself, would I live my life differently if I were to see it this way?

Me in the Napoli

2007-07-02T23:38:00.001-07:00

Someone anonymously asked if the photo here is of me in the Napoli and indeed it is.

Kaffee-Klatsching

2007-06-30T00:15:00.000-07:00

I have a little group of friends with whom I get together several times a week. Actually, there are five of us who form the core of this group and we have been meeting informally for about an hour a day for about two and a half years. I jokingly refer to them as my Kaffee-Klatsch which is a German term with the following definition in the Merriam-Webster dictionary:

Kaffeeklatsch is a German phrase translating literally as "coffee chat". This is the type of casual conversation, small talk and especially gossip enjoyed by housewives who meet in the afternoon for a cup of coffee. Kaffeeklatsch is also used to describe such a gathering itself.

It is occasionally used in a more specific and derogatory sense to mean a group of people who waste time talking rather than doing.

When you work from home as I do, it helps to be able to get out and make contact, remind yourself that there is a greater world out there and to get some intellectual stimulation. The location for this coffee drinking and life-dissection ritual has moved within the neighbourhood over time but has come to rest in a little cafe in East Vancouver called La Bella Napoli. It's a narrow, unprepossessing, little space wedged between an Asian green-grocer and a poultry shop. The north-bound Commercial Drive bus stops right outside the door on its way downtown through the notoriously poorer part of the city. The Napoli is run by a Canadian woman of Italian extraction whose father ran it before her. She's a good business woman and runs a tight ship.

When you walk in the door, she, or one of her employees, greets you by name and knows what your 'regular' is. It's soon on the table without you having to ask for it. The smokers, including her and her husband, are accommodated on an outside deck at the back or on a tiny patio at the front. Often regulars clear their own table and put their cups behind the counter, yelling their greetings as they come and go. Although we're well-behaved cafe-goers, our Kaffee-Klatsch talk about some unusual subjects and are often eavesdropped upon from other tables close by. This past autumn we picked up a guy from another table that way and incorporated him into our group! He's Iranian and is currently teaching theatre to a group of kids in Istanbul, and expected back at the end of July.

Topics of conversation range from art and artists (a lot of that!), to politics, culture, the supernatural, health, biology/chemistry/physics, the media, crossword puzzles, minority rights, conspiracy theories, books, child-rearing, recipes and death, to anme just a few. No holds barred! Our informal founder and the mover behind the group is a German, artist friend of mine who is ten years my senior. Her partner, in his late seventies, is Canadian-American and an accomplished artist and sculptor with a career as a master plasterer behind him. Our third member, a similar age and now also retired, is Danish and our master crossword puzzler. (I tease him by watching over his shoulder) Then comes me, the youngster of the group, and finally, a retired biochemist researcher, born in Hong Kong and also a portrait painter. You could call us diverse!

This diversity is partly what feeds us and I'll hazard a guess that we help to feed the people who sup coffee around us. There are the three, wide-as-they-are-tall, and not very tall, old Italian gentlemen who come in for their espresso every afternoon, removing their hats, of course. They greet us in their broken English and ask after any one of us who isn't there that day. There's the woman who comes in with her two young boys whom we've been watching grow up. There's the tall Estonian photographer, with his camera bag, who drinks espresso and speaks his native tongue with his much shorter compatriot. There's the postal worker who drives a Canada Post delivery truck and lives down the back lane. There's the woman we've code-named 'Shirley Temple' who wears fifties-style flared and petty-coated skirts and her hair in pig-tails. These are just the people who come in in the hour that we do each day! And there's the tourists who come in wide-eyed, having read the blurbs about authentic Italian cafes along 'The Drive', and who don't know what the system is for ordering. Everyone is taken in stride.

Our little group is often joined by any of our founder's three grown kids and her grandchildren. Sometimes we see some of the artists from her and her partner's drawing and painting group, Basic Inquiry. We had a sculptor join us yesterday. I'm getting quite the art education. Occasionally my mother drops by, or my friends when they're here from out of town, or anyone's friends who are visiting. Sometimes our numbers swell to nine or ten and then we have to pull over extra tables.

I've never been a person who liked the night-life bar scene. I don't like music so loud that it makes my ears hurt. I'm not a big drinker. I don't like smoke, or didn't in the era when you could smoke in all the bars. I always wished that there was a local place where I could find someone interesting to talk to for an hour or two without having to 'hang out on the make'. Cafes like the one we frequent build community. They give you a place to go and hear the local gossip, news and issues, and even contribute your two-cents-worth. The concept and the urge to commune is as old as humankind adn it's coming back into vogue.

Cities are becoming so big that I find it's hard to make contact - hard to know where to start. I guess I'm shy to some extent and not comfortable sitting beside a stranger and just starting up a conversation. The bigger the community, the less likely I am to do that. Perhaps this is what makes huge cities so potentially alienating for me. I have to say that Lena, the woman who runs the Napoli, is really good at introducing people to one another, and although she's not pushy or interfering, she notices who's alone and chats with them as she swipes the table next to them. Eavesdropping is almost a requirement for cafe life and a reason a cafe needs to be fairly tightly packed with tables. If they're too far apart, you don't meet anyone.

I highly recommend the Kaffee-Klatsch. I'm socially, intellectually and humorously stimulated and feel more a part of my community. Besides, it gives me something to write about!

Sacred

2007-06-23T03:20:00.000-07:00

I received the premier issue of a new local magazine in my grocery box last week called Granville - sustainable city living. There's that new buzz-word; sustainability. It is their stated intention to use every article to bring the sustainability of Vancouver to the foreground. I found this issue to be what they purported it would be; informative without being preachy, light, lively and intelligent, and practical. So far, so good. It's going to be coming out quarterly and you can subscribe by going to their web site.

It got me to thinking about a talk that Ben and I gave when we were on a trip to Sweden in 1995. We were invited there by a group who were trying to do business in a completely different way than they ever had. The fellow who originated the idea placed a very tiny ad in the classified section of a Goteborg newspaper saying that he was looking for individuals who might be interested in starting a values-based business from the ground up. It really didn't say too much more than that. He wanted to see what expertise came out of the group and explore ideas from the values instead of laying the values on top of the business idea. He was stunned at the overwhelming response he received - over 300 people. Whittling the group down to a manageable number and interviewing them was much more difficult than he had anticipated and he hired a consultant to help him - who was our contact.

I was asked to sit with the group he had chosen, and who had chosen one another, in a big warehouse loft near the harbour, on a windy October day. They wanted me to do a group reading for them. Not everyone was there that day but most of them were. It was quite exciting, although I don't remember now what exactly I said to them. That's often the case when I do readings. No worries about confidentiality if you can't remember!

Anyway, they could only start this business with a very small percentage of the people who had expressed an interest, so they formed an informal group with the rest. The idea was that they had a common value system and maybe they could do something together, even if it was to get together and talk. Many of them had an ecological/sustainability sort of bent. Ben and I came in to talk to them about emotional/inner ecology as an extension of their values in the business and community sphere.

The idea behind this was that a lot of people who believe in peace can be quite militant about how they go about convincing the rest of the world. And if you take that a step further, they can be less than peaceful, or ecological, with regard to their bodies and psyches. I have witnessed this many times in my therapy practice where some of my clients were little dictators of sorts; not in the outside world but within themselves. They wouldn't stop for lunch, would work seven day weeks, not take holidays and would beat themselves up and criticize themselves viciously. Briefly, our job that evening was to get them to think about practicing what they preached for the outside world, on themselves.

The reason I've been thinking about this Swedish talk is that I was wondering if there might be room for that sort of concept in this new magazine. An article might refer to being able to sustain ourselves emotionally, spiritually and physically, just as they are suggesting we do for the city. I wondered when I was driving across the city the other day, just how polluting our city affects our psyches, and whether we pay as much attention to polluting our energy fields and our relationships as we do to polluting our air and water.

I had occasion, when I first moved to Vancouver, to go to a Strata meeting for a friend who was going to be out of town. For those of you who live outside Canada, Strata Councils are groups of condominium owners who get together to discuss and vote on the issues to do with their shared building and building services. There was an agenda for the meeting that night which was loosely followed but certainly didn't stick to the times listed. I witnessed obstruction, petty squabbling, people hogging the microphone, and a chair with few facilitation skills. In short, it was boring and frustrating. To put it simply, people's interpersonal skills were extremely limited.

I was practicing yoga today, part of my commitment to treat my body with respect, and I was considering this issue as I tried to stretch my ham strings. I had to keep yanking my thoughts back to focus on what I was doing. That lead me to thoughts of my body as my temple. Not being a religious sort, I don't hang out in sacred buildings of worship very often, although I like them a lot when I get the opportunity. It doesn't matter much to me what the religion is. If the building is designed to reach 'up' to some 'spiritual' place, I usually find it peaceful and positive.

I have wondered if we miss spaces like that in our modern lives. Maybe it's less important to go to church or synagogue or to the mosque or whatever, at designated times, than it is to remember to build sacred rituals or moments or spaces into our everyday lives. I remember trying to convince my architect brother once that the houses he designs ought to have some sacred component to them. That, in fact, every home should have a sacred component. I feel this is particularly true for those of us who do our 'sacred' work, or work that is sacred to us, from home.

I was in a home in West Vancouver once, when a friend of mine was house-sitting. It had a meditation space that you reached through a hidden panel in the stair wall. It was carpeted and had a small window that looked out over a beautiful garden and a view of the Burrard Inlet. You could hardly stand in it because it was designed for the owner to sit and think or meditate or read. She had incorporated her sacred, spiritual space into her house.

Hospitals and airports have nondenominational chapels in them and I wonder if we shouldn't have something along the same lines in schools, shopping malls or community centres. Not because we're ramming any religion down anyone's throat but so that there's an 'away' space, to borrow the term of an American architect who wrote The Not So Big House. I think we need spaces where we can remember who we are and what we're doing on this little blue planet, third from the sun.

To bring the sacred space concept back to my body, or anyone's body, maybe our bodies are our ultimate sacred spaces. I was daydreaming this evening about what would happen if someone were to say to be that I could only have a job that I really wanted if I would agree to eat a diet that had pesticides in it and/or work ten-hour days and six-day weeks, and/or work in an office where there was no natural light and no fresh ventilation. The idea isn't completely realistic but I was playing out a 'what-if' in my mind. Come to think of it, I know someone who is doing consulting work and that is exactly what she is being asked to do. And thinking back to my days in the corporate world, I was asked to do this. My office was a concrete box that had originally been designed as a storage closet. It had impersonal, mass-produced hotel artwork, no plants, no fresh air, and no natural light. I felt like a mole.

What if this was my option and I refused to take the job saying, "Sorry, my body is my sacred place, my sacred responsibility, and I have a commitment to keeping it strong and clear. I must give it regular rest, fresh air, stimulating views and balanced nutrition, including food, education, and spiritual space, in order that it continue to operate at peak capacity for a long time."? Just imagine! Come to think of it, without explaining it in those terms, I did just that in 1990 and I never went back.

But if we don't make such a stand, how can we treat our cities better than we treat ourselves? If I put poor quality food, air, thoughts into my body and mind, then I am likely to put poor quality water into the sea. If I accept not having anything inspiring to look at at work, then why wouldn't I settle for the garbage that is on television?

There is one definition of sacred in my Webster's dictionary that speaks to this thought:

sacred: secured as by a religious feeling or sense of justice against any defamation, violation or intrusion; inviolate

It strikes me that just as we have to look after nature's temple that is this beautiful and bountiful place in which we live, and look after our sacred spaces which are the homes where we need to withdraw to renew ourselves each day, and look after our relationships which are the emotional sacred spaces in our lives, we must also look after our most intimate temples; our bodies which house our hearts, minds and souls.

This gave me pause to wonder how I'm doing on that score. Yoga is a start for me but I'd like to walk more. How I allow others to treat me is another angle. Most of the time I think I'm all right on this one - but there are a few exceptions. What I eat is yet another. Where I spend time and who I spend it with is yet another. I could do better I'm sure but overall I think I'm doing all right, but it's worth thinking about.

Listen for the whoosh

2007-06-16T23:47:00.000-07:00

Can you feel the world speeding up? Einstein tells us that speed and time are connected and that speed is relative. I believe this to be true. He was specifically referring to where you are and how fast or slowly you might be moving relative to the speed of what you are measuring.

But I agree with Neale Donald Walsh that time is directly related to how fast you are moving and that events just 'are'. How we see things, or our perception, is what makes the difference in our experience of what we look at. Imagine a huge landscape on the wall in a museum. If you stroll past it, the landscape, like what you would see out of a train window, seems to be 'moving' slowly. Actually, it is you who are moving past it slowly. And if it were three-dimensional, or even four dimensional (now there's a mind-bender!), you would be moving through it slowly.

I think that these days we are moving through our perceived world at a greater speed than we were even as recently as this 'time' last year. If I had to take a guess, I would say that it's because we are 'quickening'. By that I mean that we are learning more about our souls and who we are, resulting in our energy field, or our aura, vibrating at a higher frequency. It is my understanding that pure love has the highest vibration of all energy. It stands to reason that the more we understand and love ourselves, and others, the faster we vibrate.

To take yet another slant on things, physicists talk about 'field theory'. To be extremely simplistic about it, field theory says that any one thing that changes in a field of energy affects the whole of that field. Nothing in it can remain unchanged as long as one thing changes. It's a bit like ripples going out in a pond. Because people are energy too, imagine how this affects a family.

For example, imagine I have a eureka and realise that I have been codependent for years, that it's making my life miserable. Further imagine that I resolve to change my behaviour and stop being codependent. Even if no one else in my family agrees with me, even if they in fact think I'm out of my mind, they will still be affected because my change in behaviour will affect theirs. They will still have to react to me, even if it's to take me off their Christmas list.

So, take another jump here and imagine that there are loads of people around the world who are working on their self-awareness - have been, some of them, for the last 30 years. They've been reading books, going to seminars, getting coaching or therapy or healings, talking to one another, and they are beginning to see things differently than they ever have before. Perhaps this means that they are treating the environment with more care, or they are voting against war, or they meditate every morning, or they believe that the way they treat people determines in large measure how others treat them, and these are the ripples they have been sending out into the world.

Up until now, they may have been feeling that they are failing to make a difference with their lone little voices, or actions, in the great wilderness of the planet's messes. they may have thought, 'what difference does it make that I am more aware when no one else seems to take me seriously and corporatins are still setting the agendas?' But I think that this year, 2007, is the year of critical mass. I believe that there are finally enough of us doing these seemingly little things that we are finally making a difference. There comes a moment when we reach the tipping point and the balance shifts. When it does ... whoosh! It will feel like everything is going at a millions miles an hour. That will be because there is so much happening, there is so much to pay attention to, that it will feel like time is speeding up.

It's somewhat like being on a ship. It could be going very quickly but without any point of reference, without anything to look at except ocean and more ocean, it may look like you're sitting still. But you wouldn't be. If you were on a train and the city were speeding by, you might even be going more slowly than the ship, but it would appear as if everything were moving faster.

Granted, my physics is a little rusty here and very simplistic to boot. I hope you get the gist of what I'm saying about time and being confident that we are making a difference after all, because I don't think it's erroneous even if my specific ability to explain Einstein is a bit off. I'm just blogging here and I may not have read up on my Einstein sufficiently. Maybe my scientist friends can clarify for me!

What I'm really trying to say is, don't give up. Change is coming and you might even be able to feel it already. Sometimes we don't know that a bird is singing an exquisite song until someone tells us to listen carefully. I'm suggesting that you listen for the sound of the tipping point - for the whoosh.

Creating doors

2007-06-08T23:10:00.000-07:00

Welcome to my first official blog for all of you who have been in contact with me over the last few years. I invite you to be a part of this cyber-community of like-minded folk.

I had the feeling about a month ago that I was a little robot who's become stuck marching into a wall. My frustration level with the lack of forward movement in some areas of my life was mounting. I feared I might just keep marching until my batteries run out. I said this to someone who suggested very matter-of-factly that I create a door in my wall and walk through to see what's on the other side. I've given that suggestion a great deal of thought and I've concluded that the best way to make a door is to do what makes my heart sing - which happens to be communicating.

Shortly after that, one of my oldest and dearest friends closed down her old blog and started a new one. That was the next clue for making a door ... create a blog. Since then I have figured out how to do it and done a little practicing. I hope this will serve to remove some of the glitches that occasionally pop up when I try to do something new.

I will start my blogging by saying that I believe that 2007 is the tipping point that I have been awaiting for a long time. When you get to the tipping point it only takes one more thought, one more action, one more voice, one more question, to finally make the difference.

For many years I felt as though I was whistling in the dark and hoping I wasn't alone. Book stores didn't carry the kinds of books that I found interesting. There was no ticky-box on forms for the profession I was in. I had to explain the terms and language I used in conversation because otherwise no one could follow what I was trying to explain.

But now, I am at long last encouraged to see that things are beginning to shift. There are people on mainstream network television who do what I've done for years. There are whole book stores full of what I like to read. I can even get some of these books in my library! Reiki doesn't have to come with an explanation attached. There are schools that teach coaching. Something is shifting and it seems to be in the right direction.

Blogging has arrived in the mainstream and I can use it to talk directly to the people who think there is value in connecting our spirits to our daily lives, and even to our careers. This is progress and we should celebrate it by talking to one another. In an effort to do just this, I will endeavour to post to this blog once a week. Please feel free to comment and make this a two-way process.

For this week, I will leave you with a great question... How can you create a door in your wall?