Deepak Chopra Remembers David Simon

http://www.chopra.com/files/rememberingdavid.html

Deepak Chopra announces the passing of David Simon, a gifted spiritual teacher at the Chopra Center.

2012 Yearly Oracle Card Reading, Doreen Virtue

Guided Meditation by Deepak Chopra

http://www.chopra.com/files/newsletter/Jan12/Jan12-Waterfall.html

Doreen Virtue's Message from Archangel Michael

Magical Moments

(Reprinted from an undated journal entry from c. 2005-2006)

Evergreen trees lining both sides of the country road clutch at the low-lying clouds and wrap themselves in them as with a shawl. Moist air presses against my cheeks, softening my thoughts, turning them towards other moments in time similar to this one. I realize that this is one of my favorite experiences in life. This one. Right now. I have chosen to live in a part of the country that gives me the opportunity to have this experience several times a year. They never occur in midwinter or summer. Both of those points in time are too extreme to allow this softening of weather, where it it neither not for cold, only blissfully cool and moist.

I realize also that I may be the only person in the world, though I truly suspect not, that has this experience of elation at times such as these. This experience never fails to get my attention. Never fails to wake me from the dream of daily life, reminding me that right now in this moment, I am utterly and joyfully alive and happy.

In the twenty-five years I lived in Florida, not once did I experience this feeling in my given daily environment. It was not until I first ventured away from the tropics that I discovered this joyful union with nature that I now know to be integral to my existence. It seem to go hand in hand with living in or near mountains or foothills in cooler climates. I would not trade the magic of these moments for anything.

(Reprinted from my Facebook note on 4 March 2009)


I love this Navajo prayer. Years ago, I used to chant it while I walked for exercise. It turned my fitness walk into a meditation walk. I think I should start doing it again. There are variations on it, but I particularly like this version. 

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In Beauty may you walk.
All day long may you walk.
Through the returning seasons may you walk.
On the trail marked with pollen may you walk.
With grasshoppers about your feet may you walk.
With dew about your feet may you walk.

With Beauty may you walk.
With Beauty before you, may you walk.
With Beauty behind you, may you walk.
With Beauty above you, may you walk.
With Beauty below you, may you walk.
With Beauty all around you, may you walk.

In old age wandering on a trail of Beauty,
lively, may you walk.
In old age wandering on a trail of Beauty,
living again, may you walk.
It is finished in Beauty.
It is finished in Beauty

Ruby Beach in Washington State

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Transcendental Hesitation

There's a moment in time I refer to as "transcendental hesitation." It is that brief pause between action and reaction. The longer you can stretch that pause, the more likely you will be to respond to stimuli rather than merely reacting to it. You can develop this discipline by using the meditation technique of becoming a spectator where your thoughts are concerned. Simply sit quietly, observing your breath, allowing your thoughts to come and go. Judge none of them as good or bad. Allow them to exist. If you learn the practice of non-judging with your own thoughts, it will become second nature to you eventually, and you'll be able to practice it with the actions and words of others as well. Transcendental hesitation would be a natural outgrowth of this practice of non-judging. When we learn to transcend judgment, in the words of the Beatles, we "let it be." Instead of experiencing knee-jerk reactions, our response can arise from a place of awareness and mindfulness. Every action in our lives can arise from this place of measured action.

Put Down the Stick and Walk Away

I didn't have the world's best father to say the least. He wasn't the world's worst, but that was mainly because my mother finally had enough of his violent, drunken behavior and walked away with her three children so we could grow up safely somewhere far, far away from him. He's long since passed on and so has his mother (my beloved Granny), so sharing this account of my life should inflict no emotional pain on others, except maybe a pang of sadness and regret should his remaining siblings ever read it, and only one is likely to come across it. I wish to cause them no pain. They are wonderful human beings, as is the entire family, with the one notable exception of my father. I've never figured out how he came to be so different from the rest of his family. Other than alcohol, I can find no reason why he would have turned out to be so disastrously different from them, but he was. Of course, none of the other siblings were drinkers, so perhaps if he hadn't picked up that habit, he would have been as wonderful as they were and are, but we'll never know.

On the surface, my father was a very likable guy, irresponsible in some areas of his life, but likable. He was particularly reluctant to take responsibility for the children he sired. There are four that we know of, and who knows how many we don't know about? I never even knew my older half sister existed until I was in junior high school. If you had met my father on the street, you probably would have thought he was a lot of fun and generally a good guy. He was smart and funny and charming, at least until he started drinking. I don't know how much alcohol he had to consume before the Mr. Hyde side of him manifested. I never actually witnessed the transformation. I was the youngest of three children, and only six months old when my mother finally escaped from him with us in tow. What happened after that is her story to tell. It is one I cannot tell firsthand, since my first memory during this lifetime did not occur until the day we moved into the house where my mother lives to this day. I was not quite a year old, but by this time our lives without my father's presence had already begun. For my entire childhood I have only a handful of memories of him, and that is all right with me. His absence was his presence, if that makes any sense. He was absent for every developmental change, every skinned knee, and every achievement, including when I graduated as the valedictorian of my college class.  It has only been since he passed to the other side that I have felt his presence in my life in a significant way, and I must admit that his presence in spirit form has been anything but welcomed by me.

His presence in spirit form, however, has brought an important lesson to the surface, and for that I am grateful. Many times in my life, I have found it necessary to embark on a round of conscious forgiveness where my father is concerned. Forgiveness for his absence throughout most of my life, forgiveness for his inability to take responsibility for his children, forgiveness for the financial neglect of my mother and the three of us kids. This financial neglect resulted in some lifelong challenges and patterns that have been imprinted on all of us. I can't speak for my siblings, but I have had to face these patterns on many occasions, embracing the ones I could live with and rejecting, the best I could, the ones that did not serve me well--namely lack consciousness.

My mother had to raise and support all three of us without assistance from my father. In my entire life, I am aware of only one time when he actually sent her money. She received the enormous sum of one hundred dollars, and while that was nice, it hardly adds up to 17.5 years of child support for his youngest child, much less all the years for my older siblings too. My mother was glad to get it at the time, I'm sure, but I also suspect it felt like it was far too little too late by that point. I think it probably went towards groceries that month for the four of us. I don't remember how old I was when it arrived, but I was aware enough to realize the irony of it and how little help it would be to my mother who'd worked full time since the time she'd mustered up the courage to walk away from him and his abuse.

She'd had to work full time as a secretary and then come home each evening to her three children and be a mother to us, even though she had to have been tired and ready just to rest and have some peace and quiet. Those are words we heard from her a lot over the years, "peace and quiet." That's all she craved during those decades, and what she got instead when she arrived home from work were three children who already felt starved for their mother's presence by the time she pulled up in the driveway in the evenings. So starved for her attention that my brother and I often took turns standing at the front door, peering out through the jalousie windows, waiting for her car to appear.  It usually did right about the time the theme song that played at the conclusion of The Flintstones cartoon show was winding down and the credits were rolling. I don't think I could hear that song today without being transported instantly back in time to that feeling of waiting and longing for my mom to come home so we could reconnect with her.

For that sense of longing for my mother's presence, I have my father's absence to thank. His inability to take financial or emotional responsibility for his offspring is why I spent most of my childhood watching and waiting.  Watching for my mother to show up. Waiting to be nurtured. Waiting to be loved. Waiting for attention. Yes, my siblings and I gave each other attention, but as siblings left unsupervised tend to fight, that was hardly the attention any of us really needed.  Egos clashed and frustrations were vented on each other, when all any of us really wanted was our mother to be around to listen to us, to pay attention to us. She worked wonders when she was home, but because she had to work to support us, she couldn't be home being a regular mom to us. She was a working mom when that wasn't the norm. We grew up being "latchkey kids" before they even came up with that expression. Until I was about nine, we had babysitters after school and in the summer. Then when my sister turned twelve, we were on our own except for the back-up safety net of our retired neighbors across the street. If we needed anything important, we knew that we could call on them. We did so rarely. By some unwritten code, we learned how not to need anything from anyone else. Or at least I know I did.

That's still something I have a problem doing, asking for help from someone else.  I learned how to take care of myself rather young, and it has been good in some ways. I learned how to be extremely independent, self-motivated, self-sufficient, and very responsible. When I was in junior high, I started babysitting and essentially started my own childcare business.  For several years, I earned a pretty good amount of money babysitting. Thirty to thirty-five dollars a week may not seem like much now, but this was in the seventies, and I got to all my jobs either on foot or bicycle.  I had virtually no overhead and little commute time since my babysitting gigs were all within a mile or two of home.  I was able to save up a lot of money for various things I wanted, like cassette tapes, tape recorders, guitar strings, cigarettes, and drugs. And no, I never did drugs while I was taking care of children. I also did extra chores around the house and the occasional pet sitting job to make even more money. In my spare time when I wasn't doing homework, I usually read. Since we weren't allowed to go anywhere until our mother got home, we learned how to entertain ourselves, which most of the time was a good thing. Sometimes it wasn't but that's another story for another time.

Suffice it to say that I realize that the absence of my father wasn't all bad. In fact, over all, his absence ended up being better by far than his presence would have been. Who knows what horrible stuff we might have endured if he'd been in our household still, drinking the grocery money, battering our mother and probably us too later on? We were definitely better off without him. I have just had to work on forgiving him more than once. I was surprised after all the emotional work I did in college, forgiving him and trying to make the best of what happened, that it has cropped up a few more times when I was working through some issue or pattern in my life. When I got to the point each time of recognizing that the issue or pattern was a direct result of his neglect and abandonment of his responsibility as a father, I'd go through another agonizing time of forgiving and letting go.

The last time this happened was in the past couple years when his spirit started hanging around me. I knew he was around because I could smell cigarette smoke whenever he showed up, even though no one lived within a mile or more of my house. Given that I quit smoking decades ago, I was none too pleased at this evidence of his presence. Finally I told him to stop that. If he wanted to let me know he was there, he could make it smell like cherry pipe tobacco. I didn't mind that nearly as much, but cigarette smoke was just too rude, considering all I'd gone through to break that habit myself. I also told him what I thought of him being present now that he was dead. He had not been around when I needed him, so what the hell was he doing showing up now? Was he trying to help me? He was a little late for that, and if he still wanted to help me now, he could see to it that I got a windfall the equivalent of 17.5 years of child support, adjusted for inflation. Then he could buzz off. If he needed me to help him, then he could just get out now. I wasn't interested.

Now if you have any idea about who I am in this life, you'll realize how out of character this harsh response is for me. I believe in forgiveness and have been working on this aspect of life for decades. The fact that my internal response was so harsh and so immediate let me know that I had some serious spiritual and emotional work to do in regards to him again/still. I'm glad now that it came to my attention because I thought all of that had been dealt with long ago. I even remember asking the universe how many times I was going to have to forgive my father. I'd already battled with this several times and frankly I was ready to be finished with it.

That's when I remembered the words of Jesus when Peter, one of his disciples, asked him how many times he should forgive his brother. Thinking it was a generous number, and having already gotten to that number in his dealings with someone else, no doubt, Peter suggested the number seven. Jesus, being the incredibly wise and insightful fellow he was responds with what seems like a pretty ridiculous answer. He tells him that seven times is not even close to being enough. Seventy times seven is more like it, and I don't think he meant merely that Peter only had four-hundred-eighty-three more times to go before he could let his brother have it.  I think he was saying that he had to forgive his brother (I don't think he meant his literal brother necessarily) as many times as it takes for him to let go of the transgression. It wasn't about how many times his brother hurt or offended him, it was about making sure that every time it happens and even every time he thinks about it with unforgiveness in his heart, it's time to forgive him again.

Unforgiveness is like a whip or a big stick. The first time we receive the blow from our brother or sister or stranger on the street, by way of that offense, the perpetrator of the offense hands us the weapon used to harm us. From that point on, we have possession of the weapon. We can lay it back down immediately, or we can carry it with us for years and use it to injure ourselves over and over again, blaming the original perpetrator the whole time we are beating ourselves senseless with the weapon they left behind. Each time we are abused in some fashion--emotional, verbal, physical, sexual, etc.--we are given a weapon that will continue to hurt us only if WE choose to hang on to it. The moment we let go of it and walk away, we can begin the healing process. We may manage to lay it down for a while, but if somewhere down the road, we go back for it and start injuring ourselves with it again, we have made it clear that we need to forgive that person again. As long as we keep picking up that stick, we haven't completely forgiven either the original perpetrator or ourselves of that wrongdoing. I think sometimes when we keep going back it's because we haven't forgiven ourselves for allowing ourselves to be injured in the first place. Never mind that many times we had no say whatsoever in the matter. I didn't exactly have any say in what my father did or didn't do when I was an infant or even later as a child.

Now fast forward years down the road, and there I am struggling financially, still blaming my father for not having taken care of me back then, for forcing me to grow up in a situation where money was tight and nurturing was limited due to my family's circumstances. I not only have to lay down the stick from the original injury, I also have to lay down the injury from myself for not having moved on long ago. Somehow I have picked up that stick again and beaten myself with the internal message that there is not enough money, not enough nurturing, not enough of whatever it was that I needed. Given the fact that my mother was nursing me when my father threw her against the wall that last time, what kind of message did my six-month-old psyche absorb in that moment?  Right then and there, my mother grabbed all three of us and walked out of that house away from his abuse. Yet somehow part of me, part of my psyche is still there, being traumatized by the sudden violence that rent asunder the nurturing connection with my mother, that jolted both of us from that tender moment between mother and child and turned it into a scene of chaos and a wild adrenalin rush. Is it any wonder that I have found it hard to receive love and nurturing from my lesbian partners or that I'd have no desire for a masculine one?

I don't in any way think this is why I'm lesbian. I think I would have been lesbian no matter what, but I do think it is connected to why I haven't found someone who is capable of and available to be a nurturing partner to me, someone I trust enough to ask for emotional help when I need it. It's not that I haven't found love because I have. But have I learned how to trust enough to let go of the stick that was handed to me while my mother was being thrown up against the wall, her nurturing breast no doubt yanked away from my tiny lips, the bitter taste of fear still in my mouth, the sense of wrongness about my whole world swirling around me in that moment? My gawd, if only someone could have reached out in that moment and helped my mother and the three of us kids, maybe things would have been different. Maybe I wouldn't have grown up believing that a nurturing relationship was not part of my birthright. I know I have forgiven my father for being the sad and pathetic man he was back then. He just was who he was, no more and no less. I can have compassionate love for him and yes, forgive him, seventy times seven times. But how do I forgive myself for believing that traumatic and dramatic message all these decades? How do I forgive myself for picking up that stick, every time I have wanted to believe in love, and battering myself senseless until I was convinced once again that it wasn't my birthright to experience beautiful, wonderful, nurturing love?

The only thing I've figured out so far is to pick up that six-month-old baby and hold her and rock her and pat her back, soothing her with a calm voice, singing her a lullaby until she finally quiets down. I haven't figured out yet how to teach her to trust her heart to reach out for what she needs, what we all need, to love and be loved just for who I am. I have no problem loving others, but trusting others enough to allow them to get close enough to me that I risk being thrown against the wall once again? I'm not there yet, and I don't know if I ever will be, but I keep working on myself, and I keep giving love. That's all I know to do. To give. Or to exchange one thing for another. One day maybe I'll learn how to receive love as unconditionally as I've learned to give it. Until then, I just have to keep reminding myself to put down the stick and walk away from it.

The Return of The Divine Feminine - Truth Revealed

Just a thought

Does our obsession with being in constant communication with one another strip us of our ability to be present in the moment? Are we losing the gift of being alone and the gift of being present with the people we are with?

Love is the best teacher. Compassion is the perfect curriculum.

Dare to be fabulous!

Pearls on the Path

This essay is based partly on a journal entry I wrote on 14 January 2001. I went back and finished my train of thought, because it was a time in my life worth recording, if only for my sake.

"The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."-- Lao Tzu

I have chosen a travel diary to record my thoughts because I feel as though I'm embarking on a new journey. I'm excited and frightened at the same time. I'm excited because I enjoy travel and adventure. I'm frightened because while I have an idea of where I wish to go, I have no idea how to get there. All I have to use for a map are my studies in psychology, metaphysics, and Eastern thought. The journey upon which I am embarking is a spiritual one. It is also an emotional one. There is a lot at stake, namely my happiness and well-being.

I recently left my life partner after six years together. I've heard that relationships go in seven-year cycles. If so, I've never made it past the first seven-year period. I've made it to the six-year point twice now, but so far, none of my relationships had the stuff to make it through those critical watershed points. I can see why they didn't make it, of course, but it doesn't stop me from wondering if I have what it takes to make up half of a "until death us do part" kind of relationship. In this last relationship, we had both become stagnant, stifled by our relationship. I have no doubt that we will remain friends [I was so wrong about this], but our time together as lovers has passed.

I don't know whether it was meant to pass away or whether we just killed it out of neglect. That doesn't matter, I guess, since our Highest Good is always guiding us like a stalwart rudder through life's tempestuous waters. Plus on the day we moved in together, I was told (by an entity I know now as one of my spirit guides) "not to get too comfortable" because I would be there for "no more than six years." I wanted to cry when I got that clear message from the very same entity that had told me that I would be "forever sorry" if I let this woman "walk out of my life" on the day I met her in the book store where I worked. When I got that clear declaration, I dropped everything and ran around the counter and continued to engage her in conversation. I gave her my business card and practically insisted that she call me when I got back from a trip I was about to make to Florida to bring my best friend out to Seattle to live. Come to find out, she thought I was trying to pick her up, but I wasn't. At least not consciously. I was in a relationship that was troubled, but one that I had no intention of leaving.

So there I was. I had left that troubled six-year relationship because I knew that staying was destroying me and would ultimately destroy all of us, including the woman's two children. I left to keep that from happening. After then deciding to embark upon another relationship journey with the woman I'd met in the book store, I was being told ahead of time that it wasn't going to last either. We both knew at the time that we were taking a gamble on this relationship. We knew that we didn't know each other that well, but we also both knew intuitively that we could trust each other. So we decided to give the relationship and each other a chance. Whatever would come of our efforts, we were willing simply to let it be whatever it was meant to be. Many things showed us along the way and afterwards that it was the last in a series of relationships we'd experienced in multiple incarnations. It was our final time together. I have to say that I'm sorry that we weren't able to maintain the friendship, but I suppose that our souls had truly learned all we could together and to stay beyond that point would have been unproductive.

Despite the clear forewarning about the short-term nature of our relationship, I forged ahead, pushing the prophetic message to the furthest depths of my consciousness. I had no desire to know this information ahead of time, and I didn't want it to happen as I had been told. I had previously twigged on to the fact that, for some reason, I was often given information about my relationships. Sometimes I was already one relationship ahead in my mind, and sometimes I pushed away what I knew in favor of ignorance that would put me on an equal footing with my partner and the rest of the world.  It was simply too maddening to know the things that I knew. It interfered with my ability to live in the present time, thus making it hard to maintain peace of mind, since it also meant that I knew about the end before it happened. No, I didn't know every detail because we have a lot of control over events in our lives, but there are certain things that we have contracted with others to do. We may have say over the degree, the extent, and often the length of time certain tasks and relationships take, but we don't always have complete understanding or final say. We gave our word before we were incarnated that we would be there at that time for that person.

I think that we made it nearly the full six years I had been told about is a testament to our dedication to make something of value from the handful of loose pearls we'd been given. That was how she had described our situation at the beginning. We'd continued stringing pearls together until there were no more to add. It wasn't for us to discount the value of the small strand we ended up with just because it wasn't as long as we thought it could or should be. It would be what it would be--a strand of six pearls for the six years of our lives spent together. That's all any of us have anyway. A handful of pearls. Sometimes we keep putting them on throughout our entire lives with the same person, creating an amazing and lustrous necklace.  Sometimes the strand breaks under the weight of the years when, along with the pearls, we string the unspoken words and unshed tears.  The weight of that which isn't expressed sometimes stretches the strand to the breaking point. The necklace breaks apart, spilling the pearls onto the floor where many of them roll away beyond our reach and ability to put it back the way it used to be. I guess there is some gift in being warned that all you will end up with is a string of six pearls, but when you were hoping some day to be able to make a full necklace, it isn't a whole lot of consolation.

More than ten years have transpired since I wrote the beginning paragraphs of this essay. Since that time, life has been both breathtakingly beautiful and painfully harsh in turns. I wrote that account at the beginning of the year that changed all of our lives irrevocably.  As we near the tenth anniversary of 9/11, my 52nd birthday, I am sobered by all that has happened since that time, and by how much I have grown and yet stayed the same. I'm still walking life's path, knowing more than is comfortable, but not enough to be absolutely certain of the outcome of significant aspects of my life. I have to keep coming back to a place of trust. Trusting that whatever mistakes I've made are not enough to outweigh the good I've done and the help I have to offer when someone else has been left to drift upon the waters of life.   I keep coming back to the one step that is right in front of me. The next step that will lead to another until I finally take that last step across the Rainbow Bridge into eternity. Namaste.


Addendum: As I finished writing this essay, I glanced up at the television that is serenading me with melodic tones of New Age music. The song that is playing? "The Rainbow Bridge" by Al Conti.  I had no idea I was going to mention the Rainbow Bridge in that final sentence until I typed it. Then I looked up to see what interesting music was playing, since I'd never heard the tune before.  That is the bread crumb trail of synchronicity that beckons me to follow like the archetypal Fool. That encourages me to trust that the information I'm getting is true and is meant for me to know. That urges me to trust that somehow I will be able to use it wisely. Or maybe, just maybe, rather than a trail of bread crumbs, it's another pearl on the path of my life.

LOVE is all you need

Love really is all you need. If your life is based on fear, then you will struggle to be true to yourself, and you will struggle with relationships of all kinds, including the one you have with yourself. Embrace love. Fill yourself with it. Swim in it. Breathe it in and breathe it back out to the world around you. Even to those who seek to suffocate you.

Living in the Now

It is not my desires that cause suffering in my life. It is attachment to my desires that creates suffering. Attachment occurs when a belief about how I think things should be becomes more important than living in the moment, more important than my happiness in the now.To desire and let go is to form an intention and then release it so the universe can manifest it. When you desire something and release it, you incorporate it into your auric field and allow the universal Law of Attraction to draw it to you. The very act of hanging onto the desire, causes it to stay out of reach. If you think about it, you can't allow something to come back to you in real form when you are hanging on for dear life to the idea of it. Your hands/arms/heart/mind are already full of the idea, leaving no room for the manifested form.  We choose too many times to cling to the idea of something and miss out on embracing the manifestation of it when it arrives.

Solfeggio Harmonics - 852 HZ - Awakening Intuition

Sacred Sound Alchemy for DNA Repair and Healing