“Inspiration and manifestation on all levels are birthed in the present moment from your ‘I Am’, your ‘God Self.’” 
-Red Feather
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The present moment is your source of inspiration.

Suppose you have a job to do. It must be done. You’ve committed to getting it done. Now it’s time to do it and you feel uninspired. You’d rather be doing something else. You can feel the energy of inspiration around other projects, just not this one. How do you get inspired about doing this one?

You could just push your way through and get it done so that you can get on to what you’d really like to be doing. You could say to yourself, “As soon as I get this done, I can do this other thing that really inspires me.” It would be like eating your vegetables before you can have dessert. That’s one way to get the job done, and plenty of us work that way.

But where does inspiration live?

Red Feather says that inspiration comes from within, from our God self. Our God selves live in the present moment, right here, right now. Our God selves are not anticipating the future or worrying over the past. Our God selves are right here. This is where the magic happens. This is where inspiration lives, right in the heart of our God self.

Now, suppose you have a job to do, something you feel you have to get done. You have chosen to get it done now despite the fact that there are other things you’d rather be doing. It feels like work to you. Remember the saying, “It’s only work if you’d rather be doing something else,”? Well, right now you’d rather be doing something else, so it’s work. But you’ve chosen to get this done now.

So, do you push through and just get it done, focused on the product and on the doing of the job, wishing you were somewhere else? You can do that. If you do, you’ll be motivating yourself through fear or anger or some other emotion linked to your ego. Maybe you’re afraid that you won’t get paid. Maybe you’re afraid that if you don’t meet your commitments others will be disappointed, or you’ll be disappointed in yourself. Maybe you’re angry that you have to do this job, and that fuels your energy. However you motivate yourself from ego, it’s not likely to be enjoyable, but you’ll get the job done, even though it will feel like work.

Or, you can motivate yourself from your God self, with love. You can find your inspiration within your heart, opening yourself fully into this present moment.

Let’s take an example – Pretend we’re not in the middle of a stay-at-home social isolation order and you’re giving a dinner party tonight. You’re feeling stressed because the house needs to be cleaned, the table set and dinner cooked. You have an image in your mind of a clean, attractive, welcoming home, a delicious meal to offer your guests, and you as the relaxed and gracious host.

It’s a lot to live up to and not much time to make it happen. You’re feeling stressed about it. Your mind is bringing up images of the past when you felt disappointed in yourself for offering less than your best to your guests. Your fears are conjuring an image of future disappointment. Fear motivates you to rush through the cleaning, forget the decorations and barrel into cooking dinner as fear constricts your stomach. Not surprisingly, you don’t enjoy your dinner party much.

There is a more enjoyable way to approach this. You can get focused into the present moment where inspiration lives.

What would that look like? In this same example of the dinner party, the house still needs to be cleaned, table set, dinner cooked. Instead of launching yourself into a cleaning frenzy, you sit down, close your eyes, and take several, deep, calming breaths. Now, thank your Higher Self for opening the blossom of inspiration in your heart. Invite your Spiritual Support Team to guide and support you, that you may offer your guests a loving welcome, a clean, supportive environment, and a nurturing and delicious meal. Thank your Spiritual Support Team for giving you exactly what you need to accomplish this.

Next, you put on some upbeat music that sparks your energy. You gather together your cleaning materials, and while grooving to the music, you vacuum, wipe and wash. You feel energized as you enjoy the process, keeping your mind fully focused on what you are doing.

You’re not planning out the dinner as you clean, or worrying about getting it all done. If stressful thoughts come up, you mentally hand them over to your Spiritual Support Team and trust that you have exactly what you need.

You flow through the cleaning and on into the kitchen to start preparing the meal. You’re listening to music you love. Maybe you pour yourself a glass of wine or make a cup of tea to enjoy as you chop the vegetables. You feel relaxed. This is fun!

With dinner started, you turn your attention to setting the table, arranging the flowers and creating a beautiful, welcoming environment. Your guests arrive and you’re delighted by how much you enjoy the evening.

When you call on your Higher Self and your Spiritual Support Team and focus into the present moment, you are releasing the egoic fuel of fear and anger, and energizing your actions through love. That’s when what might feel like work turns into enjoyment because you feel inspired.

“Rather than fighting with ego you can work together for the same goal. Teach ego that it is an equal energy. You can say to ego, ‘While I am doing this, I would like you to support in this other way.’ This gives your ego permission to show you the parts of yourself that you have repressed out of self-judgment.”
-Red Feather
 
Have you ever found yourself caught in a looping circle of negative thoughts even when things are going well? It can be really painful, and all the more so because it doesn’t have to happen that way. Unfortunately, or fortunately for the lesson of it, it did happen to me, just the other day.

It was a magical day. I went with some of my dear soul family to a wetlands wildlife refuge. We discovered to our delight, a huge migration, hundreds of thousands of Snow Geese, as well as Trumpeter Swans, Canadian Geese, Mallards and Bald Eagles. It was a delight to my birder eyes, and pure magic for my soul. The day was filled with lovely discoveries and messages from Spirit throughout.

The lesson for me, however, was my growing awareness of how at odd moments during the day, and even afterwards, my thoughts circled around negative perceptions of small events that took place, like a dog worrying a bone. Instead of staying focused upon the magic that surrounded me, my thoughts zoomed in on some perceived annoyance or jealousy or fear and gnawed at it.

Really? Why would I want to do that?

It’s all about ego of course. Like a nervous and overly energetic dog our egos need a job to do. If we don’t assign our egos something positive to do, they will revert to old habits. So, our egos need to be taught how to support us.

It is not that our egos are consciously being negative, in fact just the opposite. Our egos are trying to protect us by searching out what is wrong or hurtful and fixing it. The ego is not programmed to look for the good stuff. The ego is programmed like a watch dog, to look for the bad stuff, the stuff that might hurt us. That worked well for survival in the past when we had to be on the look out for predators and life-threatening situations. In our lives today that more often looks like watching out for emotionally threatening situations.

So, here I was having a lovely day with friends and my ego was on alert, looking for the bad stuff, looking for anything that might be emotionally threatening. And of course, my ego usually finds something scary to worry over.

The egos way of ‘fixing’ things is to worry and fret and go over and over various negative scenarios and generally get us worked up into an emotional lather. Then we take some sort of fear-based action or just withdraw into a negative funk. It’s no fun. It certainly doesn’t feel good. But the ego doesn’t care about fun, the ego cares about survival. In this case, emotional survival.

The ego is programmed for fight, flight or freeze, the physical survival responses. When it comes to emotional survival however, these responses may be less than optimal, and keep us circling around in a loop of negativity.

Unless we can catch ourselves and redirect, reprogramming our egos with a positive response.

I caught myself repeating a negative loop, a loop I have repeated many times in many ways, in the past. It was old, familiar and painful territory.

I asked for support and guidance from my Spiritual Support Team as I became aware of what I was doing. I asked for guidance because at that moment I didn’t have a solution. I was just aware that I didn’t want to continue on with the negative thought loop of worry, running negative scenarios, going over various negative scripts in my head, and all the other egoic approaches that result in increasing emotional pain.

I asked for guidance and was delighted by the unexpected thought that I was really lucky. I was really lucky to have these dear friends and family. I felt the fullness of the love that we share, our history and our bond. I felt that overflow of love as echoed in the abundance of life that surrounded us in the wetlands, the water, the marsh, the thousands upon thousands of geese and swans coming together in floating, honking, trumpeting, feathered rafts of bird community.

It was an inspiring, loving answer to my prayer for support, and it turned me right around. After that my thoughts focused upon the beauty of the sunset on the drive home, the fun and humor of those riding in the back seat, my gratitude to my friend driving us, making this trip possible.

That night as I lay in bed, tired and ready for sleep, I could feel my thoughts edging back toward negativity. Like unwelcome visitors knocking on the door in my mind, I knew if I opened the door I’d be circling around once more.

Closing my eyes, I saw a beautiful visual of thousands of geese rising up into the air. I focused upon that visual, and other visual memories of the beauty in the wetlands, choosing not to open the door to the loop of negative thoughts. I fell asleep easily, feeling contented.

Have you ever felt yourself caught up in a negative thought loop like this? Running scenarios and mental scripts and visualizations in an attempt to ‘fix’ whatever the ego perceives as threatening, falling down the rabbit hole of negativity?

Yup, it happens to most of us. Today’s Spiritual Toolbox has some suggestions for what you can do about it.

“…happiness is the result of love coming out of you…”
Don Miguel Ruiz, Mastery of Love, A Toltec Wisdom Book

​A forty-something, tired-looking woman (who looks nothing like a younger version of me) stares at her daughter with dismay.
 “You are not going out of this house dressed like that!”

Her daughter slams the front door she had just opened, turns and looks at her mother, eyes narrowed, and disgust distorting the outline of her mouth. She runs upstairs to her room, screaming,    
“I hate you!”

If you were me, uh .. I mean this mother, how might you choose to feel in this situation?

For the sake of argument let’s pretend that you have forgotten you have a choice about how you want to feel and that you respond with a knee-jerk reaction. Your feelings are hurt. You feel anger and fear. You are trying to protect your daughter. Who knows what teen-aged boys might assume if they saw her parading around in that 6 inch skirt and tight, low cut, cropped t-shirt?

When your daughter comes back downstairs wearing an 8 inch skirt and a tight, low-cut, uncropped t-shirt, and looking at you as if you were condemning her to death, your hurt, anger and fear for her causes you to overreact.

“Get back up to your room, young lady! You are grounded! No phone, no mall, nothing, till you can learn how to dress properly!”

And so, it repeats, in many homes, in many variations, with many different teenaged daughters and sons.

This is an old road, traveled by many an irate parent of a teenager.

You may not have teenagers. You may not be a parent. Your life may not look anything like this. The learned behavior patterns of this scene may not be one of your patterns, but most likely you will have others.

We all have our individual behavior patterns, based on fear and built in response to family patterns as we were growing up.

Our hypothetical mother had a choice of how to respond to her daughter, though she may not have been aware of it at the time. (In fact, I can say for sure that she wasn’t. She knee-jerked much of her way through motherhood, sigh…)

We are constantly confronted with situations in which we choose how we will respond. The choice is not always conscious, but it is always a choice. Many of us forget this.

We are trained from infancy to perceive the world around us as our parents, family and society perceived the world, a process known as acculturation. It is the way we learn how to be in the world.

During the process of acculturation, we learn about how our world works and where we fit into it. As infants and children, we swallow whole the view of our world from those around us. Later, as adults we may question this view, but the foundation is laid.

We learn to make the choices about how we feel without conscious thought, based upon what those around us have taught us. We learn knee-jerk responses to certain kinds of experiences. 

We learn that we need certain things or events to happen in order for us to respond lovingly and feel happy. If those things do not happen, or other things happen instead, we respond with fear and we feel unhappy.

It doesn’t feel like a choice for us. It feels like our happiness depends on events outside of ourselves.

This is an unhappy way to live, because we give up our power to choose. We forget that we have the power to choose a loving response, to choose to feel happy. We believe that our happiness lives outside ourselves, when in fact just the opposite is true.

How do we choose to feel happy? We have these learned patterns that tell us when we can feel happy and when we have to feel unhappy. How do we unlearn these patterns and start over?

How do we give ourselves back the power to choose? We retrain our automatic responses through attention, time and practice.

Learning anything new requires attention, time and practice. My granddaughter will repeat a new skill over and over, day after day, until she has mastered it. Whether it is riding her bike without training wheels, drawing a human figure, or hanging upside down on the monkey bars, she is driven to practice again and again, until one day she has it. Then she will lose interest and move on to something new.

Our brains are hard-wired to learn this way. When mastering a desired new skill, we feel a driving need to practice. We are creating new pathways in our brains that allow us to master new skills.

In time, the pathways in the brain associated with any particular bit of learning become like well-traveled roads.

What happens when we want to relearn these responses? We have to stop using the old roads and build new roads in their place.

Relearning requires the repeated practice that any new learning requires. It also requires paying attention and catching ourselves before we start down an old response road, then reorienting ourselves to the new response road we are building.

When you choose to relearn old behavior patterns be patient with yourself.

You are rebuilding the learned pathways in your brain. You are learning to choose a love-based response over a fear-based response.

Relearning takes attention, time and practice.

Chances are there will be times when you suddenly find yourself on the old roads, responding in a knee-jerk negative fashion to familiar stimuli. You will have by-passed all the detour signs and gone barreling down the old road. That’s OK. Wherever you find yourself you can choose to reorient and keep rebuilding.

It’s worth it, because our choice of response, whether we respond from fear or from love, determines how we feel about any situation.

When we choose to respond from love we choose to feel happy.

Don Miguel Ruiz, in his book Mastery of Love, explains that we are only happy when we are expressing love.

A feeling of happiness is a side effect, a beneficial result of expressing love into the world. When we choose the loving response, we feel happy.

Give yourself the power to choose love.