“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.

“…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.

“Everything is always working out for me.”
- Abraham-Hicks    
 
Awhile back my husband left early in the morning to drive to a convention several states away.  I knew he’d be gone for six days. In the past when I’ve said goodbye to him and found myself alone in the early morning dark, I’ve sunk into feelings of loneliness and abandonment. Not because it was true but because old childhood tapes would play in my head.

This time I chose to experience it differently.

I put my thoughts and feelings on hold as I tidied up the kitchen from breakfast focusing my attention on what was immediately in front of me. I put in a load of laundry and made myself a cup of tea. The sun came up and I took my tea outside to sit on the patio and watch the backyard awaken.

Negative thoughts arose and I chose to focus my attention on my immediate environment. I paid attention to my breath moving in and out. I watched the light in the leaves and felt the fresh, cool morning air. I noticed the birds at the feeder and heard their morning songs.  

Even as I did so I could feel the old anxieties and fears just beneath the surface. I knew what was there. I’d experienced it all before and now it lurked, a darkness pressing against the door of my awareness. This time I chose not to give it any attention, nor did I allow it to come to the fore. I didn’t even try to fix it as I’ve done before. Instead I paid attention to what I sensed all around me.

It felt like I was faking it, and any minute the reality of negativity would take over, but it didn’t. In fact, just the opposite happened. In a little while my thoughts turned to what I’d like to do during the day, what would feel good to do.
I made a mental plan and decided to start by making myself a delicious soup to eat throughout the day. It felt nourishing and supportive.

I then took the dog for a long walk and thoroughly enjoyed the cool woods and sunshine. When I felt worry thoughts start I reminded myself of my favorite Abraham-Hicks quote and thought, I don’t have to worry about this because, “Everything is always working out for me.”

As I walked on I heard a repeated bird call from the trees. Over and over it sounded like the bird was saying, “Thank you, thank you, thank you, thanks!” It became my mantra as I walked.

Afterward, I got home and ate nurturing soup and took a nap.
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When I awoke, once again I felt the aloneness pressing at the door of my thoughts and again I chose to focus elsewhere. Instead, I returned to the kitchen and tried out a new recipe, a healthy version of blondies made with white beans. They were surprisingly good. Then I replaced our broken mailbox which had been waiting for repair, and ordered a planter to go around the base of the mailbox post.

Throughout the day several friends called with invitations and connection. My daughter called for support with something that was bothering her, and my husband called just checking in, letting me know he was thinking of me. The calls felt connecting and supportive.

I realized that as I chose to support myself with where I focused my attention, and in the thoughts I chose to think, the Universe responded and supported me. I chose to feel connection. I chose to feel support. I chose to nurture myself.  The Universe reflected that right back to me. 

You will have your own ways of loving and nurturing yourself. You know what feels good to you. Begin with your inner home, your thoughts.
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​Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash

“And as I rise to greet a new day, may I always remember the source of my abundance and wealth flows from deep within, and that no person or material resource can hinder this progress of peace, love, and joy.”
 
Ntathu Allen, Love Your Life!
 
 
In this society we are so hurried, so rushed, feeling that so much must be packed into each day, that we lose track of what the day is all about. We cannot even see the blossom, much less appreciate its beauty as it unfolds.
 
Our lives are speeded up by cars, trains, planes, cell phones, televisions, microwave ovens, instant everything, bigger, faster and better, till we are exhausted just waking up in the morning. The perfect blossom of this day is an alien concept having nothing to do with our everyday lives.
 
During the holidays the expectation is that we will pack in even more into our days, so we are even more rushed. Added to the stress of this is that we are supposed to feel loving and joyful, but we’ve lost track of the beauty of our lives and how can we feel loving and joyful about adding in more to do?
 
The purpose for all these advances of civilization are for us to have a sense of control over the uncontrollable. If we schedule our days, fit in everything we are supposed to do, make our lives more efficient, faster, better, then we will be safe, we will be happy.
 
The problem is it doesn’t work this way. I am not happier because I have a schedule and a to-do list. I am not happier because I fit in more things and get more done. I have rushed through the day, worrying over the next thing I had to do even as I worked on the one before. At the end of the day I may feel a fleeting sense of accomplishment at having done so much, or I may just feel exhausted, knowing that tomorrow holds more of the same.
                                                                                             
There is another way. We can allow the day to unfold naturally, like allowing the opening of a beautiful flower blossom. Have you ever tried to unfurl a blossom with your fingers before it was ready? It ruins the blossom. It must unfurl naturally, on its own, to achieve its full beauty.
 
There are different stages to the unfolding of a blossom, these stages cannot be skipped or taken in differing order. It all happens as it should, slowly, exquisitely, beautifully.
 
Each day is like a blossom, not to be forced, but lived at its own pace, with no more important agenda than the experience of its beauty. 


Photo by Magdalena Raczka on Unsplash