Perspective is what makes the difference.
Maybe that’s a good metaphor for how I could feel about life’s unfolding dramas. Depending upon how I perceive events I can either freeze in the cold and wet of my life’s most recent storm of problems, or I can step back into the eye of the storm, dry and protected, where trust lives. Trust can change how I perceive the storms that swirl through my life. If I know, not just believe, but know, deep in my heart, that “everything is always working out for me,” as Abraham-Hicks says, it changes everything. Whatever is occurring in my life is not happening to me, but is happening for me. And trust goes even deeper. Trust is knowing that Spirit has my back. Trust is owning that whatever is happening in my life, guidance and support are there for the asking. When I trust, Spirit holds a strong roof over my head and warms me with the fires of love. I am held within the arms of angels, as I stand protected in the eye of the hurricane. What this means is that we don’t have to be blown around by the storms in our lives. Unfortunately fear often sucks us into the drama with a tornado of emotion. Fear tells us we have to fix the problem, or make it go away somehow. Fear causes us to struggle against it and be so fully focused upon the problem that we inadvertently keep creating more of it. It might look like this. You’re having a lousy day at work. You started out that morning tired, having slept poorly. Your emotional weather forecast - grey skies with a chance of drizzle. Now, you’re feeling insecure and you’re doubting the decisions you’re making at work. Emotional rain is drizzling down your neck, cold and wet. Your co-workers are enjoying themselves, laughing and chatting, and you’re feeling left out. The cold, drizzle becomes a constant rain of negativity on your unprotected head. You’re feeling too tired and grumpy to make the effort to join in with your co-workers, and you tell yourself there’s too much work to do anyway. The rain becomes a downpour. Almost without your volition your mind is increasingly filled with negative thoughts, about what you are doing, about what others are doing. Finally, like a cartoon character with her own personal thunderstorm pouring and crashing about her head, you leave work for the day. You get into the car and your stomach is in a knot. Your mind is looping over and over the day and what you and everybody else did wrong. Your perfect storm has descended. But what if you didn’t have to go there? What if you could be more of an observer of what is happening, like a weather-watcher of your own life? What if you knew you were safe and protected within the arms of Spirit? Could you experience a grey and drizzly emotional day from a protected space inside rather than standing out in the wet and cold? What would that look like? It might look like this. You start out the morning tired, having slept poorly. As you get out of bed, your emotional weather forecast is grey skies with a chance of drizzle. Making yourself a warming cup of tea, you ask Spirit for a little extra support and energy today. At work, feelings of insecurity well up, you don’t know why. So you ask your Higher Self, “I wonder what’s going on?”* You return your attention to work and let go of worrying about those ‘not good enough’ feelings, mentally turning them over to your Higher Self. With your attention focused on work, an image memory seeps into your awareness of yourself as a young child believing she wasn’t good enough. You respond to the image by imagining your adult self holding your inner child, loving her, with the angel of your Higher Self standing behind you enfolding you both in her wings. In a few moments, everyone feels better. 😊 Later in the day, your co-workers are enjoying themselves, laughing and chatting. You’re working nearby. You feel a cold drizzle of negativity seep into your mind, as you feel left out of their community. Again, you stop and ask, “I wonder what’s going on?”* In doing so, you step out of the rain and back into the warmth of Spirit’s protection. Giving it over to Spirit, you return to your job and once again remember yourself as a young child. This time she’s feeling abandoned and alone. You visualize yourself holding her lovingly and telling her you will always take care of her. Again, you see both of you enfolded within the wings of your Higher Self. You feel comforted, loved, and able to refocus upon the work you were doing, grateful for the support from Spirit. The end of the day arrives and you’re tired, but you feel balanced and calm. You’re glad to be going home to a warm dinner and look forward to a relaxing evening. You offer a prayer of gratitude for the support and guidance received as you turn your car and your thoughts toward home. I'd rather have a day like that. Wouldn't you? I'll admit that was me in those examples. Though I didn't get to the guidance part until I finally remembered to ask. And really, it was just a little storm in the overall scheme of things given all that is going on in the world. Still, the metaphor holds true. The more that we can let go of the struggle, step into the role of observer, and back into the arms of Spirit by asking for support and guidance, the more gracefully we can weather all the storms. Support from Spirit can be the roof over our heads and the fire that warms us. It can be our safe place from which to observe the storms swirling around without getting caught up in the drama. Who knows, with practice we might even come to enjoy the stormy days as well as the sunny! * This wording is a specific technique for accessing guidance from your Higher Self taught by Maureen J. St. Germain in her wonderful book, Waking Up in 5D: A Practical Guide to Mulitdimensional Transformation.
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I heard the wind come up from behind and whirled about to see if anyone was there, although logically I knew there was no one. This annoyed me. I didn’t want to feel fearful on my favorite woods walk. In the past, I might have dealt with this by redirecting my thoughts, or I might have cut short my walk and gone home. This time, I was inspired to try a different approach. I breathed into the fear. I allowed myself to feel it inside and breathe into it. After a few deep breaths, I was surprised to discover that underneath the fear was a feeling of excitement. The more I breathed into it, the more I felt the excitement. The fear melted away. The dark, snow-lined branches surrounding me looked beautiful now. The drifting snowflakes like magic. I closed my eyes and breathed into that feeling, feeling myself expanding out of the constricted state of fear right into a feeling of connection and alignment. I pulled energy up from Mother Earth and into my heart. I pulled energy down from the Great Central Sun and into my heart. I felt the connection and sent love out and in, up and down. I pushed my hood down and turned to feel the exhilaration of the wind on my face. An amazing experience begun in fear! What a concept, fear is excitement without the breath. But what is the excitement? Perhaps it is the realization that I don’t have to be afraid of fear. I don’t have to struggle against it. There’s a thought. Before I started on the path of spiritual development, I spent most of my life feeling afraid. Then I learned that I could take charge of my thoughts and change my experience. It was amazing. The flip side of that, however, was that I struggled against feeling fear, anxiety, stress. Telling myself that if I could just keep my thoughts positive, I wouldn’t be dragged into those negative emotions. My thoughts took another tack then and turned into a litany of criticism for not staying positive. Sigh. What we resist, persists. We don’t always manage to stay positive and maybe that's OK. After all, we chose to incorporate in this dual Universe of plus-minus, positive-negative, for the experience of both sides of the coin. What if we greeted fear simply as an one expression of life? What if we choose to allow the feeling, breathe into it and BE with it. As we release the struggle, it will rumble through, rather like that freight train of wind blowing past, clearing the air so that we can experience the connection and love which lie just behind. Given this experience, next time fear comes up, I might greet it with a deep breath and a feeling of positive anticipation. Hey, it could happen. Photo by jesse orrico on Unsplash
But before I get further into that, let’s get to the point of this blog. Yes, this blog does have a point, and that is, that I’ve realized there are two ways I’ve gotten things done over the years. The first was to decide what I wanted to do, make a plan and then rush through it to completion. I was motivated by fear, most particularly the fear of not enough. Not enough time, not enough money, not enough energy, not enough ability to create whatever it was the way I really wanted it. The result being that I often settled for “good enough” in what I created. The second way was to decide what I wanted to do and carefully do my homework, researching and planning. This process was akin to priming the pump. Once the pump was primed, I released my hold on the process and allowed the project to move at its own speed, unfolding one step at a time. A little bit of guidance received here, a synchronicity there and the end result often looked very different from the original plan. Yet I was delighted with the outcome everytime. The two processes are not unlike traveling on a river in a boat. You can paddle furiously along, not understanding the current that carries you, believing you won’t move unless you work hard, and exhaust yourself with your efforts. You arrive at your destination tired and anxious. You don’t appreciate the journey or enjoy the process. Or, you can trust that you will be supported, put the paddle away and allow yourself to be carried along on the current. You arrive energized and calm. You enjoyed your journey and the process of it. Either way you get to where you are going. The experience however, is very different. In the past, I held several office jobs in which I remember taking the first approach. I felt pressed for time, worried that I wasn’t doing a good enough job. I couldn’t stop paddling furiously, the results were predictably mediocre, though I didn’t understand why at the time. My response was to paddle harder and harder until finally I was exhausted and quit. Recently however, given a project to do, I’ve taken the second approach and it’s worked a whole lot better for me. The results not surprisingly, have been successful. The difference is working from fear and lack of trust or working from love and trust. So simple, and so profound in its implications.
Anyway, I’m trying to figure out what to do with five or six of those tentacular cable things. I think they’re breeding back there behind my TV. Worst are the baby ones. They haven’t grown long enough, so there are enormous plugs to be dealt with half-way to the wall outlet. Grrr… OK, enough ranting. I’m breathing deeply and relaxing now. I’m approaching this part of the basement project one step at a time, priming the pump with research and planning, allowing space for intuitive leaps of guidance, taking the next step that feels right, then some more research and planning, a synchronicity or two, and taking the next step after that. Allowing the process to unfold. I’m right in the middle of it and even with all my planning, I can’t see what the outcome will look like because I don’t know where the current will carry me. I’m going to trust in the process and take my time. Sooner or later I will be successful, and my TV set-up will be neat, take up minimal floor space, and blend in with the décor, because I'm going to allow that to happen. That’s how I roll nowadays. 😉 Photo by Juliane Liebermann on Unsplash books, knick-knacks
Photo by Paolo Nicolello on Unsplash monkey Photo by Dominik Kempf on Unsplash cords
That’s when a small, potentially biting fly appeared and buzzed around my leg. I could have trapped it between my hand and my leg and killed it. I thought about doing so for a millisecond. Instead I waved it away. It dawned on me then, that tiny decision was a choice between love and fear. If I had been less aligned, I might easily have taken my negative feelings out on the hapless fly. I had done so out of irritation in the past. But this morning I pulled myself into positivity. I was feeling relaxed and appreciative of my yard and the morning by then, and so I chose to allow that fly to buzz on its way.
Every day in our lives is composed entirely of small and large choices. Every second of the day we are making choices from a place of fear or a place of love. It’s no wonder that Spirit is interested in the tiny details of our lives. Every one of those details involves the foundational choice between love or fear. Every detail asks, Will you choose to act from love or from fear? The choice between love and fear is not a new idea. Yet understanding that our days are composed of countless choices between love and fear takes this wisdom to a deeper level. Your every thought is a choice. For example, I walk through the kitchen intent upon some project or other. My husband is sitting at the kitchen counter chuckling over something he is reading. He wants to share it with me. If I am out of alignment my initial reaction is often irritation at being held up. Sigh… Does the irritation feel good to me? No. Why is irritation my kneejerk response? I’m focused and don’t want to be interrupted in what I’m doing. What am I afraid of? I’m afraid I don’t have enough energy and/or time and/or support to do all I want to do. What’s the loving response? Stop for a few moments and enjoy a positive interaction with my husband, knowing that Spirit has my back. I can believe that I have everything I need to do what I want to do. My day is filled with small, seemingly unimportant decisions like this one. Yet, when I make the choice to respond with irritation or negativity, not only do I miss an opportunity for a loving and enjoyable interaction, I choose to believe in lack, I choose to believe that I am not supported by Spirit. It is a much bigger decision than I might have thought, because one choice based in fear ripples outward, creating more choices based in fear, and more and more. Fortunately, the same is true the other way around. If, given this same situation, I make the conscious choice to know that Spirit is supporting me in all I want to accomplish, I can relax and enjoy a moment of pleasantness with my husband. The enjoyable experience of that choice ripples outward and I am more likely to make subsequent choices during my day from a place of love and trust. I do understand that a person could be paralyzed if they felt they had to analyze every tiny choice made throughout the day. Am I blowing my nose now because I’m afraid I’m going to sneeze and make a scene during this meeting or because I’m lovingly taking care of my body? There is such a thing as overanalyzing. Just blow your nose already. Still, assuming what we want is to make our choices from a place of love, how do we do that without getting all mental and driving ourselves crazy over every little decision? Here are some ideas.
What do you think? Will you choose from love or from fear today? It’s worth pondering.
The way this plays out in our individual lives is that we are more prone to fearful or angry thoughts, and the stress and anxiety that creates, than we might have been otherwise. In the general atmosphere of fear our survival instincts are on alert, looking for the danger. If there is no immediate, life-threatening danger the subconscious will choose something that is going on in our lives to focus the fear on and create a story about it to explain our feelings. The result is that we’ll feel more fearful, angry or stressed about that particular thing than we might have otherwise. In my life, the stress shows up in various ways. Sometimes, I’ll stress about all I need to get done and feel so tired and grumpy I don’t want to do anything but lie on the couch and escape into a good book. The book works for a day, it feels like a relief. But as soon as I stop reading, the anxiety-provoking thoughts return. I feel more stressed because I took the day off and I didn’t get done what I wanted to get done. Other times, I am on overdrive and feeling like I have to get everything on my list done this minute. I plan and organize down to the last detail, and I feel crabby about sticking to that schedule because I’m forcing myself against my natural flow of energy. Sometimes, I just feel fearful or angry about something that feels very real to me, but when I look at it rationally, I realize that I’m making a mountain out of a molehill. There has to be a better way. Trust I watched a Bashar video yesterday in which he spoke about staying within the eye of the storm and allowing the storm of 2020 to rage all around us without getting caught up in it. It got me thinking, what if I stay within the eye of the storm? How would I do that? The eye of the storm is a state of being. We are living in trust and love, knowing that everything that happens, happens for a reason. We trust that everything is working out for our highest and best. When we are caught up in the winds of the storm we are in a state of doing, trying to fix, control and force things to be the way we think they should be. So, it comes down to trust. Trusting God/Spirit/Higher Self and trusting in our inner guidance. The more we trust, the more easily we rest within the eye of the storm. The more we trust, the better we maintain our inner balance, the more easily we can set our inner radio dial to the God/Higher Self channel. When we do that, we are able to trust what in the past we might have been trying to control or force or fix or bury. When we trust we turn it all over to God, to our Higher Selves. Creating a Better Way Creating is choosing what we want, then following our inner guidance and allowing it to blossom in our lives. Creation feels like taking an ego-step back, releasing the need to control and force things to happen. Rather, it is setting one’s intent and letting go of the how of the creation. In order to be able to create in our lives we have to show up fully, we have to be in balance and alignment. Otherwise the mind is haring off into past or future worries, planning and fixing, and we are not fully present. When we show up fully, we are in trust. Trusting what is. Trusting that all is exactly what we need in this moment. Trusting that the energy is guiding us to exactly what we need to be doing right now. Trusting that what needs to get done, will get done, in exactly the way it is needed. Trusting that we are cared for and guided. Here’s What We Can Do We can understand that the energetic milieu in which we are immersed at this time is full of fear, swirling around us like a hurricane. That doesn’t mean we have to live in fear. We can choose to stand within the eye of the storm. Just being aware that we may be affected by the general atmosphere of fear, supports us to know that we have a choice. It’s good to remember that we have a choice if we find ourselves falling down the well of stress, anxiety, fear or anger. We can remember that the fear that feels like ours may not all belong to us. We can remember too that just because we think a thought doesn’t make it true. We do have a choice about the thoughts we think and how we respond to what’s happening in our lives. We can choose to trust. We can choose to be the conscious creator of our everyday life. We can choose the positive thought. We can choose to use the energetic tools we have to bring ourselves into balance and alignment. As we do so we step out of the hurricane and into the eye of the storm. Here's what I’m doing to support myself, perhaps it will support you too.
Photo by Favour Omoruyi on Unsplash
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Life LessonsLife is full of spiritual lessons. Some feel good, some not so good. All support us to grow. This blog is about my life lessons. Perhaps you'll find yourself within these stories. Archives
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