“When your inner child feels secure with you and you mend that relationship, you mend that connection with intimacy, love, respect, trust, and speaking the truth with each other. When that occurs your whole life shifts.”
-Red Feather
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Red Feather looked at me through Maitreya Zohar’s eyes, at the channeled group I attended recently. He asked me,

“Holly, where in your life are you not keeping your commitments to yourself?”

I thought about it. I had several choices. I gave my answer, avoiding the obvious choice. I wasn’t ready to face that one publicly yet.

I’m ready to face it now.

Several years ago, I lost twenty-five pounds using EFT, tapping on the statement, “I choose to eat only when I’m hungry, and stop when I’m a little bit full.” I made healthy food choices, exercised and did whatever else I felt inspired to do at the time.

I enjoyed the changes in my body throughout the whole process. I felt proud of my accomplishment. It felt wonderful to follow-through with my choice to lose weight.

Over this past year or so, I’ve gained thirteen of those pounds back and I’ve felt frustrated and angry with myself. Clearly, I hit my upper limit for feeling good about myself. Read more about upper limits in the post, “Is Bliss Too Scary?”

My commitment to myself was to lose the weight and keep it off. I have not kept that commitment. At least, not yet.

I happened upon a YouTube video of Esther Hicks channeling Abraham and discussing weight loss. Abraham spoke of keeping your promise to yourself to take the actions that make you feel that you are doing the right thing for your body.

Because you feel better as a result of taking these actions you raise your vibration. This allows ideas, guidance and inspiration to flow. You put yourself in a place where you can receive what you need to manifest what you want in your life.

The key is keeping your commitment to yourself by consistently doing the actions you have chosen to do.

Why is keeping your promises to yourself so important? Who’s to know but you?

And that is the crux of the matter – you know.

When you keep the promises you make to yourself, you learn to trust yourself. When you know you can trust yourself, you can feel good about yourself.

“I will do this for myself.” And you do it. “I choose to take care of myself in this way.” And you do. “I choose these actions to support myself.” And you follow through, doing those actions.

Trust builds up over time. The more that you can trust yourself, the safer you feel within and the better you feel about yourself. The better you feel about yourself, the higher your energetic vibration and the more you open yourself to guidance, inspiration and ease of creating what you want in your life.

How do we first learn trust? We learn from the adults in our lives when we were children.

When you make a promise to a young child it is important to follow through on that commitment. For example, when I tell my grandchildren that I will take them to their favorite playground today, I do my utmost to follow through on that promise. If for some reason I cannot, I explain why and then make sure that we go to the playground as soon as possible.
Why is that so important? They will play happily wherever they are. Does it really matter if we go to the promised playground?

Yes, because it is about keeping commitments, not about the playground.

When I keep my promises to my grandchildren, they learn that when I say I will do something I do it. Through that modeling, they learn responsible behavior. They learn that commitments made, matter. They can feel safe in this knowledge. They learn that promises made to them are important, because of this, they learn that they are important. They learn self-worth by the adults in their lives following through on promises made.

It is the same when we make a promise to ourselves. For who are we really making that promise too? Our inner child. Our inner child needs to know that we will follow through on promises made. In this way our inner child can feel safe. She can feel that she matters. She can know that she is worthy.  She gains in self-respect.

Speaking the truth with your inner child is all about keeping commitments made. You say you are going to do something and you do it.

When you offer yourself that level of commitment each day, you build trust and self-worth each day. One day at a time, as Red Feather says, “your whole life shifts.”

“The really happy people are those who have broken the chains of procrastination, those who find satisfaction in doing the job at hand. They’re full of eagerness, zest, productivity. You can be, too.”
– Norman Vincent Peale 
 
I’ll Do it Later
Do you procrastinate? Do you have an ever-growing ‘I’ll do it later’ list? I do.  Or I did.

My list was mental rather than written. It was full of jobs that had been niggling at the back of my mind for goodness knows how long. Jobs that I’d notice again and again as I looked around my house or yard or office, and thought, “I want to get that done, but not now. I’ll do it later.” That item then went on my mental ‘do it later’ list.

This mental to-do list is not an intentional thing. It just happens. Chances are we all have them. Whether at work or at home, in the yard or in the car, something grabs your attention and you think, “I want to do that, but I don’t have time now.”

It may be that you don’t have the energy right now, or other things feel more urgent. For whatever reason it gets shunted off to the mental category of ‘later.’

There is an energetic problem with the ‘do it later’ list. It weighs on you, whether you are aware of it or not. As more and more items get added to your list, it gets heavier and heavier.

In time, your home or office aren’t supporting you energetically, they are draining you. As you walk around, seeing all those many things that need to be done, you just feel tired.

​What’s a person to do?

Written Lists Don’t Work for Me
There are some organized individuals who notice something that needs doing and write it down on a to-do list. They will use this list later and actually get those things done.

They never clutter up their brains with a mental ‘I’ll do it later’ list. They aren’t weighed down by jobs waiting to get done. They just do the jobs and cross them off their list.

I am in awe of these people, and I have tried to do this. Really, I have.

The difficulty I encounter is that my ever-lengthening written to-do list weighs on me too. I feel trapped by it. It is never finished.

I guess it is just the way my brain works. I get one item done and all I see are the many items still to be done. That list doesn’t inspire me to go on to do more. In fact,  just the opposite.

Mental Lists Do Work for Me
Despite the fact that a mental list can get heavy, the thing about the mental list that does work for me is that it is hidden in my memory. I don’t have to look at the whole thing all at once as I do with a written list.

When I work off a written list, I may have a feeling of completion when a job is done, but it is short-lived. As soon as I pick up the list to cross off the completed job, I see everything else that is still to be done.

My feeling of accomplishment is buried beneath everything else still on the list.

This may just be my own need for an attitude adjustment, or it may be that one size does not fit all. If anyone else has experienced the same thing as you’ve tried to organize your life, there is another way – try working organically.

Work Organically
This is how it goes. I invest an hour or even a half-hour, a day. I choose a location in my house or office, and do whatever job first comes to mind.  It may be a time-sensitive job that must be done that day, or it may be a job on my ‘do it later’ list, a job that has been waiting and weighing on me.

Whichever it is, when I get that job done, I feel a surge of positive energy.

It feels so good that I am inspired to get something else done. Whatever next grabs my attention. An hour goes by doing whatever jobs come up and I feel energized and content with what I have accomplished.

When the hour is over, I stop. This is important. That time limit keeps your energy fresh so that you want to continue the next day.

​When I am working organically, and I finish each job that steps forward to be done, I feel a sense of accomplishment. I get that satisfying feeling of completion. It energizes me and I want to do more.

Example of an Organic Hour
Here’s what an organic hour from last week looked like.

I stood in the kitchen and looked around. There were a few dishes to wash. I did so.

I saw that the counter surfaces needed wiping down. I got that done. That felt good.

I looked up and saw finger smudges around the handles on the white kitchen cabinets. This was something I’d been wanting to get to for a while. I cleaned them. That felt really good as I crossed it off my mental list.

Then I thought about how I wanted to touch up the paint on the cabinets. I’d ignored that job for quite a while.

I went down to the basement and got paint and a brush and touched up the paint on the cabinets. Wow, that felt good to get done!

I felt a surge of positive energy and a sense of completion.

My hour was up. The positive feelings inspired me to do another hour the next day and another the day after that.

Trust Your Inner Guidance System
As you work organically each job grows out of the job before. There is no need to keep track of everything that needs to get done.

Jobs will suggest themselves as you work. Priorities sort themselves. You do what next grabs your attention.

As you work organically you are trusting your inner guidance system.

​The more that you can work in alignment with your inner guidance system, the better you feel, and the more you create a pattern of alignment throughout the rest of your day. 

​“Inspiration comes forth from within. It’s what the light burning within you is about, as opposed to motivation, which is doing it because if you don’t do it, there will be negative repercussions. Motivation is making myself do something that I don’t really want to do. Inspiration is having the clear picture of what I am wanting — and letting Universal forces come into play to get the outcome.”
-Abraham-Hicks

Do you do what you do because you are motivated by what needs to get done or because you feel that inner spark of inspiration?

​Today's post could easily have come under the door of Play, because inspiration is fun.  But understanding why and how we do what we do is at the heart of Know Thyself, and of this post.

Years ago, I was an overwhelmed mother of two, I had a part-time job at a local, spiritual magazine, and another part-time job working with a few clients. I had a husband that traveled a lot, a large, old farmhouse to take care of and a tight budget.

I found myself feeling increasingly irritable, annoyed (and I’m sure annoying), and burdened by the care of our old house. Things were always dirty and broken and it weighed on me. Cleaning and maintenance of our home felt like too much in addition to everything else. Wrangling my kids into helping, well, I just didn’t have the energy. Nor did there seem to be money to hire help, though I longed for it.

This went on for some time, until one day as I vacuumed the never-ending cobwebs in our damp and ancient basement, I remembered how I loved to play imaginative games with my best friend as a child. We pretended to be other people, whoever captured our fancy at the time. We’d role play how we thought those people would feel, speak and act. It was fun.

That day, standing in our dark basement, vacuum hose in hand, I felt inspired to play an adult version of the game. I’d watched Manor House on PBS and marveled at the staff it took to run that enormous house. Continuing to vacuum I made up characters in my imagination, my own staff. There was “Cookie,” our cook, and “Ceilie” our maid, and “Alfred” our man of all work, and then there was the Estate Manager, me. 

As I cleaned, the Estate Manager, in proper English accent, had a running conversation of praise and appreciation with Alfred who was doing the vacuuming. (He had kindly taken over for Ceilie who was afraid of spiders.) The work flowed, and I was done before I knew it. It felt so good to work in this way that I continued the game whenever chores just felt like work. I began to look forward to having fun with “my staff” as the jobs became enjoyable.

The loving appreciation and feeling of support conjured in my imagination had another unexpected benefit. The Universe stepped in and supported.

When my husband was home, he started to help out more. Not because I nagged him to, but just because he thought of it. Together we decided to hire some jobs out, and I began to feel increasingly supported with the care of our big, old farmhouse.

The point here is to be moving into what you want rather than struggling against what you don’t want, because we know that, “what you resist, persists.” Choose to find, create and move into that spark of inspiration in whatever aspect of life you are focused upon as if it were already your reality. 

To do so I encourage you to, as Abraham-Hicks suggests, take action from inspiration rather than motivation.

Next, “act as if” what inspires you is already part of your life. That’s a tool Red Feather teaches which I share in today’s Your Spiritual Toolbox.
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Are you inspired or are you motivated? Inspiration can make play of hard work and is a lot more fun!

“I have free will, but not of my own choice. I have never freely chosen to have free will. I have to have free will, whether I like it or not!”
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-Raymond Smullyan,  Is God A Taoist? from The Tao is Silent


Our last two posts in Know Thyself  covered the basics of the subconscious mind according to Huna teachings. Now we’ll move on to a short description of the conscious mind and a more in-depth look at the superconscious or higher-self as taught in Huna.

The conscious mind is our logical “adult” self. It is reasonable and intelligent. It is the planner, the organizer and the thinker. It is unemotional. The conscious mind communicates well with words, speaking its thoughts both internally and out loud. Of your three minds, you may be most familiar with your conscious mind because this is where most of us live on a day-to-day basis. If the subconscious mind is the gas in the engine of your car, the conscious mind is the driver, steering your life this way and that according to your consciously determined desires.

Huna philosophy teaches that the higher self or superconscious self is our God/Goddess-within. The higher self is that divine spark living within each of us. It is also so much more, more than it is possible to understand from our current level of development. However, it is possible to understand some functions of the higher self related to creating what we want in our lives.

The higher self is your master of energy. If you imagine for a moment the 3-D world we live in as an enormous holographic construct, the higher self is the computer genius who creates, programs and updates all the files manifesting as your life. However, and this is important to understand, because of the Law of Free Will, it is you, your conscious and your subconscious, that determine what is being programmed.

The higher self is also your source of guidance and inspiration. It has the ability to communicate with the higher selves of all other beings, and so bring you unlimited ideas, support, and synchronicities in your outer world. Your higher self is able to act as a sort of telephone operator allowing you to receive information and guidance from higher spiritual levels.

The language of the higher self is symbolic. It communicates through dream symbolism, bodily responses (chills, tingles, feelings, as interpreted through the subconscious), intuitive understanding, visual images, and symbols in your outer world.

Your higher self may do all this for you, but because of the Law of Free Will it may not do so unless invited by you. This is an invitation only party and your higher self may only watch lovingly from the sidelines until invited to participate.

The difficult piece for most of us is that in the absence of a positive, consciously intended and supportive belief system the subconscious may ‘ask’ without conscious awareness, so that the higher self will manifest the wounded beliefs of the subconscious, thereby supporting the supposed truth of those beliefs. Free will is just that, free.

Our lesson and our opportunity according to Huna, is to learn to use our free will in a positive way rather than have it determined for us by negative beliefs and old wounds buried in the subconscious mind.
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In our next post we’ll explore the Huna method for communicating with your higher self through the practice of breath supported prayer.