"And the love that's everlasting. Blessed be. The light has come."  
-Shawna Carol, Goddess Chant
 
It is the season of Thanksgiving. A month when many of us spend more time in our kitchens. And if we are not actually the one’s doing the cooking, still our minds and our stomachs anticipate the feast to come.
 
Speaking of kitchens, I’d like to tell you a story of another kind of kitchen, one which can fill you up more surely than a Thanksgiving feast.  
 
Many years ago, I worked for a spiritual magazine which also coordinated spiritual events. We organized an event for Lee Carroll, who channels Kryon. During the guided visualization at that event I experienced what I later heard termed a ‘love wash.’ I felt a surge of expansive, loving feeling deep within my body, exploding my heart wide open. I kept breathing it in, deeper and deeper. I wanted more and more of it. I felt chills and tingles thrilling up and down my whole body. Tears poured down my cheeks. It was a stunning experience though it only lasted a few moments.
 
Since then I’ve had the experience again. Only once was it as intense as that first time and I never knew when it was going to happen again.
 
Don Miguel Ruiz, in his book Mastery of Love, teaches that we have all the love we need, right here inside of us, in our hearts. He says that it is like a “magical kitchen,” providing us with all the love we could ever need.
 
He explains that our hearts are our connection with God’s love, Universal Spiritual love. Our hearts, our love, is where we feel our soul, our piece of God. Our hearts are the connection.
 
When we breathe in deeply and focus our attention, we link ourselves with the Universal energy of love, God. The breath is the connection opening our hearts which are the portal. Then God’s love flows through us. Our focused attention, intent and faith are all that is required.
 
I decided to see if I could invoke that feeling of God’s love intentionally. In meditation I asked God, and my Spiritual Support Team to be with me as I meditated. Then I asked to feel God’s love. I focused on breathing in the visualization of feeling bathed in love, opening to the “magic kitchen” in my heart.

I kept breathing in that idea of God’s love washing over me, until slowly, a sensation grew. It was a sensation of love, joy, expansion and gentle bliss.  It grew until I felt God’s love strongly, to the point of tears. It was beautiful, and all the more so because I called upon it.

​You can do this. Focus on breathing in a visualization and a feeling of a time in your life when you felt deeply loved, or expansively blissful, or gently joyful. See where you experience that sensation of love, bliss or joy in your body and focus your attention there, breathing into that feeling. Keep breathing and visualizing and feeling, allowing yourself to expand with it. Keep trusting that God's love is there for you.

We can all do this.  God's love is available that simply. But we have to ask and have faith that it is ours to ask for, always there for us, waiting for our intent and our attention. We have to intend it, ask for it, open to it and allow ourselves to believe we are worthy to receive.
 
It’s a bit like winning your own personal lottery of love.
 
It is possible to call upon God’s love and open the door to that limitless treasure trove, your very own, “magical kitchen,” because you have the key that opens the door in your heart to God’s love.
 
The table is set. The feast prepared. You have only to sit down and allow yourself to receive.

“…Unwarranted fear or worry will always be based upon something in your imagination or your memory.”
― Gavin de Becker
 
Has fear shown up in your life recently? Do you have fears, birthed in the past, that recur triggered by events in your life?
 
As uncomfortable as it can be, this kind of fear is a gift, because it can show you the door to understanding. The key to opening that door is to ask for understanding and guidance about why fear is showing up at this time in your life. Ask to be told what you need to know. Ask to be shown the gift of this fear.
 
For me, fear manifested recently as my husband attended a convention in Wichita for five days. I’ve shared before that his leaving has often triggered old abandonment fears in me. I know these are old fears and yet somehow the inner dialog comes up with current reasons to feel anxious. Reasons that are quite compelling. Be that as it may, I support myself, using the tools, nurturing myself, and I get through it. Some times better than others.
 
This time I chose to do that and add in a different approach. I asked for support from my Spiritual Support Team. I asked to be told what I needed to know. I asked to be shown the gift of understanding behind this door of fear. Here's what I learned.
 
Fear is created by wounded thinking. Wounded thinking is created by negative interpretations of past experiences.
 
Fear makes mountains out of molehills.
 
When you are anxious everything looks worse than it is. Yet, understanding the fear, accepting the fear, feeling compassion for that part of yourself that is afraid, shines the light of love upon the fear and shrinks that mountain back down into a molehill.
 
Seeing your fear as a gift reorients your thinking. Your perspective shifts from fear to love. You feel yourself relaxing about your fear and letting it be what it is. You say to yourself, “There I go again. Oh well. I wonder where the gift is?”

The gift my fear brought me was to remind me that shining the light of God upon the darkness of abandonment dispels it.  I am never abandoned or alone. I am companioned and supported in Spirit.  Love dissolves fear. 

When you shine the light of love upon fear, fear no longer has power over you. It has fulfilled its purpose and dissolves away.
 
Now that’s a gift.

Photo by Plush Design Studio on Unsplash
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“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. 

“If you’re not willing to risk, you cannot grow. If you cannot grow, you cannot be your best. If you cannot be your best, you cannot be happy. If you cannot be happy, what else is there?”
— Les Brown

Most of us grow by moving through fear of one kind or another. It can be moving through the fear experienced from triggering old wounds. It can be moving through the fear of pushing perceived limits. It is often a little of both as our old wounds come up for healing in the process of expanding our limits. 

Doesn’t that make fear our friend?

Personal growth makes us feel alive. It is stimulating. It is energizing. Even when it’s uncomfortable or scary, even when it brings up fear, there is a sense of aliveness about it, a feeling of movement and growth.

We can grow through pushing our limits, stepping outside our comfort zones, the way a crawling baby will pull herself shakily to her feet, and then to take that first step. Sometimes we fall. Sometimes we are injured and so we also grow through healing those wounds.

That doesn’t mean we enjoy the discomfort.

Most of us would rather grow through choosing to learn something new, pushing our limits, moving through any fear that might bring up and becoming more than we were.

A few years ago, I traveled with a group to Brazil. One of the most challenging parts of the trip was the opportunity to go hang-gliding off a mountain in Rio de Janeiro.  Let me tell you that created lots of opportunity for me to move through fear, pushing me way out of my comfort zone as I stood on the top of the mountain and waited my turn to fly. Even though I was riding tandem with an experienced hang-glider, during that run off the edge of the mountain my body was convinced that I was dying. The result of moving through all that fear was a huge adrenaline rush as we soared high over the coastline and intense exhilaration as we landed on the beach hundreds of feet below.

Would I be in a hurry to do it again? Maybe not. But I did it once. I’ve got a video to prove it!

Most of us would prefer that exhilarating kind of growth to the growth of triggering of old wounds. Both processes bring up fear and its consequences and having to deal with that. But the former is more fun. The latter less so.

Either way there is growth and development.

“Fear has two meanings: ‘Forget Everything And Run’ or ‘Face Everything And Rise.' The choice is yours.”
— Zig Ziglar
 
You don’t always have a conscious choice about it. Old wounds surface when they are ready for healing and that may not be when you would prefer.

I encountered an old wound that brought up a cascade of fear just recently. It was pretty benign really yet the fear it brought up was as malignant as ever.

I was out at a restaurant with a family group. A chance remark, pointed my way in all innocence, triggered me back to another remark when I was younger. This one not so innocent. It felt almost like a PTSD episode. In the middle of a pleasant family chat I was drowning in memories of this incident in my past that I allowed to injure me for years. The injury was not so much from the incident itself or what was said at the time, but because I used it as evidence of my own unworthiness.

All of this came rushing back at me with that one innocent remark in the restaurant. It felt like new evidence of unworthiness.

I hadn’t heard that old story line for a long time and it was shocking. Fortunately, I’m not willing to believe that story anymore. At least not for very long. I breathed through the fear while we were at the restaurant, and was able to enjoy the rest of our visit.

The next day those same fearful thoughts came up again, telling me I wasn’t done with this yet. I cleared through them once again with breathwork and also with EFT.

Eventually, I was able to acknowledge that the experience came up because I was ready to heal that old wound and finally release the fear. I felt both grateful and excited at the prospect of clearing that painful story.  

I believe our Soul’s purpose is to grow and develop, and we grow rapidly through fear. That makes fear our ally in the process of our growth.

We’re not talking about survival fear here. That’s the kind of fear that told our forebearers to hide from a saber-toothed tiger. We’re talking about the fear of emotional pain, the fear of rejection, abandonment, failure, success, unworthiness, and any other fears life experience has taught us.

We’re talking about the kind of fear that tells us it is too scary to try new things, or maybe it's the fear that tells us we aren’t good enough to succeed, or the fear that says we have to avoid certain kinds of situations or we will feel emotional pain.

But what if this fear that we’ve been resisting all our lives is actually our friend?

Can we welcome fear when we encounter it knowing it offers us an opportunity to grow? Can we feel curious and intrigued when fear shows up? Saying to ourselves, “Thank you fear for showing up. You’re showing me a new place to grow.”

“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.”
— Joseph Campbell

What if underneath most fear is the Soul’s excitement about an opportunity for growth? Would the fear related to pushing our comfort zones and triggering old wounds transmute into excitement? If we stop struggling against feeling fear and instead welcome it and the opportunity it presents, we might experience our Soul’s excitement.

I think it is possible. It’s worth a try.

“When a resolute, young fellow steps up to the great bully, the world, and takes him boldly by the beard, he is often surprised to find it comes off in his hand, and that it was only tied on to scare away the timid adventurers.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The same might be said of that great bully, fear. Perhaps it is not such a great bully as we thought. Perhaps it is even our friend.

​“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!