Here is a Soulbyte for the day:
Make every moment glorious! Make life a walking meditation, slowing down, noticing how things still get done, but with less stress. Stop and hear the soft sound of the snow gently falling, catch a glimpse of a red cardinal in the trees, look at the animal prints in the snow. Walk slowly and mindfully through each day and notice how being glorious becomes more attainable. Walk in calmness today…
Our thoughts create our reality. Our thoughts keep us in pain, fearful and afraid to fully live.
In keeping with today’s channeled message, create a new inner reality by changing the message to the mind, body and spirit. Breathe out the old thoughts and breathe in a new mantra: I am a Radiant Being!
Try breathing that in for 5 or 10 minutes and then repeating it throughout the day. See what happens!
Here is today’s message from Jan and Jeanne. May it assist you in achieving some much needed balance and calmness today and throughout the week. In mindfully breathing, one stays more fully present and open to the magic in life. Enjoy breathing!
I sit, sun pouring through the window. I absorb its heat and the glow of the light. I know we’re at the precipice of a major shift, but in this moment I bask in the awe of the sun’s rays. This week has been about changing dreams, minor shifts of focus that take us into other worlds, worlds of rejuvenation and awe, worlds that take us deeper into the magic.
I open The Eagle’s Gift by Carlos Castaneda, to a moment in time when Carlos and la Gorda were caught in powerlessness and gloom. “One day, in order to alleviate our distress momentarily, I suggested that we immerse ourselves in dreaming,” Carlos wrote. “As soon as I voiced my suggestion, I became aware that a gloom which had been haunting me for days could be drastically altered by willing the change. I clearly understood then that the problem with la Gorda and myself had been that we had unwittingly focused on fear and distrust, as if those were the only possible options available to us, while all along we had had, without consciously knowing it, the alternative of deliberately centering our attention on the opposite, the mystery, the wonder of what had happened to us.” (p. 127)
In this moment, I am thankful for the coming uncertainty, the forced interruptions in the continuity of routine. These are the wake-up calls to change the dream. These are those moments in a dream when we are invited to lucidity, when the absurdity of circumstance stirs our awareness to wake up and realize this can’t be real, we must be in a dream. If we awaken to that truth, without waking from the dream, we are freed to enter new dreams of possibility in full awareness.
In waking life, as well, we can find or create glitches to awaken ourselves from the trance we are induced into from the habits we mostly inhabit through the routine days of our lives, through the repetition of our behaviors, and the slumps we find ourselves so often stuck in. These trances of habit so define our actions as to shape our needs and daily outlook into fear, distrust, and boredom.
Yet, at any moment we can intentionally pause and reclaim our awareness! In the moment we skip outside the mundane—the routine, the expectations, the pain, the frustration, the sadness, the shame, the fears, the disappointments—and choose instead to occupy “the wonder of what has happened to us,” we offer ourselves the opportunity to enter a new reality, a new dream entered in full waking consciousness.
We are beings on magical journeys, fully capable of shifting our lives in an instant, making ourselves available to love and enjoy every moment of our magical lives, simply by, as Carlos says, willing a new dream.
Enjoying the magical momentary pause,
Chuck
I grew up in an emotionless household. I write about this extensively in my books, as I faced the truths of my family of origin as well as the truths of my long-repressed childhood sexual abuse. And when I say emotionless, I really mean that.
Emotions were forbidden. Neither crying nor elation, and everything in between, was staunched. Evenness of temper, implying that nothing was ever wrong within the family unit, was critical. Imperfections, if present, were denied and suppressed as appearance was everything. Underneath the facade of perfection, however, the emotions of seven children and their parents bubbled and frothed, seeking outlet. It’s no wonder that all my siblings and I went into creative careers, as writers, musicians, artisans and fine builders. Within all of us, emotion sought release in some form of creativity.
When I was a child, at seven o’clock on Sunday nights Walt Disney presented an hour long television show. Simultaneously, WOR—channel 9 out of New York City—aired the movies of Shirley Temple. My five brothers and I fought over which show we’d watch. They usually won. They’d sit by the new TV upstairs watching the Disney show while I went downstairs into the basement to turn on the old television. I’d fiddle with the rabbit ears until grainy reception came through. The snowy picture would suddenly cut out with loud static and I’d have to get up repeatedly to readjust the antenna. I didn’t give up. It was my private time away from everyone. Sometimes my little sister, seven years younger, would sit with me, though mostly I remember being in the dark basement alone, staring into the eye of the old TV set, weeping.
You see, Shirley Temple let me cry. She never asked me to hold back my emotions. She let me be ecstatically happy and deeply sad too. She let me live beside her, feeling her emotions. In every pouty mouth and every delightful glint in her eye, I was allowed to live from a place that normally I had to keep shut down. And so, I thank Shirley Temple Black, who died this week, for offering me that emotional outlet, for all the movies she made and all the moments of release that my child self received from her child self.
She was making those movies in the thirties and forties, years before I was born, but they carried forth into the fifties and sixties all that I needed in order to connect with my deeply emotional self, a natural self that found little outlet otherwise.
Thank you, Shirley Temple, you saved my emotional life,
Jan