Tap into a new attitude, a new way to walk through life, a new set of eyes. Take advantage of each new day to be new yourself. In some way make a change, big or little. Break a habit, change a behavior, strike out in a new direction. Start something that you have longed to do. Try a different approach to something. Allow the creative in you to awaken each day with you and bring play into your life, play that is nurturing and sustaining, that is enlightening and lightening. Take the opportunity that a new day brings to make a breakthrough to something new.
Breathe deeply more often, opening to the breath of life. Your ability to breathe is your secret weapon. In all its forms, whether for meditation or healing, the breath is magical. Take time to learn about it, how it can strengthen you, cure you, enhance you; how it can give you new life. Learn to breathe in new ways, to let nature in, to let life in, to invigorate and reinvigorate. The act of breathing is an act of change and change is good, especially when consciously embraced. Let change enhance you—breathe!
Shift away from negative thoughts, from old ideas of the self, from the constant voice that shows up only to taunt and criticize, telling you that you are doing things wrong, not good enough, not, not, not. Find new words that will lift you up and away, positive affirmations to shift you out of the doldrums. A simple new thought that is positive and endearing is all it takes, an idea that you are indeed good, better, best. Let the old slip away like an old worn out coat and take on the new as easily as you pull a blanket over you at night. For yes, you have the power to change, as easily as that!
In his journeys in infinity, Robert Monroe experienced a perspective of our world as a colony that refined the commodity of love, which he called loosh. This, he discovered, is why we are here, that the real reason for our sojourn through life in this world is to refine love. But how do we do that?
The notion of refining love suggests a developmental process for love, spanning its first coming alive in gross matter, at physical birth, to its subtly refined pure, spirit-energy state at physical death. Refined love is the one thing you really can take with you! Furthermore, the energy of refined love is the fuel for total acceptance, the key to wholeness. Everything that is, is part of the whole. If you cannot accept something, you cannot be whole.
Our world provides the ideal framework for this refinement process. Psychology teaches us about the absolute necessity for an infant to attach to a secure love object to move forward into life in this world. Rene Spitz, an early pioneer in attachment theory, discovered that institutionalized babies, separated from their mothers beyond three months, sank into what he identified as a progressive anaclitic depression, which often resulted in failure to thrive and death.
To survive and thrive in this world we must attach. Our emotional attachments in this world are the playing field for the refinement of love. Ironically, to achieve the maximum refinement of love required for it to transcend physical death ultimately requires us to completely detach from the physical dimension and all the objects we have loved. Many departed souls struggle with this challenge on the astral plane, especially if they haven’t reached that level of physically letting go during the dying process.
The primal necessity for attachment to a secure object can be transferred to a host of objects, including one’s physical body. For example, rhythmic rocking behavior in children enables a self-soothing behavior that somewhat autonomously satisfies the need for comfort from a secure other person. Freud illumined fixation upon particular erogenous zones of the body as serving similar self-soothing functions.
Attachment to screens, even in very young children, can provide a sense of primal connection with an energetically vibrant and stimulating other. The pleasure derived from food and substance can serve as a displaced soothing interaction with a secure love object.
As Gabor Mate suggests, addiction is persistence of attachment to any object or habit that offers soothing connection, in spite of its destructive consequences. From this perspective, the task of recovery is a refinement of love that withdraws the outer projection of maladaptive connection into the ability to truly love the self.
Psychiatrist and pediatrician, Margret Mahler described the achievement of object constancy as the internalization of the outer primary love object into a stable inner sub-personality that can soothe the child from within. Thus, if mother is not in the vicinity, the internalized mother image can bring calm and reassurance that she will return. Emotional object constancy refines love into an inner ability to love and accept both the good and the bad of self and other.
Emotional object constancy is also the foundation for the adult self, as the parenting functions of emotional regulation are now in the inner hands of the growing personality. The greatest challenge for the adult is to refine its critical judgment of itself, and others, into total acceptance of everything and everyone. Love is all-embracing.
To accept and love all, does not mean that boundaries are not necessary. We can love people who must be stopped. We can abandon people physically who must assume responsibility for themselves, yet we can still love and accept them with equanimity. Total acceptance is wholeness, even when some parts of the whole may need to occupy different places for the overall balance and welfare of the whole.
Perhaps the most challenging arena of acceptance is self-acceptance. When we recapitulate our lives, we are asked to completely accept everything we have done and that was done to us. This is not about seeing someone’s potential bright side to find greater acceptance of their dark side. This is full-on acceptance of the total truth, in its full ruthlessness, of what we have done and what has been done to us. This is acceptance completely devoid of shame and blame.
The shamans of ancient Mexico imagined the force behind our loosh/love colony to be a great Eagle that consumes the experience of our refined love journey to enhance its own evolution. The Eagle grants souls continued love journeys in infinity, once they arrive at total acceptance of their complete love journey while in the sojourn of human form.
Let yourself be still more often, quiet of heart and mind, unburdened of the vicissitudes of life in human form. Step back and feel the flow of life energy in you without attachment to the problems of the world. Know yourself in this form, as energy visiting Earth for a time, seeking to do something no one else has yet done, seeking to be you in your own unique way. Let yourself bask for a few moments in this energy being self who moves and sees, who knows and experiences as no human body can. Let yourself go for a moment. And then return quietly and comfortably back into your day.
