Today is a day of reconciliation within the self; a day for reflection on all you have learned about the self over the past days, weeks, months, and even longer, for the energy of change has been in motion for quite a long time.
Awareness of self at all times remains key. Awareness of self entails keeping abreast of the changing self, of the changes that have already taken place. With those changes in your cognition, make new choices in alignment with the constantly changing and growing self. Awareness entertains all possibilities, but it also remains fixed on the path of growth that you chose a long time ago.
All who exist upon that earth already chose a path of growth. Life asks you to wake up to this fact, and to force negation of life away, as you embrace the positive aspects of your life. Life is energy and how you view, use, interpret, and allow that energy to flow through you and unfold is really up to each one of you. As an individual you do have ultimate control over your life and so that is what the energy of now asks you to fathom and take responsibility for. The energy of now asks you to proceed on your life as if you were in perfect control, accepting everything as necessary, asking that each day’s tasks and unfoldings be totally acceptable and necessary as well. However, choices matter, and this is where your power lies, in making choices that lead you along your evolutionary path.
You know what is right. Be what is right for you to be. Be open to the energy that now aids and abets you as you take your journey. With awareness, make positive choices as you work your way out of your old self and into your new self. The energy of now fully embraces you on your journey.
Every step of your life is meaningful. Keep this in mind as you continue your journey today and every day. Greet life with the same openness with which it greets you. Deeper work now awaits, yet does it gift you greatly to deal with all aspects of life that still hold you to an old routine.
Break away from the old self and open wide to the new self. You already know who that is. Don’t be afraid to live this new self. There is no reason to hold back. It’s your life after all! Don’t you want to live it to the fullest? Approach it gently, thoughtfully, compassionately, but do embrace this energy that now seeks to release you from your old self and catapult you to a new self.
Each one of you must make personal decisions now. That’s just the way it is. Every little decision is important—know that. Each step, each day, is meaningful. Find the truth of that and you’ve found the key to life.
Be aware. Make choices in awareness of the greater meaning of your personal journey, reconciled with the truth that you chose that life and that journey. That is how to evolve.
Everything that comes in the day or in the night is meaningful…
During my recapitulation I learned that everything in my life, waking and dreaming, was supporting my recapitulation journey. I also learned that everything in my life had always been supporting my journey, though it was not until this very intense time of inner work that I was granted this knowledge in a very keen and extremely significant way, on a daily basis.
As I began to piece together how everything not only supported the inner work I was doing, but how it all seamlessly wove together pictures of my past with current situations, I saw how all of it was mirrored and supported in my nightly dreams as well. In a shamanic sense, I was training my awareness, as I went through several years in a perpetual state of heightened awareness as everything, in every moment of my life, greeted me with messages, insights, puzzles to be solved, and issues to be resolved. Since the completion of that recapitulation, I have continued to be taught by life itself, by what appears in daytime and nighttime, in awake experiences and dreaming experiences, by what my own body presents me with on a daily basis.
I know now, without a doubt, that I am guided through this life, that I have always been and always will be, that we all are. Only through offering myself the gift of innocent vision during my recapitulation, constantly asking the busy rational mind to sit by the wayside, as I turned to allowing the creativity and imagination of my adult and child self in cohesion to guide me, was I able to shift how I perceived the world and achieve this understanding. It takes some amount of daring to reject everything we’ve learned and turn inward, to turn to our child self—the defended, rejected, abandoned, frightened child self in my case—and allow the evolving adult self to show the child that, although it is all those things, it is also much, much more.
Perhaps the idea of expending the rational, the voice of reason, the voice that upholds the known and proven world, keeping us safe and comfortable, and turning toward the totally irrational, and listening to a new voice, is a crazy notion, but once the process is begun there is no going back. Once the magic begins, there is no going back to an old way of thinking, perceiving, or living. At this point, life becomes a most fascinating journey, as we accept what comes to us as meaningful, as we accept that each day and each moment in each day holds important information for us.
Once we are in it, there is no going back to the boredom of waiting for life to change or something exciting to happen to us, because we are fully aware that excitement is inherent in each moment. We are living it, painful or otherwise, and at least we can say that we will never again complain about life being boring. We just have to keep remembering the magic, remain open to it, and learn to constantly reinterpret our life and our experiences from new perspectives.
I don’t take much for granted; there is always something else behind the screen of normalcy, of convention, of the usual spin, something that is different, even magical or enchanting, and ultimately the real truth. We just have to learn how to constantly shift our thoughts away from the conventional and into the world of possibility. I trust possibility more than I trust convention, so you won’t find me believing much of anything I hear or see. I prefer to find my own answers and truths. All of this is leading me to relate an experience I had the other night, one in which I allowed my dreaming self to show me something.
It was a cool night; the sliding door in our bedroom was wide open to the brisk night air when the loud shriek of an owl startled us awake.
“An owl!” I said. “It sounds close. It must be perched on the deck outside our door.” We could hear its claws scratching against wood. It shrieked again and again.
“Why is it doing that?” Chuck wondered. “It’s hunting, shouldn’t it be quiet?”
“I don’t know, perhaps it’s calling to others, a mate or young,” I whispered. We listened to it until it grew quiet. As I drifted off to sleep I wondered why it had come.
“What does it mean?” I asked my dreaming self. Sometime later, Chuck made a sound in his sleep, waking me. I didn’t want to wake up, I’d been dreaming and I wanted to finish my dream, but the truth was that I was awake. I wondered if I could go back into my dream anyway.
I kept my eyes closed and looked into the darkness behind my lids, into the amorphous, fluid and multicolored darkness. I noticed that my left eye shut down completely and only my right was seeing. Peering sharply into the darkness behind my lid, it honed right into my dream, parting the curtains that had descended when I was startled awake a moment before.
Like a microscope, my right eye honed in on where I had left off and magically finished the dream. Fully awake I dreamed to completion. Satisfied, I opened my eyes and told Chuck what had just happened. It was then that I remembered the owl in the night and I understood the message it was bringing. It was asking me to hone the skills that I work at every day, to use the special ability of the owl to hone in on its prey with microscopic vision, even in the dark, abilities I now know I have inside me, that we all have inside of us.
“Yes,” Chuck said, “the shamans say we all have everything we need inside the human body to do everything the shamans do.”
“It’s true,” I say. “You taught me that when I was recapitulating too, as a means of keeping me focused on the inner journey, offering me some badly needed self-confidence, but really allowing me to accept my experiences as important, to not dismiss anything, but to learn how to perceive everything as meaningful.”
And that’s what I still focus on, allowing everything to be important and meaningful. All experiences are magical if we allow ourselves to experience them that way, not with ego, not by trying to be shamans, but by awakening and utilizing everything that is present in our human state, inside our bodies. The rational mind might not take offense at being pushed aside while we take a ride through our dreams at night, but it sure puts up a struggle during the day. We just have to work at assuring it that it will be okay, that it will be safe, as we let something else guide us to see a new reality, a dream reality during the day too. Our nightly dream training is showing us what we are all really capable of all the time.
Healing ourselves through deep inner work is the first part of learning just what we are capable of doing and experiencing. As we recapitulate, we are asked again and again to suspend judgment and take a look at what really happened, to not blame or attach to anything, but to let ourselves re-experience everything from a new perspective and in so doing experience just what it means when the shamans say that everything we need is inside the human body. Trusting that is the first major obstacle to leaving the rational world and the first major leap into the magical as well. Try it, in waking and/or in dreaming today; see what comes to guide you, out of your own body self, showing you the magic in your own life. Believe me there’s plenty there!
It takes trusting our inner spirit, the innocence comprised of the purity of knowing and perceiving that is ready to embrace our experiences and help us advance in this lifetime. It’s not so hard to defy convention and look at life as magical; it’s quite inspiring, fascinating to imagine that every day we are indeed being guided to learn some of the magic that resides inside all of us. I also now know that the owl’s message is to use that ability to hone my sight during the daytime too, with my eyes open. If I can hone so microscopically with my eyes closed, I should be able to do it with them open as well. That’s my next challenge.
There is a great propensity for success, for change to happen now on a greater level, for real change to take place upon that earth and within a great many individuals as well. For it is only with change within the individual that change on a mass level will occur, as you well know. However, one must be alert to the choices being made. Too often the dullness of everyday life wins out over the magic of the work and possibilities that lie within.
Be aware of your personal choices. Watch how they affect your physical and mental prowess. Be alert to the moment when decisions arise, when you are asked to direct your energy.
What is the proper use of your energy? This is the question to not only ask mentally, but physically as well. Direct the self to be thoughtful and careful and—with concern for the delicate balance between the world without and the world within—choose wisely how best to use your time, your energy, and your life. With concern for duration of life upon that earth as your sobering first thought, choose how to use that finite time to your best advantage.
Present advice is to urge humanity toward remaining alert, for the dullness of life so easily sweeps over the masses and then, no matter how hard some individuals work at changing themselves and the world, there will unfortunately be no greater mass change. And, as you all know, mass change is now necessary.
Mass change, in the right direction, is what the world needs and those who are really awake and aware of this necessity must stay awake. Choose to walk the razor’s edge of awareness, staying alert to the machinations of the mind as well as the energy outside of you. Be alert to what, how, and when it pulls you in one direction or another and make wise personal choices.
Remain balanced through this time of decision-making. Precision of timing is crucial; attention to choice and the best use of personal energy are the most important factors now. Awareness must be honed and kept in good working order for progress to stick. Good Luck!
We work in the garden in the early morning, weeding and clearing the summer’s growth. Time for fall plantings now. Time for a change. The energy is with us as we work in the early morning light, in the cool air and companionable silence. Our task done, we prepare breakfast and sit on the deck, content in our togetherness. Suddenly I have an urge. I want to go out to a restaurant that I like. It has a nice outdoor garden.
“Why don’t we go there for dinner tonight?” I suggest.
We discuss the possibility. After a while it doesn’t seem like the right thing to do. I acquiesce to the energy that says to take it slow, be patient, and stay put. It’s a day to be calm and to rejuvenate.
We sit and read. The air is calm, the day sunny and still. The birds are busy around us. I hear a fluttering of wings overhead and a zinging sound, like a jolt of electricity. Something has just been caught midair, right above our heads. A bird flies off with something big in it’s beak. I worry that it might be the hummingbird that had just hovered busily nearby.
We read for a few more minutes. Suddenly Chuck is restless. “I have such creative energy brewing inside me,” he says. “I have to do something with it.” I wonder if I can match it, if I can join him in this creative spurt, but no, my energy is utterly calm. I just want to sit and read. Chuck heads off to do some more yard work, shaping the hedges and ornamental trees, a good project for such energy.
While he works in the yard, I read and contemplate the energy of the day. A hurricane is brewing, and the Republicans are gathering for their convention, saying they will go ahead with it no matter what. I sense masculine energy stirring all around me. I don’t get attached, but stay in my inner calmness. I remember my own pull earlier to go out into the world and do something, yet I know I made the right decision to stay at home today.
Creative energies stir…
Soon Chuck returns, his energy spent. Contented and calm, he sits beside me and we enjoy a quiet few hours. The energy stirs repeatedly throughout the day, however, both inside us and outside us and we must make decisions about whether to acquiesce to it or wrestle it down. It just seems to be the way it is at the moment.
Things progress, the hurricane continues to gather energy, the Republicans begin their convention, the masculine energy continues to stir. Aggressive and controlling, I see it playing out in many instances over the next few days. Suddenly, I realize it isn’t masculine energy at all that I’ve been feeling all around me, but feminine energy, the energy of nature, the creative unleashed.
My urge to go out to dinner was the romantic feminine stirring in me. The bird snatching food from the air above our heads was Mother Nature in raw form. Chuck’s creative urge was also the feminine urge to give birth to some new creation. The feminine was stirred in us throughout the day, offering the possibility of new adventures, new desires, new experiences.
Now I understand the energy of the hurricane as it slowly amassed and headed into land as the creative force of the feminine unleashing, no man or woman able to hold such power back. This got me to thinking about whether or not we really have any control at all, over anything. Are we just fooling ourselves in thinking we make our own decisions? Are we all just subject to acquiescence, in spite of our best efforts to control and direct our lives?
I dream. I have no control in my dreams. The feminine energy of the unconscious emerges and takes me on nightly adventures while my ego is asleep. Ego is masculine; the controlling self in everyday life, thinking it has the upper hand, thinking it’s in charge. But is it really? I don’t think so. It tries hard, it asks me to conform and abide by its tenets, yet underneath other truths have been stirring for a long time now, truths that I have learned to pay attention to. And I know from paying attention to those inner truths that I am more like the hurricane, that I am nature, the creative.
We are all this force…
We are all this creative force, yet we must be accountable for it within ourselves if we are to live as mature beings. I must not let the creative feminine energy rule me anymore than I let the masculine force rule. I must learn to acquiesce to each of them when appropriate so that I am not overwhelmed or controlled by either. This is where I believe we do have power, the power to gain balance over the powers within us that constantly seek expression. This is how we become mature spiritual beings able to flow in the universe.
If we allow ourselves to be overly controlled by either force, we are not only out of balance, but we are not our true mature and evolving selves either. We become automatons to the powers that be, to the outside energy and the inside energy. In order to gain equilibrium within, we must attentively weigh the energy outside of us, making decisions on how to act and how we want to be in the world.
Do I want to control everything in my life? No, I don’t. I want to be available to flow with what comes, but I also know from previous experiences that I don’t need to be taken over anymore either. However, it’s appropriate at times to be overtaken, to allow both the masculine controlling energy and the unleashed feminine to teach us what we must learn. And so I have allowed myself to indulge in both kinds of energy, sometimes unknowingly and often intentionally. But there comes a time when it’s enough. There comes a time for living in the world in balance, as a mature and whole being.
As human beings, we have the opportunity to make choices. We are surrounded by nature in the raw, we have it inside us, and yes, it can unleash at any time. But in mature balance we learn to detach from and attach to it as feels right. We make decisions based on what is right for us at the moment. We can choose to maintain the calmness and contentedness we have so desperately sought and fought for our entire lives.
Inner and outer forces in balance…
In always saying no, we shut the door to life. In always saying yes, we leave it open to being overwhelmed by life. When in balance we offer ourselves possibility, the door always half open, and yet our choices become ones made in awareness, knowing what we are choosing and why. In choosing recapitulation—yes, I do have to mention it because it’s my life’s work and offering—we allow ourselves to gain the mature balance that leads to calmness, contentment, and access to the awareness of knowing what is right for us, at all times.
So, my lessons this week have been a growing awareness of what it means to be in mature balance, which is really a constant shifting in awareness, as if one were on a balance beam, making slight adjustments in inner balance to meet the outer energy that seeks always to upset the ego-dominated self. It’s just the way it is; the job of the creative feminine energy is to make new life, both within and without, and new life only comes from disrupting stasis. We all need a jolt of raw nature every now and then to catapult us into new life.
Sending love…
Here’s hoping that Hurricane Isaac, the feminine unleashed, doesn’t do too much damage and that it leads us all to opportunity for new mature life. And here’s to my lovely daughter who is living through it at this very moment, in her little house in New Orleans. May everyone be safe.
It is time now to take all the lessons you have learned—all the tools and techniques, the discipline, containment, and limitation practices—and not only put them into deeper practice, but to step back and take a clear look at all that you have been granted in your life. Look not at the self with pity or sorrow, nor with self-adoration or inflation, but look upon the self as a journeyer upon a journey. Look upon the journey of your life as a journey of fulfillment, a journey that is showing you just what you need and how to get there.
This is a time of acceptance, for everything is now in place; the only thing missing is your awareness of this. All of you who reside now upon that planet are in a unique position to personally and collectively grow. The big question is, are you fully aware of this? Are you totally alert to the truth of major change being in your own hands?
You are the energy and the catalyst to change. You are the carrier and the deliverer of your own change in circumstances. You are the power and the provider of power. By your very existence you hold all that you need in order to grow, to take yourself to a new level of understanding, and to reach fulfillment.
Life’s journey is, as you already know, a step-by-step process. Today, though you may awaken in a bit of a fog, will become a day of clear skies, meaning clear head and clear insight into the self, if you allow it to be so. If you accept your journey and yourself as transitioning—at all times being pushed to evolve—you will awaken to many truths about the self and the world around you.
Channeled advice and vision is ancient knowing coming to guide you, full of long-ago learned truths that have fallen by the wayside in modern times. But it is guaranteed that most of you will discover your true identity and your spirit’s yearnings explained quite nicely in these ancient truths that in fact lie waiting within all of you.
Do not be afraid to channel your own truth and your own spirit. Do not be afraid of the changing self. Accept the rightness of this changing self as you confront your deepest truths, both your past and present truths. Make a determination of how you wish to proceed, knowing all that you now know, and go in that direction. You will, if you are ready, go there anyway, for your spirit will guide you. Your main task is to accept the offer. Much life is in store for you if you do.
