Acknowledge first that you are human and as a human being you too are fallible. You too are capable of brutal acts. You too are due to do wrong at some point in your life. Do not dismiss the truth of evil within the self, for it exists as surely as the good exists within the self. Now look at the self as a spiritual being. Note that the same considerations must apply, for even in spirit are all beings capable of good and evil alike.
As conscious citizens of the world, it is your duty to remain conscious of good and evil at all times. Question the self constantly as to whether the thoughts you put out are harmful or not, whether the decisions you make are contributing to an energy that is good or bad. Use your energy wisely, for all of you are responsible for the world you live in. Do not leave it to a few to make the decisions that affect the many. Everyone has energetic impact.
In your own hearts you know right from wrong, love from hate. You know that your energy is powerful. Now is the time for you to use it powerfully in all that you set out to do. Abide by the laws of love and kindness, compassion and good. Be citizens of a new energetic morality that springs from the eternal knowledge of life as energy and each of you as energy as well. Elect a consciousness of good, and live with a gentle presence in the world. Elect to be compassionate and loving.
Elect to change the self now more fully, for there is no time to waste. Do not look outside the self for change, but look within. Society at large will not change until each one of you turn inward and rout out the dismal enemies that you carry within; until you purify your being, body and spirit; until your energy flows freely and lovingly toward all beings; until hatred is eradicated from you and all beings are accepted as energy too.
Change the self constantly. Confront the self constantly. Move into simpler life now, as you embrace the needs of a nation and a world for greater change.
Each of you matters in this process. If it is to have lasting impact, each one of you must be involved in an energetic shift away from excess and greed to the real deal, which is that life is precious. You have it for such a short time. Do something magnificent with your time there. By setting your intent to do so, you will have an impact on the shift that is now so necessary.
Be gentle and loving in thought, word, and deed—inwardly, to the self—as you face your deepest issues and deal with those. Get to your own roots and eventually you will get to the roots of everything and everyone, for the same roots grow through all living beings.
Be aware and conscious as you take your heart’s speak seriously. Take it more fully into your world now, for you and the world need it.
I am aware that I am fully responsible for myself, for my mental, physical, and spiritual health. I am aware that life on this plane, on earth, constantly offers every opportunity to experience all that I seek. I am also aware that life constantly offers the opportunity to change myself, and my circumstances, but that it’s up to me to take the leap, to decide that now is the time to take a leap of faith and trust that life and the universe will support me.
Through a great part of this life I sought something outside of myself to bring me into balance: a lifestyle, a partner, children, a career, a spiritual practice, nature and the surety of the unfolding of each day as each sun rises and each moon sets and each moment leads to the next. All of these things are positive and important events in the life of an evolving being seeking wholeness, but as I journeyed further I began to discover that I no longer needed to look outside of myself so much anymore, for I held much of the balance I sought within. But even so, as I journeyed on, new things constantly arose, blips on the horizon that signaled something coming into my world, perhaps good, perhaps bad, perhaps nothing important at all. But I still had to decide what to do with what approached, whatever it might be.
What approaches most significantly now is anticipation itself, a restless wondering. It has been on the horizon for a long time now, in the coming of the Winter solstice on 12/21/12. We’ve all heard about it, as well as a lot of hoopla about the world ending. On the other hand, I cannot dismiss that hoopla, for I understand how important it is, how even hoopla can wake us up so that we take notice of something. Even hoopla offers opportunities: to regroup, to get into balance, to face the truths of ourselves and really change, finally becoming who we know we really are, allowing what we are capable of at the deepest level to emerge and fully live.
I also know what holds us back: FEAR—fear of making a fool of ourselves, fear of failure, fear of facing the honest truth of the choices and decisions we’ve made and why, fear of what others might think of us, fear that we are doing it all wrong. Fear that someone outside of us will judge, condemn, ridicule or taunt us burdens us so greatly that we let lots of opportunities go by. Oh, I couldn’t do that! What would people say!
What do we fear and why?
If we take all that energy that is going into being afraid, into wondering what will happen on 12/21/12, and instead of projecting it outwardly decide to focus on ourselves, we might begin to feel that great anticipation in a different way. If we pause and sit with what is inside us, as Jeanne suggests in Monday’s message, we might realize that our spirit is indeed anticipating change, eagerly awaiting our decisions. And not just on that date, but in general, for we live in a time of great change all the time. Jeanne has told us this many times and this statement is repeated often, not only among the spiritual communities, but in the mass media as well. It all depends on how you elect to interpret what that means. Does it mean someone else is responsible for that change? Or does it mean, as I am suggesting, that we are all responsible for daring to change ourselves. Now is a good time to sit and contemplate the change that our spirits might be anticipating, actually yearning for.
The solstice marks the ending of one season and the beginning of another, and it happens every year, twice a year to be exact, in summer and winter, as the sun reaches its highest and its lowest points relative to the equator. This is a natural occurrence that marks a shift; it always has and it always will. That’s nature working as nature does. Have we humans become so disconnected from nature that we don’t naturally feel this shift anymore? And why is this one supposedly so different? Is it in fact any different from this year’s summer solstice, or last year’s winter solstice? Is it only different because we’ve been told it is? Do we have to be shaken out of our complacency by the anticipation of something big occurring before we dare to take responsibility for ourselves, for thinking for ourselves, for acting independently in our best interests as citizens of the natural world, and as spiritually interconnected beings?
What is on the horizon for us all?
Many of us go through life afraid to change. We must be forced into it. Forced change comes in many forms: illness, divorce, death, birth, accident, loss, sudden and unexpected shifts in our world. In my case, forced change came in a barrage of unrelenting flashbacks that I could no longer ignore. Those flashbacks were synchronistically supported by the universe presenting me with all kinds of situations and truths. And so I knew that the only relief I would get was in facing my deepest issues and releasing myself from the hold they had on me. That was the catalyst to my doing a shamanic recapitulation: I could no longer hide from what was naturally occurring inside my own psyche! The psyche in imbalance, just as nature in imbalance, has its own ways of alerting us to change.
This is the other aspect of what we are all facing now as 12/21/12 looms on the horizon: the truth of the great imbalance that we humans have wrought upon this earth. We are out of balance with nature and have been for a long time. And yet, this natural phenomenon, a yearly solstice, portends to shake us up. The hoopla around this event is created by us, but in order to balance all that hoopla brewing outside of us, we must dare to face what is rising up inside of us first.
Keeping in mind that we are responsible for our progress in life—for our maturity, our spiritual growth, our ability to successfully navigate life—and if we remain open to changing ourselves now, we might succeed in giving ourselves the catalyst we need to make this next step of change really matter. Begin where you are. Begin where you are in your inner world and in your personal outer world.
I have long sought balance, achieving it quite successfully for long periods of time, and yet life does not let us get complacent. It seeks to shake us up. How many times must it shake us awake before we realize that it’s offering us the answers we’ve been seeking, and the only way to receive the gifts that life offers is to trust that they will be there for us? It’s an ethereal thing, this life, for in reality it’s nothing more than an illusion of moments, piles of moments. What makes those moments important and significantly meaningful is what we choose to do with them. Do we choose to face our issues and accept them as our catalysts to change? Can we all accept 12/21/12 as our personal wakeup call, no matter what happens outside of us? Can we dare ourselves to take the next step to a new level of existence, coexistence, mutual consideration and caring for all beings, and bear our truths, just as we ask our planet to bear what we have done to it?
It’s time to beat a different drum…
If we change ourselves, part of the world has changed. The more people who elect to change themselves, the more the world will change. There is power in that kind of change, in numbers of people electing to change themselves for the right reasons: because all living beings are equal, because our planet is a living thing too.
The solstice will arrive. I suggest trusting nature and the universe to guide us, to show us the way to true balance, as we each acquiesce to our own truths and take full responsibility for ourselves as individuals and as citizens of the world. Nature balances by constantly giving and taking, in tension and release, in yin and yang, in contraction and expansion.
What must we take and what must we give up in order to regain our personal balance, to relieve our personal imbalance? The only way to truly figure this out is to pull inward and release what is holding us back from our true experiences as living beings.
Remember, it’s a process, so don’t be too rigid; keep in mind that balance requires flexibility. Nature is challenging us to get in balance, because it’s time.
Seasonal change is inevitable…ice on the deck this morning…
Change is good. This is one of my favorite mottos. Change is good. Back in the days before I had done a shamanic recapitulation I had another, similar, motto that went like this: Always change. Back then I was suffering from PTSD (Post-traumatic Stress Disorder), though I didn’t know this. But even so I knew that change was good, I just didn’t really know why, not on a deeper level anyway. Now I know that it was something at a deeper level that was stirring me to always change, PTSD acting as a catalyst that eventually led to self-discovery and real change. The form that change takes under the auspices of PTSD, however, is very different from change that takes place once freed of PTSD.
Back in the PTSD days, change came knocking in uncomfortable stirrings to move, to always change, to change my environment in some way, whether it be changing the furniture in every room of the house every few weeks or uprooting and moving to another apartment, another house, another city, another state, another country, another relationship. I did all of these things, under the auspices of always change, restlessness my constant companion. But something at a deeper level was always asking me: Why do I do this? Why do I have to keep moving and changing? Why can’t I just settle down?
I felt like I was running from something, that if I stopped in one place long enough whatever it was would catch up with me and that would be the death of me. For at some deeper level, I knew that death was what was chasing me—death in one form or another.
Now, on one level, this is true, for death is pursuing us all the time, reminding us that in the end it will get us. In my case, I sensed death differently, the stench of it deep inside me already. Although I didn’t know it, that smell of death—that I could never run far enough away from—was trying to alert me to what I carried inside me: a dying spirit, a dying innocence, a dying sense of hope, for these are some of the things that PTSD robs us of. Until we stop and face what the stench of death is trying to alert us to, we will constantly seek change in our outer world, to find just the right place where we will feel comfortable, safe, and at ease. I went into my late forties always changing before I stopped and faced what was pursuing me, the past that was embodied in that diagnosis of PTSD, a past I had no memory of.
Fires of change like kundalini energy burning through us…
When I first met Chuck, he presented me with those four little letters—PTSD. Oh, so that’s what’s wrong with me! At last I had a name for all that had driven me in so many unsettling ways, a name that felt right. “Yes, I get it, I suffer from PTSD,” I said to myself, “I just never knew it.” Now I had a home, a slot to fit into in the world, I had PTSD. But I would not stay there. I could not settle for long. I refused to be categorized, tagged and diagnosed, for always change was still my motto after all. And so I told myself to change, that change was good, that it was what I needed in order to heal. And so I began a changing, healing journey out of PTSD and into new life. Long and painful though that journey was I would not, in a million years, wish to live the way I used to live.
Now when I say that change is good, I’m talking about the deepest kind of change, change of the self at the deepest level, from the inside out. This involves letting go of everything that has upheld the world we’ve lived in—everything we’ve been taught and taught ourselves, everything we’ve believed and couldn’t bear to believe, everything we’ve created and controlled in order to be safe. This involves learning to let go of our judgments, resentments, fears, and regrets, opening instead to the truth of our infallibilities, our frailties, our imperfections, and our inflations. It involves discovering what it really means to be humble, to live simply, in balance with all of nature, taking only what is necessary. It involves learning to love ourselves so we can one day be available to love another, so we can understand what it means to be loved, and how to give and receive love on a far more expansive, interconnected level of consciousness, far beyond the needs of the self. It involves letting go of our ego selves, detaching from that which has held us in our defended states for so long, making way in the process for a new self. It involves allowing this new self to emerge out of the stench and fear of death that has encapsulated us in all of its forms and fully acknowledge that yes, death is the ultimate catalyst to evolutionary change. It involves discovering for the self what it means to be an evolving being, here in this lifetime to discover and resolve an evolutionary challenge, given another opportunity to get it right.
Opportunities abound, coming at many times throughout our lives. Our challenge is, indeed, to always change, to go with the flow of our lives, accepting full responsibility for where we are at all times, accepting that we are not perfect, that we are human beings, but also that we are evolutionary beings as well, spiritual beings seeking something higher, something far beyond our PTSD, our boredom, our fear, our self-pity and our hopelessness.
Seeking always a higher evolved self…
The deepest kind of change means facing who we’ve become and daring ourselves to become someone far more evolved, far more connected to life on this planet while striving always to become far more aware of the spiritual possibilities of all things, and far more aware of all life as sacred.
The creative, urging us on one level to do something about ourselves or our environment, stirs in us at all times. Perhaps we project it outwardly as I did, as an artist constantly creating something new, some new picture, sculpture, dance, play, music. But after a while a deeper creativity comes knocking, asking us to channel the ultimate creation: a new self. And you know what, it’s really okay to do that, to totally change and become someone new, for after all, in the end, it’s the evolution of the self that we’re all here to spur on to a new level. This is why, I believe, we’re all here—to always change—and such change is always good.
Here is the weekly channeled message from Jeanne. May you all find it comforting, guiding, and helpful in our challenging, changing times.
Seek balance in your own way…
Behave differently now. It is time to be openhearted, considerate, kind and compassionate, not just within but also without. It is good to know right from wrong, good from bad, but it is far better to act with this knowing foremost in thought, word, and deed.
All who reside upon that earth at this time, a time of great turmoil and change, must turn from the distractions of want, desire, greed and overconsumption, and turn instead toward a leaner yet softer persona. This more gentle aspect of humanity must come into play now if all is to be accomplished that will lead to lasting change and a new paradigm.
Life must be struck down—life as it is now expressed and grasped at—for there is no longer room for more, there is only the necessity of less. If less is not embraced, less will be presented, and thus less will be forced upon you and less will become the norm. Thus, that which is necessary will ensue—balance will ensue—for that is what is desperately needed and called for upon that planet.
It is time to behave differently, to grasp at deeper meaning and greater awareness, and not just for the few but for the many. Departure from an old way of thinking and behaving is the first step in this much-needed change. As mentioned, if not activated on a personal level, then activation will come from outside, but in reality it will be reverberating inside each one of you in some deep way.
Simplify…
Learn that less is more, that balance is crucial; inside and outside the self, inside and outside the home, inside and outside of everything that you live, encounter, and trust. Balance is all that matters now—simple, lean balance.
Begin to pare down your individual greed and consumption, your individual desires and wants, by questioning the way you feel pulled, the way you are drawn, and the way you are also repelled. Study your world now with thoughts of balance, less, and inner and outer simplicity as your guiding tenets. In this manner begin to behave differently now.
Slow down. Think. Feel. Take less. Give more. Be good. Be kind. Be compassionate. To self and other extend these most gracious human attributes and know that you are participating in the change that is sweeping across your world, far and wide, yet near and dear as well.
Let go of what needs to be let go of, that which you no longer need or wish to carry. Let go of angers, resentments, and old pains that are not worthy of life-giving energy. Let go of that which takes you from your path of growth. Turn toward a simple life now. See that you do not need so much, that life itself offers what you need, and that there is enough to be had by all.
Return to balance within the self and thus return the world to balance, reducing negativity, disease, war, disturbing energies, conflicts within and without. Eradicate that which is no longer helpful and nurture only the positive. This is the side that needs attention now. Think and act and do that which is positive, right, and good. Although such positive actions may be painful to execute, so are they right, and this you all know.
Sense the positive…
Be responsible for changing the behaviors of the self. This is how to start moving in a new direction—the direction that is now needed—from gluttony to simplicity, from the negative to the positive, from bad to good, from dark to light. However you choose to see it, know that it is time to go deeper into your personal process of change.
I leave you with these thoughts today, asking you all to be responsible adults, as if your life depended on it because, in truth, it does—it always did and always will. Be fully responsible for the self. That is where to begin. I give you enough to go on, now take up the cause of change and begin to alter the self. The universe is waiting to take up this cause of change in a positive direction, so know that you will be met with energetically resonant energy in accompaniment. You will be well supported and well met. All you need to do is look in a new direction now, with new eyes and a new heart. It’s that simple.
Here is today’s channeled message from Jeanne, offering us guidance for the changing times that we experience every day.
Seek always the Higher Self…
Consider the possibility of real change. What would it mean to let go of long-held ideas of the self, of old habits and old desires? To hold the self fully accountable and responsible for changing the self is all that is required.
Consider the evolution of the self as your main goal in life. Consider the necessity of change in order to evolve. What must you do today to honor your desire for change?
Make one decision today that promotes change and healing, that evolves the self one step further on your journey. Be mindful of your life as an ever-evolving and ever-changing process. Yet, also keep in mind that as a human being you are also equipped with far greater meaning and purpose than simply that. There is much more to take into consideration when working with the human situation, for there is the energy of the spirit to take into account, as well as the journey of the eternal soul.
Deepen your journey by accepting that there is a greater meaning and purpose to your existence than you have yet to experience. Take into consideration that your trials are leading you somewhere as of yet unknown, for a higher purpose. With that in mind at all times, reach beyond your daily lives, striving always for connection with that Higher Self. Seek always this other adventure, the unknown life of change that asks you to take one more step in its direction each day.
Each one of you who reside upon that earth is charged with the same mission: to seek to know the Higher Self at all times.
You will be shown what direction to take each day as you set your intent to grow. Be alert to the signs that come to you, and discover their meaning. Choose always growth. Though it may dare you and challenge you beyond measure, in your heart you will know what is right. Can you accept your heart’s knowing and leave something behind in order to move one step closer to its fulfillment? That is the ultimate challenge.
What are you being asked to leave behind today? Whatever it is, if you let it go you will move more swiftly forward on your journey and your path will widen, your vision clear, and your spirit enlighten. Good Luck!
Thank you to Jeanne and all of our guides. Most humbly channeled, with love for all of you as you take your individual journeys.
