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.
Change is happening now. Don’t you see it? Don’t you feel it? In your own lives change is happening.
If you decide that you are stuck, then you will miss the exuberant energy of change that has come to visit you. However, if you decide to embrace the energy of change, no matter where it may take you or what it might mean in the long run, you will be greatly surprised and relieved of your constant issues of discord.
Discord, of spirit, comes with being human, for human body and spirit will fight each other, even to the death. Yet, keep in mind that spirit and body both never give up, for they are married to each other until a new level of understanding is reached. Only then will they relinquish their grip upon each other, a grip that is both loving and adversarial. This is an ancient bond that will determine the evolution of each one of you.
Do you fight your spirit?
Find the means of communicating with your spirit throughout the day. Ask it to guide you. And yes, your own spirit will guide you; speaking to you in terms you will understand. The only thing you need to do is listen. Pay attention often enough and finally you will get the clear messages that are being directed through your human self, your body, for this is the language your spirit speaks: Body Speak. Once you understand this, it will become easier to communicate with your spirit, and you will understand your body/spirit discord as your greatest asset.
Keep in mind that spirit self resides in body self, so most often spirit will speak through body self. This means that you must start listening to how your body reacts. Investigate what it tells you. Take your first assumption, which will most likely be a mind/thought/worry/fear reaction—perhaps even full of self-loathing or deeply self-effacing—and go deeper, beyond the mind and into the body alone. Eventually you will get the deeper meaning of the signs your spirit is communicating through your body.
For instance: If you eat too much you might get a tummy ache, bloating, gas, etc. This might make you feel bad about yourself, leading to thoughts of gluttony, inability to control desire, neediness, self-hatred, etc. But what is your body really telling you? It is really telling you that it speaks to you! In very simple language that you can actually feel!
What does your headache tell you? What is your spirit telling you by your inertia? What is your spirit trying to alert you to in your vigorous energy today? What is your spirit trying to tell you, as it speaks through the wall of your human body?
Some Body Speak is easier to understand than others, such as sleepiness, hunger, thirst, but there are deeper signals behind each and every sign you receive.
Take sleepiness for instance. Okay, my body tells me I’m tired. What do I do? Fight it? A good reaction would be to pay attention and get some rest; without resentment, anger or worry, simply acquiesce. Take it to another level as you acquiesce. With care of self in mind, allow rest to be what it should be: rejuvenating. Ask spirit self to let the body rest for so many hours. Ask dreams to guide you as you sleep. Ask awareness to remember dreams upon awakening. Use sleep time on many levels, with the first intent being care of body, and second being spiritual work.
This is what body and spirit desire in human beings: constructive cooperation, enthusiasm, and commitment to growth. This is what life itself desires, life as an evolutionary project, for each one of you is a work of art. Each one of you is the inspiration and the artist, and the project itself. Each one of you has all that it takes to create a beautiful artistic creation: The Self.
Requirements for such creative work are simple: willingness, perseverance, and openness to the possibilities that you are constantly being offered to do the work of the self. All of you have the materials and tools within.
Don’t be so afraid of life. Life is yours; within you it seeks expression. Begin there. Stop looking for it outside of you and look inward. This is where your creative energy awaits, where spirit resides, in your own body. The two, spirit and body, are inexplicably aligned, even when you don’t think they are.
Ask them to teach you, and then wait, with the sure knowing that they will. Be ready to receive your guidance. Learn how it comes. It may take some time to figure it out, but just remember this: everything is meaningful. Do not dismiss anything that comes to you, for you may be missing the guidance you so desperately seek.
Life itself shows you the way to enlightenment, fulfillment, wholeness, connection, and all else that you seek. Be open. Be kind to self and others. Learn impeccability. Learn these things and what they really mean each day that you live your creative inner life.
Work on the self is the most unselfish of acts. Find the means to begin a new project: evolution of the self, ergo evolution of the world. Resolve the discord between body-self and spirit-self, for the self and for the greater good. You can’t go wrong. Listen to your Body Speak.
How critical it is to develop habits to understand and manage the world. In fact, how critical it is to form the habit of the self. Without a routine definition of who we are we have no grounding, no solid vantage point from which to function as an independent being in the world.
Much effort is spent in childrearing, socializing children into good habits. Judgments stream in from all corners of the adult world to shape the attention and behavior of children into discreet, acceptable patterns. The shamans suggest that this socialization is sheer magic, as it bundles a world of energy into a world of solid objects via mass consensus and conditioning. Shamans don’t contest the validity of a world of solid objects; however, they do point out that that solid world is only one among many worlds that exist and that we have access to.
Throughout history, shamans, out-of-body explorers, and religious mystics have all travelled into worlds of different energetic configurations than this solid one we call home, returning with wondrous and valuable artifacts. Consider the tablets of Moses or the twelve steps of AA, artifacts from energetic contact with other worlds. These are but two examples of the boon from shamanic journeys already taken, gifts offered to a solid world out of balance and seeking guidance.
As we deepen our dance into 2012, we encounter an energetic intent established in the remote past and very much upheld in the present, promising major shift, radical shift, critical to the survival of this solid world that is currently spinning toward evolutionary advance.
We must deepen our journeys into ourselves…
Don Juan Matus predicted that our very survival as a world would require that we deepen our connection to it and ourselves, going beyond its current energetic fixation—that of a world of solid objects. In other words, we must journey deeper into our energetic potential to enrich and rebalance our present world.
This is where we stand now, as we find ourselves between two polarized but parallel conventions promising to hold us together and lead us forward to safety. The true evolutionary path, however, lies in the unconventional. Only through stepping beyond the lines of the conventional—the solid, the rational—does the mystic discover what is truly necessary for evolutionary advance.
In recapitulation, we break ranks with the rational and the conventional, turning to an energetic intent that leads us through the experiences of a lifetime, stored energetically in the body or in some ethereal cloud that knows all. Recapitulation suspends the rational and leads to wholeness, to healing through daring to embark on an energetic/physical journey.
How do we access the ethereal worlds that hold the answers? We must change our habits and dare to enter the realm of the unconventional. For energy to be freed for the journey, it must be harnessed from our world of solid habits. We are a world of distinct habits, individually and collectively. All our energy is funneled into creating and upholding this world. There is no energy left to go beyond it unless we release ourselves from our habits, those that are blatantly obvious and those that we keep hidden.
If we don’t do everything we always do every day, we will free our energy and step into a different world. It’s really that simple.
Dare to try something different…
Breaking the habits of the self opens the self to new possibilities. The initial encounters beyond the conventional might be truly terrifying, encounters with the shadow self, as Jung called it, where we meet the first layer of the onion that keeps hidden all that lies in the darkness of the self. Once reconciled, we are freed to journey deeper into the energetic layers of the onion, into worlds beyond the familiar that offer to teach and guide us safely through the realizations of the intent for evolutionary shift that we are currently experiencing in this year of 2012.
This journey is well underway. We are all in it, individually and collectively. The further we spin into the unconventional the shakier it gets, but the more we learn and discover, the steadier becomes the ride. Fasten your seat belts!
Evolution demands that we reconfigure our energy. The fossil fuels of yesteryear are now the death of our survival. We can no longer turn to the dinosaurs. We must learn to harness greater energetic sources, free from the heavens, be they the sun or the winds or found in the energetic depths of our inner truths. We must dare to enter the unconventional.
Why do we get the parents we get? Why do we get distant, abusive, cold, overbearing, intrusive, smothering or rejecting parents? Why do we cling to them, asking and needing something when clearly they have nothing to offer? What is our parentage trying to tell us about our own journey? I cannot help but ask such questions, for I am a questioner of life, of the reason for being, of the purpose of my life, and so I ask questions and seek answers that make sense in the context of my life, who I’ve been and who I might become.
Dreaming under a blue moon…
On Friday night, the night of the full moon, a blue moon, sleeping under its glowing light, I dreamed. In my dream, I’m sitting on our deck in my usual seat. To my left, in Chuck’s usual seat, sits a young attractive woman with long dark hair. She has Chuck’s spirit and energy, yet it’s not him. Opposite me sits an older woman with long white hair, slightly plump, whom I interpret as an Earth Mother type. We seem to be talking, our feet up on a small table, three women of different ages and different temperaments. Suddenly, a golden hawk flies down to the deck. It has a long feathered tail and I see that it’s looking for a place to land. I notice that it’s tail will be crushed if it lands on the floor of the deck and I don’t think this is a good idea, and so I stretch out my bare right arm to receive it. I’m aware of the sharpness of its claws and steel my arm to accept their bite, but it lands upon my arm so lightly and gently that I feel nothing more than a gentle impression. I look at this beautiful golden hawk and wonder if it has a message for me, but I see that it’s not looking at me at all, but at the young woman with the dark hair sitting in Chuck’s seat. The older woman answers my question by nodding at the younger woman, saying out loud: “Yes, it’s come for you.” My ego accepts this truth, captivated by the fact that this hawk has come at all. As I watch, the hawk pours a steady stream of golden light, from its heart, directly into the heart of the young woman. Their eyes lock and the stream of golden energy pulses strongly between them without let up, without dimming or fluctuating. The older woman and I look upon this energetic encounter in total acceptance, in unattached awe.
Beginning to piece together the mandala…
Upon awakening, I’m aware that this dream is stunningly significant, though it takes me several days; several more dream experiences to work it out, at least for now. I begin to see the mandala structure in the dream set up, the four figures describing the geometrics of the mandala and the small table at our feet marking the center. My present ego self sits in my usual seat in my dream, my maternal self sits opposite me in the form of the Earth Mother. My young spirit self sits in Chuck’s seat, and the golden hawk takes up its place opposite this spirit self as I stretch out my arm and receive it into the mandala. It belongs there; I know this as soon as it descends, and so the mandala, the energy of the inner self is complete upon its arrival. There is the sense of a circle around all of this energy in my dream and indeed there is an umbrella on the deck over this seating arrangement, and so I accept it as the outer ring of my mandala. The energy inside my dream mandala is strong, contained, protected. My dreaming self presents me with the truth of my own deep inner work, my recapitulation and my continued inner work, and so I accept that I am in a strong place now.
I’m not surprised, by the way, that I envision my spirit self as a much younger me, for in all that I know and have read about, the spirit self does appear in this fashion. In my own experience of meeting Jeanne in her energy body, she too was young and vibrant, perhaps about 30 years old, the same age as I appear to be in this dream. Accounts by many others confirm this, that our evolved spirit selves are young, attractive, and vibrant. This point alone may offer enough incentive to take the inner journey, for meeting that spirit self is quite a rewarding endeavor.
But what does it all mean? The maternal self gives the answer, though my ego self pipes up wondering if it’s come for the self that constantly seeks specialness, but as soon as the Earth Mother tells the young spirit self that it’s come for her, I accept her knowing, for she is right. The mother archetype does her job, and by her unattached acceptance of this fact of her own existence as a giver of life and energy, I too can accept my ego’s role in balance with that truth. It’s time for these two extraverted selves to step back now. All focus and all energy must go to the evolution of the spirit self. It’s time, Jan, this dream tells me, to put all of your attention into your spirit’s continuing journey. As soon as I reach this interpretation of the dream, after I have sifted through many other meanings, arbitrary and significant alike, I know it’s the right one.
Question all the parts of the self…
How can I take this deeper inner journey when I have so many outer commitments? Is my dream asking me to forego motherhood, to forego my ego, and concentrate only on my spirit’s journey? Is the golden hawk asking me to abandon all outer life for some amorphous and uncertain inner life? In essence, yes, it’s asking me to do all of these things. It’s asking me to continue a deepening practice, to stay on the inner path. It’s asking me to examine the roles I have played in the world, since birth, and to question where I am with them now.
Am I ready to take this life’s journey to the next level? Am I done with certain aspects of self, of neediness and desire for something from others? Am I done with projecting my spirit onto others, onto Chuck for instance, as I first see this spirit self sitting in his chair? Can I take ownership more fully now, accepting this spirit self as fully my own? Can I take the ever-deepening inner journey without attachment to the myriad old selves who have thus far accompanied me on my journey? Can I turn to my spirit as the maternal self does and totally give the golden hawk’s gift to this inner self?
Peter Matthiessen, in his book The Snow Leopard, asks himself similar questions when he’s asked why he’s taking a dangerous trek across the Himalayas. He wonders at his reasons for leaving behind his young motherless children, for risking his life at every step on the slippery ice-covered paths, under threat of avalanche, blizzards, starvation even. Why would he do such a thing? He can find no reasonable answer to give his questioner, for to say that he’s doing it to deepen his inner journey does not sound reasonable enough. How could anyone find such an answer acceptable? And so he simply replies that he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know why he’s taking a journey of such risk, a journey that may leave him stranded or dead, his children orphans, but he cannot refuse it either.
Such is the strength of the inner spirit in all of us. Once awakened it carries an energy that will not be pushed aside by a request for reasonableness. Reason does not come into the equation. And so, I come to my topic of parentage and a return to the questions I pose at the beginning of this blog, for these questions are key to taking an inner journey.
Find the key…
Our parentage, who our parents were and what they did or did not do, to or for us, are key to taking the inner journey. In the beginning, the inward path leads us back to confronting these parents. In every part of our being we must decide where they have taken up residence. We must ask them to leave, as we gradually clear a path to our true selves. We must face the neglect and the love alike that came from them, the poor child self left to fend for itself, alone in the world, or the child self smothered by too much well-intentioned goodness. We must face the fact that perhaps we got the parents we needed to catapult us into the life we have and that the circumstances of our birth are the secret to our inner work.
As a parent, I must face that my own children got me as a parent. They got all that I had to offer and all I could not offer, all that I carried and all I could not carry, and they too must question what it means to have gotten such a person for their mother. If parenting was not part of this life, it does not matter, for the questions are the same for our inner child as for our children in the outer world. Our inner child must ask similar questions, why we got this body, this ego, this journey? In order to leave the inner parents behind and become our true selves we must all ask ourselves: What does it mean for me that I am in this life? For me.
In staying attached to our parentage, in blaming and wanting more and more from them, we end up digging ourselves into a pit of sorrow and regret, perhaps far deeper than the pit our parentage landed us in to begin with. Perhaps in our groveling we hear words of wisdom and are able to pull our heads up and look around at life without parentage as the most rewarding of gifts. Or perhaps the golden hawk visits us many times but we are so smothered in our own excrement that we do not see or hear its missives. It takes a long time to extricate ourselves from our pasts, from our parentage, from having to fulfill the desires of others and the expectations of a reasonable world.
At the same time, in fully living the life we have landed in we learn how to hone our spirit, how to contain it, how to express our creative self in one form or another so that it does not overwhelm us or take us so far afield that we are not able to retrieve it in one lifetime. If the creative spirit is allowed free reign, it can destroy us, as surely as an avalanche in the Himalayas. But, in trekking through life with awareness of our surroundings, with inner questioning and inner focus balanced by outward expression, we offer ourselves the steadiness to forge across even the most treacherous of mountain peaks.
Honing the creative to fulfillment…
I am a creative being, as we all are, and though I once used my creativity outwardly, in artistic expression, for I could not hold it within, now I use it inwardly. And in so doing I find that my outward expression, my creative output once so admired and abundant, has no need to repeat itself in the world. My creative energy now finds abundant outlet within.
And so, the inner journey continues to offer the greatest rewards, for I have found nothing better in this life for answering all the questions I might ask of myself and others. I have learned that in looking inward for my answers rather than outward, peace and contentment eventually come, the golden hawk finally arrives. In learning to let go of expectations of others—parents, partners, children, even our pets—in taking back our projections and owning them for ourselves, in honing our creativity for inner work, we nurture our inner child to enjoyment of maturity and a fulfilled life.
Most humble thanks for being there and taking the trek.
Love,
Jan
Life is meant to be lived. On all levels now act. Be what you so closely guard and treasure. Be who you are meant to be.
In action become the true self. Without talk or extraverted declaration, without inflation or ego-business, act upon your deepest desires and needs of the self to truly live. There is no time to waste. Life is lived in taking action and taking action that is right requires knowing the self on the deepest level. Each day, as you know the self on a deeper manner, allow that true self to live your life.
Allow the person you are meant to be expression, so that you do not hold back any longer. What are you waiting for? Life is meant to be lived. It’s time to be who you truly are.
This is the day to start being you, the real you. In right action be your true self. It’s a good day to start a new life simply being who you have always desired to be. Try it. Take one step at a time and on your new legs step into action. Oh, and enjoy every minute of it because there is no time to waste!
