A Time of Giving, eh? -- So, Who's Doing The Receiving?

It’s a fine balance, isn’t it?  I’ve written about this before—how so many of us are so busy doing, and not realizing that we’re in total yang mode most of the time.  Yang—outward, active, the male principle.  It is impossible to receive in yang.  Receiving is the Yin principle—the receptive, passive, feminine aspect of life.  You can’t receive if you always putting out.  Sometimes it’s appropriate to just sit back, receive, take it all in.  In fact, for there to be balance, it is necessary to do it a lot more than sometimes.

This came up recently at a meditation I was leading.  There was a specific purpose to the meditation, so I was leading a specific energy experience.  This one friend had arrived late and had missed the part about the intent.  The meditation, as experienced by those of us who did it, was very powerful and significant.  When we shared, it was incredible the beautiful journeys through the cosmos we'd experienced.

When it was my friend’s turn, he said, “I was gone.  I didn’t hear anything you said, I went way far out and just did my own thing.”

Now, this is a friend who has been on the spiritual path for a long time, and has years of experience with energy work and meditation.  And, this has happened before, where I’ve lead a meditation experience, and he just doesn’t participate.  He’s there, but he’s not on the same page as everyone else.  When he said that, it really kind of changed the energy—we had all been sharing our experience of the meditation, and what he said really kind of blew it all away dismissively. 

I was thinking about it this morning, because I have been guilty of the same thing.  I’ve been meditating and working with energy so long, I have my own way of doing it, and so that’s what I do.  But last spring I was doing meditation once a week with a friend who lead a particular technique that I was not familiar with, nor really comfortable with.  Knowing and admiring this person, however, I quickly realized that I wanted to receive what he had to offer.  What he was offering, with his heart, his spirit and his intention was beautiful and precious, a gift, and I knew I just had to put aside my way of doing things, and give myself over to him and his intention to offer this particular experience.  Over time, I got used to it, and I really liked it for the completely different experience it was.  It had a really beautiful effect on me, and I got there a totally different way than I had experienced before.

But I had to get out of “doing” mode, the yang, active principle, and get into the receiving, yin mode.  Then I was in a state where I could “get” it and fully receive the experience.

I don’t think my friend the other night realizes that there is a little bit of ego, and arrogance, in what he said… the energy of my way is better, you aren’t offering me anything worthwhile, I’m special and different so I don’t have to do what you guys are doing … that was all very subtlely in there.  That energy then has a detrimental effect on the room, the rest of the participants, and the experience.

Now, I did what I could to mitigate the situation, and energetically it was all fine.  But I think it’s a good lesson for all of us.  Are we really receiving?  At all?  Or are we pre-judging, assuming and just closing ourselves off to so much of what life is bringing to us?  Because we think we know better, or are better than …

Just sayin’ … It’s the last breath of 2012, and the time for excuses is long over.  I’m choosing to be present, to be ever more aware and to receive with intention, just as I give with intention.

May you receive many blessings throughout the holiday season and in the New Year.  What can you allow yourself to be and receive in 2013???

Throwing a dinner party for friends is one of my favorite ways to give and receive!

 

 

Happy Thanksgiving!

I like starting the day out by quietly meditating.  Using the term loosely.  I have rocks on the bedside table, and this morning I picked up a small piece of white quartz, all white except a tiny bit of black which, as I now look  closely, looks almost like a bird in flight.

My buddy picked up this rock on an island off Labrador this summer and brought it back for me, at the end of a sailing trip.  I love having those friends who’ve known you for 30 years or more.  We’re very dear to each other, and we both appreciate it.  He first laid eyes on me as I lay strung up in a hospital bed, two arms in casts in traction, a foot in ruins, my split cheek held together with stitches.  Way to make an impression.

What I saw when he walked in the door was tall, dark and handsome.  His hair was fine and black, and hung straight down to his jaw, parted in the middle.   How eyes can blaze and be pale blue at the same time is still a mystery to me, but his do.  They penetrate cleanly, the most exquisite color blue eyes I’d yet seen, set off by high cheekbones and full lips.  Add in the broad shoulders, easy manner, and a gold tooth in his mouth, I was in lust.  Way to make an impression.

Well, the lust didn’t work out, but the friendship did.  He brings me rocks from his travels, and as I hold this piece of white quartz I am grateful for his place in my life and my heart.  Today on Thanksgiving, I am grateful for friendships that support, and nurture, both ways...  That are based on understanding and love that come from years of connections, conversations, camaraderie.

I tend to stay grateful for many things, every day.  But today, Thanksgiving 2012, I am extra grateful for those friends who love me for who I am, accept me as I am, and allow me to do the same for them.

I wish you a beautiful day filled with gratitude, appreciation, happiness and comfort.

Rocking My World of Rocks

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I’ve been having more fun with my rocks lately!

That’s probably not something you hear too often.  But, being a rock lover and mineral collector and crystal healer, that’s actually my job description.  Cool, huh?

(The following is not a digression, because working with rocks means working with energy.)  Because this is 2012, and it is such a phenomenon energetically, any energy work one indulges in these days reaps bigger and sometimes surprising results/benefits.  (Search this blog for Superwave 2012 for that background.)

So I’ve been working with stones, meditating with their frequencies, playing with running my own energies through them, and really enjoying the effects.  It’s just more; more energizing, more uplifting, more expanding and illuminating.  Way better than therapy, because it’s just a more intimate understanding and experience of me, who I am and what my frequency is.  This kind of energy work offers a really beautiful process of self-knowing and self-exploration, through this energetic communion with the stones.

This practice has led to some interesting insight and revelations.  Tihis morning, for instance, as I was working with a beautiful crystal cluster (channeling clearing through it, as I hadn’t worked with it in a few months), I began remembering a conversation I’d had recently with a fellow cosmician.  We were sitting in my healing space, surrounded by the stones I work with, and she mentioned how she used to feel, in the beginning of her spiritual path, about rocks being taken out of the earth.  She didn’t like it, and sometimes expressed her opinion vociferously. 

I have heard that same sentiment from others over the years, and I shared it myself, very long ago.  But, as I explained to my friend, as I worked with stones, I realized very quickly that they wanted to be here amongst us humans to work with us, that they had their work to do here, and there was a reason they were mined up out of the earth, to play their role in the human experience happening here on the surface.

These meandering thoughts, as I sat in bed this morning with a cup of hot tea, led me to my new relationship with Gaia that has developed this year.  My sense and awareness of her being-ness, her consciousness—her personality, if you will—has delighted me, and really expanded my Understanding of Her and her role as our Mother.  I was imagining the veins of minerals running through her crust, rather like the human nervous system, different types of stones prevalent in different areas of the world, concentrating various frequencies in particular places; Brazil, with its veritable gluttony of mineral riches, Arkansas with its quartz, South Africa with its gold and diamonds, Columbia with its emeralds … what that means energetically, is something interesting to ponder.

And I imagined the small mines around the world that are operated by individuals who lovingly coax the stones out of the earth, receiving them with gratitude, as our mother Earth feeding us, nourishing us as a new mother feeds the milk from her breast to her newborn babe.  In contrast, the mammoth-scale mining operations that, without consciousness or prayer, tear apart the earth and rend it deep in their thirst for copper, as in Arizona, coal in the east, as a botched surgery, the tailings bleeding down the mountainsides, leaving an undeniable trail of Her suffering.  Although I still think she gives it willingly, a mother giving in to her petulant toddler.

Random, rocky thoughts on a Tuesday …

I shall use my stones to heal and fulfill, nourish and support today.  What will yours do for you?  :-)

An Urge to Write--Yes, YOU!

I've been telling people to journal for the last year.  And now, with my clients, I'm really insistent about it.  Here they are, doing the most important work ever--themSelves--and journaling is a key component of it.  Recording it, reviewing it, rewinding it, observing Self as it happens; all this happens with greater depth and breadth with journalling.  Writing it down regularly helps you step back a bit, get a bigger perspective; it also provides the opportunity for the reflection through which comes greater insight, greater understanding, even those flashes of sudden inspiration Oprah calls those "A Ha!" moments.

So that's why I always tell my clients to journal.  If you don't, you're missing 70% of the journey, I really believe that. 

BUT, why I think it's critical to journal now, is ... it's 2012, for God's sake.  Let me say right off the top, I'm not talking about the end of the world scenario doom & gloom that Hollywood delivers.  I'm talking about the end of many natural cycles that have long been prophesied to end with the advent of a golden age.

Just think for a moment, what if it's true?  What if there's even a sliver of a possibility that this isn't just another year?  What if things really change "out there?"  Pretend for a moment it is true.  Now pretend it's 20 years later, 2032, and your (great) grandchild asks you with all earnestness, "Gamps, what were you doing the year the world changed?"  And you think, you ponder, and what comes to you is that job you were struggling with, and the general demoralization with the socio/economic/political structures falling apart at the seams, and how you bought a new car that year ... but what was going on inside you, that's a blur.  You remember when It happened, and how you had to adjust to a whole new reality immediately, and how painful for western culture it was--but your own personal process is lost. 

Really?  You're going to let 2012 go by without recording it?  Because what I'm coming to believe is, what's inside is what 2012 is all about.  That's where it's really, mostly going to happen.  It's the internal limitations breaking; it's the precepts that we all think are real that have created a totally false world--that's what's falling apart and ending.  Who you are, what you know, what you think is true and real, and what is false, what your essence is, what you're made of ... all that is going to change. 

So write it down.  This is a moment in history that we've been waiting for a very long time. 
Write it down.

Harvard Study Confirms Fluoride Reduces Children's IQ

Harvard Study Confirms Fluoride Reduces Children's IQ

I have been a proponent of removing fluoride from our water supply forever.  I remember when my hometown, Middlebury, Vermont, started fluoridating our water, because my father was beyond furious.  He testified, he ranted and raved to the town's Powers That Be, begging them to not do this.  He was incredulous when they went ahead with their misguided decision.  And that's the day he started getting our family's drinking water from a spring up in the mountains.
I was in 4th grade at the time, and at school the next day, having listened to his horrified conversations with mom and friends, I looked up fluoride in the dictionary.  "A yellow-green poison" was the definition.  I became utterly baffled upon reading that.  Why any sane adult would choose to deliberately poison our water supply, I just could not comprehend.  (That definition is hidden further down the paragraph nowadays). 

Now, as an adult and having done years of research on that and many other topics related to health, food, etc., I know why.  It doesn't change the fact that it's wrong; I was so hopeful when the matter came up for a vote in the city of Burlington--last year, was it?  I was astonished that it didn't pass.  We're paying for it with our bodies, our health, and now, it turns out, our intelligence.  Well, most people are.  (Most tap filters do not remove fluoride, if you think that's saving you).  I choose not to. 

I drive up to the mountains to get good spring water for me and my family to consume.  It's ridiculous that I should have to--but many things about our culture are, these days.

For Goodness' Sake ...

As the spider weaves its web, it can catch both the good (an insect providing a tasty meal) and the bad (a bird that tears the web to bits).  As we navigate our days, make choices, turn corners, our lives form a thread that, together with the rest of Life, weaves a Web of reality.  What is your thread made of?

I aspire to weave goodness into my little corner of the Web. I know I fail miserably at times, but Goodness is the goal.

Goodness.
The impulse to do the right thing, to help when there's a need, to make life better for someone, somewhere, in some small way ...

We can see signs of goodness everywhere.  There's the obvious places; the Food Shelves, the homeless shelters, etc.  But in our own way, we each can create goodness as we walk through our days.  If we pay attention, more opportunities present themselves.

Walking to my healing space this morning from the parking garage, there was an enormous tractor trailer trying to back up from Cherry Street around the tight corner onto Church Street in Burlington.  A daunting task, to be sure, and the driver had to stop and pull ahead again to make a correction.  I watched as several men passing by stopped to help.  One was directing him from the front, another at the back, and the man picking up garbage on the street gave further help from the side.  Concern for their fellow Man just kicked in and they stepped up.

This past weekend I took my son to the A&W Root beer stand in Middlebury for a root beer float.  Of course, I couldn't resist the onion rings, nor my son the french fries and cheeseburger.  When our food came, she attached the tray to my car window and cheerfuly announced "$11.85."  I looked around for my wallet, and then sputtered with embarrassment when I realized I'd forgotten it at my friend's house down the road when we'd left.

"No problem," the young woman said.  "Eat your food while it's hot and then go get your purse."

So that's what we did, greatly appreciating the goodness in her that created a good situation out of a potentially unpleasant one.

Calling to check on a friend having a hard time, sending a card, lighting a candle with a special prayer, holding a door on the street for someone, or dropping a quarter in an expired meter (not your own) with the meter man coming down the block ... little bursts of goodness--random acts of kindness--can make the world spin a little more smoothly for someone, can strengthen the threads of the Web of Life.

Who can you share your goodness with today?   :-)

A Morning Moment at All Souls Interfaith