Small Empowerments, Big Power!

We spiritual types like to talk about empowerment. So do we socially conscious entrepreneurs. It struck me today that empowerment comes at all levels and in all ways.

I don’t have to wait to become a mega-powerful force in the biggest way possible before I declare myself “Empowered”!

What about when I realized years ago that I could actually find my own answers in as simple a tool as the dictionary, or online? How about when I learned to be brave enough and open enough to ask, to reveal my need for information?

How many other people – there are many, I know – are there who have come across something they didn’t know, and just rested there. Didn’t pursue the answer for themselves if someone else couldn’t answer it? Assumed that if they didn’t already know it, and someone else they already knew couldn’t answer it, that the answer was beyond them.

How many people have you known who asked a question of simple definition? Something like, “What does ‘plebian’ mean?”, and when the person opposite them didn’t know, simply shrugged and said, “Oh well, guess I won’t know”, instead of picking up a dictionary, or going to dictionary.com?

Many.

Right?

In my 20’s, when I was a secretary – back when they were called secretaries – when I discovered that if I just looked a little further, a little harder, with a little more “helloooooo? is anyone out there?”, I would/could find answers for myself, was a moment of huge empowerment that radiated and grew through my years, to the point where I find it difficult sometimes to remember what it was like to not be self-sufficient. My answer to any question for the last years has been Google and YouTube; with these giants in my life, I have come to the empowering realization that there is nothing I can’t learn! So when people say, “I don’t know how,” what I know is that all that is necessary – particularly in these powerful internet-driven times – is the will to learn, to be self-empowered, to ask, to persevere…and how to use the internet, and the community of one another’s help, consciousness, assistance and care.

With Google and YouTube, what can’t we know? With each other’s assistance – when we’re brave enough to ask and communicate – what can’t we be, do or have?!

We are limitless!

A Kid Again

Remember what it was like to be a kid? Let’s do it again. Right now. Right here.

When I was a kid, I didn’t worry about the future.

I didn’t say, “But, Mommy, how is it going to happen?” I just said, “It’s gonna happen?! WHOOPEE!”

I didn’t wonder if what I loved was the “right” thing to love; whether it would bring me what I needed. I just went on loving. And benefiting.

When I was a kid, I knew how big I was – how much a part of the unseen world I am – and I didn’t feel embarrassed about saying so, or feeling so. It was just my being!

I knew that when I spoke, something heard me. I was received. And I no longer felt alone.

Moving into being a kid again brings up the fear that I was taught to practice. But I can practice something else now: I can practice being a kid. Again.

And them I’m free.

Repeatable Magic – Solving Big Problems A Step At A Time

My 85-year-old friend Vince made a motorcycle – from the ground up! It’s a classic Honda cycle and it’s gorgeous. And we need to sell it. Why? Because we once purchased a timeshare that we ended up not using, and the monthly payments are not what we want to be investing in, particularly for something we’re not using!

We’ve been in a pickle for a long time here. Until today.

Vince’s kick-ass 1979 K-750 Honda

We were sitting at lunch and talking about how to get someone to buy it. Do you know how many people are trying to sell their timeshares??? It’s a lot.

As I sat there fuming a little about the injustice of it all – never mind that we bought into it all by myself; it’s so comforting sometimes to think, “it’s so unfair!” – I thought how badly I felt about palming it off on someone else who may discover that they have the same problem as we do now! Then I suddenly recalled my “I’m curious how Spirit is going to iron this out…” thing (see previous blog post a couple of days ago), and I said out loud, “Divine intelligence shows us the way to release this timeshare with divine right timing, in divine right ways.”

Vince looked at me with the blank stare that actually means, “I think you might be crazy.”

I don’t mind. Crazy might be the new sane. Anyway, I kept eating my lunch, and suddenly realized that we might be looking at the whole problem in the wrong way. I looked up and said, “Hey, maybe we’re looking at this the wrong way. Maybe we should be looking at what we can do that’s fun – emphasis on fun, by the way – to raise the money to pay the thing off, and then just donate it to a place one of my Facebook friends found for me. Then we won’t even have to pay the membership fees! We’ll be done!”

I mentioned eBay, and first I thought of books. But ohmygod, I would have to sell 1,600 books to raise the money! That’s not going to be a quick undertaking. So I started explaining eBay to Vince – remember, he’s 85; a young 85, but still not a computer maven – and as I spoke, I said, “So, we need something to sell that is a higher-priced item that we won’t have to sell as many of, in order to get the money. Do you know what I mean?” Yep, he knew. I went on, “See, it’s like selling your motorcycle like we were talking about a few weeks ago – but I’m not talking about selling your motorcycle – if we have a bigger ticket item…” and he interrupted.

“But I do want to sell my motorcycle. I have a bad knee, and I can’t ride it right now, until and if I get that knee fixed, so why not be smart and sell it and take care of the timeshare like that?”

Why not indeed!

So I’m on it. I’m going to do a video of him and the motorcycle, post it on YouTube, get the word out on Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook…and get it sold!

It’s a beauty. I’m sorry that he has to let it go. But he’s not sorry, he’s just determined, so there ya go.

Now…tell me that all of that isn’t from saying, “Divine intelligence shows us the way to release this timeshare with divine right timing, in divine right ways”! You can tell me, by the way, but I won’t be listenin’! And for those of you who don’t believe in this “stuff”, here is some real grounded real stuff for you: if I had continued to only worry about how it wasn’t going to happen – “we don’t have the money”, “we don’t know how it’s going to get paid off” – those new thoughts just wouldn’t have happened. Not during that lunch, anyway. And the problem would have still been on my mind. Ick.

You know what else strikes me about this? I didn’t have to be sitting in some meditational fervor, or even some meditational state of bliss for this to operate. I simply stated the truth. Why is that “truth”? Because it’s based on the principle that runs through every single, solitary religion that has ever been, which is that God/Spirit is ever-present, and always flowing its fix-it magic downhill. The practice of speaking the truth and letting it reveal itself, that’s the part that I’ve discovered through New Thought, and because it’s truth, it’s accessible in so many other non-New Thought ways! Woo-hoo!

Wait a minute. Could fixing all of my problems be just as simple as speaking the truth, and waiting in open expectation to see how it happens?

God, ain’t that worth a try??? Yuh-HUH!

Peace out! – Lori

Synchronicity and Meaning – or – Paging Mr. Poonja!

I have been having some interesting things happen regarding a spiritual teacher that I never heard of until three days ago.

it started with an email someone sent me advertising a talk I could listen to. The person being interviewed was a woman who is called Gangaji. I couldn’t have cared less, and so I ditched the email. The next day I’m watching television – cruising around looking at the titles of what was on, and what do I see? “Meeting With Gangaji”. Okay. This seems to be something to pay attention to. I put that channel on.

Watched her for a while, this California-girl-looking middle-aged, blonde woman with an exceptionally soft voice, looking for the bullshit factor – was she for real, or just really good at putting on the spiritual tone?

I decided that she seems to be honest and open and spiritually right-on about her advice and opinions. I wasn’t going to run right out and buy a book or a plane ticket to the next workshop, but I realllly appreciated some of the things she said.

In fact, two of them are worth repeating and paraphrasing here. (Emphasis on

paraphrasing

.) She said straight out that there’s a lot of nonsense amid spiritual seekers. As someone who has noticed this, and even participated in it in my mad scramble of a spiritual past – at the same time as I was questioning it! – I couldn’t agree more! She said that we smile and fake-it-til-we-make-it, and it’s all a lie! In fact, she said that this fight or flight approach to our own emotions just creates more internal war, and gets us nowhere. Now, this is exciting to me!

Why? First of all, I

always

feel better automatically when I’m being real – when I release the fight to “get better” from what I’m feeling. I mean, the fact is at when I can do that surrender gthing of just letting myself feel, without somehow “parking my car” in that emotional bog, even though I may be feeling something that isn’t pretty, I feel more at peace with letting it be…and letting it be changed eventually too.

Second, I am sick of false spirituality; sick of ideologies that excuse bad behavior by using spiritualisms from books, from talks, from teachers. I remember a man that I had known in the 1980’s when i lived in in Boston. I ran into him a couple of years later and he claimed to have become an Advaitist, which is someone who believes in non duality – no separation between the life of humans and the life of God. Problem was, he was being rude and dismissive and mocking to some of us who sat with him sharing a meal. I asked him why he felt he had to be so mean, and he said that there was no one there to be mean to: only God was there, so no one could really be hurt.

Excuse me???

Okay. Clearly that is, well, poppycock, to put it nicely. This is some of the nonsense Gangaji was referring to. And I appreciated it! A LOT! Because it took me so many damn years to figure out the bull from the Truths-with-a-capital-T and my personal truths. A lot of years, I was

so much

in seeking mode that I left my mind open to believe EVERYTHING until I could know or prove that it wasn’t so. Treating my mind like a garbage pail!

The other thing that Gangaji said was that we have to not fight nor run from our feelings, even those feelings of self-hate. That beneath that layer of self-loathing, or that feeling of simply not trusting ourselves, is the peace we seek.

That surrender thing again.

This is good stuff, and I felt glad that although I had started to record on my iPhone a new song I was writing, I had stopped singing to record eleven minutes of her talking! Good for e, I thought. Good choice!

Next day, I’m having lunch with a friend, and I’m freaking out about something, unnecessarily, and I say out loud, “Let it go, Lori. Just let it go! Let it GO.” I say to my friend, “I want to play something for you,” and I whip out my iPhone to play Gangaji for him. I turn on the recording and what do I hear in my ears? The first few words of my song that I’d recorded before letting Gangaji take up phone recording space. I hear myself singing, “Let it go. Let it goooooo. Let it gooooooo. Let it go.”

My friend asked me who this lady is, anyway; who did she study with, so I looked up Gangaji and found that she had an Indian teacher named H.W.L. Poonjia Apparently he didn’t mess around. She went to him looking to feel better, and he told her to stop running from herself. She had to sit and face her stuff and discovered lasting peace as a result.

Okay, I thought, I’m going to have to look this guy up! I’ll get to it in the next few days.

Then, today, I’m in a bookstore, and I pick up something written by a man named Andrew Cohen who dedicated his writings to … H.W.L. Poonja!

What. the. hell???

I…well, I surrender. I’ll listen to some more Gangaji and see what else is wanting to be revealed through that particular pathway. and I have to look up this Poonja character! I’m increasingly unwilling to live without what I

used

to call a brain transplant, and

now

call a change in consciousness or awareness, so wherever the clues come from which let me go deeper, I’m all in!

Sometimes I guess a message or three wants to come through a particular pipeline. Who am I to decline the invitation to listen?

Paging Mr. Poonja?

What Does Julia Child Have To Do With Spirituality?

Well, nothing really, or maybe something I don’t know about. But the fact is that today I was watching the movie Julie and Julia, about the woman who wrote a blog about her Julia-Child-inspired exploits performed every single day for an entire year, and I got so inspired!

I thought: Why can’t I also write about my cooking? Not the cooking of food, but the cooking of my spiritual consciousness. Sound dry? It isn’t. I heard recently that at a nearby ashram, someone asked what he should do when he felt bored with his meditation.

The question threw me. How can one be bored, when what one confronts in meditation seems sometimes endlessly fabulous, and seems sometimes to be endlessly challenging???

Here’s another question that is a favorite of mine, because it throws others, as it is not generally questioned: What is faith? What are you having faith in?

And then there are seemingly obvious and commonly-used phrases used in spirituality that are so seemingly obvious that they are unquestioned and therefore unexplored and misunderstood. Phrases like “doing the work”, “the ego”, “stuff is up”, “we are all one”, “we are all doing our best”, and so on. To truly be opened requires serious internal deep-sea diving, and a simultaneous commitment to not drown in one’s own suffering. A neat trick, to say the least.

To me, there is no greater conversation than that which explores these kinds of spiritual matters – conversations which uncover and free our true selves.

So, I am writing. It’s what I do. And since I am in a place in my life where I am sitting, curiously waiting to see what Spirit-as-me is going to make of my gifted but up-to-now unfocused life, why not share the juiciness of what I discover? I have, after all, some really cool credentials!

I have been a devotee of the Indian saint, Ammachi, for some 26 years or so, and have some amazing stories to tell, and experiences that have moved and opened and frustrated me. I have met a number of saints, of teachers, and I am now a fervent student of New Thought Ancient Wisdom, which has distilled the essence of all religions and spiritual beliefs to those principles that are our collective truths of spirit/God/universe, and made them available to us for practice, alignment, and realization. And I am now on the Practitioner path of New Thought, because it has become clear to me that the real answers, the lasting answers, the answers that include the greatest impact on self and others – the greatest lasting impact – is from what some call spirituality, and what I have increasingly come to call “awakened consciousness”. Not woo-woo I-see-God consciousness, but the kind of consciousness shifts that actually make us behave better because we just have to. Make better choices because we suddenly understand that there is only one choice above the others that has any sanity and ease to it.

So I’m writing. I love to write. I love people. I am in love with spirituality. And I am ticked off with spiritual bypass, spiritual bullshit, and spiritual la-di-dah. I stumble. I trip. I fall. And I get the heck up again. No perfection here – just the perfection of opening the window to deep exploration of growth in the spiritual/awareness realm.

Can you hear the splash? I’m diving in.

Peace, Blessings, and Deep Sea Diving!

Lori

When “Stuff” “Comes Up”

Through the years I have heard so many spiritual “isms”. One of those that always baffled me was this one:

“When I step into a new way of being – a transformational moment – then all of my darkness comes up in order to be cleared.”

It baffled me because I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how it would be cleared!

Magically?

Over time?

By chanting the name of my guru over and over?

Nope. Apparently not. Not if my life was anything to judge by! “Things” “came up” and I just suffered my way through it, wondering why I felt myself to be the only person on the planet who didn’t know what I was supposed to be doing – or not doing – to “clear” those things or to allow them to pass through!

Oh, it’s not that I didn’t get lots of advice: Pray, Meditate, Chant, Call out to God, Surrender (that’s another good one to talk about in a blog post!)…. But I never found that any of those things did a bit of good at helping or healing or clearing me of these things that were “up”!

It was maddening.

Then I came to the path of New Thought, and suddenly there were principles and tools to work with – actual useful methods and ways of thinking that allowed me to understand what the deal was and how to work with it. The one principle that must be returned to is – God in us, as us, is us. We are so much a part of God that praying to God becomes a vastly different process than it used to be when I thought God was somewhere far, far away, or someone far, far from being an intimate part of me!  The one tool that I am currently using to great effect in remembering the nearness of spirit is “affirmative prayer”.

While it takes an effort that is comprised of focusing and refocusing as many times as it takes, the principle is this: When I actually feel and know some aspect of my Godness, if you will – whether that is my wealth, or my health, or my compassion, or my wisdom…right? – even if I only know and feel it for a few seconds (!), then the opposite will arise. Okay, so far so good. But how to clear it? By going back and back to the opposite spiritual quality by using the tool that I find powerful: affirmative prayer!

So, if I claim my wealth, and poverty slaps me in the face, I have to go back to affirming my wealth – but not just saying over and over, “I’m rich, I’m rich, I’m rich” and hoping the words alone will swamp my bank account with millions. No. Instead, there has to be an internal and experiential understanding – which thank God I’ve been introduced to and I’ve claimed and continue to claim – that because God is everything, that means that I’m part of that everything. That because all of God’s qualities cannot be separate from God Itself, all of God’s qualities are in everything – and that includes me! So they must be accessible to me!

So, now when I pray, I am affirming the God qualities until I feel them to be the Truth in this moment itself, and I watch my life change. (And if I’m just completely unprepared to claim God’s qualities in me, I get someone else to pray with me – to affirm that which I can’t do in the moment!)

Please let me tell you that I am not talking about affirmations. Affirmations are misunderstood greatly, I feel, and in the past were my greatest thing to dislike, until I learned how to work with them. If they already work for you, I would hazard a guess that you are keying into some kind of pulsating reality around the affirmations you are using, which was not something that used to be a part of my affirmation experience, and so I never saw results. Understandably, they frustrated me.

In any case, what works for me right now is something called “affirmative prayer”, and it comes from the New Thought arena (Centers for Spiritual Living are all around the country, and they are the New Thought “churches”),  and affirmative prayer goes like this, in 5 distinct steps:

(1) Know and state that God Is. That whatever quality I am needing in my life, that is a quality of God. So, for example, if I’m poor, I know and state the ever-existence of God’s infinite supply. I affirm and know it definitively, because I know that God is everywhere.

(2) Know that I am one with that quality because I am one with God!

(3) Realize (or “make real”) the quality in my life, using statements like: “I know that I am showered by God’s infinite supply. I know that as a part of God, as God’s beloved child, I can have no need that is not supplied.” And just so you know, be prepared to hear parts of your mind argue. That’s okay! In fact, you can fold that into your praying! If my mind says, “But, hey, I’ve been broke a long time! What the hell are you talking about???” then my next sentence in this part would be, “The past is over and I know something now, which is that God is my supply, and no external situation has more power than my recognizing of the power of the Truth of God’s qualities in me.”

(4) Gratitude – What a relief to be able to claim, in this moment itself, all of my goodness! All you have to say is “thank you”. It is said by many, and I have had the experience, that when we really feel our hearts open, gratitude is natural, and then the words of gratitude and appreciation flow. In the meantime, “thank you” works! 🙂

(5) Let it go. You have stated the truth, and it is the Truth of Now – not the truth of what-will-be. It seems like what-will-be to us because we live in linear time, but in God time it is done, and it is done now! So you say that you let it go, you let it be, because all that you have said is so. “And so it is. Amen.” That is the traditional finishing phrase in New Thought.

So…that’s my best remedy for all that “comes up”, all the darkness that I have so many years of clinging to. I have to keep recognizing that “stuff coming up” is just another chance to recognize what is the lightest, best, most powerful aspect of my best self!

And nothing can stand against that. If in the midst of knowing what uncomfortable things I am feeling and thinking I can also claim the light, guess which one wins? You got it. The light. Nothing can stand against that.

Nothing.

With principles, I can watch things “come up” and know what ground I’m standing on – claiming my oneness with God – and help myself, with greater compassion, by staying there amidst the grit and grime of my experience, and watching that change of consciousness do the heavy lifting.

It’s not easy, namby-pamby work, but it beats the heck out of doing it – or thinking I’m doing it, and failing at it – all by myself, without that consciousness. And I no longer have to wonder what magical or unknown thing will make that “stuff” that is “up”, go away.

My focus will. The light of my own true identity will. This is what Rev. Beckwith calls “taking dominion” over our thoughts. Yahooooo!

So, knowing more about what to do when “stuff” “comes up”…priceless! 🙂

*****************************************************************************************************************

For more information about Centers for Spiritual Living and the New Thought movement, or about this kind of “affirmative prayer”, check out Rev. Dr. Michael Bernard Beckwith’s Agape Church in Los Angeles, CA, and any Center for Spiritual Living across the country.

Activating “Yes!” by Planting New Seeds

Who says “yes”? It’s not just us. It is Spirit as well. The only difference is that Spirit is saying Yes constantly. Yes, you are my darling daughter/son! Yes, you can have anything you want!

It seems to get tricky, though, doesn’t it? I say, “Well then, Spirit, I want a million dollars!”, and then a million dollars doesn’t appear. I’ve wondered why that is, and the answers I’ve come up with have ranged from karma to divine timing to damned-if-I-know!

But we’re talking about activating the big “yes” in our life, aren’t we? Saying yes to health, to love, to wealth, to joy, to faith, to experiencing God/Goddess in our very bodies, minds and hearts, right?

Right.

Know how we’ve been “working on ourselves” for years? Know how we’ve read countless books and attended countless workshops to try to “change our beliefs”, to “allow the good in”. Know how generally unrewarding those efforts have been? Well, there are some that have found that path to be rewarding, but they are, in my experience, generally the people who are writing the books and leading the workshops! I, and many others I’ve known, are still waiting for the rewards.

Well, that very waiting is what keeps the “Yes!” at bay. So, no more waiting!

But what does that mean – that we wait no longer?

Let’s go to the idea of karma: if karma is simply some seeds of expectation we planted once upon a time (beliefs = expectation), and they were – let’s say – seeds of poverty consciousness, if we want to keep the “Yes” of supply at bay by rooting around in our consciousnesses looking for all of the negative beliefs that have held us down, and then, one by one, uproot them and try like heck to believe in their opposite. This is exceptionally hard work, and those who can actually make headway have my appreciation. It is so not my path! And now that I’m over 50, I do not feel that I want to spend my time addressing, one…by…one…, negative beliefs that actually are not real to begin with! What a waste of my time when I know that it doesn’t work for me!

Instead, we can plant new seeds. Let’s take wealth consciousness! It’s kind of “up”, these days in our economy, no? In this way of working the Yes, I am not simultaneously denying that I don’t currently have the kind of wealth that I am going to have. I’m not denying any denser emotions that I feel – they are all part of the beauty and mystery and the grace-filled challenge of learning to love and appreciate who I am. But I am claiming and stating and feeling the “other” parts of me: the wealth, the health, the love, the faith and so on. I am doing something that Gregg Braden talks about in his book The Secrets of the Lost Mode of Prayer: “praying wealth”, rather than “praying for wealth”. I will explain, and this is game-changing, so listen up!

It’s the same sort of thing as I talked about in my first blog – if you are constantly seeking, you will be constantly, well, seeking. If you are constantly finding, that’s a whole lot more rewarding, right?

So here it is: If we pray for something that we don’t have – if we’re reaching and reaching for something that we don’t have, without any feeling that it is ours to have, we’re now in the position of the beggar. Worse, we are giving great energy to what we don’t want, so that it goes further and further away! Remember the old nugget: “What we resist, persists.”? Yep, it works this way too. If our words say one thing, while our greater feeling says another, we’re not making a lot of headway. Even more impactfully, Gregg Braden offers this stunning thought:

“If we pray for world peace, for example, while feeling [my emphasis] tremendous anger toward those who lead us into war, or even war itself, we may inadvertently be fueling the very conditions that lead to the opposite of peace! With half of the world’s nations now engaged in armed conflict, I often wonder what role millions of well-intentioned prayers for peace each day may be playing, and how a slight shift in perspective could possibly change that role.”

It’s all about feeling the answer to my prayers, right here and right now. When I think about that, I feel that I know exactly why my prayers have not been “answered”. In fact, they have been answered! Spirit/Universe/God has said, “You are putting lots and lots of energy into pushing against poverty-consciousness, so that’s where your attention is, so…YES! Lots of poverty consciousness for you!” Holy Hannah!

If, however, we feel what it feels like to have money, what we will feel like when we have money (or, if it’s more accessible this way: “what we would feel like if we had money”) – self-assured, relaxed, happy – what you bring in to your experience is that vibrational frequency that immediately relaxes you (there’s an instant return on your time and energy investment! I mean, when’s the last time you let yourself relax???), and you put out into the world what you want to attract – because that’s what vibrational frequencies do, move beyond your body/mind and draw like frequencies (a.k.a. experiences) into your life.

So, we pray money.

We pray love.

We pray joy.

And if you really want to go for the big money of total supply of all you could ever want in life, pray God.

Know God as your sole supply – because God is the big YES. You thought printing presses made money? Nuh-uh. God does and you do, in your co-creating with God. You don’t have to go delving into every negative belief and change it – just plant new seeds of what you can feel as your true mode of life, your true mode of existence. You are a child of God – time to claim that.

And if what you need in order to do this kind of work is to believe that this kind of prayer is effective, there are numerous ways (more to come). But for now, you can always pray faith.

Say “Yes!” You deserve it.

The Death of Seeking – The Birth of Being

Ahhhh, the kudos I have received from myself for being an earnest seeker!

The problem with endlessly seeking, though, is that – well – you’re endlessly seeking!!!

We spiritual types seem to be really, really good at handling frustration, don’t we!

But is that what we want out of this “exercise”? Of course not. The fact that we keep trying and trying, not for days, weeks, or months or even years, but for decades is a testament to our misunderstanding of the spiritual path and its instant – yep, I dared to say that word, “instant” – rewards.

Oooh, Lori, you’re really treading in dangerous waters here.

Well, yes, I am. That is what spirituality asks of us; not this frustrating exercise of trying to “get over our issues”, or be “better” than we think we are.

So, what do I mean by instant rewards, and how do we get ’em?

There is a shift – we all know that word and we love it because we are in fact tired of the frustration of trying and trying without getting substantial rewards for our substantial efforts! – and the shift is in understanding that there is nothing to seek (gasp!), but there is something to claim.

Think about it! If God is everywhere present, if everything is made of God-ness, so to speak, then God is us as well. We are made of Godness as well. And if we think of God as being All – and we understand the meaning of the word “all”, so we know that there is nothing that can exist outside of “all”, then we even have to accept that our humanness and even (sorry kids!) our egos (gasp!) are within God-ness, then the whole game shifts. Now, instead of trying to push against ego, release ego, change ego, blah blah blah – now, we turn from the dark and claim the light that is already there. We begin to claim the joy, we begin to claim the faith, we begin to claim the clarity of mind, and as we continue to claim and claim and claim, and assert the truth that we do in fact live, move and have our being in God – and therefore there is nothing to push against, but so much to allow in – then we are being. 

When we let go of seeking and start claiming that which already is, we start to live within and deepen our aliveness within our Godness that has always been there. And that’s where the “instant” results thing comes into play. If in the moment that you feel awful, you can affirm that God is also present, that the Truth of your experience includes and is in fact lived within the highest Love of all, either your situation shifts, or your experience of the situation shifts. We do live in a time-based reality, so sometimes I have to sit for 20 minutes affirming what I know to be true in order to feel seriously better. But honestly, the moment I remember to turn to the light, the game has changed! I am no longer the victim of my experience, I am God’s co-creator of God’s higher reality in my life, right there and then.

It’s a trip! Of course, our “egos” will have a helluva time accepting that all of the effort we put into trying to fix ourselves was not the wealthiest investment of our time. But we’ll get over it.

Helen Keller said, “Turn your face toward the sun and you will not see the shadows.” Helen Keller! Think about it.

And the great saint, Ammachi, my spiritual mother, says that when you enter a dark room, you don’t waste your time trying to push out the dark, you turn on the light!

We’ve been sitting in the dark long enough. Welcome to your God-ness!

Blessings and laughter,

Lori