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Archive for the ‘Healing’ Category

Expecting miracles

08 Jan

Some time ago, I picked up a little ebook Rebecca Messenger (previously Marina) called “30 Angel Steps”.  It’s a thirty-day journaling exercise that helps you clear out old energy, focus on what you want in life, foster gratitude, etc.  I’ve started it a couple of times, but I haven’t finished out a full round of it.  The last time, I just got distracted somewhere around day eight or nine.  This time, I’m giving myself permission to skip a few days at a time since my schedule has changed so drastically.

If you want to give it a shot yourself, you can download it here.  Her actual website is here, and when you subscribe, you get a ton more free stuff.

I’m up to Day Seven right now, and I thought maybe I’d use this as my space to do it.  (Mostly, it’s in my blue book, but I’m inspired to do it here today.  I’m not sure why.)

Here’s the angel message for today:

Dear Angels,

May I ask you about your relationship to our Heavenly Mother? Why does mankind not speak of her?

Centuries have passed and the glory of our Divine Mother, the Divine Feminine, has been hidden. Her glory and honor were stolen away by those in authority who found only the masculine served their purposes. Man always has been a creature of free will and chose long ago to turn his back on God, the Mother.

This has upset the balance of male-female relationships on every level. There is a great resurgence of the female energy in the Universe today. Not just in your world, but in many other worlds as well. The orphaned child cries for Mother and can no longer be denied.

This is truth. Raphael, Gabriel, Michael and Uriel

 

In my rapid-fire mind, this almost becomes a point of past concern, but at the same time, it’s very, very immediate.  As we sit and examine and consider just what the heck is causing this insanity in our world – economic depression, financial crisis, interpersonal warfare – the imbalance between the masculine (objective, power-striving, see-only) and the feminine (subjective, comfort-striving, feel-only) is definitely a prime culprit.  Of course, as I often state, correlation is not causation, so I have to ask myself, is the world in the shitter right now because of the imbalance between Shakti and Shekinah, or is has this imbalance between Shakti and Shekinah been created by something else that has then thrown the world into the shitter?

I know I have a hard time balancing the male-female aspects of myself sometimes, too, but more and more evidence suggests that that’s just the Aspie speaking.  I’m the queerest straight woman I know, which is saying something, but I’d rather be queer-yet-straight than be unnecessarily girlie and uncomfortable with both my appearance and the potential sexual response of others.  (But that’s a whole other story.)  A major part of me somewhat regrets the passage of attraction to women in general, but that could also just be because I haven’t met the right one.  ;-)

Digression, much?

Back to the angel days process…

One thing I appreciate about myself is: my willingness to state and defend my boundaries.  I was not always able to do this, and I’ve been bloody terrible about it in the past, but now, there’s a moment of freezing anxiety right before the words “No, thank you” come out, and then it’s gone.

One thing I appreciate about Joe is his willingness to be flexible and accommodating to his boys’ changing emotional needs.

I intend TO DO one thing at a time:

Morning: Check my comics, read PostSecret, drink some coffee

Afternoon:  Take Diana shopping so that she can have fabulous work clothes.

Evening: Snuggle the boys, make dinner, get everyone bathed, do some work, work some more.

“To Do” list for the Angels:

Dear Angels, While I am busy working or playing today, could you please do these things for me?  Thanks for all your help!  I love you!

  1. Clear up the traffic so that we can get where we’re going safely.
  2. Work on greasing the wheels for that project.
  3. Bring in that windfall in a timely and helpful manner.

Today, I intend to thank…  Well, now, I can’t tell you this part, internet, because that would give some of it away.

I Am statements.  I am filled with gratitude and love with the potential of the next few months.  I am delighted with my healthy financial status.  I am so appreciative of the bountiful resources in my home and life.

**********

There’s a whole other section that you do before bed as well.  You make an “I forgive myself for” statement, an “I intend to forgive X for” statement, then a “What I loved about today” statement, and finally, this:

“Dear Creative Mind, I know you never sleep, so while I am resting, could you please work on …. ”

And these are the internal things you’d like to accomplish, such as receiving inspiration for your latest project or releasing old guilt, shame, or anger, or whatever.

**********

I find I can pull myself out of a funk more easily when I’m doing exercises like this.  I can pick up on when I’m feeling down “naturally” or when there’s something bothering me, and that’s not always easy for me.  More importantly, though (and I noticed this when I was doing these angel pages before), awesome little bits of opportunity and serendipity just pop up out of nowhere.  Avenues that I didn’t even realize existed appear and often make the going a little easier for any number of projects or intentions.  It’s kinda neat that way.

I’m not sure I want to get into the “what is an angel” discussion just yet, though.  Suffice it to say, I don’t think your idea of an angel matches my idea of an angel, because I am definitely not thinking of a bunch of fluffy-bunny flying hippies wandering around with harps and halos.

But, that’s another story.

 
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On the nature of Santa Claus

05 Jan

A friend asked me if my kids still believed in Santa Claus.  I said, “Well, of course!  Don’t you?”

There’s been a wisdom for years, especially in my family, that Santa Claus is the modern “spirit” of a sense of giving and joy, especially for children, during the winter solstice celebration time.  We kinda go along with the cultural norms since it’s difficult to explain that we don’t mind working on Christmas but could we please have the 21st and 22nd off instead (experience has shown this), although this year (and possibly in years to come), we deferred “the Santa Spell” for a week and had our “Christmas morning” on January 1st.

The Santa Spell is the formal name for the process of acquiring and wrapping and tagging all of the presents for the family, putting up the final festive decorations, and preparing the family feast.  It’s a little bit of childhood magic, but it’s just as important as any other mythological figure.  For us, it invokes a kind of energy that just manifests things, sometimes seemingly out of thin air, that enable us to always have a kindly time of the holidays.  Some friends have gotten visited by the Turkey Fairy on an occasion or two, some have had their entire Christmas process provided spontaneously by charitable folks (myself included), and possibly more often, some kind of circumstance will pop up out of nowhere that will just make everything come together.

Perhaps my view of this is skewed somewhat by my deep love for Terry Pratchett’s “Hogfather”.  That is our annual Xmas Eve watching tradition, and the end of it makes a vital and important point:  Regardless of what kind of scrifical blood ritual may have started the mythology of Santa Claus (or the Hogfather, as the case may be), it is our innocent faith in the ideas of them that is the important point.  Traditions are grown one yaer at a time, and it only takes two generations to make something seem like it’s been there forever.  When we’re talking about mythological beings, there’s often a deeper foundation to it that adds an additional type of magic, and that’s why we aught to give ourselves permission to believe.

At the end of “Hogfather”, Susan asks Death what the purpose was for all of their efforts of the evening (you’ll have to watch to find out, I won’t spoil it here), and he says something to the effect that believing in things like the Hogather, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, et al, prepare the innocent child-mind to believe in things without physical material proof.  In the adult years, it’s the ideas of things like justice and mercy and compassion.  There is no particle or atom or element that can be isolated to identify these ideas, nothing that can be synthesized or produced to increase them (despite what the pharmaceutical companies would want you to think), and yet, we know they exist because we see the evidence of them every day.

The foundation of truth that Pratchett is trying to illustrate is that our power of faith, of daring to believe in the ideas, gives them power.  This ties in with another profound truth that “the way you think creates the reality in which you live.”  When you bring yourself to a place to encourage positive thoughts, positive things happen to you, and the same attraction of same-ness happens if you put yourself in a negative mindset.

Consider, then, that the magic of youth is a kind of exercise to build up our muscles of faith, of realizing that we have the power to choose what we believe and how strongly.  If we can let ourselves believe that a fat man in the red suit might possess our parents and imbue them with a kind of conjuring magic, then we can believe that people are mostly inherently good, that we are worthy by our existence far before our actions, and that love is an inalienable right of all humans.  Without that magic, we are easily torn down by the evidence that suggests the dark and cruel nature of the universe, and by that, we end up giving more power to that darkness.

So, you see, belief in something like Santa Claus or the Great Pumpkin or the Soul Cake Duck is really about arming yourself in the battle of light versus darkness.  You are giving yourself the power to be armored and defended against the onslaught of unpleasantness – outside of yourself and within – and that is the most powerful force one can conjure at all.

Especially when you’ve been taught that positivity leads to gratitude.

 
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Posted in Healing, Law of Attraction, Non-Fiction, Personal Life

 

Learning from Solitaire

02 Jan

I’d thought about titling this, “Everything I need to know about life I learned from Solitaire”, but almost as soon as I thought it, I realized how silly that is.  There’s nothing – no matter how glorious – that teaches you everything about life.  It’s all a culminate experience from moment to moment.

Still, there are a number of things that I’ve learned about how life works as I play game after game of that simple Klondike-style pastime.

1. No matter what you’re dealt to begin with, success is mostly determined by that which you cannot see.

2. Even the best equation of potentiation cannot take into account the unknown variables.  (Or, to put it another way, any assessment of potentiation is impacted infinitely by the factors of probability until all variables are defined.)

3. Even when you know all the variables, success is not guaranteed.

4. If you don’t like the hand that is dealt, reshuffle and try again.

5. Sometimes the way forward is the way back.

6. Always count your cards.  Sometimes you have to sacrifice making an easy move in order to get to the good move.

7. No matter how silly it seems, your attitude does more to impact your success than any range of chance.  Keep a good outlook and a positive expectation, and even the disappointments will be not so bad.

8. Figure out where your aces (foundational materials) are first, and then worry about the Kings.  Without the former, having the latter won’t matter a hill of beans.

9. At some point, it’s time to hang it up and and try again later.  Relentlessly attempting a win streak will only lead to sleepless nights and intense frustration.

10. Solitaire is great, but sometimes, you just need to play cards with other people – especially if you want to raise the stakes.

11. When faced with two possible moves of seemingly equal value, opt for the one that will show you something new.

12. There’s an undo button for a reason, but don’t go too far forward before going back or you might forget where you were trying to go.

13. Overall, the best algorithm will offer you a 20% chance to win.  That’s one in five, averaged out.  That’s pretty close to real life experience, too, so if you’ve had a bad streak, know that a good one is coming – life has just been saving it up.

 

 
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Posted in Healing, Non-Fiction

 

Just a quick note to keep my resolve alive

16 Dec

Wyoming Shelley shared this prayer, and I had to add a line to the end.  It’s been keeping me going the last couple of days, and I thought I’d share it with you.

The Light of God surrounds me. The Love of God enfolds me.
The Power of God protects me. The Presence of God watches over me.
The Mind of God guides me. The Life of God flows through me.
The Laws of God direct me. The Power of God abides within me.
The Joy of God uplifts me. The Strength of God renews me.
The Beauty of God inspires me!
Wherever I am, God is!
Whatever God is, I AM!

Just thought I’d share.

 

 
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Internet Rules for Teens

05 Dec

The teenage years contain immense changes and produce amazing evolutions, but the road is almost always a rocky one.  Emotions flare, opinions change daily, and the culture of today makes the transition riddled with far more dangers than it did in the past.  Back in my day (did I really just say that?!), we had to go through the same feelings and conflicts that kids do today, but we had different means with which to deal with them.  We had diaries that were locked up with material keys, we had notes that we passed back and forth in school, we had anonymous “friendship books” sent to far-flung corners of the world…

And kids today have the internet.

The problem is that the internet makes it very, very easy to pop off with the first reaction and post it for all the internetted world to see.  That means that mistakes can easily become indelible – trapped forever on some horrifically well-maintained server in a cold dark co-lo room, protected from whatever disasters may befall the human race.  A sufficiently advanced technology hundreds or thousands of years into the future will find this data and determine that we met our end due to our overwhelming lack of compassion and overabundance of meme reliance.

In a far more immediate way, we create the landscape of emotional land mines with our carelessness and our “need” to be heard “right now”.  I put “need” in quotes because it’s not a real requirement for our emotional survival – it’s an impulse to have our feelings validated.  The issue here is that not all feelings need to be validated by others.  Sometimes the value of a thing is just to write it out, to be able to see the words staring back at you, not necessarily anyone else, and by that, examine them again.

To that end, these rules have emerged through the trial-and-error of our age.  Parents and guardians of kids might want to share them, invoking consequences if they are broken.  Just like the classic household rules of “look both ways before crossing the street” and “don’t try to eat anything bigger than your head”, they’re meant to both teach and protect.

1. If you’re writing a blog post in the heat of fury or other intense emotion, mark it as “Private”.  When we were kids and we scribbled furiously in the middle of the night about what assholes our parents were, outlining in brilliant detail all of their multitudinous sins, it was often in a notebook we hid between our mattresses along with our pilfered porn collection.  We were the only ones that ever saw it, barring the few close friends we dug it out for, and years later, we’d go back and read those entries with enormous embarrassment that we could have missed something so obvious or have used that kind of language.  Today, a blog post is, as I mentioned, forever, potentially indexed and saved in perpetuity.  Total strangers can do a search and find those posts, even if it has nothing to do with what they were looking for.  Worse than that, relatives and friends can read that and perhaps rally to help – except most of the time, there’s nothing to “help” with – or worse yet, crawl up the posters behind with the proverbial Blowtorch of Justice.  It’s just an emotion and not necessarily something that requires action.  And the internet is not so good at telling the difference between the two.

2. When you pick a screen name, be prepared to keep it forever.  Oftentimes, we don’t mean to keep our screen names, but sometimes it just works out that way.  If you frequent two or three or more forums and you use different names on each, the other people who frequent those boards will get confused and call you by other names from other boards.  This isn’t that big of a deal, really, but it can be a serious problem going into the future when you realize that the name that most people use to address you is SexXyKittehRomp3r453 – and you’re really just a 14-year-old kid in rural Iowa.  Screen names are not just ways to identify yourself online – they are revealing themselves to be a means of developing your identity.  That means that they’re going to change sometimes as you yourself change, but sometimes, those changes don’t stick.  Don’t start off with something that’s going to rain embarrassment down upon you for years to come.  Be prepared to proudly introduce yourself at RL meetups with your screen name of Jackboots or LARPmagnet.  It’s hard for people to take Fr0steeZlutt97 seriously.

3. Protect your identity.  This was one of the first rules of the internet, and it’s a classic for a reason.  Teens especially are in a particularly vulnerable position when it comes to being victimized by predators – they don’t have the experience yet to tell a shy person from a shyster.  That’s not saying anything bad about teens, it’s just a matter of time.  However, in the meantime, it’s easy to fall prey.  In order to create a bit of safe space, there are three things that I’ve always insisted on from my under-18 crowd: don’t use your real name, don’t use your family’s real names, and don’t ever give out personal information to people you don’t know personally in real life.  This is especially true in the public forums because it’s not always the guy that’s chatting you up in the C-box that’s going to be the problem – it can just as easily be the guy who has said absolutely nothing to you directly but has your information, and he’s the stalker that you’re going to have a serious problem with.

4. Photos don’t go away, so don’t make them a liability.  There are a couple of different sides to this one.  First, the rules haven’t changed: suggestive pictures of kids under 18 still count as illegal pornography, and it doesn’t matter one bit if you were the one to take them of yourself.  Also, the kid that wants you to text or otherwise send him/her pictures of your junk (etc) does not respect you as a person, I guarantee it.  They’re not old enough to understand quite what that means, so I’m not suggesting that they are Bad People, but the result that you’re looking for is not the result that you’re going to get.  Second, do not post pictures of your face to people you don’t know, and certainly not of your immediate surroundings.  A sufficiently clever person can suss out where you live with minimal information, so don’t provide it.

5. Keep your friends lists organized.  Facebook and now Google Plus give us the opportunity to talk to people all around the world – people we may or may not know how we know.  We may end up with 500 or more “friends” on our lists because we’re networking for social games or because we happened to have one particularly popular “friend” in common.  Here’s the great thing about both of the major social networks: they can be organized.  You can set up LISTS in Facebook for Family, Friends, Mafia Wars Buddies, Knitting Folk, Basketweaving Friends, Political Yahoos, and more.  In Google Plus, they’re called CIRCLES, and they work roughly the same way.  The point is to keep your friends lists organized like this so that if you want to advertise that you’re going to be working at the charity car wash on Saturday at 1111 Main St in downtown Walla-Walla, Washington, you can tell your local friends that you know personally, and not the creepy guy two towns over who’s been lusting after your Doc Martens.

The internet allows for an incredible range of freedoms that we didn’t have Way Back When – and to a great degree, that was probably a good thing.  Now, though, it means understanding what real freedom is – specifically, that you have the right to say whatever the hell you want and no one is going to protect you from the consequences.

That’s the upshot of freedom: that it goes both ways.  Honestly, I’m glad to see the change in the world that this is becoming obvious, but it would be nice if our next generation of adults went into their “productive years” with a little more wisdom than Y U TAZ ME BRO?

 

 
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