inspired and empowered

Wouldn't it be enormously encouraging and uplifting if you knew that every little positive and meaningful thought or action of yours made a difference in the world?  We tend to think that an individual is so insignificant compared to the enormity of the world population at large, or perhaps that your individual vote doesn't make much of a difference. I sometimes feel discouraged that even though I conscientiously recycle all my paper, cans, jars and plastics so many other people don't seem to care and put it all in the trash, which seemingly makes the overall task of contributing to healing our planet so much more daunting from my individual perspective.  

 But physician, psychiatrist, author and lecturer David R. Hawkins wrote in Power vs. Force (one of the most insightful and amazing books I have ever read!), "Note that in a holographic universe the achievements of every individual contribute to the advancement and well-being of the whole." Author and changemaker Charles Eisenstein said the same thing during the retreat I attended this summer.  This awareness is so empowering and means that in effect everything matters.  Your contribution matters, makes a difference, is meaningful and inspiring. Don't ever discount your own power! Don't ever give up!

my butter dish

Recently, I broke the bottom part of my glass butter dish, while the lid stayed intact.  Both, broken bottom and useless top, or so I thought, went into the recycling bin.  Then I went online to see where I could find a similar dish to replace it.  Lo and behold, what I thought was the lid was actually meant as the bottom portion, and what I broke was supposed to be the lid. I had been stuck in my thinking. If I had  thought out of the box, I could have saved the lid, and kept using it as the legitimate bottom part it was actually meant to be.  Instead my mind had tagged the unbroken part as unusable because I had labeled it  lid.  Of course in my defense I could have said that my application was creative too, just to make me feel better.  As a matter of fact, and in hindsight, I guess the butter dish could be used either way around.

But the creative beauty would have been in seeing right away that the dish can work either way, my choice, my preference. This incident taught me to look more deeply, to slow down before acting spontaneously (the throwing out part), and to be more creative and less rigid in my approach.

Has something like this ever happened to you?

the kindness virus

My heart melts and I so want to help when someone is kind and comes to me with a big smile and open eyes.  Kindness, that great companion to compassion, is what we need lots more of.  We need kindness to each other, kindness to our Earth, kindness for people we don't know, kindness to animals, all of it. Kindness is uplifting and even healing. 

If love is the ultimate healing energy, then kindness is the little healer. Kindness promotes expansion, brakes down barriers, makes things easier, facilitates communication, fosters cooperation. The great thing about kindness is that it's contagious, as CNN reported recently.  Wouldn't it be great if we all got infected by this lovely virus?

seasonally unadapted

We have been without air conditioning for a bit over a week and it may be another week until the replacement part makes its appearance.  Besides slower thinking, general sluggishness, clumpy salt and chewy crackers, the heat has had an immediate effect on my cooking, or rather lack thereof.  

Summer is always the season of lighter meals, but air conditioning permitted me to still do a fair amount of cooking - just because I could.  Not now!  Raw food diet - salads and more salads, some precooked legumes from the freezer for protein, an egg here and there (doesn't heat up the kitchen too much to cook an egg), a lot of Caprese (mozzarella/tomato) and lots of fresh fruit. And my endless thirst for hot tea all day long has given way to glasses and glasses of cold water.  Perhaps I should have tried out that raw food diet I experimented with in February of all months, when I was looking to reboot my system rather - see a post on it.  But with the heat I just don't have the energy to experiment wildly, and my cooking adventurousness and eagerness to try out new recipes has slowed with rising temperatures. 

It's amazing how quickly we lose touch with the connection to nature when we live in an artificial environment.  The effect and character of the seasons flattens out.  Diet and cooking flatten out, the biggest contrasts between summer and winter cooking diminish.  On the other hand, my connection to these last few hot days of late summer has increased. 

Unfortunately, our business oriented culture is relentless and does not permit us a slower paced summer. Business must go on.  Yes, we are gaining comfort with air conditioning, we are gaining the ability to conduct business no matter what it's like outside, but we are also losing connection to nature and the seasonal differences, and the starker contrasts that come with it.  

as above, so below

The other day I was newly setting up my calendar on my cellphone, having previously only managed appointments and events on an agenda book that's sitting in the middle of the house where I walk by many a times a day and peek into it.  What struck me as I was setting up the virtual calendar was that it automatically pulled up event locations as I typed them in, which then automatically would enable me to obtain directions, call the place up, email it, or look at their website for more information.  Many of you are already operating like this, but I was struck and realized something else. 

We may not all fully accept a collective subconscious or the interconnectedness of all beings on the non-physical plane yet, although scientists are coming around to that - see Robin Wall Kimmerer's book Braiding Sweetgrass and similar botanical research I covered in another post. This complete interconnectedness with via the cloud or the interweb is intertwining us via technology and informs how we interact and organize in our physical environment.  

From there it is just one step to fully realize, "As above, so below." "As above, so below" is a spiritual tenet that originates in the hermetic tradition and says that what's happening on a micro level is also happening on a macro level. The technological interconnectedness seems to me like a mirror reflection of this other interconnectedness, the one Larry Dossey, internationally known physician, author and speaker, refers to in his latest book One Mind, the universal consciousness that ancient and newly revived or developed healing modalities also tap into.

The complete interconnectedness of almost the entire human population now through cloud computing and the internet/interweb physically mirrors the complete interconnectedness we have with all of life on a consciousness level.  As above, so below.

your body, your creation

"Your body is your creation......it exists solely to serve you."  What a cool and empowering quote from Mike Dooley's inspirational book Infinite Possibilities.  I know from experience how you can sort of feel stuck in your body.  

If you reflect on how you dress it's easy to see how your clothes and accessories are an expression of who you are and how you think about yourself.  You want your style to reflect who you are.  It's not that different with your body.  Your body is also an expression of who you are.  But in contrast to the clothes you step into and out of, you can't extricate yourself from your body, at least not until you leave this lifetime. 

From a spiritual perspective your body is not you, you merely inhabit it for the duration of your stay here on Earth to enjoy and experience your time here in the physical.  But realizing that your body is an expression of you over which you have a lot of control is a freeing realization.   Your body clearly reacts to what you put into it, what you're exposed to environmentally, how and if you move, and what thoughts you feed it. And just like your style changes over the years, your body changes over the years too.

If you modify the way you nourish yourself your body will change - think weight change and better or worse general physical health. If you decrease or increase your physical activity level, or change the type of physical activity you do (say body building versus dancing), your body changes -  think toned muscles, increased energy, flexibility and endurance versus loss of muscle mass, energy and stamina.  Changes in your exposure to environmental toxins influence your body - think better physical health versus respiratory ailments, nausea, headaches or perhaps even cancer.   Your body even changes if you change your thoughts - think more exuberance, charisma and positivity, which will make you look younger or more  radiant versus depression or anxiety, which will show up in your physical demeanor. 

You and your body are a team that's joined at the hip so to speak.  The closer you work together towards a mutual goal the more your body will reflect who you want to be.

value or not?

Yuval Noah Harari writes in Sapiens, "For decades, aluminum was much more expensive than gold.  In the 1860s, Emperor Napoleon III of France commissioned aluminum cutlery to be laid out for his most distinguished guests. Less important visitors had to make do with the gold knives and forks."

Value is not intrinsic to an item or a service. It's made up based on cultural beliefs we buy into together.  Think Netherlands tulip craze that imploded, think sugar price drop from the Middle Ages to now. In our culture we believe that time is precious, so precious that American employers give very little of it away for vacation and personal time off, while indigenous people, even though their lives are often shorter than ours, seem to have lots of it to sit around a campfire telling stories or making music together, and Europeans get six weeks vacation on top of all of their religious holidays.  We also believe that money is scarce since we love a good bargain and  try to pay as little as possible for our acquisitions.  

Now we laugh at Napoleon III's "precious" aluminum cutlery, but it goes to show how values come and go, and are based on scarcity, perceived or actual.  Value is really a made-up story.  Your values may be slightly different from mine, so that I might spend more money on things that you might not value the same way I do, and vice versa.  I think some luxury cars are cool looking, but would not spend the money on one.  I'm totally fine with a utilitarian car in which I can transport all of my recycling items to the various drop-off points, and my (sometimes) mud caked organic produce fresh from the farm to home, without fear of messing up my car.  I value my health first and foremost since my life depends on it, hence I value highest the best food and the best healing services I can pay for.

What do you spend your money on?  What do you value?  What do you not value?  What do you not spend your money on?

in awareness

·     Why can't we ever seem to eradicate all illnesses?

·     Why do some people lose weight on a diet that doesn't work for others at all?

·     Why are teachers paid such low salaries?

·     Why are insects dying in masses?

·     What's environmentally wrong with monocultures?

·     Why did we ever believe that formula was better for infants than breast milk?

·     Why is there good and bad in the world?  Can't we just have the good without the bad?

·     What's the purpose of life?

·     Why am I here on earth?

·     Is fat good or bad?  Why can't science give us a definite answer?

pondering death

Our life expectancy has roughly doubled from about forty years in the Middle Ages to around eighty years now, and the number of living centennials keeps growing.  There are now around 450,000 people on earth who are a hundred years or older, up from 316,000 in 2012. We tend to look at a long life as an accomplishment.  Our medical establishment has worked on prolonging life at the far end in many ways, and when someone dies early we often believe that the doctors could perhaps have done better, or that the diseased was robbed of many more years on this beautiful earth. We are especially sad when children die. 

Our culture is quantitatively oriented, not qualitatively - bigger, taller, older, and more is supposedly better.  We not only value life, we especially value youth, because we fear death.  Hence we tend to push death out as far as we possibly can so we don't have to deal with it too soon.  We have removed it from our lives as much as possible, and in general it's not a subject we feel comfortable delving into deeply.  But will we ever live forever?  Probably not. So, sooner or later we have to deal with our own mortality.  Besides, all other life on earth is subject to this birth to death lifecycle as well, so why would we be an exception?    

But there are some indications of a shift in this conversation.  Models tend to be older now, and show up confidently with silver hair; movies tell stories of older couples; the Times recently wrote about the Positive Death Movement.  Buddhists have always said that "you need to die while alive in order to live," a transcendence that can only be achieved through a mystical experience.

How do you feel about death and dying, and what do you teach your children?  What if a life's quality, or a particular break-through that was achieved, were more important than the number of years alive?   Here a previous post on this, and another.

your choice

"Contrast helps us to describe the nature of reality, but it's not because there is hatred that you have to chose it," Mike Dooley said at a conference I attended a few years ago.  

Life presents you with opportunities many times each day, and every one of them is a new chance to chose - beauty over ugliness, kindness over intolerance or meanness, helpfulness over aloofness, peace over war, joy over misery, or abundance over scarcity. Each experience is shaped by your feelings, and you do chose your feelings (yes, yes - nobody else in charge here, but it takes a while to realize that there is a choice - you feel, you don't get felt).  Negative feelings tend to promote victimization, while positive feelings tend to promote empowerment.  

Keep in mind what you'd like to experience when you chose next time.