Wed, 21 November 2007  Do You Have The Power To Heal? Welcome back! I’ve got an exciting topic for you this week so let me jump right in and ask “Do you have the power to heal?� I believe that healing presents itself in countless ways. It takes so many forms on so many levels that once you start looking for the experience of healing energy, you become attuned to the myriad ways we encounter that energy each day; a smile, a giggle, a greeting card, a hug, a phone call, or even a sanctuary that can contain you and hold you in its soothing embrace. My garden is just that way; calming me, connecting me to the world outside of my thoughts and holding a space conducive to my absolute wellness. I’m sure you have just such a place that’s equally healing to you. To heal is to make whole, sound or well. And I believe that we ALL have that capacity. So do you have the power to heal? I can answer that with an unqualified YES! But do you KNOW that you have the power to heal? My guess is that most of you don’t. If you were raised in the midst of westernized medicine, you were taught to put your faith in doctors, pills and science. And even those of you who receive alternative therapies, you’re often reminded that there’s someone other than you who holds the ability and wisdom to facilitate your healing. You’re forever told to let others play God in your life when it comes to your health. You’re taught to trust the hero or the authority and not yourself. My own beliefs about the nature of healing were dramatically impacted by my two-year herbal apprenticeship following the Wise Woman tradition. I grew and tended and harvested green allies. I learned about the energetics of plant medicines and how the power of the natural world is available in abundance to serve our needs if only we know how to benefit from them. Most importantly, I learned how to listen to my body and to respond to its call. That’s an exquisetly intimate process of deepening my listening skills on a visceral level. In other words, I had to be able to discern what was happening physically by using all of my sensory powers to collect information. That skill is one I continue to hone as I help others listen to themselves in the deepest possible way. It was during my apprenticeship that I came to understand that the foundation of all healing modalities is UNCONDITIONAL LOVE. As the group of us discussed the affect and meaning of that term, I found myself really questioning whether or not unconditional love was possible. By virtue of my asking that question, it was clear that I’d never experienced it for myself. As a result, I didn’t have that to offer to others in my healing practice. I said, “I don’t get it. There are people in the world who do unspeakable things, evil things to children and animals. They cause suffering and unbelievable harm. How am I supposed to extend unconditional love to people like that?� My mentor told me “You don’t understand. It’s not about them, it’s about YOU!� Oh my God. I got it! Only when I could love myself beyond reason and outside of my ideas of perfection could I access my own power to heal. It made perfect sense. I had to heal myself and, in doing so, I would cultivate my own ability to foster that in others. That’s it. That what this podcast and the passionate work of my life is all about. That’s why I stay up late until it’s done because I am a healer and SO ARE YOU! We all posess the ability to heal ourselves; to become whole again and again through the intentional use of our consciousness by excercising the power of love. Your willingness to do that is a life-giving act. Your willingness to be physically, emotionally, and spiritually well sets the stage for healing. When you occupy your healthier, higher self you’re a living example to the hundreds or thousands of people you encounter each day. Your healed and healing self creates a terrifically nourishing environment for the billions of people who only need to be shown how to do it for themselves. It’s not about what you say, but about who you ARE. By allowing unconditional love for yourself, you permit that in others. It’s not about fixing someone else, but about fostering the conditions for them to harness their OWN ability to love and thereby heal. That is my chosen path. And my true vocation is not to use plants as a means to make others sound but to use words. Words have an immeasurable ability to cause harm but they also have a vast capacity to heal. Words are timeless, borderless, and their force is universal. And what I’ve decided to heal with words is the epidemic of scarcity consciousness; the pervasive belief that you don’t have enough, will never get enough or will ever be enough. I choose to approach my form of healing consisentently and deliberately. I choose to heal myself, by speaking the loving language of abundance to me and to invite you to listen in on my private process. I know that I’m first obligated to practice what it means to be “enough� if I’m to guide others like you to that same deep knowing. You see, the more often you know it, the more it becomes what’s real. The knowing begins to take place on a cellular level. And when you embody that knowing, it becomes wisdom. That wisdom informs every thought, every choice and action. It changes the world starting with you, beginning with me. So you see I love you as you are because I love me as I am. I love you in your perfect humanness because I love the humanness in me. I love that you want to do it all and I know that you’re only one person. I know you have limits and challenges and pain. I know you cry and hurt and long for someone to see you radiant and beautiful as you are. I know it in my own soul and I know we’re all connected. This is the unconditional love from which the entire planet will be restored because each of us is made whole by love’s healing power. Love is the only reason for which we are alive and the only reason to live.
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Wed, 14 November 2007 Welcome back! My podcast this week is about satisfying my curiosity because I sincerely want to know... Are you really, really ready to succeed? Are you really ready to have that magical relationship, to discover work that you’re passionate about or to otherwise make that shift from hoping to having? If you're at all like me, then you're probably saying "Yes! I am, I’m so, so ready to create miracles in my life and I've been ready for a very long time!" "But (you might add), I'm still waiting for what I want and I don't know what I'm doing wrong." So, if your intention is clear and your desire is absolute, then why haven't your dreams come true? I'd like you to consider that any delays separating you from your prosperity are significantly impacted by your success aptitude. The word ‘aptitude’, like countless other words, has more than one meaning. I'm not using the definition of aptitude that refers to ability because I'm convinced that everyone has ability to a lesser or greater degree. So the question is not "Can you succeed?" but "Will you?" That's a perfect segue into another variation of aptitude that you may not be familiar with. Its secondary meaning refers to ‘a state of readiness’. And when you’re truly ready, your WILL works in beautiful concert with your ABILITY. And when you combine what you can do with what you will do, you form a powerful synergy that constitutes the force of change. These small but critical distinctions became very clear to me recently as I found myself struggling to achieve the goals I'd set for myself. In the midst of that challenge, I realized how much I really needed support, encouragement and perspective. So, I called a dear friend of mine who's a gifted coach in her own right. She knows me intimately. She knows my history and my heart. But most of all, she understands the difference between what's real and the self-limiting stories I tell myself in the midst of my own practice of prosperity. The “aha� moment for me in that conversation was when she helped me to understand exactly what was preventing me from having the experience of my life that I truly and deeply wanted. I wasn't doing anything wrong per se because it wasn't about action in this case. Actually, the problem wasn't what I was doing but what I was being. And what I was being was afraid. Can you relate? Can you think of the time when you were going through the motions that logically should have resulted in the outcome you sought but never actually realized? Can you remember making consistent effort while hoping and praying you would get what you wanted? Most importantly, are you also able to recognize that fear was a constant partner to your desire? That's precisely where I found myself. Yes, I was doing what I could and I believed that I was certainly ready to succeed as never before and yet, I was privately afraid that it would never come and that I wouldn’t realize my most deeply held dreams. The point is that fear is an invisible shield with stealthy properties for its ability to repel what might be realized in its absence. Fear surrounds you like a bottomless moat, trapping and preventing you from reaching your intended destination. And the most interesting thing about living with fear, even if you don’t realize it, is that fear is almost invariably an illusion fabricated by your mind. Most of all, fear is entirely antithetical to aptitude which means the two cannot co-exist because they’re opposing forces. When I researched the origins of the word ‘fear’ I learned that it’s connected to the words harm, distress and deception. And those early meanings underscore my point that operating out of fear is fundamentally illusionary. It seems then that our common task is to repeatedly lift this veil of foreboding in order to clearly see and reach out for that which exists beyond fear. It's not really a matter eliminating fear, but of the acting in spite of it. It means to simply acknowledge fear without succumbing to its deceptive ways. To do that is to illuminate the self-deceit that occurs in your mind; obliterating any false image that precludes your best life from being realized. You see fear has many disguises including frustration, anger, doubt, despair and worry. When you find yourself dealing with any of those feelings, it's a clear indication that your mind is where your consciousness is currently centered. Knowing that, you may actively shift that consciousness downward, to the center of your heart from which all creativity is born and in which fear cannot survive. To operate from courage means to be fully occupying your heart. And from that place, you’ll enjoy fortitude, integrity and power. From heart-centeredness comes aptitude; the readiness to fully receive your much-deserved success. In the words of Alice M. Swain:
Here's my 7-day challenge for you: When you find yourself experiencing doubt, frustration, worry or any variation of fear, immediately take five minutes of stillness and solitude. Examine the nature of your fear and continue past it until you’re clear on the underlying desire or dream that lives at the base of your fear. Hold your wish confidently. Allow it to grow from the center of your body until it fills every inch of you including that space occupied by your mind. You have the power to intentionally expand what is conceptual in a way that allows you to embody the power of your intention. And when you’re the consistent embodiment of such enchanted possibility, the veil of fear is forcibly raised and put aside by you, for you and because of you. Please join next time when I ask "Do you have the power to heal?" Until then, I leave you with abundant peace. Comments[0] | ||||||||||||||
Fri, 9 November 2007 Welcome back! This week we’ll explore the good life and how to measure the goodness you so want and deserve. Of course, the word "good" is entirely subjective so let's look at how we broadly define the goodness that comes with success. The common thinking seems to go like this... If something is good, then more of it is better! But is that really true? Does success come super-sized? Well yes, it does for a select few but it's safe to say that with super-sized success comes super-sized responsibility, overstuffed obligation and bottomless burdens. It reminds me of a comedienne I once heard recounting how her friend underwent an extremely long and painful childbirth. She responded to her friend with "15 hours? I don't even want to do something that feels GOOD for 15 hours!" So how do you scale success to a happy medium and to a level you can maintain? You might begin by questioning the status quo belief that more is better. Why, because a consuming appetite for "more" is a clear sign that you're trapped in the "not enough" mindset. Where would we be as a nation, or even as a civilization, without perpetual expansion as a core American principle? How might we impact our environment differently if we weren't buying into the premise that conspicuous consumption is our human right? To live sustainably as a collective requires that we live sustainably each by each, starting with you and me. That effort begins by redefining success with sustainability as its innate function. It's not about sustaining your outer environment, but your inner one; because when your private world is doable, realistic and maintainable, that will naturally be reflected in your external surroundings. Here's a beautiful passage by the great Albert Einstein who so eloquently conveys our undeniable interconnection and interreliance upon the sacred web of life, the preservation of which determines our very survival. He wrote: “A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest… a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.� So, if your life didn’t involve overwhelm, overspending and generally over estimating what any one person can accomplish in a day, how would it look? The answer to that question is your new definition of what it means to live a life that sustains you instead of one that drains you. Here's a little story to make my point: I recently ordered the famous noodle dish called Pad So how do you decrease the quantity of what you do in any given day while increasing the quality of what you do? There's a simple formula to help you clarify your approach and it goes like this: STEP 1 - Identify the quality of life that bring you joy and a sense of peaceful calm. Those qualities reliably provide a feeling of being in the flow of life as well as intimacy with your true nature. STEP 2 - Make a list of all activities that lead to you re-experiencing that flow again and again. STEP 3- Prioritize your daily checklist this way: items 1,2, & 3 on your to-do list will include the absolutely, must-get-done-today tasks. Begin with the one you want to do the least and get it out of your way. Items 4, 5, & 6 are those from your to-be list; in other words, those activities that give your life meaning and make it worth living. Just remember, productivity is NOT the purpose of life! By both DOING and BEING each day, you'll gain the balance that's an essential element to every degree of success, great or small. More importantly, this approach will teach you how to discern what's truly essential and surrender the rest, knowing you'll never get it all done and that, frankly, you have more essential things to be than a frustrated taskmaster with this one and precious life. Please join me next time when I ask "Are you really, really ready to succeed?" Until then, I leave you with abundant peace. Direct download: Do_You_Measure_Life_By_Weight_or_Volume.mp3 Category: podcasts -- posted at: 3:10 PM Comments[0] | ||||||||||||||
Wed, 31 October 2007 How Funky Is Your Chicken?
Welcome back! This week I'm answering a question of vast international importance. And that is... How funky is your chicken?
As you probably already know, I adore words for the powerful impact they have on our thinking. So I often provide my audience with clear definitions of the words I use in my podcast. When I looked up the word ‘funky’, I was surprised to find more than a dozen different variations in meaning. And for the sake of clarity let me say that I'm NOT using the following definition which is FUNKY: Having a strong, offensive, unwashed odor. Nope! Instead I'm using the following meaning, FUNKY: natural, earthy and uncomplicated.
What I'm saying is that having real success in your life includes having real fun. FUN fun. Funky fun! It means setting aside the struggle and strife that we so often associate with getting to the top of what ever it is that you think stands between you and your prosperity.
Let me be totally honest with you by volunteering that for the last few weeks, my life has closely resembled a steaming dung pile in every way; personally, professionally, fiscally, and even physically. Seriously, there's been no part of my life that hasn’t felt either totally overwhelming or completely chaotic. It’s during times like these when I look forward to doing my podcast because it forces me to think in a larger way, beyond the minutia of my everyday trials.
With time, I eventually gain perspective and begin to pull out of the prison of my own thoughts and worries. I start looking around myself and notice that people everywhere are facing personal challenges each and every day that far exceed my own. I come to the realization that if I stay present with myself, right now, in this passing moment, I'm fundamentally okay.
I'm safe, I'm warm and I'm loved. It's only from that awareness that I'm able to focus on what is and truly appreciate the gift of my life instead of projecting on an uncertain future that is largely unknowable and absolutely outside of my control.
When I do that and when you do that, each of us surrenders fear and gives permission for the coming light to overtake any shadows under which we may be living. Remaining in that position is ultimately an act of faith in yourself and your divine nature. It is your faithfulness that issues a powerful invitation to noticing light even in the smallest possible quantity.
In fact, it’s your willingness to remain in, and not run from, absolute darkness that allows your vision to become greatly sensitized to even the most minute glimmering; to discern and act upon a guiding light that under normal circumstances would most likely go unnoticed.
That is your opportunity for true enlightenment; for the degree of your success is in direct proportion to your willingness to be light, happy and joyful.
It reminds me of a time when I sat in on a church service some time ago. Midway through the program, a few musicians got up to play for the churchgoers. Let me be frank when I say that they were downright bad. Honestly, the music was so cheesy that I noticed myself feeling embarrassed for them. I secretly hoped that they would all sit down before things got any worse but they kept right up.
And as they continued, I realized something very important. It didn't matter what I thought because, you know what, they weren't performing for me. They weren't performing at all. They were playing. They weren't professional musicians and it really didn't matter because they were absolutely enjoying themselves; entirely free from self-consciousness and detached both from the outcome and from the need for outside approval. They had succeeded absolutely through their choice to act outside of the fear of judgment.
In their willingness to show up and just play, they achieved a level of joyfulness that I could only experience from the outside. And the clearer this realization became, the more able I was to appreciate the energy and the gift of enlightenment that they brought to each and every one of us that day.
So I ask myself as I ask you… When is it okay to be light? At what point will you choose not to perform but simply to play? And when you do finally grant yourself that permission, will you not also be inspired by your own lightness of being to play even more? In the end, this isn’t new. It’s a profound remembering of your true nature which is nothing short of dazzling in its brilliance.
It is that child-consciousness that dances at will, that bounces and squeals, sings and delights without ever seeking acceptance because it operates under its own happy authority. And that consciousness, that sunny, effervescent, funky spirit exists within you as much today as it did in your youth. You're paramount duty is to revive and reveal that essence which infects and informs everything that you do and everything that you are.
In the words of Eleonora Duse:
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