Words for the Soul
Tales and Reflections on Life, Love & Awakening
Are You Brave Enough to Tackle Your Subconscious Mind?
by Nicole Rose on The Dynamics of Dreaming
July 28, 2020
Finding the courage to face yourself in a culture of distraction.
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In Man and His Symbols, Carl Jung expressed the heroism he perceived in people brave enough to take on the raw subconscious material revealed each night in their dreams.
“It takes a lot of courage to take the unconscious seriously and to tackle the problems it raises. Most people are too indolent to think deeply about even those moral aspects of their behavior of which they are conscious; they are certainly too lazy to consider how the unconscious affects them.”
Those words from Jung in 1964 are as true today as they were then. With all the advances brought on by the last half a century, I’m not sure if humanity has progressed psychospiritually as a race, or if we’ve only succeeded at creating more masterful distractions for ourselves.
Carl Jung was a psychoanalyst, but he also revolutionized the art of dream interpretation, which he greatly valued in his practice as a therapist. He wrote profusely about the nature of dreams and wove it into his teaching and training methods. What was it about dream analysis that intrigued Jung to the point of placing so much importance on it?
Jung realized that our psychic dreaming dramas contained far more relevance than the mere steam of psychological burn off from a day in the grind of life. He knew that the information presented in our nighttime dreams brought to light all the underlying dynamics and operations of the dreamers psyche that he/she was not conscious of.
Here, was the doorway through which the subconscious patterning of unconscious, often damaging or limiting behaviors could be found. In the dreaming mind, one could actually meet the drivers of their own tendencies towards procrastination, fear of failure, stunted communication, or troubled relationship dynamics.
Even more critically, perhaps, a person suffering from more specific neurosis or phobic disorders such as agoraphobia or claustrophobia might gain crucial insight into the sources, as well as potential solutions, of such debilitating conditions.
Dreams themselves, are living transformational devices. We can impregnate the mind with a directive to receive information that may both heal and guide us before we sleep. Given time, we can learn the very fascinating multi-dimensional language with which our dreams communicate to our waking minds.
Dream symbols carry multiple levels of meaning.
You can have a dozen analysts working to interpret a dream and end up with a dozen unique interpretations. What is critical to the translation of any dream is the direct, authentic input from the dreamer. Without participation from you, as the dreamer, nobody else is going to come up with an accurate “take” on what your subconscious is meaning to say.
There is nothing light-weight about your dreams. They contain everything within you and your life that you need to face in order to become a more mature, wiser you. Jung wasn’t kidding when he said it takes “great courage to take the unconscious seriously.” What it also takes is willingness.
Some of the most influential leaders and teachers in the history of humanity demonstrated how important it is to brave up to the unconscious drivers of the subconscious mind.
Imagine a world with no Jesus or Buddha.
What if Jesus didn’t do the things he did, such as trekking into the desert for 40 days in order to face his inner-demons. He didn’t avoid the darkness that lay beneath. Instead, with absolute purpose and intent he went deep into the wilderness, and refused to leave it until the last temptation from the underlying fear-based drivers in his mind were called out. He left nothing hiding in the shadows of his subconscious mind.
I suspect that Buddha was up to the same thing when he sat his bum beneath the Bodhi Tree and refused to leave until he reached the state of enlightenment. When the demon Mara came to tempt him by sending his three daughters, and later an entire army, to conquer the consciousness of the Buddha, the Buddha did not move.
Mara was playing on the underlying drivers of fear and seduction, but the Buddha knew this. These were the moments he had been waiting for — the challenges to his inner-spiritual stamina.
When it comes to the psychospiritual maturation of each individual mind, there is no alternate road to self-knowledge — no road that does not include delving deep into the subconscious terrain of your own inner-world. Jesus and the Buddha knew that. They battled the darkness and left a breadcrumb trail for the rest of us to follow, if we’re brave enough to weather the storm.
What is amazing to me is the sheer thickness of our collective unconscious interpretations of life and ourselves. We’ve been shown the way by masters throughout the ages, yet still we do not seem to understand. One only needs to look around the world for an immediate inventory of our predicament. We are still at war — within ourselves and with each other.
As a species, we have not given enough importance to the demonstrations and wisdom of those who have understood peace. It’s as if we have not been able to hear them when they say that love and compassion are everything, that there is no higher service than caring for your fellow man (or woman).
Why does it seem so hard to embody? Why do we collectively make a living hell of a world that could so clearly be a living heaven if we so chose to set our sights on that goal?
Time, it would seem, in conjunction with the basic functionality of our brains, has played a trick on us.
Dr. Joe Dispenza, who’s expertise is the intersection of quantum physics, neuroscience and epigenics, describes 90% of what we do each day, as habitual. He describes the idea of “you” as a habitual construct — a redundant set of unconscious automatic thoughts, behaviors and emotions that are acquired through repetition (memory).
According to Dispenza, these memory circuits in the brain, when not acted upon can be rewired and can actually create new circuitry, which in turn produces an entirely new set of actions. A familiar past will create a predictable future. But when we cease to operate on the same old memories, the future becomes an open book of possibilities.
This is the science behind freeing the human mind — a potential road map for a way in which we can begin to change our individual and collective outcomes from war to peace.
But can we do it? Will enough of us get really interested in creating an entirely different tomorrow?
Although it would seem that time, in conjunction with the basic functionality of our brains, has played a trick on us, I’m willing to bargain its a trick we can overcome. To learn to overcome it, however, we’ll have to turn up the volume on our collective spiritual development. There’s no way around this. We have to grow up as a species. Our human collective is a conglomerate of individuals, so each of us has a responsibility to do our own consciousness homework.
I can’t learn to love and respect my foreign neighbors in other countries until I learn to love and respect my neighbors across the street. I can’t love and respect you until I can learn to love and respect myself. That means I have to find my way to forgiving every little twinge of imperfection about me and learn to fully accept myself as I am. When I can witness my own struggles with compassion and understanding then I can love the one struggling no matter what her journey looks like or who she is.
Growing up spiritually isn’t about being perfect — it’s about being authentic. Authenticity means that you do you the way that only you can. It means that you synchronize your mind with your heart and bring your heart to the world through the way that you communicate, live and breathe in this spiritually dry, thirsty land. It means that ultimately you rewire your inner circuitry to operate this way.
When your heart and mind become synchronized something unexpected happens as a natural extension of this relationship. Finally working together, each harmonized with the other, absent of conflict and fear, these two essential consciousness organs bow down in service to the Soul. And it’s in service to the Soul that we finally find the meaning we’re looking for.
Consider for a moment that the Soul of you is not religion specific. It’s you specific. Alignment with your Soul is an alignment with the highest, clearest, most expansive faculty of your own intelligence. Your Soul is the rightful king or queen of the psychospiritual domain within you. Only your highest intelligence should be sitting on the throne of your mind. If it’s not, then you’re settling for less in every arena of your life.
From the alignment of mind + heart in service to the Soul, an entirely different presence begins to step forward in your life. One that does not hide or water itself down. One that gives voice to the core of existence living in you and in everyone else.
Your work, no matter what field you’re in, becomes an expression of unity and a natural tendency to care for others and the joint outcomes of your shared aspirations. You begin to respond to life more fully and more holistically because you can see all sides of a situation from a place of understanding.
You begin to experience life through a kind of holism that seeks to become more inclusive and less exclusive. Needless to say, this change makes for very creative problem solving.
In the absence of inner-conflict and narrow-mindedness, a much broader scope of vision gets activated and you find your thoughts and actions synchronizing with what’s in the highest good for everyone.
The word synchronization has never conjured so much meaning.
There is no war within yourself when all your parts are synchronized. And there is no war out there when individually synchronized humans begin to synchronize with each other.
When Jung pointed out the heroic acts of self-reflection necessary to truly dive in and play full out in this journey of self-actualization, he was indirectly slapping our impatient, hedonistic, self-centered egotism in the face.
In not so many words, Jung was defining greater humanity as spiritually irresponsible and adolescent — teenagers that don’t really want to grow up. I don’t know about you, but for me that slap stung a little.
My cheek is still ringing.
He realized that very few people would give their attention to the radical real work of self-actualization through dedicated practices such as dream-work, yoga or meditation. In my 30 years of studying and working with my dreams as psychospiritual maps of the deep unconscious, I can say that he wasn’t far off the mark.
Unless something happens to shake you up, trip you out, or drop you on your head, it’s not likely you’ll take an interest in diving below the surface of what’s comfortable. Don’t worry — I’m not singling you out. You’re in the same boat as everybody else.
Habits are hard to break.
That’s why shit happens. Something has to shake us loose from the trance induction of learned societal norms that we’ve been indoctrinated into.
For me, it was being lifted from my bed by an invisible force when I was 16. It scared the living shit out of me and made me see things differently. I couldn’t understand what had happened to me so it made me start searching for answers — for meanings to my existence that nobody else was going to give me.
I had extremely vivid dreams and began to dream the “big” dreams of life — dreams that change your entire outlook— dreams that teach you and guide you and show you yourself and life in such a way as to completely transform the context in which you live and the content with which you live from.
Dreams can do that when you give them their due attention.
You are not the you that you think you are. You are so much more… so much so, that it isn’t something that can even be spoken or accurately described.
The gateway of your dreams is a porthole into the unknown, yet unseen parts of you that must be met if you are to sync up — first within yourself, and then with other people. And as Jung said, it takes great courage to face what lies beneath your conscious awareness.
Shadows dwell there…but also great light.
Jung was right when he said that most of us have a hard time taking responsibility for our conscious behavior, let alone our unconscious patterns. So, how will we as a people, begin to take an earnest interest in what’s unconsciously running ourselves, each other, and the global community we’re living in?
The yogic saying, “The only way out is in,” speaks volumes here.
As a people, we’ve built a world of distractions that keeps us looking outward. Most people are engaged in a constant need for stimulation and entertainment, the way an addict seeks out cocaine or heroin. It’s hard to fathom the emotional global meltdown that would occur if all the cell networks simultaneously quit working.
We’re easily hooked in so many ways and yet none of it will make us happy. Our culture of hedonistic, short-sited stimulus is a temporary fix for a need to feel good, with our attention engaged and occupied in a constant scrolling of false self-images and advertising.
But our truest feel good place isn’t in the farce of impulsive clicking, shopping and social screen-sharing. Our truest feel good place is inside of us. All the outward searching is a distraction for facing who we really are, warts n’ all. It’s only when we slow down, breathe into our own seat of existence, and notice who’s here that we can finally get past the warts to what’s beautiful.
There is only beauty underneath your surface. And it has nothing to do with your life story, or who you know, or who you’ve been, or who you think you will become.
It has to do with who you are.
And that is the ineffable vastness of Self you discover through working consciously with your dreams.
When Your Calling Beckons From The Road Less Traveled
by Nicole Rose
June 23, 2020
An intriguing account of sleep paralysis, dreams and the search for belonging
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Have you ever noticed how a person’s calling will often haunt their childhood? Perhaps you’ve experienced some haunts of your own…
With subtle prophetic tendencies, the elements and contours of a future’s past seem to weave in and around life events as they unfold. Like bread crumbs lain on a forest path, we get clues that lead us along the way to who and what we will become.
But still, we often don’t see it for what it is. There’s no telling the forest for the trees. Until one day, through no fault of our own, it rises up and smacks us square in the face.
My calling’s arrival was no different.
From the time I was a young girl I’d been prone to vivid, sometimes strange dreams — dreams that occasionally showed me things I had no rational explanation for.
When I was 9, I’d been startled awake by an image of my best friend, Abby, surrounded in darkness. She was naked, alone, and crying…
The next morning, when I called her on the phone, Abby told me her mother had walked out on her. She didn’t know when, if ever, she’d be back. She was alone and scared and wanted my help.
Such was the life of my dreams.
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Then shortly after turning sixteen, something quite unexpected happened.
I lay beneath my sheets one night, slumbering soundly. I was already adrift in a lucid array of colors and shapes, when suddenly everything went black. The whole scope of my dreaming vision became a black void.
Off in the distance a center point of color began to emerge, as if moving nearer and nearer to my point of reference until I could clearly make out what it was — a parrot. A very colorful Amazon parrot. There was only a split second of recognition, before everything went black again…
And that’s when I felt it.
The strangest sensation, as if a pressure were being applied from behind my head, shoulders and back. Then the clear gripping feeling of hands on my shoulders, pulling me upward as if to force me to sit up in bed. I tried to scream, but I was paralyzed, unable to move my mouth or my voice-box.
I felt pressure in my throat like a tremendous weight that I could not overcome. I struggled to open my eyes, barely managing a sliver in each, but I couldn’t see anyone there in the darkness. Yet, the very distinct sensation of hands pulling me up by the shoulders continued, pulling me upright, as if to pull me out of the bed.
I felt as if my body was going to rise completely off the bed. I continued to struggle, as if through thickening tar to get my voice out. Something inside kept telling me to get my voice out. I reasoned that if I could only scream someone might hear me and come to my aid.
What the hell was happening to me? What was pulling on me? Who was in my room? Why couldn’t I see anybody there? I struggled to see, to get my voice out… Darkness. There was only darkness.
I had to get my voice out…
Slowly, a low, rumbling, muffled sound began to make it’s way up from my throat. “That’s it!” Something inside me seemed to say, “Louder. You must get louder, try harder!”
Like a strange creature who’d lost its tongue, I slurred and groaned through a fog of paralysis. I summoned every bit of strength I had to manage a barely audible moan, “Nnnnnn… Nnn… Nnnooo… Nnoo…” Until finally, as if bursting through a barrier, the full force and sound of my emotion erupted into a wailing howl, “Nnooooo!!!” And whatever it was that held me captive, instantly disappeared. It had simply vanished.
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All at once I was released and the full weight of my body crashed back down to the bed — whumpf! Alone and petrified in the darkness, I lay motionless, afraid to move or breathe. My eyes now open completely, darted rapidly around my room to be sure the intruder was gone.
I saw nothing, no one.
All at once, like a dam crumbling to the ground, I broke the silence. Raucous sobs escaped my lips as my parents came clamoring through the door, with my older brother fast on their heels.
My mother sat down on the bed next to me and tried to comprehend what had happened. I couldn’t speak right. My voice seemed not my own. I was shuttering and shaking, and stammering through my tears. It was plain that my Mother could see how frightened I was. I kept mumbling inaudibly through broken sobs.
My father, perplexed by all the commotion, finally ventured a query. “What’s wrong with her?” he probed.
My mother, who’d been a registered nurse, steeped in medical science most of her life, surprised us all. Catching my father’s eyes, her words were plainly stated, “She’s had a supernatural experience. Now please go and get her a cup of water.”
Dead silence.
My father paused, the color drained from his face. Not a word between them. He gave my mother one last look, then turned and made way for the door.
My Mother and I had a moment then. With my Father off down the hall for water, and my brother returned to his own bedroom, our eyes met. She wiped the long wet tendrils of hair from my face, my sobs now low murmurs.
I felt recognized in that moment in a way I’d never known. I had expressed something that seemed for all rational purposes, not believable. Yet my Mother’s eyes, her tone of voice, and her body language said otherwise.
She could have insisted that I was imagining things and refused to hear of it any further. She could have tried to convince me that my own senses were not trustworthy, and sought to shut me down, the way so many parents of intuitive, mystically inclined children do.
But she didn’t. Instead she validated me.
She knew me well enough to know that what she was witnessing in me was real and authentic and not made up, and she chose to support me, mystifying as it was. And my Father, who was as rational as they come — a senior executive for a large corporation — supported my Mother’s assessment of things. He simply accepted it without debate.
How stunning is that? Granted, it was the 80’s and people were opening up a bit by then, but still today, there are many the world over who would doubt such a thing as true. Perhaps you are having your own doubts now? Well, I don’t blame you if you do. But stick around, it gets even more interesting….
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The following night, my older brother, Mathew also experienced what he termed a “visitation.” He said that he was not quite asleep, when his body in a semi-fetal position, became paralyzed and he felt a large humanoid-type presence looming over him, as if examining him as he lay in bed.
The room was dark and he had his head under the covers and his eyes shut and found it difficult to open them due to the paralysis, so he didn’t get a look at whatever it was. But he “knew” it was there and an ominous feeling came over him. Whatever it was, he didn’t feel it was there as a friend.
The interesting thing is that I had not described the details of my own event to my brother. He still didn’t know exactly what had happened to me, yet his experience was so similar.
From that point on I sought out anything I could get my hands on to do with the “world unseen.” Just what on Earth was going on here? What had happened to me, to my brother? How is it that I could feel and experience a presence affecting me emotionally and physically — something I was not able to see with my own eyes? It, whatever it was, seemed invisible, yet had the power to paralyze and immobilize a person?
In my research I learned about sleep paralysis (a feeling of being conscious but unable to move when passing through stages of wakefulness to sleep). One could also argue for a hypnagogic hallucination event, had my brother not followed up with a visitation of his own the following night.
What are the chances that my brother and I, having no previous knowledge of sleep paralysis and hypnagogia, would suddenly, out of the blue, experience the same brain rhythm irregularity while in bed at night, without any previous tendencies towards those sleep patterns?
The chances are slim. I’ll tell you that much. There is a good deal of controversy around the medical science and personal experiences of hypnagogia sufferers, and I do not lean entirely towards one camp or the other.
My college education is in the psychological sciences and human development, so I have a healthy respect for the brain functions connected with certain psychological sleep states. I am also a lucid dreamer, so I am no stranger to the drifty, groggy, sometimes immobilizing state that arises between wakefulness and sleep.
Yet I have not found anything in my research to adequately explain the fact that I was actually physically lifted into the air and dropped back down on my bed.
I mean, what does that?
I’m sure at some point in your life, you’ve had your own “what the hell is going on here?” moments, even if only fleeting. Perhaps a time when all the hair on the back of your neck stood up and you knew, just knew that something was there, or that something was watching you, but you couldn’t see who (or what).
The problem is not our senses. The problem is that we over-rationalize. The tendency of the mind is to come rushing in to discount what doesn’t make sense to our intellect. Intuition, however, is an entirely different sensory organ, and everybody has it. It just tends to go unacknowledged so much of the time that it becomes atrophied and dormant.
That night when I was 16, something in me that I didn’t understand had been activated, and I wanted answers. I dove headfirst into metaphysics and by the time I was 23, I was participating in a dream circle and training with a Native American shaman woman in the Hawaiian Islands. Some of what I experienced there would make your skin turn white.
In many indigenous cultures, to have strength in dreaming indicates a destiny as tribal shaman. The shamans of a tribe are spiritual medicine men and women — healers with the ability to move between the worlds.
I eventually learned that shamans often travel in a hypnotic-like state called hypnagogia — that strange word I mentioned earlier that depicts the experience of the transitional state from wakefulness to sleep.
According to western science, hypnagogia is an hallucinatory state brought on by certain processes of the brain and nothing more. But to the shaman, it’s a gateway into other dimensions, no less real than this one.
The world unseen was calling me.
I kept having “supernatural” experiences and an endless array of mystical events with an increased ability to sense or intuit certain things, especially through my dreams at night. So, naturally I leaned towards an exploration of the meaning of dreams and symbolic language in the development of my life path.
Eventually, I began to teach and work with other people through various healing modalities and consciousness practices, including dream work and partnership with spiritual animal allies — two primary methodologies for shamanic healers. I did not technically become a shaman, per se (in the tribal sense) but I found my own western way with it.
There is a notable difference between a calling and a career. Most people tend to choose a career, but a calling chooses you.
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If you are lucky enough to have chosen a career that has also turned out to be your life’s calling, then I congratulate you on your great find. Truly, that is wonderful news. To have two things that are often so challenging for people to figure out and reconcile, discovered beneath the same stone is a gift indeed.
For many people, though, a life’s calling is something veiled in ambiguity that only comes along for the fortunate few. I mean what is that any way? A life calling? You may be wondering, do I need to have one?
Short answer? No. You don’t. But, guaranteed, if your knee-deep in your life’s calling, there’s a sense of purpose and meaning in your life that you know you never want to live without. You simply must do it, whatever it is, or die.
It’s not physical death I’m talking about either. The kind of death that occurs in a person not answering their calling is like a slow smothering of your soul. It’s like a light in you that can’t be lit any other way, and it begins to go out for lack of a place to shine.
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Answering your life’s calling is akin to following your heart. The heart’s intelligence is something we can’t live without for very long and expect to be happy.
In my opinion, everyone has a life calling. And some people have more than one. If you wonder if you’ve found yours, put your hand on your heart, close your eyes, drop your attention into your chest where your heart lives, and earnestly seek to know.
Ask yourself, “If money was no object and no one could stand in my way or be made to suffer from my choices, and I could do anything I wanted with my time, where would I be? What would I be doing? And who would I be doing it with?”
Give yourself full flamboyant permission to be who you really are, doing what you really love. Then have the guts to tell the truth about it. The “you” you meet in this exercise is the one you need to answer to.
For most people that have found their calling, there’s no question. It’s a kind of coming home to yourself that can’t be denied.
When you’re answering your calling, you know who you are, and nothing anybody else has to say about it is going to sway you. Your calling is your gift. It’s who you’re here to be, for your sake and everybody else’s. You being truly you moves all of us forward.
That’s how important your life’s calling is. It’s about honoring yourself and everyone else, by showing up fully for this life you’re living. And when you do that, people around you feel permission to do the same.
How to Relieve Anxiety in 20 minutes or Less by Nicole Rose
May 3, 2020
If you are someone who suffers from anxiety it may seem like a far reach to imagine relief inside of 20 minutes, but I’m here to tell you that it can be done. I know, because I used to suffer from severe, debilitating anxiety and I have personally found fast relief from all the methods presented in this article.
Anxiety stems from a lack of grounding in who we are.
That said, the simple solutions I’m about to share with you are all quick-fix ways of getting grounded, no matter where you are or what you are doing.
There are enough suggestions on my list to offer you something to work with no matter what your circumstances are.
When I talk about grounding, I’m talking about a very visceral sense of being in your body and out of your head. I’m talking about a return to the sanity of an open, calm heart from the chaos of a panicked mind.
When I say grounding, I’m talking about the slowing of your pulse, the regulation of your breathing, and the sense of safety that is felt when there are no enemies lurking about.
When we are suffering from anxiety, the only enemy we truly have is fear.
When I was in my early 20’s, I suffered from severe anxiety to the point of entertaining a suicidal ideology. I had entered a spiritual and psychological crisis and I could not see a way out of the inner-blackness I was drowning in.
Luckily I had some very wise people in my life who brought me to a healer and got me the help I needed. Believe it or not, there is often a silver lining to the experience of anxiety, because it pushes us to learn about inner peace.
But let’s face it. When you’re in the middle of it, anxiety sucks. It is immobilizing and life draining. It has the power to stop us in our tracks.
Anxiety freezes us on the inside, and subverts our functionality on the outside.
So what are these incredibly simple sanity-saving exercises that relieve anxiety in 20 minutes or less?
Here they are — NOT necessarily in order of importance or effectivity. That all depends on the unique make-up of your particular circumstances. I encourage you to try each one and see what works best for you.
Watch a great movie.
The key here is to pick a movie that will completely captivate you. I know most movies are 2 hours long, but if you’ve selected the right movie, your mind will be in a totally different place inside of 20 minutes. Be sure to pick a film with a good ending, a plot line and characters you can really rally for. Don’t under estimate the power of a good film to completely shift your mood and your outlook on life.
I cannot tell you how many times I put on a great movie when I was totally gridlocked with fear and by the end of it, I had completely forgotten about my own problems. Whatever my worries were, they lost their grip on my mind while my attention was elsewhere. Post movie, the same problems just didn’t seem half as big as they had before the popcorn.
Exercise… Exercise… Exercise…
Go to the gym, go running or walking, or go swimming. Do whatever you like, but keep it upbeat and moderate for 20 minutes. During exercise certain endorphins get released within the body at about the 15 to 20 minute mark. There is something called a runners high, defined by the release of these endorphins.
I used to be a runner, and found that after 15 minutes I felt so good, that I didn’t want to stop. By the time I had run for an hour, I felt like I could keep on going. Exercise literally clears negativity out of your system. It moves the blood, increases circulation and literally burns off negative emotions through your pores when you sweat.
I cannot stress enough how important exercise is for the relief of all negative mood states.
Lay on the Earth.
This is my personal favorite. There is nothing more grounding than a piece of earth. I have found this effective in the garden, at the beach, on my front lawn, at a park, on the center divider of grass in a parking lot, and even on a slab of cement (which is made of gravel and sand).
When I lived in London, I would walk a couple of blocks to the nearest park if I was anxious. I would lay down on the ground, consciously intend to give all my pain to the Earth, and would actually begin to feel calm enough to fall asleep. 5 to 10 minutes later I’d wake up and find that the anxiety was completely gone.
All I did was lay down and intend for the planet to metaphorically compost my pain. And it worked! Time after time it worked.
No matter what I was terrorizing myself over, it had disappeared after about 15 to 20 minutes of laying on the Earth. It always seemed miraculous to me. No matter what the stressful thought was, it just didn’t matter any more because it was simply gone.
Get into Nature
When you spend time outside in nature, you get the added benefit of breathing in the fresh air and the energetically cleansing negative ionization process that takes place in forests, beaches, the ocean and other natural bodies of water, jungles, and any natural landscape.
When I lived in Maui, there was a sacred pool that I used to hike to. After only a couple of minutes of floating in the water of that pool I’d feel so deeply peaceful that I would enter a state of meditation. I can even float in a bathtub or another body of water and recall the peaceful experience of being in that sacred pool and invoke the same meditative peaceful state of mind.
For an interesting read on the scientific view regarding the benefits of negative ionization, read this from webMD.
Make a positive contribution to someone or something else.
There is a wonderful story I once heard by Gay Hendricks about a young man who was contemplating suicide. Gay was speaking with him on the phone and asked him if there was something simple that he could do to make a positive contribution to somebody else.
The young man thought about it and considered an old woman who had an apartment down the hall. There was always a lot of debri, leaves and dirt cluttering up her doorstep. He could go and sweep it off for her. Gay instructed him to set the phone down, find a broom and go and sweep off the woman’s porch.
The young man went to sweep off the porch and when he returned to the telephone he sounded like a different person. He felt totally different and had shifted into a different frame of mind in a matter of minutes, simply from making a positive contribution.
I have unplugged from anxiety through activities as rudimentary as cooking a really great meal, working in the garden or helping an elderly neighbor to take her garbage out. The vibe of contribution is akin to gratitude and love. And fear is rendered impotent in the presence of such positive feelings.
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You might notice that these are not long-term solutions as much as fast ways to help your mind to unplugged from the intense circling of anxious thoughts that feed on each other, keeping you locked in a loop of fear without a clear-thinking mind to get yourself out.
I have used the methods I’ve described countless times to disengage my mind from cycling thoughts of self-condemnation and fear, thus allowing my awareness some breathing room with which to reassess the issue at hand.
The Silver Lining…
In the end, my anxiety crisis turned out to be a pivotal catalyst in my life that turned me towards a far more creative, productive, and harmonious way of living.
Learning how to disengage my mind from the tyranny of fearful thoughts, showed me that my mind was not in charge of me, but that I was in charge of my mind. It also showed me that I was in charge of my body, which became the vehicle through which I found grounding and relief.
Over time I began to see how my anxious patterns were operating. I observed that there was always a sense of being ungrounded coupled with self-doubt. This often had to do with stepping out of my comfort zone when I was pushing the envelope of my life in a new direction where things were unfamiliar and out of my control.
Be proactive and win.
Seeing this pattern allowed me to be more proactive in preventing anxiety from developing in the first place. When we are proactive in life, we engage in strategies that set us up to win.
For the prevention of anxiety, this means doing what I need to do to stay centered in myself. When I’m centered (aka: grounded) in myself, anxiety can’t get a strong foothold in my mind.
Proactive strategies are things like meditation, having a spiritual path with a daily practice, yoga, regular exercise, spending time in nature, and talking out my problems with a trusted friend.
A little self-care on a regular basis can go a very, very long way.
Clutter Clearing - A Magic Pill for Positive Change by Nicole Rose
How space clearing can revamp every arena of your life
April 5, 2020
One look at my desk and I know it’s time to clear the deck.
I’m one of those people who’s always got my thumbs in at least five different projects. Are you one of those people too? Or are you someone who is teetering on the edge of leaping into a creative endeavor?
Either way, what I’m about to say may cause you to do some things differently.
I’ve learned that the creative process flows far more seamlessly if I create from a space of clarity. That doesn’t mean that the only thing I need to get clear on is the outline for my project. In fact, that outline might take me twice as long to write and be less organized and less effective if I’m trying to create it from an overwhelmed, cluttered space.
Have you ever noticed how your cluttered desk or room seems to reflect what’s in your mind and visa versa? If you haven’t noticed this phenomenon, then I suggest you set about clearing up your desk, room or office, and see what sort of effect it has on your mind.
I assigned this as homework last year for a group I facilitate based on a mind training called A Course in Miracles (Foundation for Inner Peace, 1975).
Every person in that group was positively impacted by this exercise.
Some group members even opted to clutter-clear a second space the following week after experiencing the clarity of mind that resulted from the first one.
My participants not only expressed a clearer state of mind and emotions, but many of them felt more energized and expressed that the spaces they had cleared simply felt better to be in.
Now tell me honestly, are you more likely to be creative in a space that feels gloomy or one that feels good?
I don’t recommend that you take my word for it. Instead, try it for yourself! That’s the only way that you’re guaranteed to reap the benefits of this little exercise.
If your work-space is clear, but your kitchen or your car is a mess, set about clearing it up and see what happens to the way you think and feel about things. What happens to your outlook on life, your relationships, your work, or your perception of yourself?
So, what’s the deal behind all this space clearing business anyways?
Why does it seem to hinder us when things are a mess? Why does order and less stuff laying around during input seem to support better results during utput?
For 12 years I’ve worked in classrooms with kids who have autism spectrum disorders. One thing I’ve noticed is that the kiddos I’ve worked with are easily distracted and overwhelmed by too many items in a workspace.
So, one of the first things I always do when I enter a classroom is decontaminate the environment. I remove anything that is not essential to support that child’s learning for the time being.
Kids with autism have taught me how to pair down and focus in on what’s necessary for the time being.
They’ve taught me that what isn’t essential to the current lesson or project can better serve my client and myself if it’s tucked away in a drawer or cupboard out-of-sight.
The children I work with are easily overwhelmed by too much outside input — too many things on a shelf or table, too many words on a page, too many bright colors in a room, too much noise, and the list goes on. They can be very sensitive to sensory input.
And the truth is, so are the rest of us. We just don’t realize it because our filters are a bit thicker.
Rather than having an abrupt reaction, like throwing the crayon box across the room, if stuff in our environment isn’t right, we suffer from a much slower reaction time, in which the light of inspiration is gradually drained out of us — so gradually in fact, that we don’t even notice it happening.
Too much clutter in a space can bog us down mentally and emotionally. It can slowly infiltrate our creative processes with a hazy grayness that smokes up the viewing screen within our minds. The more we pile on, the more weighted the feeling and the dimmer our creativity becomes.
We’ve got to clear the deck — clear the air, the desk, and the creative channel!
As an energy healer who performs space clearings on a regular basis, I can actually feel the constriction in a cluttered space. It’s almost like life begins to breathe less of itself into a space that needs cleaning, and the area begins to feel energetically suffocating.
It reminds me of how the life blood can slowly get squeezed out of our blood stream with too much plaque build-up in the arteries, until finally a heart attack occurs. When our lives become too cluttered with unfinished business, it’s like plaque in the mind and emotions and it’s harder for inspiration to breathe life into our creative channels.
Whether we express through writing, painting, dancing, or cooking, that creative energy needs a clear, uncluttered opening to stream through. When energetic debri clears out, things begin to operate in whole new way. In almost symphony fashion, all aspects of this process begin to work together.
The uncluttering of your work-space can trigger an inspiration to create something new, which can fill your heart with gladness. When your heart is smiling, the faculties of your mind operate more efficiently. Ideas come more rapidly, with greater clarity, and things get done more easily.
The interesting part is that it all began with a choice in your mind to unclutter your space in the first place.
In the end you’ll be brought full circle, back to the beginning, where you can choose to keep things clear and consistently create your best work.
We can apply this same principle and habit to any arena of our life. I can choose to clear the clutter in my mind in my relationships and take action steps to do what is necessary for the health of those personal connections. I can do this by saying what needs to be said, caring for what needs caring, and by leaving nothing undone that needs doing.
In other words, I can deal with my relationships creatively when I’ve cleared the emotional clutter around them and keep them clear by addressing confusion as it arises.
In principle, it is the same as keeping my work-space uncluttered, so that everything operates optimally.
We can do this with our health, with our finances, with our parenting, with the pursuit of our passions, and even with our state of psychological balance by staying on top of self-care. In fact, clutter clearing the different areas of your life is a tremendous act of self-care.
It’s also, simultaneously, an act of service to all the people and circumstances of your life, because when you are clear, you’re more likely to put your best foot forward.
The practice of clutter clearing can take on as many dimensions as you want it to. And the benefits can reach as far as you are willing to go in any direction.
Words for the Soul
Tales and Reflections on Life, Love & Awakening
Are You Brave Enough to Tackle Your Subconscious Mind?
by Nicole Rose on The Dynamics of Dreaming
July 28, 2020
Finding the courage to face yourself in a culture of distraction.
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In Man and His Symbols, Carl Jung expressed the heroism he perceived in people brave enough to take on the raw subconscious material revealed each night in their dreams.
“It takes a lot of courage to take the unconscious seriously and to tackle the problems it raises. Most people are too indolent to think deeply about even those moral aspects of their behavior of which they are conscious; they are certainly too lazy to consider how the unconscious affects them.”
Those words from Jung in 1964 are as true today as they were then. With all the advances brought on by the last half a century, I’m not sure if humanity has progressed psychospiritually as a race, or if we’ve only succeeded at creating more masterful distractions for ourselves.
Carl Jung was a psychoanalyst, but he also revolutionized the art of dream interpretation, which he greatly valued in his practice as a therapist. He wrote profusely about the nature of dreams and wove it into his teaching and training methods. What was it about dream analysis that intrigued Jung to the point of placing so much importance on it?
Jung realized that our psychic dreaming dramas contained far more relevance than the mere steam of psychological burn off from a day in the grind of life. He knew that the information presented in our nighttime dreams brought to light all the underlying dynamics and operations of the dreamers psyche that he/she was not conscious of.
Here, was the doorway through which the subconscious patterning of unconscious, often damaging or limiting behaviors could be found. In the dreaming mind, one could actually meet the drivers of their own tendencies towards procrastination, fear of failure, stunted communication, or troubled relationship dynamics.
Even more critically, perhaps, a person suffering from more specific neurosis or phobic disorders such as agoraphobia or claustrophobia might gain crucial insight into the sources, as well as potential solutions, of such debilitating conditions.
Dreams themselves, are living transformational devices. We can impregnate the mind with a directive to receive information that may both heal and guide us before we sleep. Given time, we can learn the very fascinating multi-dimensional language with which our dreams communicate to our waking minds.
Dream symbols carry multiple levels of meaning.
You can have a dozen analysts working to interpret a dream and end up with a dozen unique interpretations. What is critical to the translation of any dream is the direct, authentic input from the dreamer. Without participation from you, as the dreamer, nobody else is going to come up with an accurate “take” on what your subconscious is meaning to say.
There is nothing light-weight about your dreams. They contain everything within you and your life that you need to face in order to become a more mature, wiser you. Jung wasn’t kidding when he said it takes “great courage to take the unconscious seriously.” What it also takes is willingness.
Some of the most influential leaders and teachers in the history of humanity demonstrated how important it is to brave up to the unconscious drivers of the subconscious mind.
Imagine a world with no Jesus or Buddha.
What if Jesus didn’t do the things he did, such as trekking into the desert for 40 days in order to face his inner-demons. He didn’t avoid the darkness that lay beneath. Instead, with absolute purpose and intent he went deep into the wilderness, and refused to leave it until the last temptation from the underlying fear-based drivers in his mind were called out. He left nothing hiding in the shadows of his subconscious mind.
I suspect that Buddha was up to the same thing when he sat his bum beneath the Bodhi Tree and refused to leave until he reached the state of enlightenment. When the demon Mara came to tempt him by sending his three daughters, and later an entire army, to conquer the consciousness of the Buddha, the Buddha did not move.
Mara was playing on the underlying drivers of fear and seduction, but the Buddha knew this. These were the moments he had been waiting for — the challenges to his inner-spiritual stamina.
When it comes to the psychospiritual maturation of each individual mind, there is no alternate road to self-knowledge — no road that does not include delving deep into the subconscious terrain of your own inner-world. Jesus and the Buddha knew that. They battled the darkness and left a breadcrumb trail for the rest of us to follow, if we’re brave enough to weather the storm.
What is amazing to me is the sheer thickness of our collective unconscious interpretations of life and ourselves. We’ve been shown the way by masters throughout the ages, yet still we do not seem to understand. One only needs to look around the world for an immediate inventory of our predicament. We are still at war — within ourselves and with each other.
As a species, we have not given enough importance to the demonstrations and wisdom of those who have understood peace. It’s as if we have not been able to hear them when they say that love and compassion are everything, that there is no higher service than caring for your fellow man (or woman).
Why does it seem so hard to embody? Why do we collectively make a living hell of a world that could so clearly be a living heaven if we so chose to set our sights on that goal?
Time, it would seem, in conjunction with the basic functionality of our brains, has played a trick on us.
Dr. Joe Dispenza, who’s expertise is the intersection of quantum physics, neuroscience and epigenics, describes 90% of what we do each day, as habitual. He describes the idea of “you” as a habitual construct — a redundant set of unconscious automatic thoughts, behaviors and emotions that are acquired through repetition (memory).
According to Dispenza, these memory circuits in the brain, when not acted upon can be rewired and can actually create new circuitry, which in turn produces an entirely new set of actions. A familiar past will create a predictable future. But when we cease to operate on the same old memories, the future becomes an open book of possibilities.
This is the science behind freeing the human mind — a potential road map for a way in which we can begin to change our individual and collective outcomes from war to peace.
But can we do it? Will enough of us get really interested in creating an entirely different tomorrow?
Although it would seem that time, in conjunction with the basic functionality of our brains, has played a trick on us, I’m willing to bargain its a trick we can overcome. To learn to overcome it, however, we’ll have to turn up the volume on our collective spiritual development. There’s no way around this. We have to grow up as a species. Our human collective is a conglomerate of individuals, so each of us has a responsibility to do our own consciousness homework.
I can’t learn to love and respect my foreign neighbors in other countries until I learn to love and respect my neighbors across the street. I can’t love and respect you until I can learn to love and respect myself. That means I have to find my way to forgiving every little twinge of imperfection about me and learn to fully accept myself as I am. When I can witness my own struggles with compassion and understanding then I can love the one struggling no matter what her journey looks like or who she is.
Growing up spiritually isn’t about being perfect — it’s about being authentic. Authenticity means that you do you the way that only you can. It means that you synchronize your mind with your heart and bring your heart to the world through the way that you communicate, live and breathe in this spiritually dry, thirsty land. It means that ultimately you rewire your inner circuitry to operate this way.
When your heart and mind become synchronized something unexpected happens as a natural extension of this relationship. Finally working together, each harmonized with the other, absent of conflict and fear, these two essential consciousness organs bow down in service to the Soul. And it’s in service to the Soul that we finally find the meaning we’re looking for.
Consider for a moment that the Soul of you is not religion specific. It’s you specific. Alignment with your Soul is an alignment with the highest, clearest, most expansive faculty of your own intelligence. Your Soul is the rightful king or queen of the psychospiritual domain within you. Only your highest intelligence should be sitting on the throne of your mind. If it’s not, then you’re settling for less in every arena of your life.
From the alignment of mind + heart in service to the Soul, an entirely different presence begins to step forward in your life. One that does not hide or water itself down. One that gives voice to the core of existence living in you and in everyone else.
Your work, no matter what field you’re in, becomes an expression of unity and a natural tendency to care for others and the joint outcomes of your shared aspirations. You begin to respond to life more fully and more holistically because you can see all sides of a situation from a place of understanding.
You begin to experience life through a kind of holism that seeks to become more inclusive and less exclusive. Needless to say, this change makes for very creative problem solving.
In the absence of inner-conflict and narrow-mindedness, a much broader scope of vision gets activated and you find your thoughts and actions synchronizing with what’s in the highest good for everyone.
The word synchronization has never conjured so much meaning.
There is no war within yourself when all your parts are synchronized. And there is no war out there when individually synchronized humans begin to synchronize with each other.
When Jung pointed out the heroic acts of self-reflection necessary to truly dive in and play full out in this journey of self-actualization, he was indirectly slapping our impatient, hedonistic, self-centered egotism in the face.
In not so many words, Jung was defining greater humanity as spiritually irresponsible and adolescent — teenagers that don’t really want to grow up. I don’t know about you, but for me that slap stung a little.
My cheek is still ringing.
He realized that very few people would give their attention to the radical real work of self-actualization through dedicated practices such as dream-work, yoga or meditation. In my 30 years of studying and working with my dreams as psychospiritual maps of the deep unconscious, I can say that he wasn’t far off the mark.
Unless something happens to shake you up, trip you out, or drop you on your head, it’s not likely you’ll take an interest in diving below the surface of what’s comfortable. Don’t worry — I’m not singling you out. You’re in the same boat as everybody else.
Habits are hard to break.
That’s why shit happens. Something has to shake us loose from the trance induction of learned societal norms that we’ve been indoctrinated into.
For me, it was being lifted from my bed by an invisible force when I was 16. It scared the living shit out of me and made me see things differently. I couldn’t understand what had happened to me so it made me start searching for answers — for meanings to my existence that nobody else was going to give me.
I had extremely vivid dreams and began to dream the “big” dreams of life — dreams that change your entire outlook— dreams that teach you and guide you and show you yourself and life in such a way as to completely transform the context in which you live and the content with which you live from.
Dreams can do that when you give them their due attention.
You are not the you that you think you are. You are so much more… so much so, that it isn’t something that can even be spoken or accurately described.
The gateway of your dreams is a porthole into the unknown, yet unseen parts of you that must be met if you are to sync up — first within yourself, and then with other people. And as Jung said, it takes great courage to face what lies beneath your conscious awareness.
Shadows dwell there…but also great light.
Jung was right when he said that most of us have a hard time taking responsibility for our conscious behavior, let alone our unconscious patterns. So, how will we as a people, begin to take an earnest interest in what’s unconsciously running ourselves, each other, and the global community we’re living in?
The yogic saying, “The only way out is in,” speaks volumes here.
As a people, we’ve built a world of distractions that keeps us looking outward. Most people are engaged in a constant need for stimulation and entertainment, the way an addict seeks out cocaine or heroin. It’s hard to fathom the emotional global meltdown that would occur if all the cell networks simultaneously quit working.
We’re easily hooked in so many ways and yet none of it will make us happy. Our culture of hedonistic, short-sited stimulus is a temporary fix for a need to feel good, with our attention engaged and occupied in a constant scrolling of false self-images and advertising.
But our truest feel good place isn’t in the farce of impulsive clicking, shopping and social screen-sharing. Our truest feel good place is inside of us. All the outward searching is a distraction for facing who we really are, warts n’ all. It’s only when we slow down, breathe into our own seat of existence, and notice who’s here that we can finally get past the warts to what’s beautiful.
There is only beauty underneath your surface. And it has nothing to do with your life story, or who you know, or who you’ve been, or who you think you will become.
It has to do with who you are.
And that is the ineffable vastness of Self you discover through working consciously with your dreams.
When Your Calling Beckons From The Road Less Traveled
by Nicole Rose
June 23, 2020
An intriguing account of sleep paralysis, dreams and the search for belonging
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Have you ever noticed how a person’s calling will often haunt their childhood? Perhaps you’ve experienced some haunts of your own…
With subtle prophetic tendencies, the elements and contours of a future’s past seem to weave in and around life events as they unfold. Like bread crumbs lain on a forest path, we get clues that lead us along the way to who and what we will become.
But still, we often don’t see it for what it is. There’s no telling the forest for the trees. Until one day, through no fault of our own, it rises up and smacks us square in the face.
My calling’s arrival was no different.
From the time I was a young girl I’d been prone to vivid, sometimes strange dreams — dreams that occasionally showed me things I had no rational explanation for.
When I was 9, I’d been startled awake by an image of my best friend, Abby, surrounded in darkness. She was naked, alone, and crying…
The next morning, when I called her on the phone, Abby told me her mother had walked out on her. She didn’t know when, if ever, she’d be back. She was alone and scared and wanted my help.
Such was the life of my dreams.
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Then shortly after turning sixteen, something quite unexpected happened.
I lay beneath my sheets one night, slumbering soundly. I was already adrift in a lucid array of colors and shapes, when suddenly everything went black. The whole scope of my dreaming vision became a black void.
Off in the distance a center point of color began to emerge, as if moving nearer and nearer to my point of reference until I could clearly make out what it was — a parrot. A very colorful Amazon parrot. There was only a split second of recognition, before everything went black again…
And that’s when I felt it.
The strangest sensation, as if a pressure were being applied from behind my head, shoulders and back. Then the clear gripping feeling of hands on my shoulders, pulling me upward as if to force me to sit up in bed. I tried to scream, but I was paralyzed, unable to move my mouth or my voice-box.
I felt pressure in my throat like a tremendous weight that I could not overcome. I struggled to open my eyes, barely managing a sliver in each, but I couldn’t see anyone there in the darkness. Yet, the very distinct sensation of hands pulling me up by the shoulders continued, pulling me upright, as if to pull me out of the bed.
I felt as if my body was going to rise completely off the bed. I continued to struggle, as if through thickening tar to get my voice out. Something inside kept telling me to get my voice out. I reasoned that if I could only scream someone might hear me and come to my aid.
What the hell was happening to me? What was pulling on me? Who was in my room? Why couldn’t I see anybody there? I struggled to see, to get my voice out… Darkness. There was only darkness.
I had to get my voice out…
Slowly, a low, rumbling, muffled sound began to make it’s way up from my throat. “That’s it!” Something inside me seemed to say, “Louder. You must get louder, try harder!”
Like a strange creature who’d lost its tongue, I slurred and groaned through a fog of paralysis. I summoned every bit of strength I had to manage a barely audible moan, “Nnnnnn… Nnn… Nnnooo… Nnoo…” Until finally, as if bursting through a barrier, the full force and sound of my emotion erupted into a wailing howl, “Nnooooo!!!” And whatever it was that held me captive, instantly disappeared. It had simply vanished.
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All at once I was released and the full weight of my body crashed back down to the bed — whumpf! Alone and petrified in the darkness, I lay motionless, afraid to move or breathe. My eyes now open completely, darted rapidly around my room to be sure the intruder was gone.
I saw nothing, no one.
All at once, like a dam crumbling to the ground, I broke the silence. Raucous sobs escaped my lips as my parents came clamoring through the door, with my older brother fast on their heels.
My mother sat down on the bed next to me and tried to comprehend what had happened. I couldn’t speak right. My voice seemed not my own. I was shuttering and shaking, and stammering through my tears. It was plain that my Mother could see how frightened I was. I kept mumbling inaudibly through broken sobs.
My father, perplexed by all the commotion, finally ventured a query. “What’s wrong with her?” he probed.
My mother, who’d been a registered nurse, steeped in medical science most of her life, surprised us all. Catching my father’s eyes, her words were plainly stated, “She’s had a supernatural experience. Now please go and get her a cup of water.”
Dead silence.
My father paused, the color drained from his face. Not a word between them. He gave my mother one last look, then turned and made way for the door.
My Mother and I had a moment then. With my Father off down the hall for water, and my brother returned to his own bedroom, our eyes met. She wiped the long wet tendrils of hair from my face, my sobs now low murmurs.
I felt recognized in that moment in a way I’d never known. I had expressed something that seemed for all rational purposes, not believable. Yet my Mother’s eyes, her tone of voice, and her body language said otherwise.
She could have insisted that I was imagining things and refused to hear of it any further. She could have tried to convince me that my own senses were not trustworthy, and sought to shut me down, the way so many parents of intuitive, mystically inclined children do.
But she didn’t. Instead she validated me.
She knew me well enough to know that what she was witnessing in me was real and authentic and not made up, and she chose to support me, mystifying as it was. And my Father, who was as rational as they come — a senior executive for a large corporation — supported my Mother’s assessment of things. He simply accepted it without debate.
How stunning is that? Granted, it was the 80’s and people were opening up a bit by then, but still today, there are many the world over who would doubt such a thing as true. Perhaps you are having your own doubts now? Well, I don’t blame you if you do. But stick around, it gets even more interesting….
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The following night, my older brother, Mathew also experienced what he termed a “visitation.” He said that he was not quite asleep, when his body in a semi-fetal position, became paralyzed and he felt a large humanoid-type presence looming over him, as if examining him as he lay in bed.
The room was dark and he had his head under the covers and his eyes shut and found it difficult to open them due to the paralysis, so he didn’t get a look at whatever it was. But he “knew” it was there and an ominous feeling came over him. Whatever it was, he didn’t feel it was there as a friend.
The interesting thing is that I had not described the details of my own event to my brother. He still didn’t know exactly what had happened to me, yet his experience was so similar.
From that point on I sought out anything I could get my hands on to do with the “world unseen.” Just what on Earth was going on here? What had happened to me, to my brother? How is it that I could feel and experience a presence affecting me emotionally and physically — something I was not able to see with my own eyes? It, whatever it was, seemed invisible, yet had the power to paralyze and immobilize a person?
In my research I learned about sleep paralysis (a feeling of being conscious but unable to move when passing through stages of wakefulness to sleep). One could also argue for a hypnagogic hallucination event, had my brother not followed up with a visitation of his own the following night.
What are the chances that my brother and I, having no previous knowledge of sleep paralysis and hypnagogia, would suddenly, out of the blue, experience the same brain rhythm irregularity while in bed at night, without any previous tendencies towards those sleep patterns?
The chances are slim. I’ll tell you that much. There is a good deal of controversy around the medical science and personal experiences of hypnagogia sufferers, and I do not lean entirely towards one camp or the other.
My college education is in the psychological sciences and human development, so I have a healthy respect for the brain functions connected with certain psychological sleep states. I am also a lucid dreamer, so I am no stranger to the drifty, groggy, sometimes immobilizing state that arises between wakefulness and sleep.
Yet I have not found anything in my research to adequately explain the fact that I was actually physically lifted into the air and dropped back down on my bed.
I mean, what does that?
I’m sure at some point in your life, you’ve had your own “what the hell is going on here?” moments, even if only fleeting. Perhaps a time when all the hair on the back of your neck stood up and you knew, just knew that something was there, or that something was watching you, but you couldn’t see who (or what).
The problem is not our senses. The problem is that we over-rationalize. The tendency of the mind is to come rushing in to discount what doesn’t make sense to our intellect. Intuition, however, is an entirely different sensory organ, and everybody has it. It just tends to go unacknowledged so much of the time that it becomes atrophied and dormant.
That night when I was 16, something in me that I didn’t understand had been activated, and I wanted answers. I dove headfirst into metaphysics and by the time I was 23, I was participating in a dream circle and training with a Native American shaman woman in the Hawaiian Islands. Some of what I experienced there would make your skin turn white.
In many indigenous cultures, to have strength in dreaming indicates a destiny as tribal shaman. The shamans of a tribe are spiritual medicine men and women — healers with the ability to move between the worlds.
I eventually learned that shamans often travel in a hypnotic-like state called hypnagogia — that strange word I mentioned earlier that depicts the experience of the transitional state from wakefulness to sleep.
According to western science, hypnagogia is an hallucinatory state brought on by certain processes of the brain and nothing more. But to the shaman, it’s a gateway into other dimensions, no less real than this one.
The world unseen was calling me.
I kept having “supernatural” experiences and an endless array of mystical events with an increased ability to sense or intuit certain things, especially through my dreams at night. So, naturally I leaned towards an exploration of the meaning of dreams and symbolic language in the development of my life path.
Eventually, I began to teach and work with other people through various healing modalities and consciousness practices, including dream work and partnership with spiritual animal allies — two primary methodologies for shamanic healers. I did not technically become a shaman, per se (in the tribal sense) but I found my own western way with it.
There is a notable difference between a calling and a career. Most people tend to choose a career, but a calling chooses you.
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If you are lucky enough to have chosen a career that has also turned out to be your life’s calling, then I congratulate you on your great find. Truly, that is wonderful news. To have two things that are often so challenging for people to figure out and reconcile, discovered beneath the same stone is a gift indeed.
For many people, though, a life’s calling is something veiled in ambiguity that only comes along for the fortunate few. I mean what is that any way? A life calling? You may be wondering, do I need to have one?
Short answer? No. You don’t. But, guaranteed, if your knee-deep in your life’s calling, there’s a sense of purpose and meaning in your life that you know you never want to live without. You simply must do it, whatever it is, or die.
It’s not physical death I’m talking about either. The kind of death that occurs in a person not answering their calling is like a slow smothering of your soul. It’s like a light in you that can’t be lit any other way, and it begins to go out for lack of a place to shine.
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Answering your life’s calling is akin to following your heart. The heart’s intelligence is something we can’t live without for very long and expect to be happy.
In my opinion, everyone has a life calling. And some people have more than one. If you wonder if you’ve found yours, put your hand on your heart, close your eyes, drop your attention into your chest where your heart lives, and earnestly seek to know.
Ask yourself, “If money was no object and no one could stand in my way or be made to suffer from my choices, and I could do anything I wanted with my time, where would I be? What would I be doing? And who would I be doing it with?”
Give yourself full flamboyant permission to be who you really are, doing what you really love. Then have the guts to tell the truth about it. The “you” you meet in this exercise is the one you need to answer to.
For most people that have found their calling, there’s no question. It’s a kind of coming home to yourself that can’t be denied.
When you’re answering your calling, you know who you are, and nothing anybody else has to say about it is going to sway you. Your calling is your gift. It’s who you’re here to be, for your sake and everybody else’s. You being truly you moves all of us forward.
That’s how important your life’s calling is. It’s about honoring yourself and everyone else, by showing up fully for this life you’re living. And when you do that, people around you feel permission to do the same.
How to Relieve Anxiety in 20 minutes or Less by Nicole Rose
May 3, 2020
If you are someone who suffers from anxiety it may seem like a far reach to imagine relief inside of 20 minutes, but I’m here to tell you that it can be done. I know, because I used to suffer from severe, debilitating anxiety and I have personally found fast relief from all the methods presented in this article.
Anxiety stems from a lack of grounding in who we are.
That said, the simple solutions I’m about to share with you are all quick-fix ways of getting grounded, no matter where you are or what you are doing.
There are enough suggestions on my list to offer you something to work with no matter what your circumstances are.
When I talk about grounding, I’m talking about a very visceral sense of being in your body and out of your head. I’m talking about a return to the sanity of an open, calm heart from the chaos of a panicked mind.
When I say grounding, I’m talking about the slowing of your pulse, the regulation of your breathing, and the sense of safety that is felt when there are no enemies lurking about.
When we are suffering from anxiety, the only enemy we truly have is fear.
When I was in my early 20’s, I suffered from severe anxiety to the point of entertaining a suicidal ideology. I had entered a spiritual and psychological crisis and I could not see a way out of the inner-blackness I was drowning in.
Luckily I had some very wise people in my life who brought me to a healer and got me the help I needed. Believe it or not, there is often a silver lining to the experience of anxiety, because it pushes us to learn about inner peace.
But let’s face it. When you’re in the middle of it, anxiety sucks. It is immobilizing and life draining. It has the power to stop us in our tracks.
Anxiety freezes us on the inside, and subverts our functionality on the outside.
So what are these incredibly simple sanity-saving exercises that relieve anxiety in 20 minutes or less?
Here they are — NOT necessarily in order of importance or effectivity. That all depends on the unique make-up of your particular circumstances. I encourage you to try each one and see what works best for you.
Watch a great movie.
The key here is to pick a movie that will completely captivate you. I know most movies are 2 hours long, but if you’ve selected the right movie, your mind will be in a totally different place inside of 20 minutes. Be sure to pick a film with a good ending, a plot line and characters you can really rally for. Don’t under estimate the power of a good film to completely shift your mood and your outlook on life.
I cannot tell you how many times I put on a great movie when I was totally gridlocked with fear and by the end of it, I had completely forgotten about my own problems. Whatever my worries were, they lost their grip on my mind while my attention was elsewhere. Post movie, the same problems just didn’t seem half as big as they had before the popcorn.
Exercise… Exercise… Exercise…
Go to the gym, go running or walking, or go swimming. Do whatever you like, but keep it upbeat and moderate for 20 minutes. During exercise certain endorphins get released within the body at about the 15 to 20 minute mark. There is something called a runners high, defined by the release of these endorphins.
I used to be a runner, and found that after 15 minutes I felt so good, that I didn’t want to stop. By the time I had run for an hour, I felt like I could keep on going. Exercise literally clears negativity out of your system. It moves the blood, increases circulation and literally burns off negative emotions through your pores when you sweat.
I cannot stress enough how important exercise is for the relief of all negative mood states.
Lay on the Earth.
This is my personal favorite. There is nothing more grounding than a piece of earth. I have found this effective in the garden, at the beach, on my front lawn, at a park, on the center divider of grass in a parking lot, and even on a slab of cement (which is made of gravel and sand).
When I lived in London, I would walk a couple of blocks to the nearest park if I was anxious. I would lay down on the ground, consciously intend to give all my pain to the Earth, and would actually begin to feel calm enough to fall asleep. 5 to 10 minutes later I’d wake up and find that the anxiety was completely gone.
All I did was lay down and intend for the planet to metaphorically compost my pain. And it worked! Time after time it worked.
No matter what I was terrorizing myself over, it had disappeared after about 15 to 20 minutes of laying on the Earth. It always seemed miraculous to me. No matter what the stressful thought was, it just didn’t matter any more because it was simply gone.
Get into Nature
When you spend time outside in nature, you get the added benefit of breathing in the fresh air and the energetically cleansing negative ionization process that takes place in forests, beaches, the ocean and other natural bodies of water, jungles, and any natural landscape.
When I lived in Maui, there was a sacred pool that I used to hike to. After only a couple of minutes of floating in the water of that pool I’d feel so deeply peaceful that I would enter a state of meditation. I can even float in a bathtub or another body of water and recall the peaceful experience of being in that sacred pool and invoke the same meditative peaceful state of mind.
For an interesting read on the scientific view regarding the benefits of negative ionization, read this from webMD.
Make a positive contribution to someone or something else.
There is a wonderful story I once heard by Gay Hendricks about a young man who was contemplating suicide. Gay was speaking with him on the phone and asked him if there was something simple that he could do to make a positive contribution to somebody else.
The young man thought about it and considered an old woman who had an apartment down the hall. There was always a lot of debri, leaves and dirt cluttering up her doorstep. He could go and sweep it off for her. Gay instructed him to set the phone down, find a broom and go and sweep off the woman’s porch.
The young man went to sweep off the porch and when he returned to the telephone he sounded like a different person. He felt totally different and had shifted into a different frame of mind in a matter of minutes, simply from making a positive contribution.
I have unplugged from anxiety through activities as rudimentary as cooking a really great meal, working in the garden or helping an elderly neighbor to take her garbage out. The vibe of contribution is akin to gratitude and love. And fear is rendered impotent in the presence of such positive feelings.
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You might notice that these are not long-term solutions as much as fast ways to help your mind to unplugged from the intense circling of anxious thoughts that feed on each other, keeping you locked in a loop of fear without a clear-thinking mind to get yourself out.
I have used the methods I’ve described countless times to disengage my mind from cycling thoughts of self-condemnation and fear, thus allowing my awareness some breathing room with which to reassess the issue at hand.
The Silver Lining…
In the end, my anxiety crisis turned out to be a pivotal catalyst in my life that turned me towards a far more creative, productive, and harmonious way of living.
Learning how to disengage my mind from the tyranny of fearful thoughts, showed me that my mind was not in charge of me, but that I was in charge of my mind. It also showed me that I was in charge of my body, which became the vehicle through which I found grounding and relief.
Over time I began to see how my anxious patterns were operating. I observed that there was always a sense of being ungrounded coupled with self-doubt. This often had to do with stepping out of my comfort zone when I was pushing the envelope of my life in a new direction where things were unfamiliar and out of my control.
Be proactive and win.
Seeing this pattern allowed me to be more proactive in preventing anxiety from developing in the first place. When we are proactive in life, we engage in strategies that set us up to win.
For the prevention of anxiety, this means doing what I need to do to stay centered in myself. When I’m centered (aka: grounded) in myself, anxiety can’t get a strong foothold in my mind.
Proactive strategies are things like meditation, having a spiritual path with a daily practice, yoga, regular exercise, spending time in nature, and talking out my problems with a trusted friend.
A little self-care on a regular basis can go a very, very long way.
Clutter Clearing - A Magic Pill for Positive Change by Nicole Rose
How space clearing can revamp every arena of your life
April 5, 2020
One look at my desk and I know it’s time to clear the deck.
I’m one of those people who’s always got my thumbs in at least five different projects. Are you one of those people too? Or are you someone who is teetering on the edge of leaping into a creative endeavor?
Either way, what I’m about to say may cause you to do some things differently.
I’ve learned that the creative process flows far more seamlessly if I create from a space of clarity. That doesn’t mean that the only thing I need to get clear on is the outline for my project. In fact, that outline might take me twice as long to write and be less organized and less effective if I’m trying to create it from an overwhelmed, cluttered space.
Have you ever noticed how your cluttered desk or room seems to reflect what’s in your mind and visa versa? If you haven’t noticed this phenomenon, then I suggest you set about clearing up your desk, room or office, and see what sort of effect it has on your mind.
I assigned this as homework last year for a group I facilitate based on a mind training called A Course in Miracles (Foundation for Inner Peace, 1975).
Every person in that group was positively impacted by this exercise.
Some group members even opted to clutter-clear a second space the following week after experiencing the clarity of mind that resulted from the first one.
My participants not only expressed a clearer state of mind and emotions, but many of them felt more energized and expressed that the spaces they had cleared simply felt better to be in.
Now tell me honestly, are you more likely to be creative in a space that feels gloomy or one that feels good?
I don’t recommend that you take my word for it. Instead, try it for yourself! That’s the only way that you’re guaranteed to reap the benefits of this little exercise.
If your work-space is clear, but your kitchen or your car is a mess, set about clearing it up and see what happens to the way you think and feel about things. What happens to your outlook on life, your relationships, your work, or your perception of yourself?
So, what’s the deal behind all this space clearing business anyways?
Why does it seem to hinder us when things are a mess? Why does order and less stuff laying around during input seem to support better results during utput?
For 12 years I’ve worked in classrooms with kids who have autism spectrum disorders. One thing I’ve noticed is that the kiddos I’ve worked with are easily distracted and overwhelmed by too many items in a workspace.
So, one of the first things I always do when I enter a classroom is decontaminate the environment. I remove anything that is not essential to support that child’s learning for the time being.
Kids with autism have taught me how to pair down and focus in on what’s necessary for the time being.
They’ve taught me that what isn’t essential to the current lesson or project can better serve my client and myself if it’s tucked away in a drawer or cupboard out-of-sight.
The children I work with are easily overwhelmed by too much outside input — too many things on a shelf or table, too many words on a page, too many bright colors in a room, too much noise, and the list goes on. They can be very sensitive to sensory input.
And the truth is, so are the rest of us. We just don’t realize it because our filters are a bit thicker.
Rather than having an abrupt reaction, like throwing the crayon box across the room, if stuff in our environment isn’t right, we suffer from a much slower reaction time, in which the light of inspiration is gradually drained out of us — so gradually in fact, that we don’t even notice it happening.
Too much clutter in a space can bog us down mentally and emotionally. It can slowly infiltrate our creative processes with a hazy grayness that smokes up the viewing screen within our minds. The more we pile on, the more weighted the feeling and the dimmer our creativity becomes.
We’ve got to clear the deck — clear the air, the desk, and the creative channel!
As an energy healer who performs space clearings on a regular basis, I can actually feel the constriction in a cluttered space. It’s almost like life begins to breathe less of itself into a space that needs cleaning, and the area begins to feel energetically suffocating.
It reminds me of how the life blood can slowly get squeezed out of our blood stream with too much plaque build-up in the arteries, until finally a heart attack occurs. When our lives become too cluttered with unfinished business, it’s like plaque in the mind and emotions and it’s harder for inspiration to breathe life into our creative channels.
Whether we express through writing, painting, dancing, or cooking, that creative energy needs a clear, uncluttered opening to stream through. When energetic debri clears out, things begin to operate in whole new way. In almost symphony fashion, all aspects of this process begin to work together.
The uncluttering of your work-space can trigger an inspiration to create something new, which can fill your heart with gladness. When your heart is smiling, the faculties of your mind operate more efficiently. Ideas come more rapidly, with greater clarity, and things get done more easily.
The interesting part is that it all began with a choice in your mind to unclutter your space in the first place.
In the end you’ll be brought full circle, back to the beginning, where you can choose to keep things clear and consistently create your best work.
We can apply this same principle and habit to any arena of our life. I can choose to clear the clutter in my mind in my relationships and take action steps to do what is necessary for the health of those personal connections. I can do this by saying what needs to be said, caring for what needs caring, and by leaving nothing undone that needs doing.
In other words, I can deal with my relationships creatively when I’ve cleared the emotional clutter around them and keep them clear by addressing confusion as it arises.
In principle, it is the same as keeping my work-space uncluttered, so that everything operates optimally.
We can do this with our health, with our finances, with our parenting, with the pursuit of our passions, and even with our state of psychological balance by staying on top of self-care. In fact, clutter clearing the different areas of your life is a tremendous act of self-care.
It’s also, simultaneously, an act of service to all the people and circumstances of your life, because when you are clear, you’re more likely to put your best foot forward.
The practice of clutter clearing can take on as many dimensions as you want it to. And the benefits can reach as far as you are willing to go in any direction.
A Resurrected Spirit by Beverly Hutchinson McNeff
March 28, 2020
I received this in an email from a ACIM companion of mine two days ago and find it fitting for the season. Thanks to Beverly Hutchinson McNeff for her contributions to the awakening of humanity.
Long ago, before the time of power-propelled vessels, a sailing ship was stuck off the coast of South America, because there was no wind to fill its sails. Week after week went by with no wind. The ship did not move, and the sailors were dying of thirst.
One day, a schooner drifted by just close enough to read their frantic signals for help. The schooner answered back, "Let down your buckets." When they did, they found fresh water! Although they were far from the coast, the fresh water current of the Amazon River surrounded the sailing boat. All they needed to do was reach down!
A resurrected spirit is one that is willing to "let down their buckets," to open themselves up to God's presence in their lives. The resurrected spirit is ready to take its place "among the saviors of the world." The world needs a resurrected spirit — the world needs you!
So much of the time we are bombarded by the problems of the world, and this current pandemic is a good example of that. We feel like the sailors on that ship, dying of thirst for comfort, safety, and peace. But, God is calling to us, "Come unto me. Lay your troubles down; let Me help you. I will never leave you comfortless." His promise is life, and His promise is our resurrection.
In A Course in Miracles we read,
"Easter is the sign of peace, not pain. A slain Christ has no meaning. But a risen Christ becomes the symbol of the Son of God's forgiveness on himself; the sign he looks upon himself as healed and whole." (T-20.I.1:3)
A resurrected spirit has a willingness, no matter how small, to see the hope instead of the hopelessness, to heal instead of suffer, to become whole by reaching out to others instead of withdrawing into ourselves. Easter becomes a time for us once again to remember God's promise in our lives; His promise of peace and triumph over the seeming adversities; His promise of the resurrecting spirit that is alive in you right now!
Jesus is reminding us of his message of resurrection this Easter season; not a message of pain and suffering, but a message of hope and healing. "Let down your buckets," not in defeat, but in victory, and quench your thirst with God's resurrecting spirit.
~ Beverly Hutchinson McNeff
Make Love Your Goal by Nicole Rose
February 11, 2020
Well friends.....
Here’s to closing the door on 2019 and opening the floodgates of life 2020. I realize I'm a little late on the "New Year's Resolution" front, but this post is right on time for Valentine's Day and a deeper look at love.
In my house, the 31st of December is not just New Year’s Eve. It is also my birthday. Auspiciously, it is also the day, 58 years ago that my parents met car-hopping in Arizona, and fell in love--years before I would come into the world. They are still life-partners, best friends and lovers —a rare inspiration these days.
My birthday and the birth of a new year has found me contemplating on what is most important. I’m poignantly aware of the ways we human beings engage with life and the present shifts that seem to be emerging within so many people…..is it all a part of this "birthing a new age" thing? Maybe. I don’t know. I only know that I’m feeling it……
I’m discovering first-hand that there’s nothing “out there” but what I live out and project within my own mind. There is a “living” sense within me that if I can pause long enough, in the face of apparent difficulty, to pull my own pain back into "me" where it can be healed, then the “You’s” of my life have a very real chance to know love with me.
We’d have a chance to share something genuine and worthwhile.....Reality, peace, understanding. That is worth the giving up of an entire world—my world—the one that I’ve created—just to have a genuine, heart-filled moment with you.
So few people arrive at this one goal in a very big way—living all their moments for something truly real and lasting—Love. To reach this one goal, this life called mine will have been worth something. I’ve never been into New Year’s resolutions, but this year I feel different. This year I resolve to make love my goal.
So now, to you I bring this question:
Who or what is it that you’re yearning to love in a bigger way? who is waiting for your fore-giveness? Is there someone? Something unresolved? This year, we have a beautiful chance to be the “fore-most” one to give first in our relationships. we can make a choice to be a power of resolve for each situation “out there” and inside ourselves.
I've come to find that everything is worth my full attention and understanding. The life in each one of us is truly that precious.
This year, above and beyond all other motives, make love your goal.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNpeK7sDLzE (click on link for music video)
Here's a music youtube clip by a artist Gabrielle Aplin. She so beautifully sings the power of love.
With love & grace for the new year,
Nicole
3 Good Reasons to Pay Attention to Your Dreams by Nicole Rose
January 23, 2019
Dreams are something that everyone has, but few people pay attention to. Like junk mail, a dream arrives in the inbox, doesn’t seem important enough to read, and gets skipped over or thrown in the trash bin.
But unlike junk mail, a delete button won’t make your dreams disappear. They tend to keep showing up, reiterating the same themes in new and different ways until you pay attention and finally get the message.
Dreams are messages from one part of yourself to another.
They emerge from the subterranean caverns of your subconscious mind — the abyssal depth of what you know, but aren’t yet conscious of. Exploring a dream is like taking a deep sea dive into parts of your psyche you’ve never been to before.
Learning to read your dreams is like learning to access your own private oracle into the multi-layered nature of YOU.
Here’s the thing… everyone dreams, and we dream for a reason.
If you are an active dreamer, you don’t need convincing. But, if you are one of the 95 to 99% of people who don’t remember their dreams, a few notes in this direction may be helpful.
Believe it or not, most adults dream an average of 6 times per night, even if they don’t remember a thing. There are lots of ways to improve dream recall — something you may wish to look into once you realize how valuable your dreams really are.
Here’s 3 big reasons why you should pay attention
to your dreams:
1. You spend one third of your life asleep and dreaming.
That’s right. One third of your life is spent ticking away in bed. That equals about 8 hours per night for most people. I don’t know about you, but for me, that’s a rather large bite out of my time here on earth. Isn’t it worth knowing what your mind does during those hours?
Think about it…. one third of your life is spent in sleep time activities. What are those activities?
Even if you remember your dreams well, perhaps you’ve never taken the time to explore their meaning because you simply didn’t realize the impact it would have. As it turns out, there is a lot more going on than the presumed burning off of psychological steam.
2. Your dreams help you to heal and evolve your life.
They can motivate you toward change, a call to action, conflict resolution, or even inform you of potential physical illnesses. Recently I had a dream in which Donald Trump came into my room and woke me up out of a deep sleep. In my dream, I sat up and looked at him, and he said with absolute definitiveness, “You’ve really got to wake up now. It’s time.”
Regardless of what you think of Donald Trump, he is the President of the United States, and thus the most senior ranking executive officer in my life as an American citizen. So, as a dream symbol, he represents the most senior ranking executive faculty of my mind showing up to tell me that “It’s really time to wake up. No more messing around.” Talk about a wake up call!
There are many accounts of people who have physically healed due to messages from dreams. In She Who Dreams, author Wanda Burch describes many dream accounts indicating that she had a rare type of breast cancer, even though her mammograms showed her as cancer free. Her dreams eventually prompted her to get an ultrasound, which pinpointed the very deadly development of cancer that was evolving in her breast.
What I love about Wanda’s story is that it illustrates how dreams can make visible what otherwise would stay hidden in the deep recesses of the subconscious mind. So, even though Wanda had no waking awareness of the cancer growing in her breast, her subconscious knew and brought it to the attention of her conscious mind through the porthole of her dreams. Her story also illustrates how your dreams may not only help you to heal, they might also save your life.
3. Your dreams can help you to solve major problems.
Inventors, Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein, both claimed that solutions to problems they were trying to solve came through their dreams.
In dream work, there is a process called dream incubation, in which you can pose a question to the dreaming faculty of your mind, what my shamanic dream teacher, Ariadne Green, calls the “dream body,” in order to receive an answer to a particular problem.
The dream body’s consciousness is vast with a seemingly endless abyss of depth and breadth of information. It is what Jung referred to as the collective unconscious, and within it is all the awareness known to humanity for all time.
When you present a problem to your dream body to solve, whether it’s a complicated mathematical equation or a delicate relationship issue, your dream body can give you access to a universal mind that knows how to solve it while you sleep.
So, in closing I ask you… How cool is that to solve problems while you sleep, to constructively utilize one third of your life that you’ve literally been sleeping on, and to open a porthole to information that may heal, guide and save your life?
I mean, you’re basically getting a massive amount of therapy, coaching and guidance for FREE, if you pay attention to your dreams.
World War II & the Miracle of Peace by Author unknown
From the blog of Beverly Hutchinson McNeff
December 12, 2019
Christmas, 1914
The Great War was only a few months old, but already the two sides were deadlocked in the grisly new pattern of trench warfare. Both the British and Germans had learned to shovel miles-long ditches in the rocky French farmland, ditches from which men blasted at one another with machine guns and mortars. In these muddy, rat-infested trenches, British soldiers opened soggy Christmas greetings from their King while a few hundred yards away German troops read a message from the Kaiser.
Between the rows of trenches, where shivering men thought about families at home, lay a barren no-man's-land, a zone of craters and shattered trees where anything that moved was instantly fired at. So narrow was this strip that whenever there was a lull in the roar of the guns, each side could hear the clink of cooking gear from the other.
Late on Christmas Eve, with the sleet tapering off and the temperature dropping, a British Tommy on guard with the Fifth Scottish Rifles heard a different sound drifting across no-man's-land. In the German trenches a man was singing.
"Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht..."
It was a tune the British soldier recognized as "Silent Night, Holy Night." The sentry began to hum along with the melody. Then, louder, he chimed in with the English words, singing an odd duet with his enemy beyond the barbed wire.
"...heilige Nacht...holy night..."
A second British soldier crawled to the sentry station and joined in. Little by little others on both sides picked up the song, blending their rough voices across the shell-pocked landscape. The Germans broke out with a second carol, "O Tannenbaum," and the British replied with "God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen." On and on the antiphonal singing went.
A British soldier with binoculars reported that the Germans had hoisted a ragged evergreen with lighted candles in the branches to the top of the sandbag barrier. As dawn of Christmas day broke, signs appeared on both sides, in two languages: "Merry Christmas."
Pulled by a force stronger than fear, one by one the soldiers started laying down their arms, creeping beneath barbed wire and around mortar holes into no-man's-land.
At first it was just a few men, then more and more, until scores of British and German troops met together in the first light of Christmas day. The boys brought out photographs of mothers and wives, exchanged gifts of candy and cigarettes. Someone produced a soccer ball and the men played on a few yards of crater-free ground.
Then the Soldier's truce was over.
By mid-morning Christmas day, horrified officers had summoned their men back to the trenches; firing had recommenced. Within hours the Fifth Scottish Rifles issued an order forbidding such contact: "We are here to fight, not to fraternize."
And the soldiers obeyed. The war, as history tragically records, destroyed almost that entire generation of young men on both sides. But there was an indelible memory in the minds of those who lived to recall that first Christmas at the front. The memory of a few hours when their master had been neither King nor Kaiser, but the Prince of Peace.*
——–
No matter the conflict that may be raging in your life, take a moment to withdraw your loyalty from the ego's world and allow the Prince of Peace to be born into your awareness. Even if it is only for a moment, ask the Holy Spirit to be your eyes, your tongue, your hands, your feet, so that your one purpose may be to bless the world with miracles of peace. (Lesson 353 paraphrased)
~ Beverly Hutchinson McNeff
Gratitude, Healing, and a Shift in Perception by Nicole Rose
November 11, 2019
In May of this year, I posted an article about "Creating a Fertile Field for Healing." There are different ways that people refer to the healing process and different ways to create a "fertile field." I'm a Course in Miracles student, so when I speak of healing, I'm first and foremost referring to the healing of the mind.
The "Course" indicates that all healing is ultimately about a shift in perception in which we free ourselves from a sense of separation ruled by fear to an ever-present reality of oneness ruled by love.
As an energy healer I perceive life in terms of vibration and frequency, and the frequency of Oneness and Love is at the top of the scale. I've learned that we tend to perceive life according to the energy vibrations and frequencies we are aligned with. We can have an entirely different experience of the life we're living when we raise the vibration of our own energy field, thus expanding our perception of reality.
That said, there are lots of ways to assist ourselves in "raising our vibes." I briefly outline 10 different ways to raise your vibes in a FREE pdf offer when you join my email list (scroll around and you'll find the pdf). The pdf is a good place to start, but there are far more than 10 ways to raise your vibration.
There are dozens upon dozens of methods, including everything from physical activities like exercise and nutrition to utilizing aroma therapies, herbs & oils to inner-practices like meditation, prayer and yoga, to name only a few.
One of my favorite and most effective methods for shifting my own energy field is through the practice of gratitude. I don't need any special tools to be grateful. I simply need to look around me or search my mind for something to be thankful for. This makes it one of the most accessible methods available from my energy healing tool bag.
One of the interesting things I've noticed is how quickly being grateful for something (anything!!) can lift my spirits and my out-look on life from one that is meaningless, constricted, hopeless and alone, to one that is hopeful, open, purposeful and "on-course" with my greater good.
When my eldest son, Tristan, was in high school, he decided to build a project around the impacts a gratitude practice might have on people's lives.
He designed a study in which he sent out journals to 7 different people, varying in age from 18 to 72. Participants were asked to journal 3 to 5 things they were grateful for each night before going to bed. He surveyed them three times throughout the course of the study, using number ratings 1-10 on various positive emotions and mental outlooks.
The experiment was performed for three months and by the end of it, the average increase in positive emotions and outlook on life was 70%. Everyone's data expressed very clear benefits from their daily practice of gratitude.
One participant, a woman in her sixties confessed that she had just lost her younger brother and was still grieving his death. She felt that keeping a gratitude journal had uplifted her state of mind, acting as a supportive healing agent through her crisis of loss.
Gratitude is akin to love. In fact, it can only be felt when love is present, and likewise can also induce the presence of love whenever we are deeply thankful for something. Gratitude vibrates to a very high frequency in the great vast cosmos of energy signatures. Sister frequencies of gratitude are energies like appreciation, compassion, joy and inspiration.
It may sound like far too simple a solution for low-vibrational grayness, depression or grief, to just write down 3 to 5 reflections a night, but great truths are often sheer simplicity cloaked in complicated story-lines.
Keeping a gratitude journal is truly simple. No complex methods or rituals, just a journal or notebook to write in and a pen. That's all, along with your willingness to discover at least 3 things that you can be thankful for, even if it's just the pillow beneath your head. Believe it or not, being grateful for your pillow will work wonders.
It doesn't matter what you're thankful for. It just matters that you're thankful.
How to start your Gratitude Journal Practice:
Keep a journal or notebook and a pen next to your bed at night when you climb into bed, open your journal and write down 3 to 5 things you are grateful for. Keep it simple and don't complicate your statements or your list.
For example:
1. I am so grateful for this warm bed.
2. I am so thankful for the warmth I feel right now. I feel safe.
3. I am so grateful for this home.
4. Thank you for the intimate conversation I had with Elsa today.
5. I am so grateful for her friendship. Thank you.... thank you for her.
OR another list might look like:
1. I am so thankful for the great dinner we had tonight.
2. I am so grateful for the garden and that we have such wonderful and nourishing food.
3. I am so grateful for my job, for all that it provides.
4. Thank you God for listening to me all the time. I am so grateful for you being you.
5. I am so thankful for my family and friends, that they help me learn how to love.
The important thing is that your journal statements have real meaning for you. Nobody else needs to read them. Your list is your own.... a tool to support you in your own state of harmony and inner-work with yourself.
Blessings & Gratitude.....
The Call of the Mystic: Going Within by Nicole Rose
October 13, 2019
Angels of Heaven
Gather one and all,
Building pyramids of light
To answer the call.
Like the bees of spring
Let us pollinate the Earth,
And arouse mankind
For God is giving birth.
I scribed the above poem more than 26 years ago, while sitting alone in the back of my sister’s beat up 1985 Toyota Tercel. We had parked at Baby Beach on the Island of Maui and my sister got out to check the elements to see if it was friendly enough to spend the day there.
I turned towards the sun streaming in through a backseat window. Enjoying the warmth, I closed my eyes, when suddenly my mind went quiet. The atmosphere turned silent and still, and out of a poignant sense of emptiness came the first words of that poem. They began to pour into my mind as if emerging from some internal well of consciousness, and I scrambled to find something to write on.
I’d written some 250 some odd poems by that point, but hadn’t written much in the previous year, and now suddenly I was overcome by the presence of the words now flooding my awareness and not a pen or paper in sight. Scanning the car, I found a crumpled up brown paper bag on the floor mat, and a chewed-up pencil on the dashboard. Needless-to-say, I scribbled the poem down in a flurry.
There came a point, years later amidst my spiritual awakening process, when I threw out all of my previously written material, and all the poems I’d recorded and crafted were lost……all, save one--the one you’ve just read about the angels, the pyramids and the bees.
Somehow it has etched itself into the recesses of my mind and it remains the only poem of all 250-something that has been memorized. I’ve been writing since grade school, and it’s the occasional moments as a writer that seemed touched by grace…. Moments like “receiving” this poem that fill me with wonder about the process and keep me writing.
But this is not really an article about inspired writing. It is an article about receiving insight and grace when we take the time to get quiet, to still the noise in the world around us and bask in the inner silence. As a mystic who centers my life around the spiritual, my experience has been touched by Grace more times than I can recount, and although it always comes as a surprise, I realize that grace isn’t something that suddenly comes out of nowhere. It’s something that seems to arrive when we are ready for it.
Regarding the poem above, I didn’t just suddenly receive a beautiful sonnet from “on high,” without an ounce of effort or attention. I had embraced a daily practice of prayer, devotion and reading at the outset of each day. In other words, I kept myself primed for communication with Spirit.
26 years ago I received the gift of those words and I’m only now beginning to comprehend the depth and expanse of their meaning. I have, in the last 26 years, experienced many deeply penetrating moments of silence and Self-realization… moments that have taken me deep inside to the mystery of myself and all of life, and none of those moments arose through the “busy-ness” of life.
We are spiritual beings, yet we can only come to know ourselves as we really are when we turn our attention from what we are not. As we begin earnest practices of meditation and fundamentally practical spiritual exercises, such as those found in A Course in Miracles, we discover that everything “outside” is a projection…. A reality that manifests according to our inner-conditioning and fickle point of perception—a point of perception that is always in flux.
There is, however, a point of insight within each of us that is beyond the reaches of our mental and emotional conditioning. It is the “still point” of our being. All deeply insightful moments are attempting to guide us to this inner-point where we can finally discover the energy generating light-systems that we are.
As A Course in Miracles tells us, we are, quite literally, the Light of the World. But, in order to experience the truth of that statement, we must turn our backs on the world as we know it, and go deep within, through all the inner-gateways of our being, to meet ourselves and life as it really is, before judgments and projections have tainted our perception.
Knowings do not involve explanations of reality. They are immediate—a direct transference of awareness. Such knowings can only emerge and announce themselves when we quiet all the other voices screaming out in desperate attempts to control and explain our lives away. We think our daily minds are helping us to create order, when in fact, they’ve created a world of continual chaos.
When we are silent…. When we are still…. When we dedicate even a few moments of our time and energy to turning our attention fully from the world, we hear, see and feel in new ways, and finally meet the God of our being. New thoughts begin to spontaneously arise from that fresh direct experience of hearing, seeing and feeling the life-infused energy that is the very core of what we are.
A life guided from such a practice of “going within” is a very different life indeed. It is not the life we will read about in our history books or learn about in our science labs…. But rather perhaps something more akin to stories of Saint Francis of Assisi, Hildegard of Bingen, or Mahatma Ghandi, where silencing the world through turning one’s attention to the inner sanctum of the spirit becomes daily practice.
It doesn’t become regular practice because one wants to be a saint, but because the deep abiding presence of that inner-sanctum calls us back to ourselves again and again.
A Tale of Two Babies ~ Life After Delivery by Author Unknown
From the Blog of Mathew Warner
September 15, 2019
In a mother’s womb were two babies.
One asked the other: “Do you believe in life after delivery?”
The other replies, “Why, of course. There has to be something after delivery. Maybe we are here to prepare ourselves for what we will be later.”
“Nonsense,” says the other. “There is no life after delivery. What would that life be?”
“I don’t know, but there will be more light than here. Maybe we will walk with our legs and eat from our mouths. Maybe we will have other senses that we can't understand now.”
The other says, “That is absurd! Walking is impossible. And eat with our mouths? Ridiculous. The umbilical cord supplies nutrition and everything we need. Besides the umbilical cord is too short. Life after delivery is to be logically excluded.”
“I think there is something and maybe it’s different than it is here.”
The other replies, “No one has ever come back from there. Delivery is the end of life, and in the after-delivery it is nothing but darkness and anxiety and it takes us nowhere.”
“Well, I don’t know,” says the other, “but certainly we will see mother and she will take care of us.”
“Mother?!” You actually believe in mother? Where is she now?”
“She is all around us. We are surrounded by her. We are of her. It is in her that we live. Without her there would not be this world.”
“I don’t see her, so it’s only logical that she doesn’t exist.”
To which the other replied, “sometimes when you’re silent you can hear her, you can sense her. I believe there is a reality after delivery and we’re here to prepare ourselves for that reality.”
Referece:
Retrieved from: https://matthewwarner.me/story-of-two-babies
Dream Recall: How to Remember Your Dreams by Nicole Rose
August 8, 2019
Having trouble remembering your dreams? Well, you’re not alone.
And believe me, even if you think you’re not dreaming…. You are.
Adults generally dream between 4 to 6 times per night (a bit less for children), yet an article on sleep.org indicates that most people forget 95 to 99 percent of what they dream. Being a very active, vivid dreamer, myself, I considered how crippling it might be if I suddenly couldn’t recall my night-time adventures into a vaster awareness….. An awareness that so often has been the harbinger of conflict resolution, healing, insight, and spiritual transformation.
When people hear that I’m a dreamworker, they nearly always have immediate commentary about their own dream lives. I hear everything from, “I have the craziest, most vivid dreams--I just don’t know what they mean,” to, “I’ve never given much thought to my dreams.” But by far, the most frequent comments I receive are from people who don't remember their dreams.
Having worked with my dreams for 30 plus years, I know the deep value a dream exploration can bring to healing the psyche of anyone who’s willing to put their attention on it. So, I’m going to share with you some tried and true methods to improve your dream recall.
The first thing to employ is your desire to remember your dreams, and the openness to working with them. Become comfortable with the idea that you can actively communicate with your deep unconscious, or what psychotherapy might call the “subconscious” and what my first dream teacher called The Dream Body.
Realize that you have a dream body, a deep well of awareness into the depths of every aspect of your being, all aspects of humanities collective unconsciousness (Jung’s dream architypes), and the entire pulsating beingness of the Universe. Your dreams are portholes into the great mysteries of what you are.
Sound interesting? Ready to buckle your seatbelt and embark on the incredible journey of you, the great unknown? It’s time to discover the unknown realms of you that are trying to make themselves known by delivering you messages through the porthole of your dreams each night.
The next step is to keep a dream journal. I recommend an actual journal that you will write in versus a method of digital recording, because there tends to be greater recall through the written process. However, if you are averse to writing or find yourself pressed for time, using a microphone/recording mechanism on your cell phone, tablet, ipad, or dictaphone is another effective way to record your dreams.
Set your dream journal and a pen (or recorder) right next to your bed within easy reach. As you go to sleep each night, state to your dream body your intention to remember your dreams. I often will also ask my dream body to please deliver my dreams in symbols that I can readily understand. That is all the prep you need before drifting off to sleep. You’ll be surprised at how easily this can work when you start putting earnest attention on wanting to recall your dreams.
There are a few things to be aware of that can affect dream recall. Drugs, whether prescription or recreational can affect the nature of your dreams and the ability to remember them. Alcohol can inhibit the deeper REM cycles, the sleep states needed to produce dreaming. So, drinking at night will likely prevent your dreaming life from flourishing.
When you wake in the morning, resist the urge to turn over or move in any way. Staying in the same position that you were in during the dream helps dream recall. Then, after allowing the memory of the dream to flood into your awareness, immediately grab your dream journal and write it down.
Pay close attention to any emotions, colors and fine details in your dreams and write them down. The commitment to recording your dreams has a way of spurring on more dream recall in the nights that follow. So, make sure you stay dedicated to recording them in some way, even if in brief notations.
Some people don’t want to wake up enough, in the middle of the night, to record a dream…. This is a decision you’ll have to make. I personally record my dreams in the middle of the night if I am stirred awake by them. I consider the possibility that my psyche is waking me intentionally so that I might record a dream that might otherwise be lost by morning…. and so I wake myself to write.
There is a great deal that can be elaborated on with regards to dream recall, but this article will suffice as a very effective beginning to remembering your dreams so that you can start to tap into the endless well of insight that awaits you each night.
Sweet dreams……..
Reference:
Retrieved from: https://www.sleep.org/articles/how-often-dreams/
Lifestyle on the Road to Transformation by Nicole Rose
July 22, 2019
What is lifestyle? Perhaps it is something we take for granted in the western world, where we tend to have an excess of choice in the way we want to live. Someone living in India's cast system, for instance, especially if he/she is a member of the lower-cast, would not be so privileged.
But, even in the west, lifestyle is more than a luxury of choice or an outward expression of who we feel ourselves to be; it is the framework from which we manifest our Selves and our vision into reality. Lifestyle can be an energy sapper or a nurturer of our dreams. Do you know which one is yours?
For individuals on the transformation path, one of the fundamental principles to live by is the awareness that everything is energy. This one realization alone can shift how we live our lives in countless ways.
As we learn that everything has and is vibration, we find ourselves in the seat of responsibility for the people, places and things that we have in our lives. We’re responsible because vibrations have magnetism, and there is a law and a process that says, “we draw to us that which we put out.”
We can learn a lot about where we’re at energetically when we take notice of what we surround ourselves with. By the same token, we can make a choice to actively support our lives to shift into a higher vibration by consciously changing our environment, the things we indulge in, or the company we keep.
Why is it important to raise our individual vibration?
Raising our individual vibration not only affects the quality of our own life, but also the lives of others. It is important because it is the way to "world transformation." When we each do our part individually, global change happens as an automatic by-product.
That’s why sages and wise ones throughout time have often delivered the message that the most important person to put your attention on and heal is yourself. Through your personal journey of healing and Self-discovery the world is transformed.
Choosing a lifestyle for transformation means zeroing in on what will help us to continually increase the vibration of our own energy and then maintain it. Another way to look at it is to say that the deeper our transformation goes, the clearer our understanding becomes, and we rest in the inner-peace and light of that understanding.
Clarity, inner-peace, light and understanding are all synonymous for a very high vibration of energy. So, what supports that kind of an atmosphere?
There are many answers to that question, but the one thing that all the answers have in common is their “quality” or caliber of presence. If what we want is inner-clarity, then lifestyle changes for clarity in as many areas of our lives as possible will assist the manifestation of the clarity we seek.
We may look at our diet, for instance, and realize that there is a lot of fast foods and over-processed ingredients that aren’t necessarily supporting clarity and strength in the body. So, in the area of diet we may feel inspired to make a change in support of a “higher vibration.”
We may also start to recognize the variance in vibration or “feeling” that seems to occur with particular music that we listen to. When we have a goal to lift our vibration, then considering something as simple as the music we listen to can make a significant difference, especially when you add that to a dietary change and then perhaps a shift from wearing a lot of dense colors, to wearing something a little more colorful and buoyant—one of those colors that makes you feel vibrantly alive every time you put it on…..
We are the creators of our lifestyle, yet by some crazy law of paradox, our lifestyles are also creating us. Surely inner-peace must already exist somewhere inside of us when the choice to create lifestyle changes in support of inner-peace comes from “within.”
Through honoring the aspect of ourselves that is peace, we draw it out of us, to the forefront to who we are, and we begin to be led by the clear calm seeing of a peaceful presence.
We are supporting ourselves to become “more” of who we really are through our lifestyle choices, and so our style of living can reveal much about where we’re living from as well as what we’re transforming into.
As we transform, so does our style of living—the outward expression of what’s on our inside. One begets the other, and the other begets the one.
Everything is Invited by Nicole Rose
June 14, 2019
“The Guest House”
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
Some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crown of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
Still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
-----Rumi
Everything is Invited
When I first sat down to write this article, it didn’t happen. I sat in front of the computer screen, jotting a few words here and there, but really nothing much was “coming,” I took my hands away from the keyboard and just sat there, noticing……”Hmmmm, nothing much is coming…..”
Then the neighbors and their three kids came outside to play basketball in the courtyard of our driveway. Suddenly the surrounding environment became very, very noisy.
Until that moment, it had been the prefect time for me to write. My own children were at their father’s house, and the environment was calm and non-distracting. Suddenly, what had appeared to be a perfect situation had shifted.
On the surface, it seemed as though everything had shifted for the worse, that circumstances were now “against” me writing an article for the June Newsletter. But the perfection of Universal Consciousness was revealing itself, extending it’s blessing, it’s Love, through the present moment.
As I sat there at my desk, listening to the noise all around me, I noticed a tightness in my body, and a slight feeling of frustration. Then I became aware of a thought which was wrapped around that feeling. The thought said, “Conditions are not ideal for writing. Yet now is the allotted time that I have….my children are away, there’s nobody needing my attention, if not now, then when?”
I noticed this thought and also the feeling of 'no flow'. The article just wasn’t happening.
I then looked at the title of the article, “Everything is Invited,” and said to the Conscious Light of my being, “Yes, everything is invited, isn’t it. So, let’s invite this……all of it.” In the acceptance of my own tension, it immediately began to fall away and leave my body.
I got up form the computer and made my way into the living room to have a seat in a big easy chair. Hollering voices, bouncing basketballs, and laughter echoed all around me. I then said to the fullness of the present moment….to myself, “I invite you in totally, just as you are. Thank You so much for this moment.”
Suddenly I was aware of a sweetness in the laughter, a togetherness and lightness of play in the voices echoing in the courtyard. The annoying bounce of the basketball fell away, it was just a sound, no longer an annoyance.
The smile of peaceful joy began to permeate everything…..tightness was nowhere to be found, and visually, everything began to subtly emanate a vibrance, a kind of light…..gratitude escalated to overflowing.
I became aware of the table sitting next to me and noticed a journal and pen were there. Just then, words describing the gift of “invitation” began to flow. Needless-to-say, I picked up the journal and began to quickly write down everything that was coming.
When I had finished writing I closed the journal and became aware of the fact that it was quiet. The neighbors had all gone inside. Now, it was time to go to the computer.
God’s timing is the only timing we need. If we can just relax and allow the Presence of the present moment to “unfold” us, we will discover that our life is a miracle revealing itself to us in countless ways.
“Living” the process of serving Consciousness is to live a life of constant humility.
I find myself humbled at every turn, both by the subtle ways in which I still momentarily identify myself with the ego-mind, and by the overwhelming love and unsurpassable compassionate Presence of God.
In the very instant we are willing to “let go” and invite in the present moment in it’s entirety, we are filled to overflowing by the Power and the Presence of the One Holy Being. We know, in that instant, that we are Heaven on Earth, extending itself to an entire world, calling to itself, recognizing itself in everything and everyone.
To invite something means to welcome it in totally, without condition, without judgment. It means to allow something to be as it is, right now in the fullness of this moment, without asking it to change, without asking it to be anything other than what it is.
Healing occurs in a moment of absolute acceptance and in the release of everything which is not in alignment with that. That means we must welcome ourselves and all of life in it’s entirety. To invite everything means just that…. EVERYTHING.
We can’t just invite all the “feel good” stuff and expect that any real transformation has taken place. We must invite everything into the Light of our Consciousness. Whatever is left in the dark, stays in the dark, operating unconsciously, pulling our strings and pushing our buttons, and we remain as puppets and pawns subject to our ignorance.
Whatever arises within us arises out of a resistance to the present moment and is reflecting to us our own state of being. It’s calling our attention back to the present, and our return to the “Now” moment lies in being intensely present for whatever we are feeling and experiencing.
Instead of judging it and pushing it away, we can invite it in further. We can allow it to unfold within us, to be totally what it is, spontaneously in the moment. This does not mean mentating about it and creating stories around it, it means “feeling” it in its completion.
Mind activity and storytelling is an avoidance of the direct experience of what is “being” felt right now. It is amazing how quickly and easily things pass through if we allow them to “be” without any indulgence in a storyline.
So much of the time we are not fully feeling what is here, because we are too busy judging it. If we are judging something, we are no longer aware our connectedness; we’ve stepped away energetically, separated ourselves, and start pointing fingers as though the separation has occurred “out there” somewhere.
The mind splits itself, making resolve impossible. The only way resolve can occur is for one to welcome in what one is judging. The welcoming, itself, is a gesture in returning to the clarity of Oneness.
By inviting whatever is here for us to experience, we reopen ourselves to the “Reality” of the present moment. Our True Reality is one of Love, so opening to the present moment is opening to Love.
In Love, all things are created new. Meaning, that in Love everything is finally seen for what it really is: the Love of God, appearing as you, as me…..expressing itself, moment by moment, in perfect Unity and purpose…..everything in perfect correlation with everything else.
That is why it is said that healing can only take place from within. It takes place within our own Consciousness, in a moment of radical willingness to invite in whatever is here for us.
True Healing takes place from a shift in perception, and all authentic shifts in perception occur in our willingness to be the openness of our own hearts.
First published in the “Awakening with Aim” Newsletter, June/July 2003
Creating a Fertile Field for Healing by Nicole Rose
May 15, 2019
Last weekend during a lecture on detoxing parasites, Herbalist and Metaphysician, Matt Hammond, mentioned the Fertile Field Theory. The Fertile Field Theory basically says that for dis-ease to occur, we must first have created a fertile field within ourselves in which that dis-ease can grow and manifest.
During the lecture we were mostly taking a look at physical illnesses, many of which are being linked to parasites by cutting edge researchers, such as Hilda Clark, who wrote “A Cure for All Diseases.”
What interested me most, however, was the mention and focus on the Fertile Field Theory and how we create the environment for dis-ease to occur within ourselves.
It’s not too far a leap from there to realize that if we create a low frequency environment that subsequently attracts to us low frequency entities, such as a parasite or virus, then we can also create an environment within ourselves that is Fertile for Optimal Health.
One fascinating study that was mentioned during the lecture was one in which live bacteria were observed under a microscope while being targeted by a very high frequency of light vibration. In this experiment a machine was designed to send the high vibration of light directly to the harmful (low frequency) bacteria. When the high frequency of light hit the bacteria, the bacteria exploded.
The bacteria was unable to exist within that high energy field. When speaker, Mathew, shared that with the audience, I felt myself suddenly shot back to a statement made by Jesus and so many great teachers since his time: “Ye are the light.” And I felt struck by the utter simplicity of the situation.
It was a powerful reminder that we certainly do create our own dis-ease, by forgetting what we really are, and by believing in something else that honestly has no real part in our inherent make up. We forget that the true power behind all apparent levels of reality is God’s Light. We forget that when the purity of that Light is focused with great intensity and meets something less pure, the less pure will vanish.
When we receive information like that, it’s like a coming home to ourselves and all the other stuff that we’re doing to try to get healthy suddenly appears to be trite and missing the mark.
As a people, we keep looking “out there” for the solution to our ill health. This is the case, many times, even in alternative fields of healing. Yet the message has been available to us for hundreds of years that “healing comes from within.” It’s a message that goes hand in hand with “ye are the light.”
God’s light is within us; that’s the stuff we’re made of. All the other material is like merchandise that we purchased along the way to dis-ease and dis-harmony.
This is a very important message for those of us working with energy modalities and higher consciousness practices for healing purposes. Such methods assist us in the loosening of all the gunk that we’ve created, which is presently blocking the clear knowing of our essential essence.
The Light is there, even if we can’t see it and aren’t aware of it, and our practices as healers and students of Higher Consciousness, assist us in clearing the way for it to shine through.
This is important to understand when it comes to creating a fertile field for healing, because a fertile field for healing is one of high vibration with a highly concentrated degree of Light activity.
When we come back to the basics of remembering that everything is energy, we can become more conscious of the energy we are cultivating within us and around us.
We can begin to take note of what sorts of vibration we tend to associate with and we can be very honest with ourselves as to whether or not our choices of association or inner-cultivation are truly supporting the healing we say we want.
In my own life I see the significance of this everywhere, from the vibration of the food I eat or the music I listen to, to the vibration of the words I speak and the thoughts I think.
What kind of a fertile field am I creating? It all starts right here with me, within every conscious choice for harmony or disharmony, for freedom or limitation.
We can choose high frequency stuff in our lives to support us in breaking free from limiting patterns. We’re free to make that choice and every little bit helps.
When we say, “yes,” to living from a higher octave of existence, we find ourselves faced with a process of breaking old alliances with patterns that are not serving our greater good. This can often be very uncomfortable.
As life works to bring us into greater energetic balance, we often begin to notice things that we were previously unaware of, and in many cases, unwilling or unable to see. What people sometimes don’t consider is that greater awareness might mean discomfort or giving up the familiar lifestyle they’ve been living, in exchange for one that will affect and maintain optimal health and well-being.
The process of allowing those changes to occur is key and its importance is often overlooked. With a little bit of willingness, what A Course in Miracles calls “the little willingness,” we can begin to consciously create a fertile field of "being" that naturally magnetizes the love of God and optimal health.
We can re-align ourselves with the Purifying Power within our own lives by asking for assistance, being available to receive it, and by giving ourselves to an alliance with it. When we serve the higher intelligence within us, we become irresistible to its endless blessings and mercy.
First to Love by Nicole Rose
April 3, 2019
A disgruntled husband complained to his friend about his unhappy, uncompromising wife. The husband, fed up, was considering divorce. His friend, however, didn’t support his idea of divorce, and instead suggested that the husband “choose” to love his wife.
“Love her?” replied the husband. “What on earth do you mean? We hardly speak…..”
“I mean Love Her.” countered his friend. “Really, really love her. Make her needs more important than your own. What’s her favorite movie, favorite flower or favorite food? Put a smile on her face! Try it and see what happens.”
The husband did as his friend suggested, and to his delight, discovered over time, that he was married to a very beautiful and caring woman.
Now, I realize that not all unhappy relationships are resolved this easily, however, in a society where so many marriages end in divorce and many relationships barely “get past go” before they fall apart, this little fable yields a powerful message regarding the deeper ways of love and relationship.
A Course in Miracles states, “Only what you are not giving can be lacking from any given situation.” The challenge is to bring to the table of our relationships whatever it is we feel is missing. If we want less conflict, then we must look inside ourselves to see, “Where am I conflicted?” If we want peace, we must be the one who brings it.
All encounters are opportunities to love and be loved—to recognize what is “real” when things feel difficult or painful. Those are “golden” moments—chances to forgive and thus transform and make holy what was once a grievance in the heart. With every resolved grievance, the heart opens further and loves deeper, and love, itself, is increased, amplified and glorified anew.
Published in Maui Vision Magazine, Feb/March, 2012
Healing the Healer by Nicole Rose
February 13, 2019
A Course in Miracles speaks of the “unhealed healer,” one who has not fully undergone the treacherous journey of healing himself, yet seeks to heal others. If we are still struggling to find our own way, how can we know the way for anyone else?
Many of us, as healers, find ourselves facing this question.
The Course explains further that we teach what we most need to learn. We teach spiritual, emotional and physical freedom because it’s what we want most for ourselves. We are overshadowed by the feeling of our own desperate need for wholeness. We need healing the way we need air and water. We yearn for self-realization…..the unbroken peace of one resting in Divine Consciousness.
A Course in Miracles (ACIM) is one of many gateways leading to the great transformer within. It remains true and consistent throughout, asking us to walk with unshakable conviction. As a Reiki Master, I find myself being asked to live the same principles, the same radical integrity with life as in ACIM.
What’s so sublime about Reiki energy is that it transforms each healing situation as it sees fit. The healer cannot manipulate its influence. Reiki energy is Divine Love. The most one can hope to do is be an ever deepening state of surrender…….to become so devoted to the Divine Presence from which Reiki springs, that we remove ourselves from the equation entirely.
And so, what if we look at ourselves and still see “unhealed parts?” There is a great chance then to love ourselves anyway, to let go of needing to be anything, and relax our minds around what we see. In the depths of relaxation we discover the wholeness that we already are.
Published in Maui Vision Magazine, June/July, 2012
Summing up A Course in Miracles by Nicole Rose
January 15, 2019
Marianne Williamson once said that if she could, in one word, sum up Jesus’s message to us in A Course in Miracles, it would be to “relax.” I tend to agree with Marianne’s take on what The Course is petitioning us to do. What The Course wants us to experience and extend from that state of relaxation is Love.
When we relax, we loosen up what was tightened, we soften what was hardened, we let go of what was held, and we open what was closed. Relaxation is synonymous with Forgiveness—it’s a full body exhale from an in-breath held too long by the tyranny of a fearful mind. Forgiveness, The Course reminds us, is our only function, and when we are fulfilling our God-given function, we quite literally are the light of the world.
Over and over again The Course bids us to forgive, not only our selves and other people, but the entire world and all of our judgments about it. It defines forgiveness as something radically different from what is commonly believed. It is not a pardon of one’s wrong doing, but rather the realization that what we once believed happened, in Truth never did—a hard pill to swallow for most people, but one that will eventually be digested if one stays dedicated to The Course’s daily lessons.
The Course in Miracle’s Workbook for Students leads us through a purification of the mind and a complete transformation of one’s perception.
Though universal in theme, A Course in Miracles is colored throughout by Christian terms. It’s rich explanations, however, transform the meaning of those terms from their familiar biblical definitions. For instance, the word sin is defined as a lack of love and is something to be corrected not condemned.
The Course’s outlined lessons are fundamentally practical and the application of each step, deeply personal. It’s imperative to realize that every word is being spoken directly to you. The Course isn’t meant to be theoretical. Instead it asks us to apply its teaching, embody its principals and experience directly for ourselves, the awareness of God’s Love.
This is, in a nutshell, the long journey of The Course made short. In The Course’s own words:
“The Course does not aim at teaching the meaning of love, for that is beyond what can be taught. It does aim, however, at removing the blocks to the awareness of love’s presence, which is your natural inheritance. The opposite of love is fear, but what is all-encompassing can have no opposite.
This Course can therefore be summed up very simply in this way:
"Nothing real can be threatened.
Nothing unreal exists.
Herein lies the peace of God.”
Pray First by Nicole Rose
December 15, 2018
Several years ago, I was working in the schools of Maui County with children who have autism spectrum disorders. One day I’d been contemplating on how to resolve a particular problem, when I looked up and saw a fellow staff member wearing a t-shirt that said, “Pray First.” I felt energetically slapped in the face by Heaven.
How many times in my life had the idea of going to God first simply slipped my mind? Instead, like so many people, I’d run the gamut of possible ways to solve a problem, putting in a great effort, and finally when things just weren’t working out and I felt at the end of my rope, I’d internally call out in desperation for Divine intervention of some kind—any kind, just so long as it would “fix” the things I'd been unable to.
I was so struck by the utter simplicity of such an epically wise statement that I went home that day and posted a sign on my wall using plain white paper and tape that said, “Pray First, no matter what the problem!”
I am still working on following that creed. If I pray first, it doesn’t mean I then sit back and do nothing and expect answers from Heaven to fall out of the sky. It means that at the outset, I’ve handed over the perceived problem to God, who knows far more about what’s really up than I do.
That means that as I now set about doing whatever I can to solve the situation, I’ve already made conscious contact with the Divine regarding the issue. I’ve clarified that Heaven is working with me on the perfect resolve and therefore I am more likely to be receptive to guidance and to notice when signs and signals relating to potential solutions show up in my path.
My mind tends to relax and open, making my physiology and brain function at optimal levels, all because I’ve opened and ignited the channels of communication with “On High.” Why on earth would anyone want to struggle alone with such limitations of perspective when we could have all knowing, all loving intelligence on our side the whole way through?
Recently I was engaged with an ACIM study group in a neighboring town, and we considered what life might be like if each of us literally turned inward to the Holy Spirit or Jesus for guidance on absolutely everything, every step of the way. I confessed to the group that I had not been living that way and to my surprise, so did everyone else.
The comment came back, “Nobody’s doing that,” and yet that is exactly what Jesus tells us to do in The Course. Years ago, when Helen Schucman was scribing ACIM, Jesus bid her to ask for guidance even on what clothes to wear each day. Can you imagine the conscious connection each of us would have if we were speaking to the Divine that often?
Jesus makes it clear in The Course that if we really want to wake up, we must put all our Faith in Him and seek guidance every step of the way with all situations. That sounds an awful lot like praying first, if you ask me. It also seems like a sure way to pray without ceasing. Either of these prayer activities is likely to cultivate a strong and powerful current of insight and life-giving energy between oneself and the Divine.
The more we pray, the more God appears in the world around us, through other people, through situations, through the miraculous resolve of apparent problems, and usually with very little effort on our part. It works this way because we’ve already put in the effort to pray, to put our attention on the Divine, to remember first cause in all circumstances.
By praying first, we recognize the real power in our lives, and we set ourselves up to win because we know God is in the outcome, whatever form it takes.
Rise Above the Battleground by Nicole Rose
November 14, 2018
When great teachers speak of awakening to the light of Heaven within, they are pointing to a conscious emergence from the dark, binding nature of a fixated mind.
When Jesus said, “Ye are the light,” he wasn’t speaking metaphorically. He was describing the literal truth—that each of us exists as the luminous omniscient presence of God itself. He was expressing that quite literally, all there is is light—an infinitely intelligent light appearing as various forms—and all else is a lie, a made up story, like a dream that ends the moment we wake up.
To recognize this is to free oneself from the mind-field of the race, to “rise above the battleground,” as A Course in Miracles calls it. Self-realization is not something that can be figured out. It is only something that can be experienced.
The way to recognizing omniscient love is not one of understanding spiritual concepts, but is rather an active moment-to-moment disentanglement from what love is not. It is only when we disengage from our ideas about what love is, that we finally meet love face-to-face. In other words, when the mind is quiet, we can see clearly.
It is actually very, very simple—perhaps too simple for most minds—when illusions dis-appear, what is real remains.
Realizing love is about learning to see, to live life with all of your eyes wide open. Perception happens through far more than the eyes of the body and our sight is greatly affected by our degree of openness. The heart does not see clearly if it is closed. Neither does the mind.
Most of us think that we’re seeing life the way it really is, but unless the heart remains open and the third eye activated and awake, our perception of reality is crippled and limited at best.
This is why a process of healing is so very important for human happiness. Without love there is no happiness. Yet paradoxically, love is the power that heals.
Strangely it is love itself, that nudges us towards the right book, the right film, the right teacher, the right therapist, the right relationship that will help our hearts to open up so that more of the same love can enter in and heal the illusory woes of our imagined past.
Through healing the heart, the mind naturally follows, seeing everything anew and an authentic inner-shift takes place. It is through an open heart and mind that the soul emerges and begins to live through your personality and life.
From this point on, a much higher faculty of mind takes over, the faculty of conscious loving awareness. One is set free of the old paradigm of egoic thinking and perceiving. The ego sees itself in everyone. So it is with love. Love knows only love appearing everywhere in a miraculously intelligent play of self-evolution.
The more we can relax around what we see, especially if we experience pain and constriction over what we see, the more our perceptions have a chance to be replaced by true vision.
When we find ourselves relaxing our minds around just one fixated idea—perhaps the way we see our spouse, for instance—and suddenly we’re struck by how sweet or beautiful he is, when only moments before he had appeared to be a harsh and critical person, the spiritual and energetic relief is so tremendously freeing that we are impelled to address every thought that follows in the same way.
“Really?” we might say to ourselves. “Is that really true? Is Ralph really that way? What if I’m not seeing correctly…… perhaps I’d experience greater peace if I inquire rather than assume that I’ve got all the facts strait.”
Suddenly through the willingness to inquire and investigate what is appearing in the mind, the mind, heart and body all relax together in a single breath and the possibility for freedom and peace becomes apparent.
The way to a lasting realization of love and the freedom it brings is to love our illusions away, one appearing thought at a time.
Eventually a figure/ground shift is experienced and it is as if Love is “thinking us” into being without any effort on our part. When Love is fully realized, the mind has finally healed and returned to sanity.
What does it mean to be Creatively Conscous? by Nicole Rose
October 16, 2018
Heal, pray, create.....As we heal and grow in consciousness, we strengthen our connection with ourselves, our source, and each other. We discover that life itself is divine, and that we are all interwoven into its fabric. Through prayer and daily practice, the realization of life as divine deepens and we begin to live from a profound sense of inner-clarity, wisdom and joy. Being creatively conscious means sharing the gift of your newfound awareness with the world. It means supporting life with your talents and giving back. To create consciously is to act from wholeness and the recognition of life as divine. In every instance, life is for you. A creatively conscious mind is one that knows this and works with life rather than against it.