Is Suffering Even Necessary?

This is something that is important to realize in your own life. When you are suffering, most of the suffering is caused by your own thoughts. You would be best to give up the idea that others cause you to suffer. That is not true because they are not your thoughts. Your thoughts are all your own.

Your thoughts create how you feel. There is no one else you can blame for how you feel.  Your feelings come from your thoughts about what is going on in your life. If you play the blame game for how you feel, you are basically saying other people have control over my brain and make me think certain thoughts that cause me to feel how I feel. That is not true nor is it ever true.

With this is mind; there are some other important considerations:

• It is important to know what you are thinking, what is the internal dialogue that goes on in your head? If you don’t know what is going on inside of you, you are a train without an engineer. 
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• Thinking and awareness come into conflict because it is very difficult to think and be aware at the same time. There is however a part of you that can be aware and knowing simultaneously. That knowing is not a thought but more a sense of what is true. The source of this higher knowing is you beyond your ordinary thought. What is it? You can call it what you want; it is a knowing that comes from your higher mind, your higher nature, your soul/spirit, the part of you that is infinite and eternal.  Are you aware of this higher nature in you?
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• You can step away from the noise upstairs and enter into a observing watchful mode, this observer self is free of judging, accepting, seeking the truth of the moment. Truth is usually best known through the watchfulness of your higher self. This Self is one with your soul, your spiritual nature. This eternal aspect of yourself is within the collective intelligence of all of life on the planet and not separate from the source of all creation. “Not separate from,” is a way to say at one with but many will argue for their separateness from the Source of the Universe.
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• You can free yourself from the limits of your own mind by being aware of the limits of your own thoughts, by being aware that all thoughts need to be paid attention to and often questioned. The mind wants to hold onto the familiar and will even refuse to release beliefs that are false and don’t work.  Have you every caught yourself arguing for a belief you then realized was no longer true?

Enter into the place within you that is quiet, still, and knowing. There in that place you can shape your experience of life with clarity and then shape your thoughts to support that life. Now is the time.

*Update of the experiment – I am finding it difficult not doing more in the way of actions other than tuning in. My one hour of intense actions is often more like two hours. My writing keeps calling me for more than an hour. All kinds of things in life get me distracted. I also see that my mind can use some additional focus.

There is really turning out to be a learning experience more than an experiment.  I will keep working at it though because I feel the value of it. I also feel the inner conversations with my higher nature are too easily mixed up with the sly workings of the ego-mind.  More on all of this as the light becomes brighter.



Working For Peace Every Day

At the heart of what I do, I always have peace as my goal.

I believe it is time for all of us to have peace inside and peace in the world.

Peace is possible and all that is needed is more love and compassion, more light and consciousness.

Also helpful is the simple realization that we are all connected to each other, one big family on a small dot of a planet in an ever expanding universe. 

On my desk is this inspirational quote by Mahatma Gandhi:

First they ignore you,

Then they laugh at you,

Then they fight you,

then you win.

Is It Our Actions Or Our Vibrations That Create The Most Powerful Results - An Experiment

The doing of life so often distracts from the deepening inward. I keep getting caught up in stuff instead of the light of a deep connection with spirit. It is surprising how often things like emails, Twitter, and Facebook (even though they are part of my social media enhancing strategy) take up so much time.  There are so many ideas out there that I find myself exploring, yet inward the most important exploration gets set aside. As I write this I wonder if the inner work will take care of all the rest and immediately my inner voice says YES!

I think it is time to do an experiment. That experiment will be to sort out which of two strategies will create the best results. I guess I better define the two strategies and the results I want to measure. I use the word measure here because I think the results have to be more than what feels better, or what seems better. The results have to be things that can be measured like number of new opportunities that come my way, new social media contacts (followers/friends) or income generated or other measurables to be determined as the experiment continues.

My hypothesis includes:

That the inner work is just as, if not more important than the outer actions taken

That the higher vibrations of inner work creates more positive results

That actions in themselves are positive but informed actions guided by intuition, heart and/or spirit are more powerful

That the outer world is not the source of supply, the inner world connection to Source is my supply.

That I live in an abundant universe and what I need to do is open to the flow of that abundance.

That what I focus on expands, the more my thoughts are on living in a wonderful life, the more wonderful my life will be.   

 The two strategies are:

1. Action - Spend my day blogging, commenting, twittering, reaching out to other bloggers, interacting with Facebook, generating and using my email list and promoting my book(s) and services.

2. Inner Focus - Spend my day being mindful, tuning inward, listening to my intuition, raising my vibrations through inspiration (reading and videos), meditation, out of body experiences, and visualization.

The next question is how much time do I spend doing each strategy? If I spend one day doing one and another day doing another, how will I determine what create the results I get. I could do a half-day of each but that would really make the results difficult to measure. If I spent one week doing one strategy and another week doing another strategy the results would be easier to measure. Can I spend an hour of each day doing the work of the non-primary strategy or would that mess up the results?

Lots of questions always come up in these kinds of experiments so the goal is so reduce the variables so I can get cleaner results. The challenge is that I have been using these two strategies blended for a while so I need to figure how to sort them out in a way that makes the two separate from each other for this experiment. My thinking is I will reduce one of the strategies to one hour per day while I full focus on the other strategy and then switch those the following week.

The following are measures I will use in the first experiment. I will take notes as I go and fine-tune for the next two weeks.

Scale 1 - 5                                            

Low – 1     Neutral – 3    Positive - 5

Overall sense of self         ____

Degree of self-awareness  ____

Receiving intuitive guidance  ____

Sense of accomplishment  ____

Note for scale:

Number of positive indicators noticed ____

Interactions that created significant positive opportunities ____

Write out positives noted

As I read this again I see lots of uncontrolled variables but I will go forward anyway and make adjustments as needed. One of the questions I have is, the follow week may be where the results of the past week show up. How do I measure that? 

I welcome your suggestions and ideas. I think within a month, I will have some very interesting results if I keep good notes on the process.



A Call To Your Light

Be aware: the following words flowed from me and if you are not careful they might infect you with bigger possibilities and turn your inner light on. They are for you from the me that is not separate.

I am an ocean of consciousness.

As the rain pours down my separation joins with the stream.

I flow to the source.

I Am but I am not what I thought I was.

The wind carries me upward and away.

Sometimes the cosmic dust gets in my eyes

Into it all but a drop

Joining dissolving but still infinite and eternal

Awakening, then forgetting

Stepping bravely and then returning to the familiar

Outside, inside, everywhere

Stepping back for a look

Reaching with my heart, opening

Standing strong with what is right

Entering the mystery

Like a flock of birds in coordination

Inward, outward, nowhere

Stars of which I come

Big bang flashes the beginning

Now I run to leap out on the edge

I was, I am, I will be

Pure freedom is a wonderful song

Shall we dance and sing together       

Words are such fun to explore, like painting a picture with orderly shapely marks too contained for an abstract painter but just right for the prose artist.

Where are you in this moment?

How are you being informed by your inner knowing?

Have you appreciated the beauty around you?

In the journey of awakening, the light comes on for glimpses of possibilities and if you lean into that light you can stretch the Ah-Ha for a lifetime. If instead the mind wanders out of the now, that light quickly fades into a buzz of the familiar.

Insight arises, opportunities present themselves and you can bath in them and allow them to soak into your spiritual membranes or be too busy to pay attention.

If you are willing to give this moment your full attention, you will open to the presents of the present.

Now feel the foot as it touches the floor, let that awareness sink deeply into the Earth Mother. Feel the now flowing with aliveness. Keep the foot awareness and the now stays in your lap.

Breathe, follow, breathe, follow, breathe follow.

The grace of the moment helps you find hope, heart, and the humility to realize you are but a drop in the ocean of consciousness, a grain of sand in the infinite universe but also contained within you is all consciousness and the entire ever-expanding universe.

I invite you to honor who you are and take the time to be mindful, to stretch yourself out into what is possible. The world needs you so much right now to be bold and rambunctious about life.

You are infinite in your nature yet you, as the rest of us do, argue for your limits.  “Argue for your limits and they are yours,” from Illusions by Richard Bach. 

You have been programmed since you were so small to believe in your limits. Now these beliefs run your life and they are not true. That is what is, but it doesn’t have to remain so. There is no blame but the loving acceptance of you as you are, reading this knowing there are greater possibilities in you waiting to be realized.

Now make a commitment to yourself, with all the courage of your heart and the determination of your higher mind, to be more fully your potential every day.  In a year you will be a star that shines brightly on the stage of life and we will all be so grateful to you for being you.

In case you were wondering what The Inner Conditions for Happiness are: Be Present, find appreciation in the now, be at one with beauty, be creative, hold in your heart a sense of flourishing and fulfillment, be in positive mind, and serve others. 



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