I have a very clear vision of the life I desire for my family and myself. This desire is not only infused with love, but soaked in it. Love is the reason for wanting it at all. Love for myself and my belief that I deserve loving good things for my own life has grounded this vision and made it more real than it has been in the past when I left myself out of the equation. All of my energy and attention is focused on the positive and I no longer allow any of it to be spent on situations that deplete my resources. I’m still focusing on my mental diet and I am more aware of the dampening of the flow when my thoughts turn to fruitless or negative things and quickly look for something positive to feed my spirit to keep my focus. My Franklin chart is telling me to focus on courage this week, but my spirit is telling me it’s time to focus on abundance. I have been focused on lack for too long now and it’s time to look for what I’ve blinded myself to. This week I will continue to welcome the intuitive visitor and allow them to open my eyes to the abundance all around me. I will also continue to clear the channels so that abundance can be distributed to me and those I love.
Week 16-Control
The last 6 months of my life have been an intense period of learning to take control over my thoughts and behaviors, as well as, learning to avoid or pass by those people who have a need to actively or passively control others. It hasn’t been an easy year by any stretch of the imagination, but I am putting together the pieces I’ve been collecting and I find that everything I need I’ve brought with me. Meditation is probably the most powerful tool in that arsenal and there has been a switch from avoiding this practice to craving the centered, powerful energy that comes through me when I sit and focus. My lifelong study of yoga is the secondary tool. Yoga is the process of aligning with that energy. Practicing the mental and physical discipline and removing the resistance so that the energy can flow freely. My diet also supports the process of connection as it affects my mental and physical health. Keeping my finances orderly and paying bills on-time reduces stress and confusion and promotes living in connection. Everything I can do to strengthen that connection allows the desires of my heart to manifest with ease and speed. This gives me hope and hope feeds the process of connection. When I experience difficulties and challenges, I remember that there are spiritual laws governing my experience and I turn my focus from the present difficulty to the principles at work. As I acknowledge these principals, my intuition becomes stronger and clearer. I’ve been aware of the concept of freedom through discipline, but I wasn’t ready to live it until now. I am very happy to be on this path and I have genuine excitement for the good things that are coming and, at the same time, are already here.
Week 15-Infused with love
As I’ve stated, I’ve been experiencing a significant shift lately. All this knowledge and the exercises have been organically intertwining and creating new ways for me to view and move through the world. I’ve understood the principal of forgiveness, but my programming was causing me to see it differently in the past. I now have a clearer and more functional understanding about the role that past difficulties have played in my life. I can choose to focus on the damage that was done, or I can choose to focus on the invaluable lessons that pain and suffering have brought me. Everything comes back to my thoughts. Which way will my soul go? It’s not enough to just do no harm. If that’s the case, I will continue to wander directionless on the “misty flats.” About 10 years ago, I found the book “Hinds Feet on High Places.” It’s a beautiful allegory of the spiritual path and the message of the book is so fitting for the place I’m in right now. Moving past the stuckness that has enveloped me for too long now. My practice for the next week will be looking for kindness, but also practicing infusing my thoughts with love. I have a lot of navigational questions. How do I operate the beautiful machine? The energy of love has a way of changing the question before you even get to the answer. This is the path I’m going to follow. Up the high road.
Week 14-Sea Change
I like to read about great thinkers who have delved into the liminal space between the known and the unknown; science and faith; the seen and the unseen. There is great beauty in the ability to see and articulate that arcing spark of energy that ties everything together. Week fourteen lays out the pattern and the flow of the manifestation of that spark in a very palatable way. The next step in my understanding is the role of community (masterminding). Michael Polyani is a philosopher who writes about “tacit knowledge.” Knowledge born through/from our experiences in our unique contexts and the spontaneous occurrence of pieces of knowledge arising and coming together organically to solve/create. The health of our thinking is directly correlated to the health of our channel to the source of that spontaneous happening of inspiration and knowing. The health of the community and it’s ability to create is effected by the health of the individual. Discord does occur in nature. There is always an expression of the energy, but it is not always the beautiful harmonious expression. Sometimes the expression is deformed, incomplete, dissonant. The same is expressed in a community of individuals. This is a great responsibility. The quality of my thoughts/energy, whether harmonious or discordant, are traveling out from me in concentric circles of influence. They are the mechanism of manifestation; individually, locally, globally, universally. We are not islands. Our thoughts are not private. They are forming our cells, our society, our reality. We are part of the problem or part of the solution. It’s not our job to know the solution. It’s our job to think in harmony with the universal energy and then the solution will spontaneously appear.
There is a vast ocean between knowing something and KNOWING it. I feel like I’ve crossed that ocean.
Thank you.
Persistence/Endurance-Week 13
Recognizing that I am a part of the whole is a simple exercise when my mind is peaceful and I can feel the flow. However, when I am moving through my life and I encounter the material challenges and the corresponding belief that there is not enough and therefore I am not enough; the reality of my disconnection is painfully clear. The Christmas season, for most of my adult life, has been a time when I feel inadequate. In order to make everything appear as though I am fine and life is good, I usually pull a rabbit out of the cash machine hat and do financial harm to myself in the name of not giving my loved ones less. So, needless to say, the timing of this weeks lesson is synchronistic. How do I believe and keep faith when my bank account has dwindled and my generosity of spirit is met with low returns? How do I break out of these deeply rooted patterns of belief? My dream board feels like a dream, not a potential future. Repeating the words, reading Og, my shapes and colors…they all feel like a game right now. I do not expect the channels I enrich to be the source, but I put a lot of time and energy into those channels. They are what is currently available to me and I’m tired and I earnestly want more for myself and my children. There was a time when I leaned into this principal with an open heart. I firmly believed that there was a way and I would find it. Then I lived through the most difficult season of my life and the way that revealed itself was to lose everything and accumulate debt and have to rely on my family to put a roof over our heads. Operator error? Apparently. I realize a lot of people use this space to offer positive encouragement or document how great their experience is and I hope that is what this space becomes for me, but I am nothing if not authentic and this is what I think and how I feel tonight. I truly hope I “come to an understanding of the beauty, the grandeur, the transcendental opportunities” placed at my disposal, but until then I will be the bull that keeps auditioning for it’s execution. I will persist.
Week 12-Fresh Eyes
There has been a good and difficult process taking place as I align with my purpose in life. Understanding who I am and what I want in life is causing changes to manifest all around me. My priorities are becoming crystal clear and my path is becoming easier to see. Unhealthy and inauthentic people are self selecting out of my life and I’m drawn to truly loving and supportive relationships with the people who really want good things for me. While these growing pains aren’t easy, they aren’t debilitating the way they could be if I wasn’t moving towards a free and vital life. My DMP is changing to align more clearly with my PPN’s. It’s starting to look more cohesive and clear. More like me.
I’m visiting my dad in Florida this week. His eightieth birthday is in 2 days. It’s been a good respite from my daily responsibilities and an opportunity to reconnect with my family. I’ve realized how high my stress level has been and the warm sunny weather has been so rejuvenating to my spirit. I can see the simplicity and beauty in the keys for week 12 and feel closer to truly internalizing this knowledge. The past 12 weeks of this class have felt like treading water with ankle weights on. I’ve learned a lot about who and what I’ve been allowing to create drag in my life and I look forward to “walking unencumbered” through the remaining weeks.
Week 11-Waking Up
In the past couple weeks, I’ve been considering whether to change my DMP and PPN’s. I’ve made the decision to do a rewrite. It’s not that the outcomes are drastically different, but a fog has cleared and I am more present to what I truly want and why I want it. The keys this week are a little off for me. They smell too much like “prosperity gospel.” I understand the philosophy and the underlying truth resonates with me, but when Haanel writes of “those fortunate natures” in #21, he loses me. I don’t know one person who fits that description. I know people who work really hard to present themselves as effortlessly successful in all things and hide anything that falls short. I know of organizations that promote the idea that if you always think and do the right thing, the difficulties of the weak and faithless won’t touch you. This is spiritual elitism and it ignores the complexity of our interrelationship with each other, our ecosystems, and our planet. I know that the ease and prosperity of my life is built on a foundation of exploitation and greed. The land I live on is not my people’s land. I am a citizen of a conquering nation. The clothes I wear, the gas in my car, the gold in my electronics are dripping in blood. The prosperity of my home state of Minnesota is at the cost of the pollution of our land and rivers. My county has had one of the highest cancer rates in the country due to our proximity to the Koch brothers refinery, 3M, and a nuclear plant. There has been a generational wealth created for the people who benefited (and continue to benefit from these places) and a lot of them sit in church and thank God for blessing them and their children. I don’t want to contribute to a culture that celebrates healing and success and diminishes the reality of those who are not finding the cure or the financial breakthrough they earnestly desire. We are not children. We can hold space for the complexity of cause and effect. That being said, there is also beauty in these words and I am practicing stating clearly “whatsoever things” I earnestly desire with confident expectation and firm demand. I just won’t do it with my eyes closed.
Week 10-Visualize
I’ve lived in my imagination most of my life. As a child, daydreaming and imaginative play were my life. As I grew older, living vicariously through the characters in novels was my obsession. I could feel and experience life in any time or place in the universe through written words. The bigger the book or the longer the series, the better! The visualization exercise for this week is child’s play for me. I see it. Plain as day.
The challenge has always been the connection. I haven’t been able to complete the circuit. Yet.
Creative projects, digging in deep to a design project. These things bring me closer. They energize me and inspire me to create more. Yoga and sex create opportunities for integration of body, mind, and spirit. They fortify me and help me to deepen my connection to life.
I think in terms of color and movement and feeling. Vibrations. Light. Shadow. When I need to communicate my feelings, I have to translate the color and images into words and they fall flat out of my mouth. Logic looks like structures, outlines, sequences, patterns. When I begin a project, I have to go all the way to the beginning of the sequence. I need to build or rebuild the foundation and then set all the dominoes in their place. When my heart is heavy, thinking through a problem becomes nauseating. Navigating life is sometimes overwhelming to me. The old patterns are strong, retreat has always been my response to distress. When I retreat, I reject connection. This is the essential struggle for me.
Harmony. Living in harmony. Leaning in when I’m distressed. Lean into what? Whom? I feel like I’ve run the gamut on that one and come up empty-handed. I’m reading the keys. Translating them into sequences, patterns, vibrations. What does it feel like to live these words. What does it look like to be in harmony? What does it mean to be heart-broken or disappointed and still be confident in your expectations?
The parable of the two wolves is rarely told in its entirety. When the elder answers the child’s question about which wolf survives, the common end to the story is “the one you feed.” The end that is rarely told and resonates with me is. You must feed both wolves. If we don’t learn how to love and care for (feed) our shadow selves, the dark wolf will grow hungry and desperate. We must love the darkness for it shows us the stars.
I continue to sit. To exercise. I’m practicing the law of relaxation. I can’t yet imagine how my future self-will integrate adversity and continue to thrive, but I believe it is possible and the answers will come as I continue to focus. Growing intuitively towards the light. Earnest desire, confident expectation, and firm demand.
Week 9- Just Imagine…
This week my mental diet created some major cravings for mean and nasty thoughts. Life has a plentiful supply of challenges for me to show me exactly how toxic my mind is. Old resentments, that I didn’t think I gave much attention to, have been a constant under the surface poisoning my mind like a slow underground leak of toxic chemicals into an aquifer. I’ve given it thought, brought my mental awareness to it. I visualized letting the hate out of my veins. There is an endless supply, it doesn’t run out. That’s how darkness works. It’s voracious.
“I am whole, perfect, strong, powerful, loving, harmonious, and happy.”
I want to experience the connection. There are moments of real happiness that are beginning to knit together into a better life. My focus is getting stronger. I’m not interested in situations that won’t bring me closer to truth. I hear the discord in the words that aren’t grounded in truth. Like a roller coaster pulling so hard to reach the apex, I feel closer and closer to the tipping point. I’m nervous and excited for the rest of the wild ride.
Week 8-No Trespassers
My love for procrastination is dying a fast and uneventful death. It’s just gone. I’m still making choices about how I want to spend my time, but I skip right over the resistance and the mental anguish. Without giving it thought, the thing is done. Television hasn’t been a big time consumer for me for awhile. I work evenings or I’m supporting my children at their activities. There are a few shows that I really like to watch, but I can set them aside for sick days or snow days. An occasional movie with my love is a nice way to spend the evening together after a busy Saturday at work. I’m careful about who and what I give my time to. I had a meltdown/tantrum a month ago, because I wasn’t taking responsibility for myself and managing my time and energy. Since then, I’ve brought more awareness to my boundaries. The only person I’m really willing to go the extra mile for is myself. I give lovingly and authentically to others, but I need the extra right now. I’m thriving on it. I’m not closed off to new connections, but I’m “keeping the door shut…to every element that seeks admittance with no definite helpful end in view.” That is a big paradigm shift. In the past, being loving meant being available and willing to give at a moments notice. I had become dispirited by the deficit that had accumulated in my relationships. I realize that not only were my actions and expectations unsustainable, but I had attracted a lot of selfish people. My life feels full and the relationships that I invest in feel healthy. I feel good about going to my job, because I see it for what it is and I “no longer expect reciprocity from the channels I enrich.” I have bigger plans. I’m entering the flow. Everyday things are happening to confirm my path, broaden my perspective, and see more clearly. I have more to say, but that’s enough for now.
Peace-
Jodi
A Brand New Day 