Joyful Mission News

Born This Way...

2011-12-07T11:08:00.000-08:00

I was a weird little girl. When I was small I had an “imaginary” friend named, Thomas, who went everywhere with me. I have a lot of memories of riding around in the back seat of my Mom’s car, enjoying long conversations with my magical friend.

When I was four Thomas gave me two important directives for my life. He told me that I am here to teach alchemy and that I am to go out into the world and teach only love.

Those two statements rolled around in my head my entire youth. My journey to becoming a teacher of alchemy and love has been a long and sometimes convoluted one. (I didn’t even know what alchemy meant until I was about 30!)

Over time, after being bankrupt, divorced, losing a house, getting my car repossessed, and struggling for many years with finances and, finally learning how to gain the financial “upper hand”, I naturally grew into being a teacher of alchemy.

But the teaching love part was hard.

I confess, I’m still learning about love and relationships.

One of the aspects of love that I have always struggled with is the notion of unconditional love. As child with huge religious fantasies and a deep love of martyrdom and sacrifice I cognitively understood the concept of unconditionally loving someone.

In my very dramatic mind, I could easily conjure up fantasies of being smacked in the face and then graciously turning my other cheek while whispering, “I love you” to my victimizer. (I told you I was a weird kid.) In my innocence, I thought that was how you unconditionally love someone.

Of course, that was before I learned to love myself. (Now I would lovingly kill anyone who treated me that way.)

When I became a mother, my understanding of love moved to a level that, still to this day, exceeds my cognitive ability to understand and certainly defies my ability to articulate. The love I feel for my children is bigger than my heart, larger than my body and stretches way beyond the rational confines of my mind. Mother Love is this unending ribbon of light and love that I will dance upon through all my days here in this lifetime and beyond…

But is it unconditional?

I think it is as unconditional as it will get in my limited human expression. I am certain that I will always love my children, but are definitely places that come from my own human conditioning that give me pause for thought.

For example, my Dad was the first person to go to college in his family. He went to Marshall University on the GI Bill while working full time and starting a family with two small children and taking care of a third child from his previous marriage. Working hard to get ahead is a big deal in my family.

I now have four teenagers living in my house. (Yes, they are all mine.) The oldest two are in college, one at a four year school and the other in junior college. I would be lying if I said that I am thrilled that my oldest daughter is choosing an Associates degree over a Bachelor’s degree. Oh, and did I mention that she’s moving in with her boyfriend at the ripe old age of 19???!!!

I’ve really had to wrestle with my own judgments about my daughter’s choices. And I feel guilty that I’m so thrilled about my oldest son’s success in college and I’m proud of his “A” average (…like I’m the one who did all the work to earn the A’s, right?).

And now, my youngest son, who is sixteen, is talking about joining the military and not going to college at all…more stretches for the human limits of my heart…

Aaaaahhh….but there is still My Great Hope…my middle daughter wants to go to M.I.T. and get a double major in engineering and design.

Please know that my tone here is kind of self-mocking. I don’t think that I love my children any less because of their choices but I do feel that I am still attached to how they show up for their own lives, like it’s really any of my business!!!!

And, I do believe that my judgments about their choices does lend a certain subtle “conditional” slant to the way I love them. (And yes, I can hide behind the idea that I just want what’s “best” for them and this is why I’m reacting, but that’s not really true. I do still have a charge on wanting to be viewed as a “good” Mom by others and, of course, we all know that “good” mother’s have children who get Ivy League educations and all the other mothers are just “average”, right?)

AAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH!

Of course, I’m talking about my Mother Love which is the easiest and, arguably, the most powerful kind of love on the planet. If I’m still struggling with conditionality related to how I feel about my kids, imagine how challenging it can be to be “unconditional” with our lovers, our other family members and friends.

This is why I love Human Design so much! Human Design is truly a powerful tool to help you understand others and to see that so much of what we judge, criticize and even dislike people for, is often just an expression of their personal energy, or the dynamics of your composite energy and…

IT’S NOT PERSONAL.

Let me share some examples with you. (You might find that you have some of your own examples in your life, too.)

I have a friend who is extremely powerful by design. If you look at his Human Design chart you would see that he is all about bringing change to the world. He is driven by opinions, provocative, emotional, and he’s not designed to initiate. He’s a Generator with an undefined Throat Center and needs to wait to be recognized by the people who are ready to honor and value the change he is here to share with the world.

He’s also doubtful and suspicious by nature so he thinks most of what I do is Woo-Woo-Hooey.

Most people think this guy is an arrogant *****. But that’s because they don’t understand his place in the Human Puzzle.

Let me explain.

All of humanity is like an amazing puzzle with 7 billion (or more) pieces. A puzzle is only as beautiful as the conglomerate of its pieces.

If you have dogs or small children, you know that puzzle pieces get torn or otherwise mangled. (Or, if you are a Manifesting Generator with an open Root Center and the urge to complete the puzzle and your frustration gets the better of you, some pieces get sort of smashed into an incorrect spot because you can’t be bothered to find the right one…)

When the pieces of the puzzle are torn or missing, it affects the full expression of the puzzle. Each one of us is a crucial piece in the Puzzle of Humanity. And, even though in relative comparison, each piece seems small, we cannot come together and express the full magnificence of humanity if some of our pieces are torn or missing. We are all hugely significant.

When we don’t allow each other to be the fullest expression of ourselves as our Magnificent Selves, we, in essence, are mangling and tearing pieces of the Human Puzzle.

Here’s the deal.

Not everyone is designed to be nice. Some people are moody, emotional, provocative, bossy, critical, wimpy, nurturing, sweet, compulsive, impulsive, obsessed or lacking in focus by Design.

Some people are here to experience all that life has to offer. Others are designed to stay at home and cook big pots of stew and kiss boo-boos. Some of us are designed for adventure. Others are here to maintain the status quo. Some of us have direction and we know it from the start of our lives. Others of us are here to experience all the permutations and directions that life offers us.

Some people are easy to get along with and like. Others are more challenging.

And we all play a crucial role in the Human story.

And being loved for who we are…warts and all…is something we all deserve.

The mechanics of personality and even the mechanics of how we interact in relationship are not personal. It’s just energy and we can’t necessarily control the energy.

Be we can control our response to it. That part IS personal.

I would not love my children with the same degree of openness and willingness to allow them to be the fullest expression of who they are if I didn’t understand their unique piece of the puzzle.

According to Human Design, my oldest son is subject to the expectations of others. He is also here to be a leader and a change agent. But I will never know if I really see him for who he is or as a projection of my own expectations. I have to work doubly hard with him to allow him to own his own accomplishments (and failures).

My oldest daughter is designed to learn about life through experimentation. Falling down and getting back up is crucial for her to become the very wise woman she is well on her way to becoming.

My youngest son is emotional, moody, romantic and nurturing. He is the Incarnation Cross of Laws and has a life story about taking care of others and preserving rules and values for the greater good of the whole. The military might be a great place for him to have a consistent way to take care of people.

My middle daughter is designed to question her lovability. She might really want to go to MIT or she might unconsciously know that would “please” me. As a mother, I am working hard to detach from her choices so she can make the right choices for herself, not the ones she thinks will make me love her more. I already love her madly.

And my baby is designed to be intense, manage and guide others and to think about things in new and unique ways. Her energy is very different from my other kids and I know we’re going to have a delicious adventure together!!!

Knowing these little tidbits about my children (and more…) allows me to support them in the natural unfolding of who they truly are and who G-d designed them to be. I am grateful for this knowledge because it helps me transcend my own parenting baggage and serve as a better steward for these precious souls who have entrusted me with their care.

As we enter the holiday season, I invite you to remember the Puzzle of Humanity and the unique role each one of us plays in completing the puzzle.

Take this time to ask yourself how you can love yourself, your friends, your lovers, your family and even strangers more deeply, more “unconditionally”. And then celebrate the immense and breath-taking diversity of All of Us.

Pretty frickin’ awesome, isn’t it???

Compassion

2011-08-16T10:27:00.000-07:00

I’m a bit under the weather today with a high fever and a very sore throat. Thank goodness my kids are here to help me with my rambunctious toddler. I have had the luxury of being able to “crash” in bed for a few hours while my Motrin kicked in.

Today I want to share with you my second insight from our Sacred Ceremony this weekend. This one is a little more personal and I hope that it speaks to your heart.

The first day of our ceremony, we went down to the ocean in Galveston, Texas. We started at Galveston State Park, a reasonable developed ocean front park. The park has toilets, “rinse off” showers and a nice little headquarters.

While Jim was filling the pipe and saying his prayers, a fledgling bird landed on the fence by us. He was scraggly and kind of ragged looking. He appeared hot and parched and when I observed him I was immediately reminded of the horrific photos I’ve been watching on the news about the drought and famine in Africa.

It has been estimated that over 600,000 children alone will die from starvation and dehydration. Many mothers will make 100 mile treks while significantly weakened by starvation and thirst with babies on their backs seeking resources to keep their children alive.

I’m not feeling well today and taking care of my child feels very difficult. Can you imagine trying to carry a hot, hungry child across the desert while you yourself are barely able to move…?

During the ceremony I watched my own little daughter dance and leap around in the waves, her chubby, healthy little hands wide open, welcoming life into her heart and spirit. When we were done playing in the waves, she took an almost 10 minute “rinse off” shower, enjoying the fresh water running over her head. Then we returned to the car and drank fresh, cool water from clean water bottles.

Even though we are facing a serious drought, water is everywhere. So is safety, food, shelter and air conditioning. We are lavishly abundant, even if we believe we’re struggling economically. We live in a reality that is extremely supportive, privileged and safe by global standards.

But we are going to have to make some radical changes if we want to keep living this way. Balance and respect for nature were the messages that Jim got and shared with us in yesterday’s video and this is crucial.

But there is another piece that is also important if we are going to create a new Era of Sustainable Peace.

We must be actively compassionate.

I was reading a Facebook post yesterday that said something to the effect that “I’m happy now that I’ve stopped reading the news.”

I agree that being happy and sharing a joyful abundant vibration with the world is also an important part of making the world a better place. Let’s face it, the world doesn’t need any more suffering. But, ignoring reality isn’t going to change the world. If you are solid in your joy, your inner harmony will not be destroyed by the truth of the outer world. In fact, you could use “negative” news to serve as a catalyst for creating something different…something better.

I often tell my students that if you don’t know what you want in life, take what you don’t like right now and imagine it 180 degrees different.

You can do the same for the news. If you don’t like what you see on the news, imagine it 180 degrees different. What would the world look like if we were all well-fed, educated, safe, healthy and supported? Take a minute and imagine it.

In my book, Inside the Body of God, (http://www.amazon.com/Inside-Body-God-Karen-Curry/dp/0982780346/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1313514823&sr=8-1) I write about how the human body is a perfect metaphor for the Divine. There are parts of our body that are “helper” cells and other parts that are here to “detox” and “clean up” what is not healthy in the body.

We are all like cells in the God Body. Each one of us has a specific role and function and each one of us is equally important. What if our role as lavishly abundant people on the planet is to “help” some of the other cells in the God Body? What if we are to “detox” and “clean up” starvation, drought, war and poverty?

The body is only as healthy as its sickest cells. When we are ill, our body reacts to remove the sickness in order to restore health.

In truth, we are not abundant until we are all abundant. Starving, dying children on the planet need our help. For example, f they are not given foot, they may become vulnerable to militant groups who WILL feed them.

And train them to shoot guns and commit terrorist acts.

The pain and suffering of a mother who loses a child or children to starvation impacts us all, even if we are not aware of it.

How different would all of our lives be if the whole planet was abundant?

As lavishly abundant people with water bottles and “rinse off” showers, we have an obligation to do what we can to share our abundance with the world. In a world where water and rice are precious, precious commodities, a dollar can save a life.

We must take care of each other. We cannot turn away from our Divine Siblings.

If you’d like to start making a difference today click here:

http://www.wfp.org/

More soon!

Love,

Karen

Surrender!!!!!

2011-08-11T06:29:00.000-07:00

The call from Spirit is powerful and always exciting when it’s confirmed and echoed by other people. I was first inspired to invite Jim Tree to Texas to conduct a sacred pipe ceremony after receiving a very powerful dream.

In my dream I was standing on top of a mountain plateau overlooking a lush green valley. My two-year-old daughter, Ayelet, and Jim were with me. We were standing around a large fountain that we could not possible reach across, yet, in my dream, the three of us were able to reach across the circumference of the fountain and as soon as our hands connected, water began flowing from the center, overflowing the edges of the fountain and creating a waterfall into the valley.

Later that day, Ayelet, who is by nature a precocious imp, began to chant, “Jim Tree is coming. Jim Tree is coming” over and over. When I shared all of this with Jim, he decided that, in spite of the warm temperatures, it was time to fly to Houston and get to work.

The prospect of ceremony is sometimes tricky. There is a temptation to want to direct ceremony, to use it as some form of “magic” to create what we want. But the true purpose of ceremony is not for us to dictate the end results, but rather for us to align with Divine Order.

It’s kind of ironic that as our consciousness evolves, we move from being “victims” of our consciousness to surrendering to Divine Order.

There are four stages in consciousness evolution. While we like to think linearly, the truth is all of us go back and forth through these stages of consciousness evolution and it is quite normal for you to experience several stages of consciousness simultaneously.

This is the nature of evolution.

The Four Stages:

Stage One: Your Reality Creates You
In this first stage of consciousness, we are deeply conditioned by the collective, the world around us. Our beliefs, our thoughts, our actions all flow from a belief that our creative capacity is limited to creating a reaction to the world around us.

Our creativity is in navigating our way through challenges and situations that we feel powerless to control. Who we are, what we feel, what we create is dependent on luck, fate and is all determined by a source outside of ourselves.

For most of us, our conscious evolution journey begins here. Our goal in this first phase of awareness is to begin to clear our conditioning, old patterns, thought forms and habits that keep us entrained to a powerless mentality.

Stage Two: You Create Your Own Reality
During Stage Two we begin to remember our true creative capacity. We learn that our thoughts, our emotions, our mindset, our beliefs and our expectations create our reality. Using the basic "grammar" of creation, we begin to create something new and desirable in our world.

This is the phase taught to us in the movie "The Secret". It is during Stage Two that we focus on our personal reality and move more deeply into a state of abundance consciousness. We learn to focus and control our minds and master our emotions and use both to deliberately and consciously create.

Stage Three: We Co-Create Our Reality
During Stage Three, after experimenting with deliberate creation, we begin to realize some very important things:

1.   There is a greater force helping us create and sometimes things work out bigger and better than we intend. Miracles happen to us every day and we give up having to know "how" something is going to happen. We begin to take bigger leaps of faith with our creative capacity.

2. Sometimes things don't turn out at all like we intend but there seems to be a Divine Plan playing itself out. Sometimes we don't know why a creation "fails", but we begin to understand that, in spite of this, the Divine Plan is good and the results are part of something bigger than ourselves.

3. Our awareness of our creative capacity deepens and we realize that everything in our outer reality is created by us. The things in our personal reality are personal creations and the things in our global reality are a result of projections in collective consciousness. We co-create our reality with our Divine Siblings.

4. We come to realize that, as creative beings, if we don't like our collective creation, we can join together with our Divine Siblings and with intention, co-create something different.

This more expansive understanding of collective consciousness and the power to co-create, compels us to join together in the face of challenges on the planets, like earthquakes and oil spills and co-create in consciousness a different and more abundant outcome
.
Truly, this is an exciting stage for us to enter into. Just go to Facebook or any of these social media forums and see the growing quantity of opportunities for you to join with your Divine Siblings and co-create an abundant New World.

Stage Four: God Creates Reality Through You
The fourth stage marks a complete return to your natural state prior to being conditioned. It is a state that is created after all your old beliefs and conditioning is released and is maintained by three key creation tools:

1.   Meditation is vital for Stage Four. Meditation, in whatever form works for you, keeps your channel to your expanded awareness and Divine Intent open and flowing.

2. Maintaining a prayerful state is also important in Stage Four. Each moment can be expressed by gratitude and an acknowledgment of Divine Order and abundant perfection.

3. A clear intention to allow the Divine to work through you helps keep your energy and attention focused on being present to the Divine working through you.

In the Fourth Stage, you realize that you are a uniquely created being and that your highest purpose in the fulfillment of the Divine Plan is to express the truth of who you are in the fullest way possible. The Self in its pure, unconditioned state is intended to serve God by manifesting its full potential into form.

Each moment in this phase is a moment in the flow. You know that you are fully supported and you simply obey the truth of the moment and your awareness if finely honed on the Now. There are no worries, no fears, no lack, only faith and complete surrender.

A sample prayer for Stage Four might be:

I am an emissary of the Divine.
I am a child of Light.
I am an unlimited aspect of the Universe.
Because G-d is abundant, I am abundant in all ways.
Because G-d is powerful, I am powerful in all ways.
Because G-d is creative, I am creative in all ways.
Because G-d is all-knowing, I am always clear.
Because G-d is omnipotent and omnipresent, I am always in the right place at the right time fulfilling my Divine Purpose.
I pray that each moment, my hands, my body, my mind, my spirit, my Light and my essence be used in the service of the Divine.

A sample intention for Stage Four might be:

I intend to joyfully allow the Divine to easily create through me each and every minute of my day.

We all bop between the different phases, but you will realize that as your consciousness evolves, you tend to spend more time in one particular phase.

As we stand on the cusp of our time together in ceremony, let us keep in our awareness that we are in partnership with each other and our beautiful earth. It is our responsibility to flow with the changes in a way that is harmonious and in alignment with what needs to happen to restore us all to balance.

We might see rain. We might receive messages that help us understand our role in serving as Stewards for a new Era of Sustainable Peace. We might gain insights into what we need to do to take better care of ourselves, our earth and each other.

No matter what the outcome, we will be humbled by the magnificence of the Divine (as always…)

Please join us in consciousness on Sunday, August 14 at 10:30 am Central Time. During this time we will be at Hamilton Pool in Austin, Texas finishing our ceremony. Please hold the intention that we all align with restoring balance in our lives, our lifestyles and in alignment with the Earth and all of her precious resources and inhabitants.

We’ll be sharing photos, videos and more insights and updates along the way!

Love,

Karen

The New Normal

2011-08-10T10:48:00.000-07:00

We are 32 inches behind in rain fall here in Texas. The weather people are calling it an “exceptional” drought. That may or may not be true depending on which books about global warming you read. Many experts say that this may be the “new normal” as we see shifts in global climate.

It’s hard when we face things that are “not normal”. Our old patterns and habits often don't meet our new needs and we're left confused, frightened and overwhelmed.

It doesn't have to be that way. On Friday, Saturday and Sunday of this week, I will be accompanying Jim Tree-Gilmore as he conducts a traveling Sacred Pipe Ceremony. There are many inspirations behind this journey that we will both share. As we begin the preparation for this journey, we will be blogging as well as sharing video and photographic updates.

On the final day we invite all of you to join with us in setting an intention to align with Divine Order as we seek new ways to navigate the "new normal" of our planet. Our intention is to deepen within all of us the awarenesses and energies necessary to promote community, sustainability, compassion and a new era of peace on this planet.

I hope you will stay tuned and join us!

Below is the first installment of our blog postings. Today's message if from Jim. Enjoy and please feel free to share with others!

*************

As we get ready to start on our journey across parts of Texas in response to a call for ceremony, to hopefully get assistance for the extended heat wave and drought that is currently scorching much of the central United States, I wanted to share some of the information with you all that will help you in your participation in this event.

First, why are we doing it? It is not just because there is a desperate need for relief here, that would apply to much of the US right now for many reasons. Drought, flooding, extended heat waves, (today we are at day 38 of continuous plus 100 deg. F in this area of Texas) destruction from winds, storm, tornadoes…and soon hurricanes. So, once again, why here and why now?

The answer is simple, but also the key to understanding the nature of all effective ceremony. This intervention was not instigated by me or any other human, but by Spirit through the messenger of the Sacred Pipe. As with all ceremonies that I conduct with this ancient Sacred Pipe, I wait until I receive directions and information before I attempt to set out on such a course. I began to feel the tug of the messenger about a month ago, a tug that I have become familiar with. Trust me, the last thing I wanted to do during August was to take a trip to Huston Texas…I live in the mountains of N.W. Montana where today the temperatures are in the high 70’s…not the 108 plus we are experiencing here today. But, when The Boss says go I go.

So I began to pray and ask for guidance as to the timing of the trip and through circumstance, coupled with inspiration, bought the ticket to fly down. There have been several confirmations to encourage me that we are at the right place at the right time to do this ceremony. (I want to invite you if you have not already heard it, to listen to my teaching about how to release the full power of ceremony. You can find a free recording to download or listen to at this web site, http://www.jimtree.com/booksandrecordings.html just scroll down to recording # 4 and enjoy)

So now that you know what is required to have a powerful and effective ceremony, let me give you some more understanding of the history and workings of a “Traveling Pipe Ceremony.”Remember, Nicholas Black Elk of the Lakota said decades ago, “The power of a ceremony is in the understanding of it.”

There are many different kinds of Sacred Pipe ceremonies; most where you smoke the Pipe right after you fill it. But there are some where you fill it and then put a plug in the bowl to protect the prayers that have been put into it because you will not be finishing the ceremony by smoking it until sometime later.

Examples of this kind of ceremony would be during a Sundance, some sweat lodges and what we call a traveling ceremony. (In the old days it was called a walking ceremony because after filling the Pipe it would be carried to the final destination by someone who took special care to not let the Pipe come apart or that any of the mix in the bowl might spill out. The Pipe was not carried on horseback because of the increased chance of a mishap.)

In this particular traveling ceremony, we will fill the Black Thunder Pipe, a Pipe that is directly connected the the Thunder Beings who control the weather for the Great Mystery, at the Gulf of Mexico near Galveston, TX., where the bowl will be plugged with sage after it has been touched to the ocean. This is to connect the ocean water with the Pipe which will, as we travel on, connect to the sky water and then to the earth water. (The ceremony ends after we smoke the Pipe near Austin on Sunday morning and touch the tip of the bowl to water that comes up from the aquifer there in a special sink hole that has been a sacred site for centuries.)

It is important that we know who we are teamed up with in the spirit realm when we are doing ceremonies like this. In this case the spirit that has been assigned by the Great Mystery to assist us is one known as the 5^th wind, or the whirlwind. The Thunder Beings are in several different forms, all being what are often called contrary spirits. There is a name for them in every tribe,The Lakota call them Heyoka, the southwest tribes call them Hohocum, the Tsalagi (Cherokee) call them the "Ayvdaqualosgv". No matter what the name, they all work with the weather in various capacities. The whirlwind is the younger brother to the 4 winds of the 4 cardinal directions. Those winds are stable and only come with specific jobs from their assigned direction. i.e North wind brings the winter wind, etc.

The 5^th wind however has no assigned direction or defined action. He comes in the form of the dust devil, the tornado, the cyclone and the hurricane. He comes from where ever he wants and travels in whatever direction he wants. I believe this is why he has been assigned to help us. We need unusual intervention with the weather. We need gentle continuous rains and winds to cleans and refresh the scorched land. We do not need, from our human perspective, a hurricane but it is not up to us what to even pray for. This is directed by Spirit as well. So, we do not come to the ceremony with preconceived ideas of the outcome, but to take our part along side of the spirits that will attend, the 5^th wind in particular, and add our part of being in harmony with the great circle of life.

As a form of confirmation and encouragement from the Great mystery, there is a group of people up in Montana that held a drumming group last Sunday. At my request they drummed the prayers for the ground water in Texas and asked for assistance from the 5^th wind. They were in a teepee up in the mountains and there was no wind outside. As they drummed the prayers into our mother earth there was a dust devil suddenly just outside the door of the Teepee, a very good sign.

So as you prepare to join in on the privilege of being part of the traveling ceremony I want to remind you to have a humble attitude and be sensitive to nature for direction in your individual part of this ceremony. Follow your intuition and the confirmations shown through nature all around you. It takes all of us doing and saying the right thing at the right time to have a good effect on this situation. Please be encouraged to write in your comments and massages received to this blog site so we all can share in your contribution.

In closing I will share a bit of the recent history of the Thunder Pipe and some traveling ceremonies that we have done.

7 year drought in Colorado, Montana and Arizona. In the spring of 2003 I was directed to do a traveling ceremony for Montana because of the drought there. I loaded the Pipe up on the Flathead reservation at the canyon where the Thunder Bird has her nest, plugged the bowl and traveled 200 miles south to a spot on the Bitterroot River just south of the Great Medicine Tree of the Salish. I finished the ceremony there by smoking the Pipe while standing in the river then touching the bowl into the river and pointing the stem to the sky to re-connect the earth water to the sky water. I was told that it would start to rain in 48 hours and would continue until fall. It did.

In the summer of 2005 the Midwest was in a drought. I was told to go to the annual Gathering of the Pipe keepers in Pipestone Minnesota in late July and teach anyone I met who were called by the Thunders the ceremony I was given to seek for rain. Usually at a gathering like this there might be 1 or 2 people who have been called by the Thunders, through dreams or being struck by lightning or who have died and come back. There were 11 there! We gathered by the 3 maidens at the sacred quarries and I passed on the template of the ceremony as it was given to me.

We all filled our thunder pipes and then plugged them to travel back to our home in every direction, one all the way to Hawaii. The clouds formed as we left and it rained for some days in Minnesota, but the clouds also followed every one home except for a woman who lived where they were having flooding. In her area the rains stopped and the floods went away, in every other case the rains came to the drought areas and refreshed the land.

Of course there was the big drought in Australia several years ago, the worst in over 100 years. I suggest you watch the u tube video about that one to save my poor fingers from typing anymore. http://www.jimtree.com/australia_video.html

The point is that this ceremony today is another that the great Mystery has called for and we are being asked to take part. Let’s do our part and contribute the unique gifts that we have been given to bring balance out of chaos, if it is not too late.

In closing I feel I must say that even though we are asking for rain and cooler temps, also for moderation in the upcoming hurricane season, it must be realized that the weather over the last 2 years in now the new NORMAL! We will have to adapt but this is also a way for us to learn how we as a race can help shape the new normal.

Blue Sky!
Jim Tree-Gilmore

What Are You For?

2011-07-25T21:00:00.000-07:00

My oldest son has an internship working on a documentary about the Gulf Oil Spill. He’s been asking me some great questions about consciousness and “being” in the world.

Last week he asked me a really good one. He said, “Mom, you talk a lot about where you put your energy and attention creates growth and results in your life. So, I was wondering, if you put your energy into fighting something, like for a good cause…say, for example, against the death penalty, are you actually helping or adding to the situation?”

What an important question!

We are at such a crucial time on this planet. We seem to be done clearing old patterns and traumas from the past. We’ve gotten a great start on collectively evolving our consciousness. I mean, you can buy the book ,”The Secret”, at Walmart!

As Lightworkers, we’ve fulfilled a lot of what we came here to do.

But now we are in an amazing and powerful place. When we remove old blocks, habits and patterns, we clear a space to create in an unlimited way. I’ve actually had a lot of friends and clients tell me that they feel overwhelmed and kind of lost in the vastness of the possibility of what we can create.

Our blocks, traumas and contrasting experiences have served us well by creating limits to make creation easier.

But, for many of us, getting rid of limits has left us with kind of a void, a vast potential filled vista that isn’t offering much for us to push against and define our creative space. It can feel sort of like being wrapped in a big amazing blanket of expansive nothingness.

And we are very well-trained to push against something.

It takes practice to create without resistance.

Remember Mickey Mouse as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice? If not, here is a reminder:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XChxLGnIwCU

It takes a while for Mickey to learn to use his magic correctly.

We’re kind of in the same place. We have tremendous creative powers but if we aren’t properly trained to use them, acting consciously with correct alignment, we can inadvertently create something different than what we intend.

It can be very subtle, like the difference between fighting against something versus working for something, or preventing something bad versus creating something good.

But these subtle differences can manifest vastly different results even if the intention is similar.

When we fight something, we are, first of all, resisting something. Resistance is a form of creative energy. When we resist something, we’re giving the resistance a LOT of energy and, if where we put our energy and attention is where we get results…AND we’re focusing our energy and attention on resistance, what are we getting more of…?

You got it! RESISTANCE!

Whew!

I’m going to try to keep this short and sweet. I’m going to be posting a lot of short creation “tweakers” over the next few weeks, to help us strengthen our creative core “muscles” and practice our magic to speed us towards mastery.

If you are fighting against something, you are energetically fighting for it. You are adding more energy against the “it” you’re fighting against because you are resisting it.

Instead of fighting against something, ask yourself what would you rather be experiencing instead. What would you like to have happen on our planet? Take your time and really see it in your minds eye and feel it in your heart.

Then find evidence that what you want to see is already happening.

Express your gratitude for what you have discovered and then continue to see the evidence that what you want is already here waiting for you right now.

This week has been a nasty week in the news. We have financial challenges, violence, drought and starvations and just downright mean militant behavior. It’s so easy to point fingers and be against what has happened.

I invite you to rethink your focus. Instead of blaming or resisting, take a few minutes to remind yourself that you intend to live in a world where all earth inhabitants are safe, well-fed, loved, nourished, supported, educated, celebrated and cherished. We intend to live on a planet where there is ample food, water, shelter, clothing and being healthy is a natural and normal state. We intend to live in a world where people honor diversity and love each other because each one of us is a vital piece of the puzzle of humanity.

Then search for evidence that this is already happening. Put your focus there. Express your gratitude and keep holding that vision.

If we are to create solutions to the challenges facing the world, we have to start first by getting our minds in order; creating the RIGHT thoughts that are in alignment with the POSSIBILITY of right action to follow.

Your thought forms and consequent words can create massive change. Imagine the power of people coming together with the intention to set things into motion by speaking and spreading empowered thought…

Our responsibility is to steadfastly focus on what we want to experience and then allow Divine Mind to create the inspiration and the circumstances for possibility into action. (Divine Mind is much better at working out the details!)

Here’s a cool link to the website of a friend of mine. His name is Jim Tree and he is a powerful prophet and spiritual teacher. Check out his predictions and then think about what kind of a world you want to live in. Our unified creative thoughts be powerful positive catalysts to a new world of sustainable peace for everyone.

http://www.jimtree.com/index.html

Enjoy!

Love,

Karen

Freedom is the Right of All Sentient Beings

2011-06-30T20:08:00.000-07:00

Happy Fourth of July! A celebration of freedom…

Planetary transits these last few weeks have left many of us wondering about our personal contributions to humanity and questioning how we can make a positive difference in the world. As we move towards the new moon and a powerful solar eclipse and finishing up solar transits in the Gate 15 (The Love of Humanity), the Gate 39 (Provocation) and moving into the Gate 53 (The Gate of Starting Things) in Human Design, our intention has been to start acting in ways that restore the flow of abundance in our own lives and in the world around us.

It is a time of renewing our commitment to making a positive difference in the world and truly expressing and invoking compassion for each other.

The news has been a nice example of this energy. On CNN.com they have been running a series of stories about human slavery in the world. Did you know that there are an estimated 10-30 million slaves on the planet at this time?

Horrific stories about rape being used as a weapon of war all over the world have also been featured prominently in the media. I have been reading these stories and working with my stunned amazement at the capacity human beings seem to have to treat each other terribly. (Of course, I also believe that our capacity to create an abundant world for everyone is unlimited!)

You may be wondering why I would read such stories. Many of us are taught by our spiritual teachers to ignore the news. It’s not “happy” and lowers our vibration.

Truly, I understand that.

But, I would also argue that nothing can lower our vibration and “take away” our happiness except our own consciousness. You can choose to be happy no matter what your situation and no matter what you read or even experience.

And, if we ignore what’s really going on out here, we miss an opportunity to create change.

One of the first books I ever read about awakening our creative potential was a small book by Charles Fillmore, one of the founders of the Unity Church of Christianity. Frankly, I don’t even remember the title of the book but in it he wrote about the power of what he called “denial”.

Charles Fillmore limped for most of his life as one of his legs was significantly shorter than the other. He had to wear special shoes and orthotics to compensate for this difference in leg length. During the course of Fillmore’s life, he “denied” that his leg was a problem and his leg actually grew several inches so that his limp was barely perceptible by the end of his life.

The principal of “denial” was an integral part of Fillmore’s teaching. Basically, Fillmore taught his students to deny that problems are real and consequently, the possibility of experiencing something different than the perceived problem can manifest.

I think there are two kinds of denial.

The first kind of denial is the dysfunctional kind of fear-based denial that keeps us from looking head on at a problem and handling it with faith and confidence that we are fully supported and there is an elegant solution (i.e. miracle) available to us. Sometimes we don’t want to see challenges because our mindset and belief systems are such that we don’t think we can handle the problem.

The real danger of this kind of denial is that it puts us into a kind of la-la fairy land existence that doesn’t empower us to make good choices. With this kind of denial, we can’t use the “negative” emotions from this experience to clarify and deepen our intentions to create something different.

Fearful denial is very different from the second kind of denial which is not so much “denial” as it is simply shifting your attention to a different aspect of a challenge and then focusing on a solution. You “deny” the situation your attention and energy, not as a way of avoiding it, but as a way of focusing on something better, a solution or ways to make change.

What we “deny” with this kind of denial is that pain and suffering of any kind is in alignment with Divine Abundance. We deny that rape, torture, slavery, oppression or poverty (to name a few) are fulfillments of our abundant potential. And we allow that there are other more abundant realities for us to manifest.

We also affirm that we have faith that something else is possible and we are empowered to create a new reality. This is a denial rooted in the understanding that abundance is the promise of the Universe. We operate from a place of complete trust and surrender to the true abundant nature of the Divine, knowing that a miracle is always at hand.

Some of the stories I read this week were very moving. One in particular was about a group of students and journalists who traveled the world with the mission of simply listening to the stories of war-rape victims all over the world.

These compassionate souls quietly held space for victims, not even necessarily sharing their stories with others. They just listened, turning each victims recounting into a sacred moment ripe for transformation. Many of these women (and men, btw) had been silent about their stories for years and this sacred sharing moment was the first time they had ever told anyone what had happened to them.

One of the many (many, many) reasons I love Human Design is that there is actually a complete, extensive energetic circuit in the Human Design body graph (Don’t know about Human Design? Check it out: http://www.humandesignforeveryone.com) that is all about the energy for sharing stories.

The human mind before the age of nine is designed to learn about values and the world through stories. In the archetype of humanity, we are designed to share our stories together to create a collective tapestry of all the rhythms, colors, experiences and adventures of mankind. When we stop listening to stories, our tapestry gets dull and monochromatic. We lose the depth of who we are.

Another essay I read was about rape victims during the Holocaust. In their book, "Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust”, authors Sonja M. Hedgepeth and Rochelle G. Saidel, share the stories of women who were horrifically raped during the Holocaust. While the stories and, obviously, the experiences of these women were beyond traumatic, the trauma has only been amplified by the Jewish academic community who has declared these stories as being “insignificant” because the numbers of rape victims pales compares to the number of people murdered…(???)

After years of keeping their stories to themselves, these victims are again being silenced.

When we silence victims, we not only delay their healing, but we also cut our collective consciousness off from a vital piece of the human creative process.

We have gotten into a funny habit in the metaphysical community with our denial of all things “negative”. We only want to hear “happy” things.

That’s nice. But if that’s what we’re working with, we’re missing a whole spectrum of reality and blocking our capacity to grow and evolve.

It’s natural to want to feel good. Feeling good is a prime directive of life. But when we experience pain and trauma, we can’t just leap to feeling good right away. Sometimes we have to get there step-by-step and the only way we get there is to work through our emotions and our stories.

And it doesn’t always look or sound pretty. (Or happy.)

Have you ever had the experience of trying to talk through a challenge with a friend and they shut you down, trying to get you to refocus on the positive?

I even know of a “technique” taught by a very influential personal growth “guru” that involves taking your attention off of a challenge and problem until a better solution appears.

Now, I know I’m walking on shaky ground here so keep rolling with me here.

There is a difference between a real story and a habitual patterned retelling of an event that you have allowed to define you. Sharing the story of your trauma is different than calling yourself a survivor of your trauma.

If you call yourself a Rape Survivor or an Incest Survivor you are stuck in your story and it isn’t a story anymore. It’s an identity. If your trauma has become your identity, then you are not evolving your story. You are trapped and each re-telling only anchors the story in your neuro-biology.

But simply telling your story, moving through it and giving yourself a chance to discharge some of the emotional energy around it, is crucial to the healing process. Emotions are energy in motion. If we aren’t allowed to freely express ourselves, the emotional energy doesn’t go away. It just shifts around, building up in the physical body or manifesting as challenges in other areas of your life, repeating in cycles until the energy finally shifts.

Being heard can be a powerful way to release the emotional energy of pain and suffering.

The Hopi Elders teach us that one of the first steps in creating a template in consciousness for a new Era of Sustainable Peace is for us to take care of each other and our relationships. I believe that to invoke this new era, we must first and foremost live with compassion for each other.

Listening is the primary step necessary to live compassionately. When we hear each other’s stories, our hearts open and our natural caring for each other grows.

Not only that, when we listen (Btw, did you ever notice that when you take the letters in the word “silent” you can make the word “listen”?), we become aware of the dark boundaries of human behavior. These stories inspire us in consciousness and in our physical realities to create a world in which these kinds of tragedies never happen again. Our rules and laws, heck, even America, is here as a result of the contrast people experienced.

If the European Americans had not experienced religious oppression, they may not have ever sought to create a new country where religious tolerance is legally protected.

If we don’t listen to stories about war crimes, rape or slavery (or other stories with a “negative vibe”), how are we going to know what needs to be nurtured, protected and evolved? One person’s nightmare can be the catalyst for a collective dream; the initiating sequence for the possibility of change...something better…

Sometimes knowing what we don’t want, is the best way to get clear about what we do want.

Yes, the trauma of your CNN.com news page can be draining and heartbreaking. And, of course, if you are already struggling with your own well-being, you don’t have to read each story word for word. You must take care of yourself first.

But what if there was a way to read the news and be empowered by it? What if you read the stories and, instead of cringing and turning away, you used these stories to clarify what you do want to see in the world and took a moment to hold a space for each story and each person who is a part of the story and then hold an intention or a vision of what you’d love to see manifest into form in the world?

Here’s an example. Right now Syria has been featured prominently in the news. There has been a tremendous amount of government sponsored violence and murder. Take a minute and imagine a Syria where all citizens are safe, where government is for the people and by the people and the police are trustworthy souls who genuinely want to uphold laws that are fair and democratic and everyone is empowered and abundant.

You don’t have to know how these things will be created. Enough awareness and contrast will create an energy in the world that will initiate the sequence of evolution, revolution and change. Your intention is an important start. Nothing has ever started on this planet without starting first in someone’s mind with a vision and an intention.

So, I end this very long blog post with this short gratitude.

Thank you to all of you who have honored the world with your stories. Thank you to all of you who have experienced trauma, oppression, repression, slavery and other horrors. Thank you to all of you who have listened and transmitted these stories to the world.

Without your stories and experiences, the possibility for real change would not exist.

Remember that where we put our energy and attention is where we get growth and results. Celebrate your freedom this weekend and the possibility of freedom will grow for the whole world.

Let’s hold a vision of every human being on this planet living in joyful freedom!

“Freedom is the right of all sentient beings.” - Optimus Prime, from the movie Transformers

Love,

Karen

LARPing, Anyone?

2011-05-24T11:54:00.000-07:00

I was working with one of my new website clients a few weeks ago. In my Sacred Website program I always start my clients off by encouraging them to visualize their ideal business, how much money they want to make, how many hours will they work each week and how it will feel to really be living their business dream.

This particular client, not unlike many of my clients, reported to me that she was having trouble imagining her ideal business. She said she was so locked into old beliefs about working hard for money that it was just impossible for her to really visualize a business that was easy, profitable and fun.

This email is NOT about business, so keep reading…

The real problem here was not related to her business. My client is suffering from a malady that afflicts many, if not most of us. She had lost touch with her imagination. The density of life had seduced her away from the realm of pure creative potential and rooted her in the linear world of “possible”.

Imagination is a natural part of our brain function. In fact, our imagination is the vehicle for our learning in our early years. Through stories and images we master basic concepts and even more advanced things like values and morals.

When we are young, our creative capacity rules our world. Have you ever had dinner with a four-year-old ballerina or Davy Crockett? Young children truly live in the imaginary realm. They aren’t just dressed up as ballerinas or wild-west heroes, they ARE what they are imagining themselves to be.

But, pretty soon on our journey of life, we get knocked down for dreaming too much or too big. How many times were you told to “get real” with your life? When did you first get the message to pare back your dreams and be…realistic?

Think about it. If someone calls you a “dreamer”, it’s not necessarily a compliment, is it?

But, if we’re not dreaming, how will we stretch and grow beyond our current reality? Take a minute and look around the room where you are reading this blog post. Everything you see started first as a thought or a dream in someone’s mind.

You’re probably reading this on a computer, right? If you are my age (or a wee bit older), if someone had told you, when you were 15 years old, that someday we would be typing messages to each other that would be delivered instantly on tiny, hand-held computers, would you have thought they were dreaming?

We can only create to the extent that our imagination allows us. And if we imagine beyond what our logical minds or our experience allows us, we are deeply conditioned to believe that what we imagine is “impossible” and therefore not possible for us to live or create.

We even have expressions such as, “I can’t even imagine…” and “impossible dreams…”

When we stop dreaming and allowing ourselves to imagine beyond our current life’s circumstances, we become like caged birds who accept that their cage is their home and natural habitat. We forget the flowers, insects, sweet fruit and sunshine. We accept our jail as reality and what we allow ourselves to experience becomes very dense and limited.

It’s no accident that when dictators and other totalitarian regimes take over a country, often the first thing they outlaw is art and any other forms of creative expression. When we shut down the imagination, we no longer dream of what it means to be free, or abundant, or joyful, or fulfilled, or powerful, or…the possibilities are only limited by your imagination…

The nature of the caged bird is to sing and dream of life beyond the cage. It is the consciousness of our dreams that create the golden templates for a new reality.

Not only for ourselves, but ultimately for the whole world.

Can you dream of a world that is limitlessly abundant, where all people have enough food, shelter, are safe and supported in fulfilling their Divine Potential in every way? Can you imagine a world of limitless possibility and abundance, an era of sustainable peace with resources that easily shared with everyone?

We can only create to the degree to which we imagine. Even that’s a bit limiting. We believe that we can’t create beyond what we can imagine. It’s an artificial boundary we’ve set for ourselves in the conscious awareness of our current reality. What if we were creative beyond even our wildest dreams?

Think about this for a minute…

What if you could imagine a reality that was unbounded by the “possible” and deeply rooted in the realm of “miracles”? What if we all held a belief that the non-linear and seemingly “impossible” was merely a daily occurrence in our reality? And that we didn’t have to know the “how” of something to make it possible? That all we had to do was imagine a potential outcome and trust that the “how” would be revealed to us in magical and amazing ways?

It could happen…

In the meantime, let’s all LARP.

For those of you who are older than 20, like me, LARP is an acronym for Live Action Role Play.

It’s a new concept for me.

Two weeks ago I picked my oldest son up from college and drove him home. On our way home, we passed a field full of tents and picnic tables. Grown men were running around with large foam rubber swords chasing each other around and having a pretty darn good time, it looked like.

As we drove by, my son yelped, “COOL…they’re LARPing!!”

“LARPing?” I asked.

“Live Action Role Playing,” he replied, rolling his eyes at me. (At what age do they stop rolling their eyes?)

I’ve thought about this LARPing thing a lot since then. I think it’s a pretty cool concept. Dress up and pretend you’re doing something fun, creative, delicious, passionate and juicy. Use your imagination and play hard with a bunch of like-minded people.

I’ve decided to LARP my imaginary life. I'm thinking this has to be a powerful way to help me remember my creative potential.

In my game, I live in an abundant world where the Universe perfectly conspires to bring me opportunities, circumstance, and synchronicities that perfectly match my abundant vibration.

Want to join me?

I have lots of room for my Divine LARPing Buddies!

http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=group_189859161062113&ap=1

Love,

Karen

Act Like a Baby!

2011-04-22T11:19:00.000-07:00

What’s the fastest way to create an abundant life?

Act Like a Baby!

Thank you all so much for responding to my survey that I sent out earlier this week. I was very touched by your responses and I’m carefully putting together some guest teachers and classes to address some of the areas of growth you requested.

One of the most common challenges people listed was frustration with life and feeling like every aspect of life is “not working”. Many of you said that in spite of knowing “what to do” and tending diligently to your “mindset”, abundance still seemed elusive.

All of these frustrations for many of us have been amplified over the last few weeks as Mercury has been retrograde. You may have noticed that communication, technology and agreements have not been working. You may have discovered “snafus” and mistakes that have made you feel like pulling your hair out or beating your head on your desk.

The purpose of Mercury Retrograde is not to drive you insane. It is a time when the energy of the planet asks us to go inside and to get clear about who we are, what we are doing and how we can best align in a joyful way with what is in our lives as we continue to grow and expand on more of what we’d like to be experiencing in our lives.

Contracts of all kinds get reviewed. Agreements are renegotiated. It’s a time to re-align our lives as we move forward and make new rules about how we want to live our life.

But, OMG, it can be a time of tremendous confusion and frustration. And, by all reports, this mercury retrograde cycle has been exceptionally intense.

Personally, during this time I flew across the country to speak at a “big” conference attended by 8 people, the airlines lost my luggage both ways, I got bumped off a flight and had to spend the night in Phoenix and almost didn’t find a hotel. I’ve had books go to press with the wrong files, lost some long-time friendships, renegotiated some agreements with some clients, my son broke his leg, had a huge chunk of money disappear out of my bank account for no reason, had a different huge chunk of money appear in my bank account for no reason, had checks get lost in the mail and have spent a LOT of time re-evaluating my own life and direction. I pretty much have felt like a total space cadet and have been sitting at my desk staring out the window with drool coming out of my mouth for 24 hours now…

Ugh.

All of these challenges bring us lessons and as I have listened to other people’s Mercury Retrograde horror stories and, of course, participated in my own, I realized that life will always have cycles of chaos and disaster. Order always comes from chaos and when we are faced with the unexpected the only thing we can do is laugh, get back up and keep going.

In other words, the best way to survive the ups and downs of life is to act like a baby.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfvp6zUqP5M

This is a video of my almost-two-year-old daughter taken last year when she just learned to walk. Notice how unsteady she is on her feet. Pay attention to her proud smile as she wobbles. Watch how, when she falls down, she simply gets back up and keeps walking.

She doesn’t quit. She doesn’t sit on the floor wondering what is wrong with her. She doesn’t even doubt herself. She just gets up and keeps going.

As I mentioned earlier, my 15 year-old-son broke his leg two weeks ago. This was the first major broken bone in my family. As a Mom, I was worried and concerned about my son and his pain. I thought he’d be scared and hurting.

As I anxiously drove him to the emergency room, he started calling and texting his friends bragging about his big fall. (He was trying to do a “180” on roller blades off the edge of a curb and missed the landing of his jump.) My oldest son called him and the two of them practically high-fived each other over the phone. Clearly, this was not a scary process. This kid was absolutely proud of his chaos.

Our lives are really just “movie-projections” of our consciousness. What we think, believe and feel about our lives will be projected out into our experience. We are actors in a story that we co-create with other souls and our Creator. (If you want to learn more about this, listen to this presentation: http://InstantTeleseminar.com/?eventid=12757593)

The purpose of our life story is to learn, experience and, ultimately, grow.

If you can imagine that your life is just a movie and you are an actor in the movie, then it becomes easier to see that the challenges we face in our lives are simply “scenes” that are vital to the overall plot and outcome of the story.

But, how easy it is to get trapped in a scene and think that a single horrific scene is the whole story!

Not only do we get trapped in the scene, we begin to define ourselves by this one piece of the story and suddenly, as a result of our constant attention and projection, the scene keeps repeating itself. Instead of sitting at the back of the theater watching a great movie with a bunch of your soul-friends and “high-fiving” each other for doing such a good job playing your respective parts, you get stuck in a scary hallucination that keeps going and going and going…

Instead of acting like resilient babies (or children), we cringe and hide like scared grown-ups.

For the sake of reclaiming our baby-like resilient qualities, let’s look at some key components of “baby consciousness” and learning strategies:

1. Babies are immersed in a world of learning. When a baby is focused on mastering a specific skill, their every moment, awake and asleep, is focused on achieving mastery.

2. A baby’s mastery is accelerated by constant feedback from family and friends. Positive correction and persistent reinforcement nurture and foster the growth of a child’s ability.

3. Children learn through play.

We can help ourselves master our world by remembering these key components:

1. In order to learn and grow, we must immerse ourselves in the world of learning. The Law of Focused Success teaches us that where we put our energy and attention is where we get results and growth in our lives.

If you want to create an abundant life, you have to immerse yourself in an abundant world. Surround yourself with people and circumstances that reflect your intended creation and mindset. Read inspiring information daily and develop a daily practice of visualization.

Visualize, not for the sake of creating a specific circumstance, but as a way of keeping your energy and enthusiasm high. Ultimately, the Universe knows best what circumstances and situations to bring you that are in alignment with your vibration and energy. Your job is to make your happiness an “inside” job by focusing on the things in your life that ARE good, that ARE working, that ARE beautiful and let the other stuff simply fall away by attrition.

2. Recognize that you are receiving constant feedback about your mindset from the world around you. You can never pretend to not know what is going on. Your world is always demonstrating to you where you stand in your mindset and your consciousness.

It’s your movie. If you don’t like it, instead of focusing on what you don’t like, find whatever you DO like (even if it is as simple as the color of your shoelaces) and put your attention in that direction.

Make sure that you surround yourself with people and information that supports your creative process. You don’t have to get rid of people who are “nay-sayers” but don’t give their words and energy your attention. Build a community of people who acknowledge your successes and wins. Reach out and ask for support if you need it.

This is a time of interdependency. We are not here to suffer alone any more.

3. Play. And play. And play some more. When faced with challenges, indecisiveness, confusion and frustration, do something light-hearted and fun. Change the energy. Go for a walk, dance, take a bubble bath, plant some flowers, make love…do something different. Break the pattern.

And don’t take it too seriously. Remember, this is just a movie. Turn to your fellow cast-mates and high-five each other for creating such a great scene. While there are tragic moments in life, your life is not a tragedy.

You put the “disasters” in your life there to help yourself learn. What an amazing creator you are! Now glean the lesson and create something new. There are no mistakes in life. Only new things to master, new perspectives to be gain, faith to be deepened, love to be experienced and magnificence all around.

A couple more quick cues to take from babies:

1. It’s okay to stomp your foot, cry, scream and raise your fist to the heavens for a bit. Sometimes we have to discharge the energy. And then move on to the next adventure.

2. Do what you need to do for yourself first, and then worry about everyone else. If it’s naptime, then, by God, it’s naptime.

3. Ask for help.

4. Savor the moment. Get messy. Eat with your fingers. Have dessert first. Cuddle with kitties and puppies. Stay in awe. Clap your hands with delight and jump up and down.

5. Learn to say no when you need to.

6. Say “I love you” and give hugs freely. (Who said love has to be so complicated?????)

7. If something feels good, do it again and again without guilt.

8. Smile and say hello to strangers.

9. Accept gifts from others.

10. Speak the truth.

11. Live in the now with the intention to grow.

12. Keep trying.

13. Take baby steps and remember every journey starts with one step.

14. Dream big, have fantasies and an ever-expanding imagination.

15. Pretend shamelessly.

And, my favorite, fall down, laugh and get back up again.

We’ve had a rough couple of years. Let’s keep getting back up, taking baby steps, laughing and moving forward.

Stay tuned for more. Next week we have a New Moon teleclass with Sao, more free sessions with Community-Building Expert, Jim Tree-Gilmore and a new Inside the Body of God teleclass.

Have a wonderful holiday weekend!

Love,

Karen

http://InstantTeleseminar.com/?eventid=12757593http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfvp6zUqP5M

Meditation for Japan

2011-03-11T10:51:00.001-08:00

Close your eyes. Take a deep breath. Let the air from your breath fill your lungs, and as you release your breath, let your fingers, your hands, your arms, your shoulders and your chest relax…..

Take another nice long deep breath and let your belly fill with air. As you breath in let your abdomen, your pelvis and your hips expand and then gently relax into your chair. Feel the support of your chair gently holding you up.

Now take another nice long deep breath and this time let your breath travel to your toes, to your feet, your calves, your knees, your thighs and your sitting muscles. As you let your breath out, all the muscles in your legs relax and your whole body is now filled with nourishing air. Your body is soft, perfectly supported and you rest comfortably in your chair, ready to let your mind relax and realign with your Abundant Source.

Imagine now that you are standing at the top of a rainbow colored staircase. As you look down the staircase, you see, at the bottom of the stairs, a beautiful garden. Begin descending the stairs, one step at a time, moving down the stairs towards the beautiful garden.

You step first on the red stair, now the orange, now the yellow, now the green, now the turquoise, now the indigo and finally on the last stair, the purple one….

You are now stepping into the center of the beautiful garden.

You sit down on the beautiful green grass. As you are sitting on the grass, you notice a soft, gentle light. The light floats towards you and you are bathed in a warm glow. Everything is just perfect….

As you sit soaking up this glorious golden light, you remember, without a doubt, that you are a Divine Child of God. Within you is the code for perfect abundance and abundance is your true and natural state. You remember, fully and completely that abundance is your birthright and your natural state.

As you remember your Divine Power and your Abundant Birthright, you know that you only have to focus your energy and attention on what you choose to experience and you know that this power of creative choice allows you to live and have any experience you choose.

In the purity of your essence of you as you really are, you naturally choose abundant experiences. You were created and designed to experience complete and total abundance.

As you sit in this beautiful garden, you reflect on what you will choose to experience today. Imagine all the abundance you will enjoy on this glorious day......

As you enjoy your abundant thoughts, you remember that you can create whatever reality, whatever world you choose to live in. And that when you add your intentions for an abundant world with the intentions of your Divine Brothers and Sisters, your power to co-create an abundant New World is amplified a million fold.

Today, as you enjoy your abundance in the garden, we come together to co-create an abundant new world.

We hold a vision of deep healing for Japan and all people affected by the earthquake and tsunami. We see rapid and miraculous emergency rescues. We call angels and Divine Unseen Loving Forces to help rescuers quickly discover those in need. We send love and light to all rescue workers that they may be strong, full of energy, courage and so that they may receive the support they need to fulfill their missions.

We see countries around the globe coming together to create and provide resources, shelter, food, water and medical supplies to all those in need in Japan and all around the globe. We hold a vision of a planet where all people recognize the divine in each other and are called to come together to lift up, support and nurture each other in times of stress, trauma and tragedy.

We see friends, families and loved ones joyfully reunited. We see a rapid return of communication technology. We hold a vision of abundant resources being delivered to Japan and a powerful network that delivers food, water and shelter to all those in need.

We see Japans nuclear power plants peacefully quiet. The walls and infrastructure of the reactors are sound and full of structural integrity. Everyone is safe from the threat of nuclear meltdown.

We hold a powerful vision of healing in Japan. We see the people of Japan enjoying a rapid recovery from this earthquake and tsunami. We see the Japanese economy as strong, resilient and on the leading edge of evolution and people turn this tragedy into an opportunity to anchor the energy of abundance even more deeply into the collective consciousness.

We see people moving joyfully in the streets, fully recovered from the fear and force of the trauma experienced today. We see the Japanese people safely restored to their lives, free from pain and suffering.

We see the earth as strong and stable. All tectonic plates are quiet and beautifully aligned. The energy of the earth is restful, fully expressed and the planet is, as always, a source of sustenance, nurturing, support for all her inhabitants.

We see this event as an opportunity to continue to work together as Divine Siblings, loving each other, co-creating an abundant world together and we continue to consciously co-create an ever-expanding, ever-abundant new world where love rules, all people are fed, all people are honored and empowered and we are free to live the fullest expression of our authentic selves.

As you enjoy this vision of a peaceful abundant world, you bring your attention back to the garden. Your intentions for the day are set and open to evolving as the day progresses. You know that your day will be filled with abundant opportunities. All you need to do is be ready to take guided action that is in alignment with your desires and intentions.

As you prepare to leave the garden and start your day, you take a nice long deep breath and you offer your gratitude to All That Is. You are so blessed and you know that you will use your blessings of abundance to increase the blessings of others.

You stand up and begin to climb the rainbow stairs. First the purple one, then the indigo, the turquoise, the green, the yellow, the orange and the red…..

As you finish climbing the stairs, you take a nice long deep breath and bring your attention back to your body, your toes, your feet, your calves, your knees, your thighs, your sitting muscles, your back, your belly, your chest, your shoulders, your fingers, your hands, your arms, your neck, your face and the top of your head.

You are fully present to your body and to your life. You smile, stretch and greet the day with joyful anticipation of all the abundant miracles you will enjoy today.

You are fully supported, deeply loved and magnificently powerful. You are an unlimited child of the Universe.

Integrity Matters!

2011-03-06T14:48:00.000-08:00

For those of you who know Human Design, I am a 4/6 profile “on the roof.” That means that I am in a life-cycle where I am watching others to see what works and what doesn’t. I have a few more years of learning before I can come “off the roof”.

I’m also deeply responsible by Design. I’m a big lover of humanity and this world. Sometimes, I can just watch. But, every once and a while, I have to jump off the roof and speak up.

I’ve been accidentally dropping plates and bowls on my tile floor all week. Each time I break a dish, the sound of the glass shattering seems to be shattering my soul, waking me up and pushing me forward to speak my truth.

We are in a crucial time on this planet. We are entering an era of sustainable peace and to grow into this era, we have to grow in consciousness AND take strong, third-dimensional actions that will support us in our evolution. We have to be honest and courageous. We have to be willing to stare into the face of the things we might not want to look because sometimes we have to push against the darkness to consciously reach for the light.

Please forgive me if my tone seems harsh. It is not intended to be rough. If the energy of this blog post hits you in a way that is disturbing, I gently ask you to please see what is within yourself first that may be triggering this response. My intention is to invite us all, as Lightworkers, to check in with ourselves and be accountable for our own consciousness and actions.

I have watched the metaphysical community turn a blind eye to tragedy and trauma because it wasn’t “positive” and it created “negative” energy. I find it baffling that a community who sees their consciousness of the Divine within as Source could be so easily knocked off center by the reality of what is taking place on the planet right now.

If we believe that the projections of our own consciousness creates our reality and what is in our reality is some of the stuff we read on the CNN news page, then, by GOD, don’t we want to be darn sure that we’re constantly and consistently realigning our consciousness with Love and Source so that we can create a more abundant, more peaceful and more loving world?

I know we don’t CAUSE the bad stuff to happen but, as humans and Divine Siblings, we are responsible for taking care of each other. Hiding our heads in the sand is not going to make it go away. Shifting our consciousness and deliberately creating the possibility of something better, something MORE ABUNDANT and aligned with what we know as Source is crucial. And so is delivering food, water and creating safety and shelter for each other, (among other things).

Recently I was given the great honor to publish a very important book by Shawna Bowen about the Sedona Sweat Lodge deaths. On October 8, 2009, three people died, nineteen people were physically injured and an untold number of people were psychologically and spiritually wounded when a sweat lodge ceremony, conducted as part of a personal growth retreat hosted by best-selling author and speaker, James Arthur Ray went horribly wrong.

Shawna Bowen was a witness to the aftermath of this tragedy. In her book, Never Again, Shawna chronicles the events leading up to and following that terrible day. In this book Shawna shares her insights and unique perspectives as a both a student and a teacher in the personal growth field.

Shawna reveals the dark side of the personal growth industry and issues a call to both teachers and consumers to act with integrity, honor and to always trust your own guidance, no matter what the "experts" may be urging you to do.

By all accounts, this book is an empowering statement to all of us who are both teachers and consumers in the self-help industry. This story is not about blame, finger-pointing or anger. It is an important wake-up call to all of us to check in and make sure we are truly operating in our work, our practices and our lives with the intention to serve the highest good of all.

In spite of this powerful intention, this book is being pushed aside by some members of the metaphysical community, dodged and thrown about like the proverbial “hot potato”. While many people are saying that this message is important, we are struggling to create venues where Shawna can share her story and create a platform for open and honest dialogue about the Sedona Sweat Lodge tragedy and what we need to do in the self-help industry to make sure that it doesn’t happen again.

I agreed to publish this book because it struck a nerve for me personally. Before I was an abundance teacher, I worked for several years as a professional psychic medium. I always HATED working as a medium because my clients were always in a very vulnerable place and, being a very logical person in some ways, I wanted to see the “proof” that what I was experiencing was real. My nervousness has always made me use my language carefully, wary of presenting information in an unquestionable and indisputable way. I always saw my role more as translator, rather than messenger.

It wasn’t unusual for many of my clients to have had several readings by other psychics who had told them things that seemed “wrong” or were unsettling and they felt compelled to keep searching for answers. I have also met people who were devastated by bad readings and gave up looking for answers.

Sometimes the stories my clients would share with me about “bad” readings would make me very angry. I couldn’t understand how other psychics could take advantage of people in such obvious pain.

I like that being a psychic makes me nervous and uncomfortable. I think my nervousness keeps me honest. I have always believed that I never tell someone something they don’t already know…they just want confirmation. If a client resists me strongly, I will always encourage my client to trust their own knowingness. In fact, this is one of the primary reasons I started teaching psychic development classes. I like it much better when my clients are their own psychics!

Lightwork is not a science. It is always subject to our own interpretation and our own conditioning. How we see information is often filtered through our own experiences and beliefs. As responsible Light workers, we owe it to our clients to present information in a way that allows our clients to interpret along with us. Yes, that DOES mean that sometimes you, the psychic, have to ask a lot of questions. But I’ll take a psychic who asks a lot of questions over a psychic who makes bold, indisputable claims any day!

I eventually went on to teach abundance classes. As part of my process of growing into a teacher, I was an avid prosperity consciousness student and I attended every seminar I could. People who are desperate for money seemed even more vulnerable than grieving loved ones. Desperate people can sometimes make some desperate choices.

In countless prosperity seminars, I witnessed people on the edge of foreclosure and bankruptcy run to the back of the room with their credit cards held high, ready to plunk down up to $60,000.00 for programs that guarantee they will be wealthy in six months (or less!!). I can’t tell you how many of these people I have had as clients and students six months later.

I have watched many well-dressed, muscled men in shiny double-breasted suits talk about how making money is our responsibility as Divine Beings and that if you’re broke, it’s all your fault. I have watched people who know better than to spend $60,000.00 they don’t have, leave these workshops dejected and broken, feeling even more “less than” than when they walked in.

I certainly have had some of those feelings and experiences.

I actually attended a free James Ray seminar about five years ago. I was scheduled to have James Ray on as a guest on my radio show and, after almost up-chucking during his 90-minute presentation and sales-pitch, I canceled the interview because I could not, in good conscience, host him on my show.

I believe that the James Ray tragedy is a wake-up call to all of us. And as people on the leading-edge of consciousness, we MUST come together and dialogue about what is in front of us. The self-help industry has no real way of policing itself. There is a danger in this industry that we don’t often talk about.

I have read comment threads after news articles calling the victims of the Sedona tragedy “stupid” for following James Ray and for being willing to spend over $10,000.00 to attend his Spiritual Warrior retreat that ended so terribly.

Many of us use techniques that are designed to assist our clients to “re-wire” their neurobiology. We know subliminal and hypnotic techniques designed to trick the brain into accepting new ideas and programming. It is easy to apply these techniques and manipulate people, if you are not clear about your role as healer and if your intentions are less than honest.

Our clients trust us. They look to us for support, guidance and sometimes help with healing. With the purest of intentions to grow and make their lives better, they turn to us and, before they reach awareness of their own power, transfer their power to us to help them.

Our clients are not “stupid.” They are vulnerable and open to growth and transformation.

Sometimes the dark side can sneak up on you. The ego gets seduced and, if you aren’t clear about the role of your own ego, it’s easy to see how things can get messy and convoluted very quickly. Sometimes we are motivated by needs and beliefs we aren’t always aware of. I believe that is what happened to James Ray.

I don’t think it will ever work to regulate this industry. It evolves too quickly and, because of the difficulty of measuring parameters for validity and accountability, it’s too hard to make good rules. Many people seek help from us because a traditional, more regulated approach hasn’t worked.

That leaves it to each and every one of us, on a personal level, to agree to be our own “police”. Here are a few simple guidelines that we should consider for ourselves.

I’m going to list them below and I look forward to any others that you think should be posted here:

1. Always see your client as healed, not broken. Your job is to help them see themselves as healed.

2. Walk your talk. Be honest. Admit when you don’t know or if you are in over your head.

3. Set your intention to be of the greatest service to your client and allow the Creator to work through you. You don’t heal your clients. They heal themselves. You just give them a gentle nudge sometimes…even Jesus didn’t claim to heal people.

4. Never convince someone who doesn’t have the money to beg, borrow, steal or whatever they need to do to procure the funds if they can’t afford your workshops, services or trainings. Always offer free resources on your website that they can benefit from while they are shifting their money consciousness. Sometimes it’s just not right timing. And sometimes potential clients have to learn what they have to learn to be ready for the next level.

5. If a client isn’t a good fit, let them go and support them in finding someone who is.

6. Never judge your clients or potential clients.

7. Don’t make promises you can’t guarantee or keep.

8. Always speak to your client in terms of possibilities and probabilities. The future can shift on a dime. You want to help your client understand and master new patterns so that the probability of their outcome changes in their favor.

9. Always tend to your own evolution. You can only lift someone up to the degree to which you yourself are lifted. Stay humble and honest with yourself.

When we are faced with “negative” or “dark” things, like the deaths in Sedona or some of the many tragedies on the planet, as Lightworkers, we cannot turn away. These tragedies are here to help us define what we’d rather be experiencing on the planet instead. Use tragedy to construct a vision of what you’d rather see happened, then hold that vision, knowing that it is Truth and begin to look for evidence that it’s already starting to come into form.

Then get to work making it happen with your own two hands.

When we turn away, we judge a situation as “bad” and the denial only creates more of what we are seeking to avoid. We have to give our attention to potential solutions rather than ignoring what isn’t going away at the moment.

This is not a time for hiding or blaming, running or denying. That is what James Ray allegedly did. I wonder how the outcome might have been different if he had stood up from the very start and stated something like this:

“Wow. Something really terrible and horrifically sad has happened. I don’t know how it happened but I am committed to discovering exactly what happened so that it doesn’t happen again. And, I’m going to do a serious search of my own mindset and consciousness to see what my part of creating the energy associated with this terrible tragedy played. I am truly, truly sorry to the people who were killed and hurt and to their families. I am deeply remorseful. Please let me know what I can do to help and support you in your healing from this event. I am removing myself from a position of teacher and leader as I need to tend to my own personal growth and evolution.”

We are in an era of authenticity and integrity. Things that are out of alignment with integrity can only fall away. We need to honor those brave souls like Shawna Bowen, who have the courage to speak the truth and are willing to accept the consequences. They are helping us deepen our intention and co-create a new world.

In our dying days and in the time that follows our death, we never wonder if we made enough money, if we were famous enough or if we got enough testimonials and kudos for a job well done. Our only question as we savor our last breaths is this, “Did I love enough?”

As Lightworkers, I pray that your answer is a resounding YES! Love is the only true legacy we leave on this planet.

Love your creator, love each other, love yourselves and trust that everything is in Divine Order, even if it looks messy right now. Have the courage to take a good long look at the darkness and use it to push against to spread even MORE light!

Love,

Karen

p.s.

If you’d like to learn more about Shawna and her book, Never Again, please visit: http://www.shawnabowenbooks.com

Make sure you download the Introduction by Jim Tree-Gilmore. He shares some important insights about how this event impacted the Native American communities in Northern Arizona.

http://www.shawnabowenbooks.com

Lies and Love by Design

2011-02-03T12:33:00.000-08:00

Welcome February, the month of Love and Valentine's Day!

Ok. I'm a Leo. I'm also a 4/6 profile in the Human Design System, which means that relationships and partnerships are very important to me.

I've been working on writing and editing my new book, Parenting by Design. As I work on my book and actively parent my own five children, I'm gaining a new awareness of how many our actions and interactions in relationships are influenced by our conditioning.

The official definition of conditioning is, "the learning process by which the behaviour of an organism becomes dependent on an event occurring in its environment."

When you expect an event to occur, you begin to prepare for it on a psychological, spiritual and emotional level. Unfortunately, many of us have a life history of experiencing events that are not based in the truth of our magnificence and the possibility of our limitless abundance. Consequently, we are conditioned to expect punishment, suffering and lack from the world and from our relationships.

I get that this is old stuff for you guys. You all know this and I am certain that most, if not all of you, have been diligently working on "de-conditioning" yourselves for many years now.

I have, too. And, yet, in spite of all my internal searches, I still discover small and subtle places where I seemingly continue to believe in the "lies" in my consciousness.

I know that "lies" is a harsh word. But I don't know what else to call a set of beliefs or "conditioned responses" that are not rooted in the truth of my limitless abundance and magnificence, so "lies" feels like a good word.

I also don't want to sound like Chicken Little running around screaming that the proverbial "sky is falling", but, the more we evolve and grow in consciousness, the more these "lies" feel the the "pea" underneath the princesses mattress. These little "lies" make the mattresses of our life, lumpy and uncomfortable.

Not only do they make us uncomfortable, if we don't pay attention to the discomfort and make some serious changes, these "lies" will force our reality to collapse until we realign with the truth of who we are. Frankly, we don't have a whole lot of wiggle room in pretending that we don't know the Truth. Once you know the Truth, the door to evolution busts open and we are compelled to begin the process of "plucking the peas from under the mattress."

The thing about conditioning is that sometimes it can be very subtle. We often don't realize we've seduced ourselves with a "lie" until we're deep in the middle of the self-deception.

One of the of the horrific gifts of parenting (and one of the reasons why evolution can become an urgent agenda when you are a parent) is that you get to see your "karmic lies" reflected back at you in the actions, choices and words of your children. Those of you who are parents, how many times have you noticed your children doing or saying something they learned from you? Have you ever watched your older children relive your karmic choices?

I have a friend whose sons have all married women with the same name as their mother. One son has married a couple of these women, all with the same first name. My oldest daughter is dating a young man with the same name as her father. Her father wanted to study acting in college and was told that if he studied acting, there would be no money for college. Her boyfriend is experiencing the exact same thing...and more.

When I watch my children, sometimes it feels like I'm looking in a mirror. Through my children I see their conditioning from their life with me and their father. And I see the conditioned patterns I carry from my family as well.

When conditioned patterns are so generational and deeply ingrained in our bodies and our consciousness, they are so much a part of who we perceive ourselves to be, that they can really sneak up on us before we realize what's happening!

Our "lies" can be family patterns that are not only ingrained in our decision-making consciousness, but in our energy fields. One of the things that I find so fascinating about Human Design is that our Human Design is inherited from our grandparents. If you know your grandparent's birth charts, you will see that your chart is a compilation of all of those energies.

You are designed to carry the energetic patterns of your grandparents. Imagine the delicious agony of our parents (or you as a parent) when they realized that they are sandwiched between two generations who can trigger and provoke them in the same way!

Another way to think of this is you intended to be born into a family with a preset energy pattern. You picked the energetic "karma" you needed to further the evolution of your soul and your life path.

In addition to there being a genetic component to the energy we play with, we are also deeply conditioned by the energy in our families, the energies we experienced on a daily basis during our childhood. In the Human Design chart, where you have white in your chart (openness or undefined energy) is where you take energy in from the world and the people around you. (If you are new to Human Design, click here to watch an introductory webcast.) To receive your free Human Design chart click here.

When we consistently experience other people's energy, we get used to always experiencing that energy in our own essence. When we leave home as young adults, we commonly believe, albeit mistakenly, that we have that particular kind of energy.

For example, if you are not a particularly emotional or dramatic person but you live with emotional people, you take in that emotional energy your whole childhood. It's hard to believe, when you leave home and enter into a new energetic world, that you are not emotional.

Even when we realize that perhaps those energies are "not us", we are still drawn to them in relationships, over and over again until we learn to navigate our way through those energies with an evolved, higher consciousness. If you run your parent's Human Design charts and the charts of your lovers, spouses and friends, you will see that you are usually attracted to people who have similar designs to your family of origin.

Aren't we really good at recreating themes in every arena of our life? What a powerful way to insure that we'll have LOTS of chances to evolve in one lifetime!!! Talk about Divine Order...yikes!

Awareness (and, of course, intention) can be all that's necessary to shift and change energetic patterns and help us start on the process of re-telling ourselves our Truth. Once you become aware of patterns, it gets easier to make different choices.

We live in a dualistic Universe. Energies and patterns can be expressed on a continuum but at the end of the ribbon of energy there is one end or the other. While there can be gray in the middle of a "spectrum" of expression, at the end of the gray "spectrum" there is either black or white. Most "lies" have a truth that is the opposite of the lie. And it is usually in experiencing the "lie" that we create energetic alignment with the intention to bring forth the opposite experience.

Our "lies" are often very good at revealing the Truth of our heart's desires. You can use your "lies" to help yourself create a different reality. Your "lies" can become pushing off points for evolution and clarity.

To do this, you have to start first with an awareness of what you desire to be your Truth. Just for grins, I've inserted the Abundance Manifesto here to inspire you. I encourage you to write your own manifesto related to whatever area of growth you'd like to focus on.

Click Here to read the Abundance Manifesto:

http://www.joyfulmission.com/articles/article/1975190/49301.htm

Once you have identified what your Truth is, you can now make a list of your "lies" to help you see where you may need to make some deliberate changes in your choices.

Start by picking an area of your life that you'd like to bring into alignment with your Truth. Since it's almost Valentine's Day, let's use an example about relationships.

Let's say that your Truth is that you are a lovable, beautiful, partner who deserves to be cherished, valued, loved and honored exactly as you are.

Now make a list of all the "lies" you may have been allowing in the relationship part of your life.

Here are some of my "lies", past and present:

1. Men only want "one thing." (And now that I'm older, I have nothing of value to offer a man...)

2. Men are inconsistent and you have to always be prepared for the unexpected if a man is involved in the equation.

3. Men leave. Sometimes they come back. Sometimes they don't.

4. Men hate commitment and being tied down. It's not in their nature. We just have to accept them for who they are.

5. Men aren't responsible. They chase after their dreams and leave you with the "serious" work of life. A woman has to figure out how to live her dream while still fulfilling her obligations and responsibilities. A woman's dream is her hobby.

6. If you love a man enough, he will change for you, settle down, get a job, realize that you are The One...

7. Your physical beauty is your most valuable asset.

8. A woman is more capable than a man. But you have to keep it a secret from the man. You don't want to hurt his ego.

(Aren't these YUCKY?)

Using your understanding of the principles of duality, you can now use these "lies" to redefine your Truth.

You new Truth List might look like this:

1. I am an older, wiser woman and the right man will see the value of who I am and what I have to offer in a relationship. I celebrate my wisdom and the beauty that radiates out of me. My consciousness, my heart, my spirit and my Light are the true sources of my real beauty. I only allow people into my life who see these parts of the Truth of who I am.

2. There are consistent men on this planet who are diligently dedicated to the growth and expansion of their own consciousness and live a life that reflects this evolutionary state of awareness. I'm looking forward to experiencing commitment with the right man.

3. Some men commit strongly and enjoy and celebrate their commitments. I'm excited about having this kind of man in my life.

4. See above.

5. My dreams and the fulfillment of my life purpose is the most important part of the expression of the Truth of Me. I only attract people into my life who support me in this expression of myself.

6. My love is strong and true. I commit to expressing my love with a man who shares my commitment to our relationship and to me.

7. See number one.

8. I celebrate my own capability and intend to attract and allow people who are of like-mind, passion and quality of energy. I serve myself, my Creator and my Divine Siblings by shining my light brightly for all to see!

These are just a few quick examples to help you see that awareness can give you a dramatic way to re-write your "lies" into Truth.

Of course, the next step is a little trickier. Once you have identified your Truth, you have to inventory your life and get real and honest with yourself about what you've been creating. You may discover that in order to live your Truth and bring it forth into form, you have to take some pretty dramatic actions to make space for your Truth to grow into your reality.

Are there situations in your life that you need to let go of? Where do you need to make room? Where do you need to speak your Truth? Where do you need to set clearer intentions and, sometimes, take courageous action to allow what you intend to experience?

As you move into action phase, remember that these actions can and must be taken with loving energy. This is not about rebellion, revenge or even a need to prove anything. Without your current "lies" you may never have discovered the Truth for yourself. Everything in your life that has brought you to this point has been in your life to serve you in some way. When you can deeply see the truth of this statement, positive change will hasten its way towards you at a breath-taking speed.

As you move into your new awareness, you will begin to see how to shift the "darker" expressions of the essence of who you are into higher expression and fulfill your Divine Potential.

In honor of The Month of Love, I am offering a unique Love By Design reading to help you identify your old energy patterns and "lies" so that you can start telling yourself the Truth of Who You Are. During this one-hour reading we will examine the energetic patterns of your life using your Human Design chart and (if you have them) the Human Design charts of your family of origin and your past and current partners. With this new understanding, you will learn to shift from living from the "low" expressions of these energies to the "high" expressions to help you create relationships that are loving and empowering.

In addition, if you are currently in a relationship, we'll look at your partner's Human Design chart and the composite Human Design chart for your relationship. We'll use these charts to talk about strategies to help you create a strong, mutually loving and respectful Truth in your relationship.

The Love by Design readings will all be recorded and you may, of course, bring your Beloved to the reading with you, if you choose. The cost for this reading is $147.00. My schedule is pretty tight so please be sure to book your reading quickly if you want to do this for Valentine's Day. To schedule your reading, simply click on the Paypal button below. After we receive your payment confirmation, we'll contact you asap to schedule your session.

May you discover and celebrate the Magnificent Truth of Who You Really Are!!!! You deserve to be loved wildly and passionately.

May you fall madly in love with yourself first...

Love,

Faith and the Cash Cab

2010-12-07T11:53:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I discovered a new brand of “miracle”. By miracle I mean the possibility of a wildly unexpected and powerfully abundant experience.

I was at the gym running on the treadmill. I was working out at an unfamiliar facility away from home. The gym attendants graciously strolled between us sweaty joggers and offered us cups of water from their well-stocked trays. In front of us were three massive flat-screen TV’s with subtitles, distracting us from our puffing and pain and informing us of the current trends and news.

As I watched the giant screen, the scene changed from the local news to a taxi cab picking up riders in New York City. As the riders entered the cab, magical lights began to shimmer and shine on the roof of the cab and the driver turned to the riders and said, “Welcome to the Cash Cab!”

At first I thought this was a joke or an advertisement for something, but as it turns out, this was a real TV show. The Cash Cab drives through New York City picking up passengers and taking them to their destination. While they are being driven, the riders are asked questions and given money for their correct answers…think “Jeopardy on Wheels…”

As I watched happy passengers go for a nice cab ride in New York City and win cash, I thought how cool it must be to be a tourist in the city, get into a cab and win some unexpected money. I imagined how one man, traveling with his teenage son, might have used the extra money to take his kid to a Broadway show or stay an extra night in a fancy hotel.

Or that the two young women, who took their turn next in the Cash Cab, might have used their money to make their student loan payments or for rent….

What I love so much about the Cash Cab is that is falls into that amazing category of weird and unexpected blessings. I mean, what is the probability that someone would hail a cab, step into an income generating vehicle and receive abundant cash, just for being in the right place at the right time?

This is the nature of a true miracle.

All of my life I have struggled with mastering the difference between hope and faith. Hope, I have been reminded, is not really a good strategy. Of course, it’s a step up from despair, but “hoping” by definition implies that there is still a chance that whatever you are intending won’t come true.

Sometimes we get trapped in hoping versus KNOWING when we struggle with what I call a Belief Gap. A Belief Gap is when you desire a certain outcome but you don’t believe that the manifestation of this outcome is possible. In other words, you want to get from Point A to Point B but you don’t know if getting there is possible (but you HOPE that it is…).

There is a distinct difference between hoping and knowing. When you know that Point B is possible, you can relax, tune in and pay attention to the signs and signals that the Universe provides you so that you take the necessary actions to get yourself to that awesome Point B you’re inspired to be at (pun intended….).

When you’re just hoping, your focus is split, waiting to see if Point B is actually going to happen or if your desires are being carried away on an eternally empty wind. When you’re hoping, because you’re tuning in to see if what you desire is manifesting or not, you run the risk of missing that vital next bit of information that will lead you to the next step in the creation of Point B.

Sometimes we get stuck in hope versus knowing when we can’t seem to see the “how” of a specific manifestation. How many times have you let go of a dream because you can’t “imagine”’ how it’s going to happen?

And how many times has something miraculous and ridiculously unexpectedly good manifested in your life?

Things have to happen in linear order on Earth. It’s the nature of the third dimension. We experience time and distance here. When we try to jump out of order we simply create chaos, especially when we haven’t completely rewired our physiology.

Once you really master your Divine Power and you live out your full creative potential, it is possible to take great leaps of faith. But, if you do not completely, deeply believe that something is going to happen, if you still have underlying fears or limiting beliefs about knowing that something will manifest, beyond a doubt, then do not take action.

Faith is not hope. Faith is pure and relentless knowing. It is an act of unwavering certainty and surrender.

The delicate dance between humanity and Divinity starts in the human brain. The right hemisphere receives Divine Inspiration; the left hemisphere translates it into human action. The right brain conceives the “what”. The left-brain conceives the “how”.

The brain is just an organ, like the heart and the liver. Its function is to think, translate data and regulate the nervous system. Your heart doesn’t have the option to do anything other than beat. Your brain doesn’t have the option to do anything other than think.

When we live in the paradigm of a separate God, we think that we have to come up with all the answers. We have to take our inspiration and figure out “how” we are going to make it happen. As you may have experienced yourself, this can put you under tremendous pressure, especially when you have an inspiration that is bigger than you know how to create.

This is where a lot of people get lost in the creative process. We think we have to come up with the “how” things will happen and we close ourselves off to the constant possibility of miracles.

Thinking is to the brain as beating is to the heart. But the human brain presents challenges to us that the physical heart does not. In the brain we experience not only thinking, but also consciousness. Our Divine Awareness is perceived with the brain and we are given the task of sorting out Divine Thought and human thought, both of which are crucial on the Earthly plane.

Our human thoughts are vital. We need human thoughts to drive a car, put on our shoes, cook and build houses. Our human thoughts are the operating system for the body.

Our Divine Awareness is the antenna or the inter-dimensional interface between our expanded Self, or the Soul, and our human Self.

But, as I stated before, thinking is happening all the time. The brain has to be still for us to hear our Divine Consciousness talking. This is why a habit of daily meditation is crucial. The thinking has to be silenced in order for you to get into the habit of being able to hear your Divine Consciousness. Meditation helps you learn to sort out the different voices in your head.

Imagine this for a moment. Your brain is like a giant chamber. Inside this chamber, you are hearing your Divine Guidance, Consciousness and Inspiration. You are also simultaneously experiencing your old thought patterns, limiting beliefs and subconscious fears. At the same time, your thinking mind is translating all of this activity into possible actions, thinking thoughts about what you saw on TV last night, remembering an old experience and wondering what’s for dinner tonight.

No wonder so many of us feel paralyzed, confused or overwhelmed.

You have to think of your brain as a muscle. In order to build muscles, you have to gently train them to make them bigger. When you first start to go to the gym, you start with small weights and gradually, over time, build up your muscle strength and mass. It takes time and repetition.

Even though the brain isn’t technically a muscle, it operates the same way. You have to really build your mental “muscle” over time. You have to train it to be still, be deliberate, and hold a thought for a prolonged period of time and to know the difference between God-Mind and human mind.

It takes years for a body builder to build up his muscle mass. The process of training your brain won’t necessarily take years but it is a process that has to occur over time. Remember, as you are training your brain, you are also physically changing the nature of your body. You aren’t growing muscles, but you are growing neuropathways.

There is a simple strategy to learning how to use your brain to anchor the high vibration of Divine Thinking and turn it into inspired action.

Step One: Daily Meditation

It is crucial that you adopt some kind of daily meditative practice. There are a lot of techniques out there. I suggest that you experiment until you find one that works for you.

The most important part of meditating is learning to get your mind quiet enough to be able to hear Divine Mind speaking to you. You probably will never be able to fully shut off your thinking mind, just as you may never get your heart to stop beating for a while.

Regardless of what technique you use, enter into your meditative practice with intention. I suggest that you write down an intention statement each morning before you meditate to help you line your energy up with the experience that you would like to have.

Your intention might say something like this:

I intend to use this special, quiet time to connect deeply with Divine Mind and to hear clearly and understand perfectly. I intend to sit in silence and deeply integrate my understanding of my Inner Divinity and to act in accordance with my Divine Wisdom each moment of this day.

Step Two: Clarifying and expressing your desires
God whispers within us through desire. God wants what you want. The blueprint for the Divine is within you and communicated through you with hopes, wishes and dreams. These are the direction points given to us by our Divinity Within.

When you turn away from your dreams and desires, you are turning away from your Inner Divinity and shutting off your access to unlimited re-Sources and miracles.

You have to have dreams and desires. These are the catalysts that inspire growth and expansion.

Step Three: Know that your desires will manifest into form
Faith is the unwavering knowingness that your desires will manifest as part of your reality. The knowingness carries a certain vibration that lines up your consciousness with the reality you choose to experience.

You will allow yourself to experience a desire to the degree to which you believe it is a possibility for you.

When you can exist in a state of certainty and knowingness, then you can allow the natural flow of miracles to enter into your life and then take action accordingly.

Step Four: Take actions that are in alignment with your desires and beliefs
“Act as if” your desires are coming true. And make sure that your actions are leading up to what you want. I see so many people waiting for “miracles” who forget that creation in this dimension is a co-creative process. You can’t just sit back in your cave and wait for the situation to magically show up. You have to do your part.

If you’re going to be a best-selling author, then you better be spending time working on writing your best-selling book, or hire a ghostwriter. If you are planning on having a lot of money, then you better have a real plan on how you are going to save and invest your money when it shows up.

You have to take earthly actions that line up the frequency of what you expect in the third dimension. If you are not making the necessary preparations to receive your miracle, then you may want to re-evaluate whether you really want what you want or believe that it can really happen for you.

Miracles are wonderful works done by the Power of God. If the Power of God resides within us and our vehicle for this power is our human form, then we as humans have to co-facilitate our miracles by getting ready for their manifestation and surrendering to the process of creation.

This is the supreme expression of the spiritual concept of “surrender”. The human mind that is co-creating with Divine Mind operates like a beautiful machine. Inspiration comes in. Desire is triggered. Imagination and emotion take over with delight and the human mind begins to imagine the possibilities.

The envisioning of the earthly possibilities is the translation of Divine Inspiration into human form. Once the possibilities are envisioned then you begin to prepare the way. “Act as if” your vision is coming into form.

And then you surrender. You wait until the circumstances in your outer reality show up to give you the next steps to follow for creation. Our human experience is a metaphorical experience of the Divine. Our outer world is God’s world. Miracles show up daily, even hourly, in our outer reality, if we expect them.

We get inspired with big ideas, often times ideas that we don’t know how to “do”. Let’s say, for example, that you wanted to be a best-selling author, but you didn’t know how to make that happen.

First you begin the process by taking the inspiration and turning it into inspired action. You write a book.

Over time as you are writing your book, you feel and imagine yourself as a best-selling author. Maybe you even pretend a little bit and you create a fake New York Times Best Seller list that you tape on your office wall.

As you are working on your book, you realize that you keep meeting people who are authors and publishers. (Funny how you never noticed this before!) One evening you are at a dinner party at a friend's house and her brother is visiting from out of town. Turns out he is a publisher and has worked with several best-selling authors. The two of you have a lovely conversation and the next morning he emails you and asks you to send him your manuscript.

You send him the manuscript. He’s impressed and wants to see more and before you know it, you have a publisher, your finished book is in hand, you are on a whirlwind book tour and your book is steadily climbing the best-seller list, just like you desired!

In this story there is a gentle relaxation or surrender that happens when you take action and wait with certainty and expectation. Of course, this is only one possible scenario. The cool part about co-creating with Divine Mind is that Divine Mind is waaaaaaay bigger than your human mind.

Although your left-brain is very good at figuring out possible “how” scenarios, Divine Mind truly understands the magic of unlimited possibility. Surrendering is letting go of pre-conceived ideas about “how” your inspiration will manifest. You simply need only to know that it will manifest and all you have to do is get ready for it and pay attention to the evidence in your outer reality.

This process of knowing and surrendering creates a vibration that is in alignment with what it is that you want to experience. The more you hold this vibration by staying in a place of certainty with your expectation, the faster your vibration aligns with the unlimited possibilities that will help you perceive your desire into form.

The marriage between the Power of God within you and your human form creates the unlimited possibility of miracles in everyday life. When you let your Divine Power work its magic, you are an essential player in creating Heaven on Earth and you fulfill your Divine Role of anchoring the vibration of God deeper and deeper into the third dimension.

When you master this process, you open yourself up to experiencing the magic of the Universe and your Divine Power. Miracles will happen to you every day!

(And you never know when the Cash Cab will carry you to your next destination…!)

Love,

Bury Your Worry in the Dirt

2010-09-21T20:01:00.001-07:00

It's raining outside and right now, my electric bill and one of my credit card bills is in my backyard…three feet underground in the dirt, getting all wet and muddy.

Why, you might wonder, are my bills buried in the backyard?

Did I conduct some woo woo ritual to eliminate debt?

Did my frustration get the better of me leaving me senseless and enraged with my bills?

No.

It's kind of a long story that started with me experiencing worry.

I was raised by "worriers". I love my parents dearly and they did a good job of worrying about everything. Even now they call me up worried that I'm not taking good care of myself, worried about my financial well-being, worried that my kids aren't getting a good education and worried about the possibility of carbon monoxide poisoning in my house (and to make sure that I have enough carbon monoxide detectors in my home.)

(They also worry a lot about my sanity and my life path, but that is a whole 'nother blog post…)

Worrying is in my genes. All of my memories of my grandmother involve visions of her wringing her hands with worry over everything.

She had a stroke at age 65. For 15 years after her stroke, she was carefree. It took significant brain damage to make her stop worrying.

Somewhere along the line, I learned that worrying was the responsible way to go through life. If you weren't worried about the future, making money, your kids, your neighbors, the news or your career, you weren't being responsible.

And, of course, if you were irresponsible in any way, you were giving your parents something to worry about.

I got good at worrying at a very young age. I bit my nails most of my life until I discovered acrylic fingernails when I was thirty. I chew the side of my mouth and have a hard time sitting still and focusing on one thing when I'm worried. I pace a lot and am very good at waking up several times in the night fulfilling my responsibility to worry about my life.

Over the last few years as I have experienced shifts in consciousness, I have mastered my worrying habit (for the most part).

When you integrate a deep understanding that your true and natural state is abundance in all of its expressions, you realize that you don't have to worry about anything. You are abundant. And abundance continually shows up, often in beautiful and unexpected ways.

But shifting is hard work. As we raise our vibrational frequency and continue to align energetically with our Divine Abundance, it's not unusual to become more and more sensitive to our conditioning and those places where we may still hold beliefs that keep us from allowing our abundance.

We are more sensitive, not because we are weak or vulnerable, but because we are more finely tuned to those places where we need to continue to shift our focus back to abundance. Our intention is to live abundance in consciousness and, obviously, in our third dimensional realities. When we are out of alignment with that intention, we notice!

We have been training for "The Shift" for many years. It is crucial as our souls come together and unify our energies that we ignore our outer realities and stay focused on our inner abundance, no matter what may seem to be going on outside of ourselves.

What does that look like in reality? That means, for example, that when the bills are due and things look grim, you have to ignore "reality" and focus on the abundance that is already there for you, even if you can't quite see it yet.

Freaking out and worrying, albeit "responsible" behavior by old standards, really doesn't work in these situations. We have to practice holding a vision for what we intend, in spite of the outer circumstances.

When we worry, we are basically expressing an unconscious underlying belief in lack of some kind. When you examine what you are worried about, it is always a belief or possibility that somehow there will not be enough and terrible things will happen.

Explore those beliefs and see what needs to be cleared in order for you to come back to an awareness of your natural state of abundance.

From a physiological perspective, worrying triggers the adrenaline "fight or flight" response. When you are fearful or "running", all creative thought shuts down, your connection to Source is forgotten and you go into survival mode. Not only is this tough on your body, especially if you do this on a chronic basis, but it also shuts your mind to creative possibilities and inspirations that can change your situation.

When we worry, we are basically making an energetic statement that we do not trust in the Divine Plan and the Universe. Worrying points our creative energies, our thoughts and emotions, at the worst case scenario and, not surprisingly, worrying can actually contribute to making your worst fears come true.

These are the simple mechanics of deliberate creation.

Letting go of worry doesn't mean you don't "deal" with reality. You may need to call your utility or credit card company and ask them for an extension on your payment. But you do it with knowingness that the bills will get pain, not with fear or shame.

You will be amazed at how simply holding the energy of knowingness that there is an inspired, Divine and elegant solution to your challenges (even if you don't know what it is yet…) creates, well, an inspired, Divine and elegant solution to your challenge.

Where you put your energy and attention is where you get growth and results.

Of course, this all sounds so simple and easy. Just stop worrying, right?

LOL!

I have found that turning your attention away from the worry and back to gratitude and appreciation is the fastest way to get out of the worry rut. If we focus on what we DO have, what we appreciate and all the abundance around us, it's hard to slip into worry and fear.

Not only that, if you place your attention on all the good that surrounds you, you will, by Universal Law, only draw to yourself more abundance. (Focus and attention creates.)

"If you can rid yourself of worry, you will rid yourself of things to worry about.
It is really that simple.
Shift the way you feel and watch what happens."

- Abraham-Hicks

So, you are probably wondering what this has to do with my bills being 3 feet under in my backyard.

Lately I've allowed my consciousness to be seduced by worry. In my meditations, I have been working on releasing my worry. I know how little worrying helps my life.

Well, as you know, the Universe often has unique ways of sending us messages. Personally, I think G-d loves to laugh.

Yesterday I was outside on my back deck talking to a client on the telephone. Ayelet, my 16 month old Star Baby, came running out of the house with a handful of my bills clutched in her chubby little fists. Now, as I was talking to a client, I was trying to get my bills back without eliciting a scream of defiance from her (She IS gifted and "NO" is one of her favorite words right now…).

Not only did Ayelet come tearing out of the house, but Kwincy, my 110 pound lab/Rhodesian ridgeback mix followed right behind her.

As I was gently trying to pry my bills out of Ayelets hands, Kwincy galloped towards the back corner of the yard and began to dig a huge hole. Ayelet, seeing that mud and dirt were flying, immediately followed him to be a part of the digging "party".

As soon as the hole was just right, Ayelet, with all her might, pitched my bills into the hole and proceeded to help Kwincy fill the hole back up. My bills had met their fate, 3 feet underground.

Upon completion of their task, both of the Sneaky Sneakers dusted off their respective paws/hands and grinned with pride at me.

The moral of this story:

Go bury your worry in the dirt.

And if you can't do it yourself, get some good soul friends to help you...

Love,

Karen

My Soul Friends, Ayelet and Kwincy

http://myemail.constantcontact.com/Got-Something-to-Say-.html?soid=1101065865054&aid=GRBKWXhzv9c

2010-09-17T13:30:00.000-07:00

http://myemail.constantcontact.com/Got-Something-to-Say-.html?soid=1101065865054&aid=GRBKWXhzv9c

Forgiveness - The Big Reset Button

2010-09-14T10:08:00.000-07:00

I’m Jewish. As a Jew, I am in the midst of what we call The Days of Awe, the time from the holidays Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur.

During this time, we focus on repentance, deep self-inquiry and atoning for mistakes we’ve made during the year.

Now, I know that even though this doesn’t really sound like so much fun, I actually enjoy this time of year. There is something to be said for dedicating 10 days to looking back, taking stock and remembering Source.

I like to think of these days as one big Reset Button. Push the Resent Button, start over, new possibilities, new opportunities and a chance to improve and “get it right’.

Obviously, this time is about asking others to forgive you for any wrong-doings you may have committed or regrets you may have in how you’ve treated people.

But it’s also a time of “unbinding” yourself from your stories, old thoughts and beliefs and, most importantly, victim consciousness. To me, this is the real definition of forgiveness.

There is a real danger in playing with the concept of forgiveness. Forgiveness can be tricky.

I know forgiveness is a crucial piece to spiritual growth and evolution. Many

of us have done all kinds of forgiveness exercises. I personally have written at least 20,000 forgiveness letters to various people who have victimized me in my 45 years…(okay, I exaggerate a bit…but you get my drift.)

One of my publishing clients, Pat Rainville, author of Forgiveness is an Act of Power, (Empoweringbydesign.com) says that one of the dangers of forgiveness is that we think that by forgiving someone we make their actions “okay”.

This style of “turn the other cheek” forgiveness is dangerous in that it doesn’t usually honor your self and often results in people re-creating old stories and victim circumstances because the underlying energy isn’t shifted.

Forgiveness is not about condoning what someone has done. It’s about releasing ourselves from the story of the transgression and setting ourselves free to define ourselves not by what “crimes” we may have survived, but by our authentic identity.

I attended an Abraham Hicks Meetup group a few years back. I remember the third time I attended the group we were invited by the leader to go around the circle of attendees and introduce ourselves. The third woman who spoke, introduced herself as a survivor of childhood incest.

It was fascinating to me that every person after that enthusiastically introduced themselves as survivors of different sorts of victim situations such as incest, rape, bankruptcy, infidelity, etc. Once someone opened the door to “story-telling”, everyone had a story to tell.

To be honest with you, I never went back to the group. It wasn’t that I didn’t appreciate that these people had endured and survived terrible things, but it was energetically challenging to sit in a room of people who seemed to still be so tied to the story.

If you define yourself as a survivor, there is, by definition, something terrible that you have endured and that you probably were victimized by. Survivors are still tied to their association with the transgression.

As long as you continue to tie yourself to the story, the energy of the story perpetuates itself. And while the lessons of the story were probably quite catalytic in your own personal evolution, the actual event is over. If you choose to hang on to the story instead of the lessons and the blessings, you run the risk, by virtue of focus and attention, of re-creating similar circumstances over and over again.

Haven’t you ever wondered how it is that some people just seem to attract the same kinds of tragedies again and again? Perhaps there is a need for cutting the ties to the story and truly forgiving the situation…

You can immediately end these cycles and create something new and different when you stop looking at the past and stand clearly in this current moment, recognizing that this moment is the only moment that matters in shaping your future and redefining yourself.

The past is over. And only determines your future if you choose to let it.

Personally, I prefer the term “Thriver” rather than survivor. I am a Life Thriver, plain and simple.

Of course, it feels good to let go of being a victim of any sort. But there is another important reason to release any victim stories from your consciousness.

It’s important for the planet.

We are representatives of the energy we want to see on the planet. (For more information on this, scroll down and read about the four stages of evolution in consciousness.) When you open your newspaper, turn on the TV or read your CNN webpage on your computer, notice the headlines. Ninety-nine percent of the time, there is some terrible headline that involves someone doing something to someone or groups of people being victimized by natural disasters or catastrophes of some sort.

When you really understand the mechanics of consciousness, you realize that the projection of our collective consciousness, the sum total of our thoughts and beliefs, create our collective planetary experience.

We create reality and on a global level, we co-create our world.

What we think, how we behave, our thoughts and our consciousness is added to the thoughts, emotions, beliefs and actions of others to create a consistent projected collective reality.

We are all unique pieces to a giant puzzle. When your piece of the whole is carrying the energy of being victimized or victim consciousness of any kind, you are adding to the victim consciousness of the whole.

Now, before we go any further, this is not blame or chastisement. I am simply pointing out that we are responsible for what we put into the world and what we project into the collective consciousness.

If we want to live in a world without victimization, then we have to eliminate victim consciousness in our own personal consciousness.

While this may sound big and obvious, you have to also be aware of the sneaky places where victim consciousness creeps in…victim energy can be insidious.

Think about this. In your outer reality, you are responsible for the creation of every experience.

Yup. Every single experience. It’s Universal Law.

So, for example, if you believe that your business is not doing as well as it could be right now because of the economy, you are engaging in victim consciousness. You are not a victim of the economy. You are simply aligned with a belief that the economy is bad and you are manifesting that into your reality.

If you believe you “can’t” do something because of any outer circumstance, including shifts in energy on the planet, karma and the old standby, “It’s just not God’s will.” Remember that you are not a victim of shifts in energy, karma or even God’s will. (God doesn’t want you to be a victim.)

I invite you to examine your beliefs on a deeper level and see if you have any beliefs that may be keeping you locked into a victim position.

Some questions to ask yourself that may give you clues to hidden victim consciousness might be:

Are there any things you feel resentful of or circumstance that feel like they are “not fair”?

Do you have stories about your life that you retell often to the point where it almost feels scripted?

Are they any places in your consciousness where you define yourself as a survivor?

Are there any creations in your life that make you feel like you are a loser of some kind?

Do you have excuses about why you aren’t experiencing the success or results you intend?

Are there any people or circumstance that you feel resentful of or trapped by?

Fill in the blank: If only ____________________________________ hadn’t happened, I’d be ____________________________________________________.

This is just a start. Give yourself the gift of taking an inventory of your consciousness and “untie” the ties that bind you into victimhood!

Enjoy THRIVING!!!

Love,

Karen

http://myemail.constantcontact.com/Calling-All-Authors--Speakers--Lightworkers-and-Healers---.html?soid=1101065865054&aid=VsIFqZazPdY&share=fblike

2010-09-10T09:03:00.000-07:00

http://myemail.constantcontact.com/Calling-All-Authors--Speakers--Lightworkers-and-Healers---.html?soid=1101065865054&aid=VsIFqZazPdY&share=fblike

We Are Not Free Until We Are All Free

2010-08-29T09:34:00.001-07:00

This blog post may challenge you at ask yourself some hard questions.

Your answers might cause your world to flip instantly (in a good way…)!

For the last 15 months, I have been trying to gather 8,000 people together to hold a single thought in consciousness in order to begin weaving an etheric template for an abundant new world.

My intention is to gather enough people together, at least once a week, to create a shift in the collective thinking of the world in order to speed up the creation of abundance and sustainable peace on the planet.

I have hosted meditations daily, weekly and monthly. I have had as many as around 100 people show up for a meditation and, on several occasions, I have been the only one there.

Last week I had over 200 people register for the mediation and only 4 showed up for the live call.

Now, I know enough to know that if people aren't showing up for my calls, it's very personal. It might not be ABOUT me personally but I am clear that there is something in my own consciousness that is not attracting what I intend to attract.

I ran through a lot of thoughts the day after the last 8,000 Meditation Event. I scrolled the the "Rolodex of Beliefs" trying to find the limiting belief that was keeping me from allowing what I wanted.

Here are some of the thoughts I came up with:

No one is as interested in Pakistan (my theme for the last meditation) as they are in the BP/oil spill because there is no "corporate bad guy" so there isn't anyone to unify against.
People care more about animals than they do about people.
Unconsciously, we are biased against Muslims.
No one cares about what I'm doing and I'm the "only one" who sees things the way I see things…(wah, wah, wah…)
I'd rather be playing with my kids in the evenings that leading mediations for the world.

I am really clear that I truly want to be leading these meditations. When I have a mediation scheduled, I am super excited and I can't wait for the call to start. I daydream about the effects of the meditations on the world and I lose time just enjoying the experience of these thoughts.

Shifting consciousness on the planet is my passion. It is part of who I am and my Life Purpose.

So, my excitement tells me that I am doing the "right" thing for me.

But, as I sat with the excitement, I noticed another spot in my consciousness that was kind of begging for attention. As I tried to hold an image of actually hosting a meditation and actually having 8,000+ people be a part of it, I noticed that, even though it was a nice thought, my mind kept flipping back to the more comfortable thoughts listed above.

On a very, very subtle level, I liked the feeling of being misunderstood, being the "only one" and trying to find someone to blame for all the suffering happening on the planet right now. (Selfish corporations, dishonest people, bad city planning and corrupt governments, etc.)

Surely it wasn't MY fault. I'm a Lightworker, right? I only think about good and happy things and if I'm blaming someone, it's only because, well, it's TRUE! Right?

But, the truth is, if we subscribe to the belief that You Create Your Own Reality (Stage Two Consciousness…see last week's blog post) or that We Co-Create Our Reality (Stage Three Consciousness), then we are responsible for everything in the world that comes into our reality and our awareness.

In other words, there is something in our collective consciousness that creates earthquakes, floods and oil spills.

Now, I'm not going to get too heavy into blame. It's not your fault and guilt is certainly going to get us no where pretty. However, as conscious beings who intend to live an abundant life and want abundance for others, we do have an obligation to be deliberate with our thinking and creating so that we can begin to choose a different experience; a different reality.

If we are intending to live in a joyful, abundant, sustainable, peaceful world, the vibrational frequency for those experiences needs to be held by all of us together.

If you want to live in an abundant world, then you have to hold the vibration of abundance.

If you want to live in a joyful world, you have to hold the vibration of joy.

If you want to live in a peaceful world, you have to hold the vibration of peace.

You get my point, I am certain.

It is our responsibility to get very, very honest with ourselves and see if there are still those quiet places in our consciousness that are holding old, familiar and, therefore, comfortable "un-"abundant energies.

Try this.

Take a deep, very conscious, very aware breath in and then out. Now try this again and simply feel in your body what joy, abundance and peace feel like. Don't think about it too much. Just breathe and feel.

Pretty easy, huh?

Now try holding those energies for 10 minutes and while you do that, notice what happens to you. Do you feel anxious or restless? Are you suddenly craving the chocolate ice cream cake in the freezer downstairs? Do you need to check your emails or your Facebook status? Where is your mind? What are you thinking about? How is your anxiety?

If you imagine that your consciousness is like a wind instrument, how long can you consistently "hold the note" of joy and abundance?

Now, just for fun, think about the oil spill in the Gulf or the challenges various relief agencies are having getting aid to Pakistan. What are your thoughts and feelings? Do you feel despair, frustrated, angry or powerless?

Naturally, we will feel these feelings first. Our emotional response helps us clarify what we want. But if we get stuck in these feelings we are only adding to the "mess" in consciousness.

In such times of rapid shifting in consciousness, we have little "wiggle room" in our thinking. We have to continue to cultivate the good habits of focusing on the world we choose to experience instead of lamenting that it isn't here yet.

The world we choose IS already here. It is up to us to shift it from its template form in consciousness to creating it in the third dimension. This can only be done by focusing on what we want.

Another subtle thing we have to be aware of is the idea that somehow, all of these events occurring outside of us to other people and in far-away places are separate from us.

If something is being perceived as a part of your reality, it IS a part of you.

When you read the news and you see an infant crying or turtle dying, because it is in your awareness, it is a part of your consciousness. It is a part of you.

I like the statement, "None of us is free until we are all free." (I could not find a good source for this quotation, so please forgive me for not notating it properly.)

The minute you perceive of a situation or someone as being separate from yourself, is the minute you give away your power to create a different outcome.

All of "it" is all of us.

And if we want to live in a world that is more abundant, healthier, sustainable, peaceful, where corporations act from integrity, where there is food, shelter, freedom, education and the conscious power to choose for everyone, then we have to take responsibility for what is drawn into our awareness and "clean" our consciousness to reflect what we desire.

The most important thing that you can do to create an abundant world, is to be abundant yourself in every way possible.

For the next few weeks, I am shifting the focus of the 8,000 Meditation Events. Instead of working on global issues, I will be hosting meditations about personal abundance. I know that when we know we are fully abundant, we are so much more powerful on a global level!

We can only lift people up to our own vibrational frequency. When we raise our own vibration, we create a greater energy to lift others up.

In addition, I will be offering a special two-hour “Tap-A-Thon” next Monday, September 6 at 8pm Eastern/7pm Central/5pm Pacific. We will be using EFT and some other belief-shifting techniques to move us all collectively towards an expanded state of abundance.

The cost for the “Tap-A-Thon” is $35.00. To register, simply click on the Paypal link below:

Love,

Karen

What is all this Consciousness Evolution Thing, Anyway?

2010-08-24T22:16:00.001-07:00

T he last 20 years have been marked by, what I think, is unprecedented shifts or evolution in consciousness.

For those of you who have been on a conscious path for several years, you may remember a time when you read a new book, discovered a new healing modality or tried a new technique and thought to yourself, "I must be the only one in my neighborhood doing this…"

Maybe you tried to share these new ideas with your friends and family and they simply looked at you as if you dropped from a spaceship or another planet.

But now, especially after the movies, "The Secret", and "What the Bleep", we've expanded our understanding and our vocabulary about consciousness. (You can even buy the book, based on the movie, "The Secret" at Wal-mart!)

You're no longer the "only" one!

But as you've embraced certain core ideas like the Law of Attraction, positive thinking, meditation and healing, you've noticed that even though you can feel deeply connected and you "know what to do" to create what you want in your life, you seem to have cycles of things working and then not working.

You understand the prosperous nature of the Universe and Love, and yet, you may still be struggling in your own personal relationships and with money.

You're not screwing up!

You're not doing anything wrong!

Where you are is absolutely perfect!

You might just need some new understandings and information to help you make sense of how you are evolving and growing.

There are four stages in consciousness evolution. While we like to think linearly, the truth is all of us go back and forth through these stages of consciousness evolution and it is quite normal for you to experience several stages of consciousness simultaneously.

This is the nature of evolution.

The Four Stages:

Stage One: Your Reality Creates You
In this first stage of consciousness, we are deeply conditioned by the collective, the world around us. Our beliefs, our thoughts, our actions all flow from a belief that our creative capacity is limited to creating a reaction to the world around us.

Our creativity is in navigating our way through challenges and situations that we feel powerless to control. Who we are, what we feel, what we create is dependent on luck, fate and is all determined by a source outside of ourselves.

For most of us, our conscious evolution journey begins here. Our goal in this first phase of awareness is to begin to clear our conditioning, old patterns, thought forms and habits that keep us entrained to a powerless mentality.

Stage Two: You Create Your Own Reality
During Stage Two we begin to remember our true creative capacity. We learn that our thoughts, our emotions, our mindset, our beliefs and our expectations create our reality. Using the basic "grammar" of creation, we begin to create something new and desirable in our world.

This is the phase taught to us in the movie "The Secret". It is during Stage Two that we focus on our personal reality and move more deeply into a state of abundance consciousness. We learn to focus and control our minds and master our emotions and use both to deliberately and consciously create.

Stage Three: We Co-Create Our Reality
During Stage Three, after experimenting with deliberate creation, we begin to realize some very important things:

1. There is a greater force helping us create and sometimes things work out bigger and better than we intend. Miracles happen to us every day and we give up having to know "how" something is going to happen. We begin to take bigger leaps of faith with our creative capacity.

2. Sometimes things don't turn out at all like we intend but there seems to be a Divine Plan playing itself out. Sometimes we don't know why a creation "fails", but we begin to understand that, in spite of this, the Divine Plan is good and the results are part of something bigger than ourselves.

3. Our awareness of our creative capacity deepens and we realize that everything in our outer reality is created by us. The things in our personal reality are personal creations and the things in our global reality are a result of projections in collective consciousness. We co-create our reality with our Divine Siblings.

4. We come to realize that, as creative beings, if we don't like our collective creation, we can join together with our Divine Siblings and with intention, co-create something different.

This more expansive understanding of collective consciousness and the power to co-create, compels us to join together in the face of challenges on the planets, like earthquakes and oil spills and co-create in consciousness a different and more abundant outcome
.
Truly, this is an exciting stage for us to enter into. Just go to Facebook or any of these social media forums and see the growing quantity of opportunities for you to join with your Divine Siblings and co-create an abundant New World.

Stage Four: God Creates Reality Through You
The fourth stage marks a complete return to your natural state prior to being conditioned. It is a state that is created after all your old beliefs and conditioning is released and is maintained by three key creation tools:

1. Meditation is vital for Stage Four. Meditation, in whatever form works for you, keeps your channel to your expanded awareness and Divine Intent open and flowing.

2. Maintaining a prayerful state is also important in Stage Four. Each moment can be expressed by gratitude and an acknowledgment of Divine Order and abundant perfection.

3. A clear intention to allow the Divine to work through you helps keep your energy and attention focused on being present to the Divine working through you.

In the Fourth Stage, you realize that you are a uniquely created being and that your highest purpose in the fulfillment of the Divine Plan is to express the truth of who you are in the fullest way possible. The Self in its pure, unconditioned state is intended to serve God by manifesting its full potential into form.

Each moment in this phase is a moment in the flow. You know that you are fully supported and you simply obey the truth of the moment and your awareness if finely honed on the Now. There are no worries, no fears, no lack, only faith and complete surrender.

A sample prayer for Stage Four might be:

I am an emissary of the Divine.
I am a child of Light.
I am an unlimited aspect of the Universe.
Because G-d is abundant, I am abundant in all ways.
Because G-d is powerful, I am powerful in all ways.
Because G-d is creative, I am creative in all ways.
Because G-d is all-knowing, I am always clear.
Because G-d is omnipotent and omnipresent, I am always in the right place at the right time fulfilling my Divine Purpose.
I pray that each moment, my hands, my body, my mind, my spirit, my Light and my essence be used in the service of the Divine.

A sample intention for Stage Four might be:

I intend to joyfully allow the Divine to easily create through me each and every minute of my day.

We all bop between the different phases, but you will realize that as your consciousness evolves, you tend to spend more time in one particular phase.

In the last few months, I have seen a lot of my clients hovering between Stage Three and Four. To some of you, it may feel as if you are living in kind of an energetic "gap".

For many of us, we are so used to "manifesting" that we are unsure of what we're doing if we don't have a "plan" or a vision we are working towards.

If that has been your experience lately, I invite you to relax into just simply being and remembering that your emotions are the GPS of your soul. Simply follow what feels good and correct and you will be in the right place, at the right time, doing the right thing.
Stage Four is joyful.

Some of us find that our "missions" that we do diligently served in the first part of our lives, has fallen away and we are truly following our hearts, sometimes into experiences that our previous, "serious" selves might have deemed frivolous. The purpose of Stage Four is simply to BE abundance and to follow the passion....no guilt, no remorse, no worry and, most importantly, no martyrdom.

It is in this fullest state of expression of the Self that we serve the Divine Plan. Remember, we are hard-wired to be happy, healthy, wealthy, connected and enlivened in whatever way feels correct for each one of us individually.

My intention, here at Joyful Mission, is to help you navigate the changes that come with each stage of evolution in consciousness.

Currently, there are three classes available to help you with your own personal growth and evolution. Each of these three classes is specifically designed to work with the energies of each stage of consciousness expansion:

Prosperity Boot Camp – Helps you transition from Stage One to Stage Two. This course teaches you what I call the "grammar" of Deliberate Creation and is a building block to all stages of consciousness expansion.

Inside the Body of God – Helps you fine tune your Deliberate Creation skills so that you can move from Stage Two to Stage Three and begin to use your skills together with other people to co-create an abundant New World.

Ascension 101 – Helps you understand all four stages of consciousness and continue to move solidly into Stage Three and Four of consciousness. This class is currently only available live. A recorded version will be available by January of 2011.

I hope you'll join me for these fun, dynamic and transformative courses. Taking this courses helps you set a clear intention to stabilize and ground your evolution and your "shifting".

You also get to be in the energy of some wonderful, like-minded people!

If you attend these classes as a pre-recorded experience, I'd love to hear your feedback and your experiences. Please feel free to drop me a note and let me know what's up in your world!

I look forward to continuing to expand these offerings!

Thank you for all that you do to take your place in the Divine Order! You are truly magnificent!

Love,

Karen

Suffering, Love and Homegrown Tomatoes

2010-08-19T20:33:00.000-07:00

I’ve been thinking a lot about suffering recently. Not the greatest topic to swill around in your brain but I have NEEDED to figure out this weird web of self-generated pain I’ve been indulging in for the last year.

It’s been a great learning journey that came to a conclusion with a baby, two dads, a magical homegrown tomato and a lost necklace. But more about that later…

Let’s start with the fun stuff first.

I’m experiencing love.

I’m experiencing love with a lot of things and a lot of people. I’m experiencing love with my kids, my family, my friends, my work, my brain, my life and, in spite of my resistance, the father of my youngest daughter.

My relationship with this man is a weird and very personal story. But since it is my birthday and kind of the beginning of a new era for me, I’d like to share it in the hopes that it might help you find love, too.

I started seeing this man about four years ago after I issued a personal moratorium on relationships in my life. I had just gotten out of a very painful relationship that ended the way all of my relationships in the last 10 years have ended and I didn’t want to get involved with anyone.

This relationship sort of started out without a whole lot of “relating”, if you catch my drift. Until I got pregnant, very (VERY) much against the odds…

Now, I have been diligently working on manifesting my life partner since my fortieth birthday, five years ago. I have a nice list of all the qualities I’d like my life partner to have. Some of you may have heard me read it out loud in Prosperity Boot Camp (which starts next Thursday, August 27, BTW).

I wanted a metaphysical man who would sit and meditate with me, a man who shared my passion for teaching and my life mission, a man who believed in fate and soulmates…

Instead I got this incredibly brilliant, well-educated, logical, intellectual Jewish man who is 15 years older than me and doesn’t really fit many of the criteria on my list.

I am very frightened of being in a relationship with this man. He is very attractive and many women want him. He has lived long enough to have a parade of “exes” of one sort or another and, given my history in relationship, and the statements he has made about the quality of our relationship, I can’t figure out what he wants with me, other than the fact that we share a daughter. (I know, you don’t have to send me emails about the “obvious”.)

But it’s more than just that.

For all the places where we lack common ground, we also have many places where we stand solidly together, side by side. We both believe in family, are committed to our children and doing the right thing because it’s the right thing to do. We laugh a lot. We do really well playing house together and we’re both very creative. We have an incredible energy together and, at the same time, a lot of simple peace between us and we really love our daughter, Ayelet.

And he likes my writing.

And he thinks I’m a good mother.

Oh, and did I mention that he lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota and I live in Houston, Texas and we commute once a month to spend time together?

We live in separate cities because my fear drove me all the way across the country so that I could be “in control” of our relationship.

All that really happened is that my baby and I have logged an absurd amount of frequent flier miles and I spend my free time with a telephone glued to my ear.

So a big part of my suffering this year has been about being afraid to let go and love (and TRUST), feeling abandoned (even though I’m the one who left), feeling overwhelmed by parenting a baby by myself, missing my guy, feeling guilty when I leave my other children to spend time in Minneapolis (or wherever we end up traveling),feeling guilty for taking my baby away from her father, trying to explain this relationship to my friends and family who just look at me with one eyebrow raised and wondering just what DID my Higher Self have in mind with this pairing anyway????

(BTW, this is the LAST post about suffering for at least three months…new topics coming soon!)

Love scares me. I’ve had some really painful manifestations in relationships that have left me with a crook in my neck from looking back and a lot of fear that if I surrender to love, I’ll just get hurt again. So I enter into love always waiting for the “other shoe to drop”.

A few years ago, a very wise friend of mine told me that if you don’t want the “other shoe” to “drop”, stop looking for the other shoe. One of the things that I have learned recently is that if I want to stop suffering, I have to stop looking for it.

When you stop searching for evidence of something in your life and instead focus your attention on something else, “magically” we begin to see more of what we are looking for.

We are actually “hard-wired” in our bodies to only see what we condition ourselves to see. Think about this for a minute. At any given moment you are surrounded by thousands of bits of information. If you pay attention to all of it, you might go mad.

Your brain has a system call the Reticular Activating System (RAS) that programs your awareness to sort through about 250 bits of information per minute so that you are not overwhelmed by data. Did you ever notice how when you are thinking about buying a particular kind of car that you start to notice that car everywhere you go?

It’s not magic or even a “sign”. It’s simply that your RAS has programmed your awareness so that what you are thinking about is more evident in your outer world. Basically, you can program your thinking to see what you want to see and consequently even influence the kind of experience you want to have.

When I was living in Sedona a few years back, I got to spend a lot of time in my hammock under the stars. One night I got a very clear message in my head comprised of only one sentence:

It’s all Love.

And in that one moment I had this profound awareness that everything, every experience, every person, every situation, basically, all of life was an expression of love. I just had to learn to see it that way.

Marianne Williamson, author of “A Return to Love”, says, “There is no such thing as a neutral thought. Every thought takes us into love or into fear, and whichever one we choose casts out the vision of the other.”

We cannot be in love and fear simultaneously. One has to win. When we embark on an enlightened path and we begin to see the expansive, unlimited nature of the Universe, we also come to understand that love is the basic unchanging nature of life.

In the Human Design System, which I believe gives us the archetypical blueprint for the highest expression of humanity, love and life force are inextricably intertwined. Fear isn’t even a part of the map and is actually evolving out of the system as a place of awareness. (See the Solar Plexus Mutation mini-course.)

The only pain we experience in love is the pain of separation or the perception of separation. Are we really separate or do we just perceive ourselves to be, focus on it and then sit and suffer in the ever-growing gap we create in consciousness?

My friends, Paul and Layne Cutright, relationship coaches and authors of several relationship books, including “You’re Never Upset for the Reasons You Think You Are,” stated once in a teleclass I hosted, that the root cause of all conflict in a relationship is a couples desire to be closer and an inability to manifest that desire.

As with all contrast, our suffering in the perception of separation is simply our Higher Self helping us clarify that we want to be closer and in a loving space. To create more love, we simply have to shift our focus away from the places where we think we are apart from love and look at where we find closeness.

Creation is simply a matter of where you put your energy, attention and focus.

When we get stuck in fear or even panic (not-love) it’s usually because we don’t understand what is happening. Most of us, when we are caught in fear, struggle, resist or try to escape the circumstances that created the fear. We act like bugs caught in a spider web. The more we resist and struggle, the deeper we are ensnared in the web.

If we, instead, allow our response and work to see the experience from a different perspective, we can use the not-love experience as a powerful Point of Evolution that gives us the information necessary to move to a deeper experience of love.

There are many reasons why we get trapped in the web of fear. I’ll list a few but you may have your own:

1.It’s time to move on. You are done with the experience but you aren’t trusting that what is coming next is more in alignment with what you truly want to experience.

2.What you are wanting isn’t in the highest good for all, including yourself and your Higher Self is staging an “intervention”.

3.Your experiences are triggering past painful memories and you are afraid that the past will repeat itself.

4.You are focusing on what you don’t want instead of what you want.

5.You have an identity rooted in your “stuckness” and you don’t want to let it go. Maybe you don’t know who you are without pain, suffering, struggle, etc.

6.You are too tired to make the change. You’re burned out and need a break.

7.You have old beliefs that won’t allow you to believe that you can have/deserve to have/it is possible to have/feel guilty for having…

8.You forgot (temporarily) in the midst of the “earth dream” that you are a Source Being.

As I said, you may have other reasons but basically, they are all rooted in fear and not love. When we see the love, we can experience immediate healing.

Try this for a minute. Sit and breathe deeply and consciously. Let your breath fill your body and just hold the energy of the breath for a minute. As you exhale the breath, imagine that with your out-breath you are releasing all the tensions, fear, anxiety, concern, panic, or whatever may be bugging you.

Now breathe in again and as you breathe in this time, simply think about and feel love entering your body and breathing in pure love in all of its expressions and forms. Just be love.

Isn’t it interesting how such a simple experience of love can erase everything else?

I was recently at a wedding. One of the guests made a toast and compared love to the image of Adam and G-d in the Sistine Chapel, fingers reaching towards each other but not quite meeting. He stated that maybe love was the work we needed to do to actually connect and touch. I agree.

We can stand in the gap and connect and touch simply by shifting our focus. Do we spend our time noting the places where we don’t connect and lack common ground, or do we stand in the moment and savor all those places where we do connect and touch?

Your experience will depend on your answer to that question. (Hint: Life is precious and each moment can pass in heart beat. Do you really want to spend the time we have standing in “the gap”?)

Now, back to a tale of a baby, two dads, a magical homegrown tomato and a lost necklace…

When I was in New York a few days ago, I was traveling in the backseat of a rental car trying to keep my very active toddler happy at the end of a long road trip. I was wearing a necklace my father had given me when I was eight-years-old that was very dear to me. I took off the necklace and gave it to Ayelet to play with. She dropped it and it slid to the floor, or so I thought.

In the morning when I went to the car to look for the necklace, it was nowhere to be found. Her Dad and I tore the car and her car seat apart looking for it but it was gone.

When I was growing up, my Dad traveled a lot and I really, really missed him. He always brought me back a souvenir from his travels, usually a piece of jewelry. I have several pieces stored away to give to my daughters when they get older.

But this particular necklace is my favorite and when I wear it, I always remember how much I missed my Dad when I was little. When I lost it, I realized that maybe it was time to release the memory of always missing my Dad and I adjusted myself emotionally and let it go.

A few days later, after traveling with the car seat from Newark to Houston and putting it in two different cars, I was leaning over to put Ayelet in her seat when, seemingly out of nowhere, my necklace “dropped” into my hand. I was thrilled but kind of confounded at where the darn thing had been hiding itself.

In my meditation that evening, I got a clear message that instead of wearing it as a symbol of my missing my Dad, that I needed to see it as a token of my father’s love for me and I imagined him in the port city of Basra in Iraq picking out a special trinket for me. (BTW, he is still delighted when he sees me wear it.) It is time to release the old memories of separation and remember the love.

(One Dad down, one Dad to go.)

Now for the Magical Homegrown Tomato…Last week, Ayelet and I were outside enjoying our beautiful, tropical backyard in Houston. After roaming around the back of the garden, Ayelet brought me a warm, beautiful, sun-ripened, homegrown tomato.

Now, this isn’t such a big deal except that we have no tomato plants in our backyard and neither do our neighbors. I was, again, confounded about the appearance of something out of
“thin air”.

Later that evening, when I was talking to her Dad on the phone, he mentioned that he had picked the first ripe tomato of the season from his backyard in Minneapolis. We joked that maybe Ayelet had found a portal to her Dad’s backyard…

Now, I am certain that there is some kind of logical explanation for the reappearance of my necklace and the magical tomato. But I’ve decided to let go of my need to know…

Instead, I prefer to think that the power of remembering love vs. separation brought my necklace back to me and that the strength of a little girl’s love for her Dad (and his love for her) was powerful enough for her to blast through the time-space continuum and go tomato picking with her Daddy on a warm, beautiful summer afternoon.

Today is my birthday. Today I commit to a year of finding the love in everything.

I hope you’ll join me!

Love,
Karen

P.S. At the end of my time with Ayelet and her Dad, I made a little stack of stones, three stones representing each of us, and at the base I placed a perfect heart-shaped rock. I thought about taking a photo to mark the moment but I realized that the moment was, like all moments, temporary and profound because of its fleeting, impermanent nature.

My intention is that this “note” will remind you to see all the love that surrounds you, too! And That you won’t waste a minute getting after it! Hop to it! Love in all of its unique and amazing expressions is waaaaay more fun than suffering…

8,000 Meditation Event

2010-08-19T17:45:00.000-07:00

Event: August 19 8 PM Central

Happy Mother's Day

2010-05-09T12:39:00.001-07:00

Happy Mother’s Day!

Motherhood has been the most incredible journey I have taken in this lifetime. My children have been my greatest teachers, my biggest joys and ultimately, as they stand on the edge of the “nest”, my best friends.

I wonder how I got so lucky?

(It’s okay. I actually figured out the logistics of it…no need to send me emails ;-)

As a new mother for the fifth time at the ripe young age of 44, I am enjoying have a baby more than I ever did when my other kids were small.

It’s not that I didn’t enjoy the others. I did very much. But my mothering abilities have been forged in the fires of experience and I’m wiser (hopefully), more relaxed and better at seeing the big picture.

Last year my oldest son went off to college. My oldest daughter is on the cusp of leaving home, too. I have begun another phase in my parenting and the emotions surrounding this part of parenting is quite surprising.

Truthfully, I grieved when Keegan, my oldest, left home. I missed his ever-constant gentle demeanor and his sunny smile. Those Who Were Left Behind were weird without him. For several months it was as if my family has an un-fill-able hole in it. We had to redefine who we were without him.

And he was lonely without us (and his friends from High School), too.

This semester has been a different experience for him, though. He is taking exciting classes, working behind the camera at a TV studio, writing, creating and very much beginning to live his dream life.

Keegan was always an unusual kid. This was a child who informed me at the sweet age of two years that when he grew up, he was going to be a filmmaker.

Now he is solidly on his path and when I hear the thrill of excitement in his voice, it awakens in me something new as a mother. I see him truly begin to take flight with his life and there is this deep tickle and rush of huge love in my solar plexus that delights at witnessing the final stages of his rapidly departing childhood.

Complete joy and awe at who he is becoming has replaced grief and I can hardly say his name without gushing…almost like it was when he was newborn.

Soon my daughter and then a son, another daughter and eventually my baby will hopefully begin to take their fledgling flights. I hope that I am lucky enough to witness these launches!

I have been a very lucky woman all of my life. I was mothered by a mother who believed fiercely in Family. We grew up in unusual places and my mother had to create an oasis of safety and “home” in the midst of foreign cities and environments, oftentimes on her own while my Dad traveled for work.

She did her job very well. Truly, in my world, home was where the Mom was. The location may have changed periodically but the Mom was consistent.

I am certain that even my more challenging children are “easy” compared to me as a child.

There have been tales told that I was often frustrated, full of questions and never quite “normal” as a kid.

All of the above is probably true.

In spite of this, my Mother believed in me. There were many times when my Mother and I clashed and I suspect she secretly longed for a “normal” child (actually, sometimes she wished that out loud…), but no matter what transpired, my Mother always knew there was greatness inside of me.

She still thinks this is true.

With my new understandings of “The Big Picture”, I now know that the frustrations my Mother experienced were a direct result of her knowing what was possible for me and her witnessing my circuitous route to my greatness.

I am sure she had many sleepless nights wondering just what the heck was going on in my life…

Probably, I’ve even given her a few of those wakeful nights as recent as…well…last week!

The “normal” life has never had much appeal for me…

I am who I am today because my Mother saw greatness in me. Her belief in me fostered that same belief in myself. That deeper awareness of my unlimited Divine Potential that she instilled in me with her Mother-Love is the strength that I have drawn on when I have stumbled and fallen in my life.

Her love has given me the courage to move forward, even when the prospects were grim or seemed hopeless.

From my Mother I learned Dedication and Commitment, and the importance of rhythm and consistency.

And staying dry when it’s raining and always making sure you pack a little extra food, just in case…

Thank you, Mama, for the 44 years of greatness you have seen in me.

I promise, I’ll keep working on it!

Love,
Karen

"Curving Back on Myself, I Create Again and Again" - Bhagavad Gita

2010-05-01T09:59:00.000-07:00

The experience of being alive is quite an adventure!

When I first started learning about deliberate creation and the power of consciousness, I was 28 years old. (I’m now almost 45, so you do the math.)

In the beginning, deliberate creation seemed simple. We visualized. We affirmed. We meditated and thought positively with pretty good results.

Lately I’ve been hearing a lot of teaching about how hard it is to change and how conscious evolution and deliberate creation can create chaos and “shifting” and “processing.”

I have read a lot of writing recently about “The Shift” and evolution towards 2012. Many teachers are sharing information about ascension patterns and speak to challenges associated with deliberate expansion in consciousness.

I agree with some of what I’ve read. When we begin to live a deliberate life, our Higher Selves call forth energies that create experiences that help us clarify where we may carry limiting beliefs that keep us from embracing fully the manifestation of our natural state of Abundance.

This experience isn’t a “test”. It is simply artifacts in consciousness that are being brought to your awareness to help you see what you need to correct in order to fully live as Source.

Sometimes the experience feels extreme or exaggerated, but it has to be to get your attention. (At least that seems true for me.)

But, does it really have to be as hard as we seem to be making it? When you first started learning about deliberate creation, did it really seem so difficult?

The Universe vibrates, down to its tiniest particle. We are composed of the same “stuff” as the Universe and we, too, vibrate.

As vibrational beings, it is natural for us to have what I will loosely call “good” experiences or “bad” experiences. (I personally believe that they are all good, but for clarification’s sake, I am labeling them as good and bad.)

(I’m not going to get too much into the nature of the ups and downs of vibrating. If you’d like to learn more, please read my book, “Inside the Body of God” or download my free e-book, “Notes From the Edge”.)

In other words, you’re always going to have rough patches in your life. If you don’t, you’re not growing and evolving.

The trick is learning to navigate these rough patches and avoid identifying with them so deeply that you get stuck.

Okay. So bear with me here. I’m going to get a little preachy. Please know I am coming from a place of deep love and a desire to support. And certainly, I am also coming from my own personal experience of challenge and struggle.

When things get dicey in our lives, it can feel challenging to apply the basic rules of deliberate creation. Our natural tendency is to want to make is complex and complicated. We look for reasons that we are stuck and feeling thwarted in our quest for a “good” life.

I have watched my clients...and, of course, myself...look for past life trauma, subconscious beliefs from old childhood wounds, genetically conditioned patterns, etc., etc., etc.

Lately I’ve been thinking about the statement, “Curving back upon myself, I create again and again” from the Bhagavad Gita.

The “stuff” of the Universe is, well, universal. It’s all made of the same components. The stars and us, birds, rocks, air, water, even light, are all composed of the same basic building blocks at a sub-atomic level.

Creation, because the Universe is dynamic, is never permanent. It changes and, eventually, reverts back to its original form and then is used again in another creation.

The Universe is like a giant Etch-A-Sketch. Shake it and you get a new picture. If you don’t like the picture, shake it again.

As creative beings in physical form, we have control over the buttons on the Etch-A-Sketch. We can shake it, too, and destroy a creation that no longer fits and create something new.

The creation process is pretty simple, although as we all know, not always easy. I think we may be making this whole evolution/ascension process way more complicated than it needs to be

It takes a lot of deliberate practice, discipline and consistency to develop good creative habits. And, like all habits, it takes time and practice to make them a natural part of your life experience.

I’d like to take the statement, “curving back on myself, I create again and again” and break it into two parts.

Let’s talk about the first part: “curving back on myself.”

What does it mean to curve back on yourself?

We are Source beings. We are individuated aspects and representatives of the Divine. You could say that we are holographic representations of the Divine. As beings composed of Universal “stuff”, contained within us are aspects of the entire Cosmos on a sub-atomic level.

But, as humans, sometimes we forget our Divine Heritage. We think we’re stuck in this dense 3-D form, hapless victims of our conditioning, our lives and even our DNA.

But we’re not stuck.

In fact, the science of epigenetics is showing us that we can even change our DNA structure when we make different choices. We are not locked into any condition of life. We can create any situation we choose.

The only thing keeping us stuck is our thinking and our perception of being separate from Source.

Curving back on yourself, to me, means creating a regular habit to connect with the Source within you. Now, as you may know, I’m not a big stickler for rules so I’m not going to say how you need to do that. Find what works for you.

For me, curving back on myself is done by meditation every day. It is during meditation that I can connect with the deeper, infinite aspect of myself that gives me direction for what I truly want to create.

Connecting with Source gives me conscious power over the Etch-a-Sketch buttons of my life.

If you are to act as a Source Being and regularly call on your Source capacity to create, you have to be able to hear and connect with Source within you.

Think about this. If you are a deep sea creature who lives miles under the ocean and has never seen light or breathed air and you want to communicate with a seagull flying over the ocean, you have no way of connecting with each other, right?

When you don’t have an established line of communication to Source within you, it’s easy to feel lost, disconnected or out of control of your life.

If you want to connect with the Source You and draw on your Universal creative power, you have to be able to communicate with that aspect of yourself. You can’t do that if you aren’t in some way connecting on a regular basis and establishing a line of communication.

Let’s look at the second part of the statement, “I create again and again.”

We are never locked in a stagnant state of creation. All things that are created can, and eventually, will be destroyed. Change is constant.

As Source Beings, when we create and our creation no longer serves, we can simply shake the Etch-a-Sketch of our lives and create again. And again. And again. And again.

There are no situations that you are stuck in.

There are no creations that you cannot change, no matter how impossible it may feel to change it.

As we navigate the challenges that life brings to us, (or truthfully, that we bring to ourselves to further our own evolution) it is crucial that we remember to stick to the basics of deliberate creation.

Deliberate Creation is simply the grammar of the Universe.

While it is easy to get lost in the despair, to wonder “why”, to justify and find archaic patterns and to worry about the possible scary shifts on the planet, we must navigate our way through these changes by diligently and deliberately applying the creative principles that we have been mastering for the last few years.

We have total control over how we choose to experience our reality. We cannot afford, especially at this time, to get lost in mental machinations about how or what is going on. While thinking is a fun sport, now is the time to put “pedal to the metal” and ask ourselves, what do we want to be creating? What direction feels good?

And, once we curve back upon ourselves, connect with the Source within us and discover the answers, we have to apply creation principles and begin drawing the reality we choose.

Here are some basic principles to review. Gently ask yourself if you are consciously and deliberately applying these concepts on a daily basis.

1. Connect with the Source within you regularly in a way that works for you.
2. Clearly ask for what you want.
3. Stay focused on the fact that an elegant, even miraculous solution is always available to any and every situation, desire or challenge you may be facing.
4. Stay in a perpetual state of gratitude and appreciation. Find evidence that what you intend is already showing up in your life, even if it’s teeny tiny.
5. Stay focused on the present moment.
6. When old thoughts or beliefs come up, deal with them and then refocus on creating, not healing. You are already healed.
7. Follow what feels good to you.
8. Use challenges as pushing off points to help you get clarity. Don’t define yourself by what you have survived. You are here to thrive, not survive.
9. Stay in the creative flow by giving and serving others. Nothing, I mean, absolutely nothing feels better than helping others.
10. Know that all situations will pass. It’s the Law.

May you enjoy this glorious co-creation of life on this planet!

Keep it simple!

Love,
Karen

'Ready to Find Out Who You REALLY Are?'

2010-03-23T08:44:00.000-07:00

'Ready to Find Out Who You REALLY Are?'

'Are You Evolving? Feeling the "Shift"?'

2010-03-20T08:24:00.000-07:00

'Are You Evolving? Feeling the "Shift"?'

'Thank You!'

2010-03-09T09:21:00.000-08:00

'Thank You!'

The Blessings of Despair

2010-03-07T08:50:00.000-08:00

Like many of you, I am no stranger to despair.

These last few months have been very interesting. I have born witness to my own manifestation of despair and boy have I learned a lot about the creation process.

There has been a quiet undercurrent of despair in my life this last year. It all started when I moved from Minnesota to Texas weeks after the birth of my baby daughter. My journey took me a whole country length away from my baby’s father, a move that has broken my heart in a very soft and subtle way (even though I did it to myself…)

There were many wonderful things that happened over the year as well. My days have been full with the joy of having a new baby, life with my family and time with my parents. The winter has been short and warm by my old Minnesota standards and I have a wonderful new house close to miles of hike and bike trails and innumerable parks.

I have a rich and complex life. Maybe you do, too?

In Prosperity Bootcamp we talk about the Law of Focused Succes:

“Where you put your energy and attention is where you get growth.”

As the year progressed, I had a lot of options about where to focus my attention. Some days it was very easy to focus on all the love and joy. When a gorgeous light-filled baby grins at you, it’s hard to feel miserable.

But there were other days fraught with sleep-deprivation or the stress of trying to raise a family of six on my own, run a more-than-full-time business by myself and stay balanced and centered.

On those days my focus was certainly directed more towards the despair.

Feeling crummy and focusing on it only created more feeling crummy.

The worse I felt, the more I avoided feeling my feelings. Rather than diving in and really allowing myself to use my despair as a tool to help me get more clarity about what I’d rather be experiencing instead in my life, I resisted my “bad” feelings.

I could have zipped through the despair, recognized it as a message from my Inner Wisdom, telling me that what I really wanted was to feel supported, nurtured, balanced and closer to my baby’s father.

But no. That would have been simple.

Instead, I chose to walk along the very well-worn neuropathway of Martyrdom and Suffering, going over and over and over all the events that created my despair until I could call up the pain (and then quickly resist it) with very little conscious thought. A cloud of pain just kind of hovered over me all day long.

(You all may now play your violins…)

Of course, as I was focusing on resisting the pain, I created more resistance until I had very little choice but to start really disconnecting from my Inner Wisdom and the Universe.

Not only that, but I was investing so much energy and attention into resisting an experience that, instead of going away, the experience kept getting bigger and bigger.

Isn’t it cool how the Law of Focused Success works?

It’s no wonder we get ourselves trapped in all kinds of self-made sticky situational webs…

This whole mess reached its “high point” just before Valentine’s Day when I decided to have a serious “heart to heart” talk with my guy. I didn’t go the way I hoped, but it did go exactly the way I had imagined, I had been creating it for half a year…

As this conversation went from bad to worse (his cell phone battery died at midnight and he wasn’t able to call back until morning…PERFECTLY CREATED, don’t you think…?!!), I could feel giant, etheric lead doors slam shut on all my charkas until I became nothing but a very logical head with legs. (Not pretty…)

I twisted with numb misery for a couple of weeks. I felt so disconnected from everything, even my kids, and entertained very dramatic visions of having a wildly successful business and being alone for the rest of my life…

Thank God for Inner Wisdom, old friends who kick your butt not matter how logical you think you are and the eternal magic of the Universe (disguised as seductive baby grins…)!

After weeks of whining to some of my friends, one in particular who can etherically “pull my covers” while sitting on a surfboard on the other side of the country, the magic in my life began to slowly reveal itself.

One exceptionall beautiful afternoon I was sitting on my back deck enjoying the warm sun on my body, even though my heart was heavy. In a flash my Inner Wisdom snuck in a brief thought and a light-filled epiphany echoed through my Being.

I was gently reminded that I had been praying to feel closer to my Divine Creator and the magic of the Universe for some time now and that, indeed, in the midst of all this misery, my prayer was being answered.

It’s hard when you’re in the midst of despair to remember that It’s All Good, even the pain. When we are experiencing the pain and identifying with it (I AM…) we can feel overwhelmed and hopeless.

Getting out of pain requires a diligent piecemeal approach. Sometimes we get stuck in pain because we are trying to move into joy too quickly, avoiding the message our pain is bringing us. Such a Giant Leap feels overwhelming and impossible. It’s too big a leap to start with.

While I was sitting on the deck enjoying the sun I decided that I was DONE suffering. And, even though I knew the possibility of joy, I just couldn’t quite get there. I was too dense and heavy with the energy of my suffering. So I started small.

Moving from despair to joy often requires taking tiny steps.

I began by making a mental list of all the things I am grateful for: the sun, my children, warmth, the beauty of the big sky over me.

I certainly didn’t move into joy but gratitude gave me an opening to grow into something that felt better.

Later that evening I headed out for a walk with my baby. As we strolled in the light of the setting sun, I marveled at the way the light hit the tree trunks of the trees lining the hike and bike trail. For 30 uninterrupted minutes I was blessed out by tree bark and the unlimited creative power of my Creator.

The little steps of getting out of pain were the real answer to my big prayer. As I expressed my gratitude for what I was experiencing, my connection to my Creator grew and I began to remember that big feeling of awe and wonder. My pain helped me become more present to the small joys and delights the Universe has to offer.

I remembered how, a few years ago when I was really struggling financially, experiencing deep gratitude for all my financial challenges. Without the challenges, I would never have grown in faith. My struggles taught me to use my creative powers and the lessons I learned are fundamentally a piece of who I am today.

But, I have been conditioned to suffer. While I am grateful for the lessons, what I have also learned is that you don’t have to get to a place of suffering to experience appreciation, joy, connection and gratitude.

Each moment of my last year, I was given a choice. My prayer was to feel more connected to the Divine. My conditioning created opportunities to do it the “old” way. I created despair and suffering as a vehicle to move into re-connecting with my Creator.

Many years ago, when I was a Parent Educator, I used to teach that children don’t have to suffer to learn.

I think adults don’t have to suffer to learn either. But sometimes we forget.

At each of my “choice points” over the last year, I could have just as easily chosen to focus on creating joy, by focusing on all the things that felt “good”. I wonder if I would have felt even more connected had I chosen that path…?

In addition to choosing to suffer, I also shut down and identified with my pain instead of using pain as the compass of my soul.

In Prosperity Bootcamp I talk about how we are not our emotions. Rather, our emotions help us identify how close we are to creating our intentions and our Pure Hearts Desires.

Our so-called “negative” emotions are simply energetic indicators that we are not holding a space in consciousness that is helping us create what we intend. Usually when we are experiencing “negative” emotions, we are either off-target with our thought forms or we are harboring old beliefs that are keeping us from allowing what we truly desire in our lives.

When we are experiencing “negative” emotions, it is simply our Inner Wisdom communicating with us, letting us know that we need to recalibrate our creation process, sometimes simply by asking the question, “What do you want to be experiencing instead?”

Instead of looking for evidence to support my belief that I am not loved, not supported and all alone, I could have searched for evidence to support new beliefs that I am supported, deeply loved, magnificently powerful and I have an abundance of people who love me in my life.

Truthfully, when I look back at this year with my renewed perspective, I HAVE been VERY supported, loved and cherished. But, I missed a lot of it.

It’s important when we are stretching ourselves into new belief patterns that we look for evidence that what we want is already present and growing in our lives, even if it feels like the evidence is teeny tiny. Remember, where you put your energy and attention is where you get growth.

What if I had seen the support that there all along? How different would my experience have been?

I am profoundly grateful for what I have learned. I am grateful for all the love and support I have received. I am grateful for my renewed connection to G-d and the renewed unleashing of magic in my life.

AND, please kick my butt if I choose the suffering path again.

I now choose to know that I am instantly, easily and constantly connected to my Divine Creator and that this awareness is Source of all my Good. I only have to appreciate and energize all that I desire and keep my energy and attention focused on the infinite abundance I AM. I am grateful for all of my life experiences. I am fully supported, deeply loved and magnificently powerful. I am an unlimited Child of the Universe. With this understanding, it is impossible for me to have any unmet needs or desires.

Wooo Hoooo!

'I've Decided to Stop Teaching..'

2010-02-25T15:50:00.000-08:00

'I've Decided to Stop Teaching..'

'Last Chance To Help My Students'

2010-02-25T15:16:00.000-08:00

'Last Chance To Help My Students'

Be The Change

2010-01-18T09:56:00.000-08:00

It’s been a powerful week as nature unleashed herself in Haiti leaving unimaginable devastation in her wake. It’s hard to tear yourself away from the photos of families torn apart, children in pain and broken people.

We are all left with the question of what to do. How can we best help the people of Haiti?

The third dimensional answers are somewhat obvious. Most of us can not travel to Haiti and help in the field, although I am certain that many of us would feel a bit more empowered if we could.

Instead we text our support, gather supplies and send money to various organizations and continue to watch the news with horror and compassion, looking for some sign of hope.

If you read the news every day, there seems to always be a situation that pulls on your heart and makes you wonder just what can you do to help the world?

It is, of course, vital that we take concrete action that offers aid and comfort to people in need. There really is no way around the basic tenets of life. We need food, water, shelter and clothing, for starters.

But, if you look at the trajectory of concrete action sometimes the physical steps we take feels like the equivalent of trying to fill a big empty hole with water, one drop at a time. The small amount of water at the bottom of the hole seems to evaporate before we see any noticeable change in volume.

Truth is, “bad” things will always happen in a vibrational world.

But just how do we change the nature of the “bad”?

If you are just a “normal” person with a “normal” life, what can you do, beyond sending money, to really make a difference in the world?

Mahatma Ghandi said, “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.”

For years I wondered exactly how to “be the change”. I mean, I have tried to be as kind as I can be to others. I do my best to take care of my family. I recycle. I feel guilty if I’m not the Poster Child of Virtue.

But as I have grown in my understanding of the Universe and the nature of consciousness, just being nice, while important, is only a fragment of “being the change”.

Let’s break this down into smaller understandings.

If you want to bring change into the world, the first thing you have to define is what kind of change do you really want to see?

If we are to create any kind of change, we have to know where we are headed and what we are creating. In order to create what you want, you have to know what you want.

It may seem obvious, but just for grins; make a list of what you think a “better” world would look like. What are the key components of a “better” world?

Perhaps you wrote down, peaceful, abundant, loving, secure and creative.

If you follow Ghandi’s statement, in order for the world to change, you have to embody the qualities you wish to see in the world.

If you want a peaceful, abundant, loving, secure and creative world, then you must be a peaceful, abundant, loving, secure and creative person.

Are you?

(Don’t worry. Most of us probably aren’t embodying all the changes we’d love to see in the world…yet.)

The world is a magnificent sum of the total of her parts. Each and every one of us is a vital and crucial part of the world and the way we “be” has a very real impact on the world on an energetic level.

Mahatma Ghandi also said, "A man is but the product of his thoughts. What he thinks, he becomes."

The sum total of our thoughts and feelings create our reality. This is the simple mechanical order of consciousness. Where we put our energy and attention is where we get growth and results in our lives.

As holographic representations of the Divine, we are individuated aspects of Consciousness. Our collective Life Purpose is to work ourselves up towards the holiness of the Divine and to not tolerate anything in ourselves or with ourselves, which is contradictory to this holiness.

What exactly does that mean?

Most religions teach that we are Children of God. God created us. We come from God.

But that’s not enough. There is a danger with not following through with this thought to its deeper understanding. When we perceive ourselves to be children of some deity outside of ourselves, it gives us all kinds of excuses to not line up energetically with the magnificence of Who We Really Are.

When we see ourselves as “children of God”, it is easy to think of ourselves as some young, immature, tiny offspring of some benevolent deity who kind of watches us from Heaven, amused by our naivety. Sometimes, this deity has to come down from Heaven and punish us when we are really bad…you know the story.

And, to get even a little more heretical, when we are these little, tiny “children of God”, we can also act with reckless impunity and thoughtlessness with the prospect of being forgiven by an eternally Loving Being. The forgiveness part isn’t the problem in that scenario, but the reckless impunity and thoughtlessness is.

You, as a human, have a Divine Blueprint for your human experience. And, because you truly are a Child Of God, your blueprint is the same blueprint as God’s Blueprint. You are a Holographic Representation of the Divine.

The word “hologram” comes from the Greek words, “holos” which means “whole” and “gramma” which means “message”. In most religious creation stories, God creates the world with words and sounds. Contained within the world is the “Whole Message” of God.

God and The Universe, the “Whole Message” are contained within you. But, in the process of dancing in the density of the energies of being human, we forget.

We come to believe that we have no power, we are not worthy, we have to give up who we are and what we want, we are victims, we have to fight for what is ours, that there are not enough resources for everyone, etc. etc, etc.

We then use these false beliefs to trap ourselves into patterns of consciousness that take us far away from our Divine Heritage. Naturally, these negative consciousness patterns create actions and experiences that are less than aligned with our holy nature.

We are not only holographic representations of the Divine; we are also individuated aspects of the Divine. That means, even though contained within us is the “whole message” of our Divinity, we also have our own unique expression of that magnificence.

To truly express into form the holiness of Who We Really Are, we also have to express into form our magnificent uniqueness.

In other words, part of our life purpose as manifested Children of G-d is to live out the highest expression of our authentic selves. And this authentic expression of yourself as Yourself is one of the most powerful things you can do to “save the world.”

There has been a lot of buzz lately about 2012 and the Shift. I personally subscribe to a belief that the Shift won’t be a cataclysmic event but rather is a gradual ending of an era and the birth of a new era in consciousness.

We have already been deeply entrenched in the changes of the Shift for years now. Collectively we have been focusing on removing blocks and limitations in our belief systems. As each one of us individually experiences breakthroughs in consciousness, we add to a collective consciousness that more readily accesses its Divine Potential.

The concept of a collective consciousness of humanity cannot be realized without a thorough analysis of the hearts of all who comprise it. When we “heal” ourselves, our personal healing adds to the healing of the whole world.

The more we remove the illusions of having “forgotten” our holiness, the more we are called forth to live an authentic life, a life that is aligned with our individual unique blueprint.

Think about this. When you are living a life that is out of alignment with your authentic self, it feels terrible. If you are working a job you hate, living in circumstances that feel stifling and willing your way through each day, what kind of energy are you adding to the collective?

Now, don’t get me wrong. For most of us, waking up and spontaneously making the decision to quit everything is also not an authentic action.

But, I am advocating that one of the greatest things that you can do to add to the holiness of the collective consciousness is to get very real with yourself and start creating a consciousness and a LIFE that is rooted in your own personal passion.

When you are living a life that is juicy, fulfilling, rewarding, enlivening and exciting, you can not help but simultaneously create abundance and prosperity in form and in spirit.

These are the energies that can create great shifts in collective consciousness.

“Being” these energies begins to impact the world, not just in consciousness but also ultimately in form. (You can’t have one without the other.) People who are fulfilled, abundant and prosperous have much to share in the physical realm.

The cracking open of our hearts over Haiti is a beautiful thing, in spite of the tremendous tragedy. Tonight at the grocery store, there were children outside with jars collecting money for Haiti. We are moved to compassionate action. Millions of us are focusing our energy on giving and sharing.

But there is more required of us if the changes we are seeing are to become sustainable.

The truth is, the trauma of Haiti will eventually fade from our consciousness.

What are we consciously doing now for the victims of the Phuket Tsunami? Or the people of Rwanda? Or the victims in Darfur? Or the hungry children in our backyards?

If we want to see sustainable changes for all the peoples of the world, we have to start first by taking care of our own consciousness and truly “being” the change we wish to see.

Haiti was already a desperately poor country, a by-product of a lack-influenced collective consciousness. Don’t you wonder how the effects of this earthquake could have been mitigated if the Haitians had had better housing, a better governmental infrastructure and greater prosperity?

I am gently arguing that a shift in consciousness on all of our parts that can add to a shift in consciousness for the collective is the most powerful proactive stance we can take in the face of this tragedy.

We might not be able to control the rumblings of the Earth, but we can control our thinking, our consciousness and our actions.

And once we get our collective thinking and consciousness in an abundant place, the inevitable outcome will be a change in the physical conditions on the planet and (I suspect) a radical wave of action across the globe to make this world an even better place.

So, when you ask yourself from that heart-broken compassionate place, what you can do the make a difference in the world, start first by aligning yourself passionately with your Divine Holiness and the Truth of Who You Really Are.

Give up suffering and compromise and remember that the answers you seek in the world, are no different than the answers you seek in your countries, your neighborhoods and in your personal life.

You must first “BE” the change and then enact the change from an abundant and empowered place. And only from this energetic position will the changes we make be permanent and sustainable.

Love,

Karen

Day 19 - Critical Mass

2009-10-15T20:18:00.000-07:00

One of the things I've noticed on my 30-day well-being experiment is that it seems to be getting easier and easier to stay rooted in my well-being.

In the beginning, I was really struggling. It was pretty easy to get into a cycle of negativity and then, of course, NOTICE the cycle of negativity and as a result of my focus (or self-flagellation) create more of what I was so desperately trying to avoid.

Of course, my intention with this process is to live predominantly with a vibration that is aligned with my natural state of abundance. So, in spite of my struggles, I have been quite diligent about shifting my mindset around to bring it back into alignment with my bigger intention.

I have noticed each mental "coup" and celebrated accordingly. I have had many small victories.

As I have been increasing my habit of noticing my successes and constantly asking myself what I need to do to stay in my well-being flow, I have been more and more successful at the process. Last week while I was driving to Austin, I realized that the bulk of my thoughts are aligned with my intention.

Wooo Hooo!

It's interesting to stand at this point. When any unwanted thought or old pattern creeps into my awareness, my new expanded mindset just seems to kind of "collapse" the old thought unwanted thought patterns.

It is literally as if the old thoughts just kind of melt away or fall down like a long row of dominos.

Last week I was in the middle of a panic attack about money, work, life balance, etc. and I started to do my usual mental spin. Normally it can take an hour or so to get myself realigned and the panic usually keeps creeping back into my awareness.

This time I was able to immediately face my panic with a list of 10 possible excellent outcomes to my situation. I immediately felt much better and eagerly expected an unexpected good thing to happen.

By Monday, every single one of the 10 possible excellent outcomes had come about.

And I didn't spend hours visualizing, journaling or meditating on these possibilities. I simply had these thoughts for about a second and then returned to my state of well-being.

Now, I've only had this experience once so I'm not going to write a sales letter and try to start teaching a class on this process. I'm just going to sit over here and keep applying what I am learning and encourage you to start your own experience.

But I do suspect that as your vibration continues to grow, you create a critical mass of energy that forces all the other vibrations to modulate up to meet it.

We spend so much time looking for "blocks" and uncovering old patterns. If that is where we are putting our attention then I wonder what we are growing...?

Maybe the key to removing "blocks" is to stop looking for them and shift your focus onto what is good and what is working...

Just wondering...

If nothing else, I SWEAR my skin looks younger and I feel like my old sunny self is returning...!

'Looking forward to having you join me on this journey!

Love,

Karen

Day 18, ""Other People's Stuff"

2009-10-14T13:48:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I’ve been a bit remiss in blogging about my 30-day experiment. Speakers Boot Camp was this past weekend and I was totally busy enjoying each and every day! Wooo Hooo!

It is now Day 18 and I have two big thoughts I’d like to share with you.

Today I want to talk about “Other People’s Stuff”.

I have noticed that when I keep my mindset clear and give it words, I can receive, in exchange, some very interesting feedback from the people around me.

I have been accused of being a “Polly Anna” more than once and not always in a nice way.

Really. It’s kind of funny how violently people react to you being happy.

I have also noticed, especially this year with the “bad” economy myth going gangbusters, that many people in my life have manifested some pretty dire life situations. I have several dear friends who are really struggling financially.

When “other people” (and I use quotations because they are not really “other” people but instead beautiful reflections of our own consciousness) share their reality with us, it is pretty easy to want to chime in and either defend ourselves, convince and change or save the “other” person.

I always muse at how hard it is for me to change myself. What in the heck makes me think that I can change someone else? (Especially someone else who didn’t even ask for my “expert” guidance and insight.)

Have you ever noticed how other people seem to trigger your core issues? Do they trigger your issues because they are mean or are those issues triggered because you’re sending out a vibration that is in alignment with your core issue?

Here is an example. I have someone very close to me who “makes” me feel judged. He is extremely bright, well-educated, accomplished in his field and has an aura of authority. When I stand next to him, I feel like a bug.

Now, in the past, I would have said that this person judges me. I don’t have some fancy college degree. I am not so accomplished, prefer jeans, cowgirl boots and a t-shirt, the company of my kids and my dog. Fancy cocktail parties make me gag and I hate small talk.

But if you ask me what has this person DONE to make me feel judged…well…NOTHING. Not a single thing.

Who is really doing the judging here?

Yeah, yeah, yeah…I can see all your fingers pointing at me!

Underneath this bright and shiny wise-ass exterior is a shy girl who still questions her own value.

I perceive myself as being judged because of my own lack of self-esteem.

It is absolutely important to surround yourself with people who support your creative process. But, what I am discovering is that when you see yourself as a powerful, abundant being, you don’t even HEAR the judgment or the negativity or the nay-saying or anything that is out of alignment with your vibration.

AND, if you are deeply rooted in the magnificence of who you are, you don’t draw those kinds of dream-sucking negative experiences into your reality anyway. It’s not in energetic harmony with your vibration.

Basically, it’s all you.

Here’s the next question. How do you handle “other people’s stuff” when they are struggling and suffering and you want to help.

Think about this for a minute.

When we are struggling, how much time do we spend talking about the problem with our friends and family? Not venting or releasing, just plain talking (or bitching...)

We sigh. We shrug shoulders and wring hands together. We dutifully validate for our loved ones that their lives do, indeed, suck. Yes?

But, if where you put your energy and attention is where you get growth and you want this other person to realign with their abundant state but you are both focusing (or in my case, my whole family is calling each other and bemoaning the circumstance…) on the problem, what are you co-creating?

I know. Your family and friends will truly think you’ve gone nuts when, in the midst of the drama, you focus your energy on the things that ARE working. But, in the end, who is going to have more fun? And who is creating more in the direction of abundance?

If you really love someone, you’ll see the possibility for an elegant solution instead of tragedy and gloom.

They might hate you for being happy and positive. In the beginning it’s always more fun to focus on the problem. But, trust me, it is always WAAAAAY more fun to imagine the possibilities and see each bump as an opportunity to clarify what you truly, dearly want in your reality (or in their reality).

Here's quotation from Esther and Jerry Hicks that says it best:

"No solution ever comes forth - it's never inspired; you never recognize it, and you are never able to facilitate or achieve it - from your place of focusing on the problem. If you have someone who has many things going wrong and one thing going right, beat the drum of what's going right, and let that be your point of attraction. If you focus upon their problems, you achieve vibrational harmony with someone other than the Source that gives you solutions."

The sun is always shining above the clouds!

Love,

Karen

Day Seven and Eight

2009-10-04T19:25:00.000-07:00

Well I was going to write about my adventures dealing with other people's energies and circumstances...BUT...I'll write about that tomorrow.

When I started this journey, I set the intention that my Expanded Awareness would help me bring into my consciousness everything I need to consistently be in the stream of well-being.

I know that there are old patterns that I am being given the opportunity to transcend and I am grateful for the insights I am receiving, particularly in dream time.

I've had a recurring dream this week about being vulnerable in my relationships. I am learning that I have a deep desire to trust and feel safe in a relationship. I'm looking forward to growing my capacity to be an authentic partner and not run...

Okay...here's the good part.

After experiencing one of my dreams about running, I woke up with a panic attack, a pretty consistent experience recently.

As I was laying in my bed trying to work with my mind to get to a better feeling place I was given a beautiful vision.

In my vision I was told that love is never created or destroyed. It simply changes form. Then I was shown that love is the true energy of creation. Emotions (which are separate from love) are merely the hands on our compass helping us gauge how close we are to living our loving essence.

Then I was shown that appreciation (in the form of attention and gratitude) is the grammar of love.

In other words, in order to create and to align more closely with our natural loving state, we have to focus our energy and attention on what is working, especially in relationships.

I read once in an Abraham Hicks book that in our relationships with any human being on the planet, 99.99% of our interaction is based on energies we have in common. Instead of focusing on all the things appreciate about our Divine Siblings, we choose instead to focus on the .01% of things that don't seem to be working.

And look at what we get.

We are pretty powerful, aren't we?

What if everything we are experiencing is technically a relationship...with ourselves...and, of course, with the creation of the perception of "other players" in our outer reality?

And what if all we had to do to change our outer reality is to align with love?

In other words, what if all we had to do was focus on what is working, what we do appreciate, what we love and are grateful for?

If love can neither be created or destroyed and it is a constant on this planet, then we can never really "lose" someone. The form of the relationship can change and we may have a concurrent emotional response to help us realign with love in a new way in our reality but there is no loss here.

As relationships change form, on an expanded level, we are just co-creating with a Divine Sibling to learn a lesson. When the lesson is done, we move on OR we keep growing in appreciation together. It's never static on this planet.

The bottom line is this. Love can never leave you. It can change how it shows up in your life. You can align with it or not (your choice based on your focus and level of appreciation). But, love is constantly available to you in a multitude of expressions.

If love is a constant and it can never leave us, then maybe we can have more courage to show up for love more authentically, ask more courageously for what we want and need and, most importantly, stay in deep appreciation and gratitude for our Divine Siblings and the players in our personal "reality show" and for ourselves.

Have fun!

Love,

Karen

P.S. I am so grateful for this deepened awareness from my Expanded Self. This is such a cool experience!!!

Day Five and Six

2009-10-01T20:35:00.000-07:00

I kind of lost my momentum the last two days.

It's interesting to me to see how when I get "busy" I "forget" to do my due diligence. Instead of taking the extra five minutes when I lay down to go to sleep and really feel the comfort of my bed and express my appreciation for a great day, I just kind of dive-bomb between the sheets and crash.

For the last few months I've been waking up with panic attacks in the middle of the night. I haven't been able to link them to any specific event or circumstance, although I have been enjoying a lot of contrast related to being overwhelmed and very busy.

I have noticed that since I have started my experiment, the panic attacks have stopped. And my lower back pain, which has been intense since my baby was born in May just totally disappeared.

Two nights ago I had a really powerful dream. In my dream I was offered a contract (don't know what kind of contract...) and given a payment of 2.5 million dollars.

What was so powerful about this dream is that one minute I was financially struggling and the next minute I was quite financially abundant. I woke up feeling like this was a very clear reminder from my Inner Wisdom that we can have/experience ANYTHING and our current challenges can be transformed in a moment.

We're never really stuck.

Unless we believe we are.

These last few days I've really been thinking about what I want. I'm truly surprised to find that I have some areas in my life where I am feeling some growing pains and I'm not clear about what I want.

This is probably not entirely new for me but I think I have manifested sum funky chaos lately to remind me to check in and see what is feeling good for my life right now.

When I realized that I'm not being totally authentic with my intentions and still doing a lot of "shoulds" rather than following my True Hearts Desires, I was curious to discover that I'm a little nervous about "discovering" the answers to my questions.

In the past, when I have had an unconscious intention, I am quite well known for blowing my entire life up in a relatively short amount of time.

I'm not really in the mood for more rampant chaos and deconstruction so I have carefully sculpted a new intention statement about my work:

"I am joyfully in the process of discovering my newly evolved career passion and direction. I honor the fact that I am growing and changing. While I am enjoying this process of discovery, I intend to attract a sustainable income that affords me all the money necessary to pay my bills with plenty of money left over to play with. I attract my income doing things that bring me great pleasure and fulfillment and I work in a way that easily allows me to balance work, family and other additional delights. I easily have the money to purchase things for my children, take care of my business and personal expenses, travel and attend workshops and trainings that aid me in my discovery adventure."

I am writing myself a message on the back of my hand to remind myself to keep working on my experiment.

It is an incredible process to reprogram the mind.

But, being conscious and deliberately in the flow is sooooo much more fun than just moving through the day without intent.

Wooo Hoooo! Aren't we lucky to be given Free Will and consciousness.

Love,

Karen

Day Four

2009-09-28T19:34:00.000-07:00

Today was Yom Kippur. Traditionally on Yom Kippur we fast. My Rabbi says we fast to remind ourselves that we depend on G-d for everything.

This is a particularly thoughtful theme for me during my 30-day experiment.

When you are in survival mode, it’s easy to think that there is something that you can do to save yourself in the eleventh hour. After all, you’re probably a “survivor” because of your clever thinking and the sheer determination of your will. Right?

I like to think of it as having a back-up plan, in case G-d or the Universe or Source or whatever you may call it, doesn’t “come through” for you.

Of course, there is a lot of funny irony in this equation.

It’s not like it’s not all G-d anyway. (But aren’t we clever at thinking G-d is this capricious Being somewhere “out there”?)

And, of course, G-d “comes through” for you every time, exactly the way you intended.

Our entire experience in this focused reality is a result of our intention and attention. When we hold a belief that we have to endure and struggle and work really, really hard to pull off a “last minute miracle” and we behave according to this belief, we EASILY manifest exactly what we have been focusing on.

Think about it.

What is hard to make it sooo hard?

NO.

It was easy to struggle. It was the expected outcome, yes?

The whole process of creation works consistently in a formulaic manner.

Ask.

Believe.

Take Action.

Receive.

Ask for what you want. Believe you can have it. Take guided action to get it. Receive it.

And in the meantime, focus on all the good you have in your life and find constant evidence of your abundance in each moment. (In other words, be happy.)

I must confess that there is a part of me that kind of likes chaos and disaster. I like experiences that force me to stretch and test my faith in G-d.

When I am surviving, I can get myself into such messes that I don’t have a clue how to get myself out of. It is under these extreme circumstances that I have mastered the art of getting on my knees and surrendering to my Creator.

When I don’t know how to fix a problem, the only thing I can do is turn to a power greater than me and let the Divine Plan find the most elegant solution. (With, of course, the expectation that there IS a solution.)

I noticed this recently about myself. I was facing an extreme circumstance that I did not know how to fix and I really ENJOYED the feeling of surrendering the outcome.

I felt closer to G-d in my moments of panic than I do in my every day life.

I think that the difference between a “survivor” and a “thriver” is that a “thriver” feels closer to G-d in every day moments and understands that G-d is all there is and all there is is G-d.

Therefore, a “thriver” is much more comfortable getting on their knees and allowing the Divine Plan to unfold on a moment-by-moment basis than a “survivor”.

As a “thriver”, each moment is sacred and an opportunity to allow for a more “elegant” unfolding of the human experience.

It doesn’t mean that I have to give up my will or my human actions. I still have to “move the mud”, so to speak.

But I do have the opportunity to listen more intently, appreciate more deeply, and honor each act (even the really simple ones…) as sacred.

It also means that if I can realize that G-d can provide an elegant solution in my darkest hours, imagine what elegance is available to me on a daily basis.

Perhaps, when I have ignored G-d in my daily moments, I have shut myself off from fulfilling a potential that would assist me in creating a truly thriving life. And be of great service to my Divine Siblings.

What if I could truly embrace and act upon the sanctity of each moment of this very precious life I have?

I end my third day with a profound gratitude for the magnificence of each moment and the power, compassion and love that is constantly and consistently available to us.

I am eagerly anticipating the adventure of living my expanded potential and celebrating the preciousness of each moment.

Thriving.

Love,

Karen

Day Three

2009-09-27T19:32:00.000-07:00

One of the things I noticed about having been in "survival mode" for so long is that I missed a lot of details. My focus has been on getting to the other side and while I was leaping valiantly (and desperately) to the finishing mark, I missed a lot of the juicy things that make this gift of life soooo precious.

It really hit me hard this summer as I watched my oldest son walk across the stage and graduate from high school. I was holding my three week old newborn daughter in my arms and the perspective was so extreme.

In that one moment my son's life flashed before me, baby grins, a head full of blond baby curls, his first words, his four-year-old swagger ("I know everything..."), when he first started reading and how proud he was of the first movie he made....all that and so much more....and I realized I had missed volumes of his life.

I mean, my body was there. But, I was absent. I was focused on the next thing I needed to survive to make sure that HE survived....

I don't want to miss any more of my life or the lives of the people I am so blessed to share this journey with.

Yesterday my intention was to focus on appreciation and gratitude for everything in my life.

As I started my gratitude list, I realized it was too long....more that I could ever complete in one day.....

So I decided to break the process up into smaller bites. Each day I intend to focus my gratitude on one specific area of my life.

Today I am focusing on my gratitude for the people in my life.

I wish I could adequately express the huge swelling of my heart and the overwhelm of deep love and appreciation I am feeling right now as I offer my appreciation for all the people who have graced my life and for those rare, beautiful souls who bring me such joy and love every day of my life...even when our interactions seem mundane...their voices, their words, their love, their support...their smiles and laughs...all seem so sacred to me....

I pray that if you choose to complete this process for yourself, you will discover how deeply and truly blessed and loved you are.

Tomorrow I intend to focus on remembering that G-d is the Provider of Everything.

So Very, Very Grateful....

Love,

Karen

Day Two

2009-09-26T21:18:00.000-07:00

Day Two of my 30 day well-being experiment was full of opportunities to grow and expand.

I have five children. One of them is a twelve-year-old daughter. We are in a powerful co-creative phase at the moment where we are using a lot of contrast to help us redefine our relationship.

I know that I committed staying in the flow of well-being. And I know that in order to create the types of relationships that I desire, I have to focus on what is working and what I love and appreciate about the person(s) I am in relationship with.

(I used to actually teach this technique when I taught “Parent-Teen Communication” classes.)

So, I have spent a lot of time these last 24 hours, looking at baby photographs of my 12 year-old daughter and noticing all the things I love and appreciate about her:

I love the way her face is gently changing into the face of a young woman and the brightness of her eyes. I love the way she approaches everything with an unparalleled intensity. I love her gentle, extremely generous heart and the way she wants to nurture those she perceives as less fortunate. I love her quick mind.

I love the way she made me a beautiful bubble bath last weekend and babysat the baby so that I could take a 20-minute bath.

She is an amazing kid.

I learned a couple of things these last 24 hours:

1. There are some pretty dark, very quiet, consistent counter-productive thought patterns that seem to always be gently streaming through my consciousness. I notice them when I am doing seemingly “mindless” things like drive.

2. It’s much, much easier now than it has been in the past to immediately shift my focus and energy to other thoughts, especially when I ask myself the question, “What would I like to be experiencing instead?”

3. I have become keenly aware that I need to adopt a much more deliberate practice of appreciation.

4. There are a lot of areas where I have emotional and mental “dead space” when it comes to knowing or even having an inkling of what I want.

5. In just about any given moment I have a choice to appreciate and grow into an experience that I intend or to experience contrast. I thought the contrast would be less frequent and maybe with more intention it will become that way but today contrast happened every hour.

6. I don’t have to blame myself or feel like I’m screwing up when contrast happens. I just have to remember to gently shift my focus.

Tomorrow I intend to continue on this journey. My biggest intention is to spend the day deeply immersed in appreciation.

I am so grateful for this knowledge and the adventure of remembering the power we all carry inside of us!

Love,

Karen

The 30 Day Program (For your personal invitation, scroll down to the previous post)

2009-09-25T10:22:00.000-07:00

For the next 30 days try this:

1. Stay focused on what you DO want in your life.

2. Stay focused on what IS working in your life.

3. If you feel stress, fear, anxiety or any other intense "yucky" emotions, ask yourself what you'd like to be experiencing instead and shift your focus THERE.

4. Express your gratitude and appreciation for everything in your life. If you need to, make lists of things you are grateful for. This is especially powerful when you feel "yucky".

5. If you want to know WHY you should try this 30 day experiment go here:

http://www.insidethebodyofgod.com

30 Days...Day One

2009-09-25T08:41:00.000-07:00

I don't know about you, but sometimes I feel like I'm back-sliding on this "enlightened" journey that I keep intending to be on.

There is a distinct difference between surviving and thriving.

I'm very good at surviving. I am excellent at pulling a metaphorical "rabbit out of a hat" in the eleventh hour of any crisis. I pride myself in saving my own butt at the last minute.

But, surviving seems to be taking a toll on me. The thrill and the adrenaline rush of last minute butt-saving is exhausting, and frankly, I'm bored with the suffering in between all the eleventh hours.

I want to thrive. I want all those things I dream about but then get distracted from, because suddenly I'm experiencing crisis again, to become a part of my reality. I'm tired of getting close to my dreams but not actually being able to fully manifest them.

I think, for the first time in my life, I am really ready to have it all.

And I know that in order for me to truly experience everything I desire, I have to give up my addiction to surviving.

Think about it. If where you put your energy and attention is where you get growth and results in your life and you are focusing all of your attention and emotions on the drama of surviving, what are you going to keep growing in your life?

More things to survive, yes?

Ugh.

I have read in many different books written by some of the most wonderful leading-edge teachers. They all say the same thing.

This is an attraction based universe. We attract to ourselves in accordance with our attention. In other words, what we focus on, we live out in our reality.

Many teachers say that if we would just focus on what IS working in our lives, what we INTEND for our lives and stay in a space of appreciation for what we already have for just 30 days, we would see RADICAL shifts in our reality.

We would be thriving.

I'm ready to really give this a try. In fact, I've been doing this for almost four hours now and I am laughing at myself because, even though the concept is so EASY, applying it seems so challenging.

Obviously, I am paying strong attention to the thoughts that are dancing across my brain and I'm telling you, folks, some of them aren't pretty.

And I can tell that some of these thoughts have been dancing around pretty regularly in my head...

Each minute I am recommitting to my 30 day program.

Since I like doing things with other like-minded people and I am blessed to have so many wonderful, amazing Light Beings on my mailing list, I thought I would invite you to join me on this 30 plan.

Here is my intention. For the next thirty days I will blog daily about my 30-day experiment. I invite you to join in and post your comments and experiences.

I want you to share all the aspects of your journey. If it feels hard on a particular day, then be honest with it and let's work together to stay on track. If you're having an incredible day, then share it with us, too! We'll celebrate together!

I've written the number "30" on the back of my hand with a black felt tip marker. Having a physical reminder helps me keep my intention focused.

I'm looking forward to hearing your stories and sharing your successes!

Bring it on!

Let's thrive!

Love,

Karen

Beware The Dreamsuckers...

2009-03-23T08:48:00.000-07:00

You know I don’t like using a lot of negative words or titles, but this one just came to me and I had to use it!

But, even though this title has a playful, but militant tone, be mindful of really integrating the main point of today’s post.

There is a great mystery to being human and having a human experience.

We are born encoded on a cellular level to be abundantly healthy, wealthy, happy, fulfilled, etc. There are 10 trillion cells in your body functioning perfectly right now.

(I know with you, my dear readers, that this information is well established so I won’t waste your time proving my point today.)

As representatives of a Divine Creator and individuated aspects of the Divine, we have an unlimited capacity to create any kind of life we choose.

With so much possibility available to us, why do we choose to limit our creative expression?

Or, more simply put, why do we choose to make everything so hard?

Isn’t it weird?

One of my dear friends says, creating is simple, it’s just not easy.

And to a certain degree, I agree.

When we come to the planet, we are bathed in a collective energy field, a conglomerate of beliefs that flow from thousands of years of human experience on the planet.

Somehow, in the sum total thoughts of all of humanity, we decided that life is a hard struggle and continue, to this day, to create a collective reality that seems to support this belief system.

We have collectively forgotten the magnificence of who we really are and many of us spend a lifetime trying to remember.

The good news is that this scenario is changing!! Whooo Hooo!

As we continue to herald a new era on the planet, our memories are getting better and easier to reclaim. Our children are born remembers and reminding us old “foggies” that we are unlimited in our capacity to create. We are on the leading edge or reclaiming our creative potential.

Its getting easier and easier every day!

But, simple logistics dictate that not everyone can stand on the edge. Some people in your life will be “behind” the edge and sometimes it might seem that there are very few people in front of you or at your side.

The edge is, after all, the edge.

When you are striking out on your exciting new journey of creation on the leading edge, your dreams and the whisperings of the promise of something new deserve to be nurtured and attended to.

In the beginning, remembering your dreams and the full capacity of unlimited possibility is like tending to a new spring garden. As the tender shoots and buds begin to show themselves, you have to protect them and water them.

Our belief systems are rooted in our physiology. When we have repeated thoughts and beliefs, our bodies create beautiful nerve “highways” called neural pathways that make repeating these thoughts effortless and, to a certain degree, (ironically) “thoughtless”. You can have your thoughts without a whole lot of conscious effort on your part.

When you have a new dream or a new belief system, it takes time and repetition to build new neuropathways in your body. In other words, it takes time and repetition for new thoughts and dreams to “take root” in your mind and body.

As your new garden grows, you have to pluck the weeds that threaten your new sprouts to make room for continued light and nourishment. As we grow our dreams, we have to also pluck out the “weeds” in our consciousness.

Just like weeds tend to grow robustly and quickly, old negative thought patterns rapidly infiltrate your thinking and push your dreams out of the light. (This is the “hard” part, by the way.) The trick to successfully growing your dreams is to catch your old thought patterns and immediately return your focus to your dreams.

You don’t have to go on a long detective hunt to figure out why you are having an old thought pattern. Simply turn your attention away from it and shift your perspective. Sometimes it helps to answer this very important question:

What is it that I want to be experiencing in this situation instead?

Or even more simply:

What do I want?

The other danger in the garden is predators. Rabbits, raccoons, birds and bugs love to eat the delicious new shoots. When I was a kid, my Dad would hang foil in the garden to scare away the birds. In order to protect your garden, you have to make it “predator-proof”.

Just like in the garden, there are those who, often inadvertently, try to pluck your dreams out of your mind. Sometimes these are very well intending loved ones who are “practical” and want you to be “realistic” so that you don’t get hurt or disappointed.

Remember, not everyone is standing on the leading edge. It’s easy to be swayed by the influence of the collective. Ancient belief patterns have their old and strong roots.

I’m not saying you have to stay away from your loved ones but be sure to surround yourself with those people who support your creative process. You need a couple of people in your life to remind you that dreaming isn’t crazy.

In fact, dreaming is one of the most powerful things you can do.

Never listen to anyone who tells you “you can’t”.

You can.

If you dream you can and you believe you can.

I recently read an article about an old Jewish family that had to sell off their collection of Jewish artifacts because they had lost a lot of money investing with Bernard Madoff. Many of these artifacts were rare and had great sentimental value to the family.

When they interviewed the matriarch of the family, a widower who had escaped the Holocaust and come to America, she recounted the story of how she and her family arrived in America with nothing to their name.

This beautiful old woman summed up the story of dreams so beautifully. “Things may come and go out of your life,” she said, “But whatever is in your head and your heart belongs to you and no one can take that away from you.”

And I would like to gently add, hold on to what is in your heart and your mind. Focus on it. Get excited about it. Nurture it. Protect it from well intending Dreamsuckers and all your dreams will come true.

By Universal Law, it can’t happen any other way.

Dream on!

Love,
Karen