I know what you’re thinking: But Carrie, you say, being a shy, dweeby hermit sounds so glamorous and interesting. Why would you want to give that up?
The truth is, I really didn’t want to give it up.
Because all ego minds, including mine, get their juice from specialness. And it really doesn’t matter what kind of specialness. If you’ve got reasonably healthy self-esteem, you probably believe you’re better at basketball or more gifted at Guitar Hero than others. Or you secretly know your ass looks way better in jeans.
I wasn’t much for the self-esteem, so I built a very convincing ego identity out of being the very worst: The ugliest, the stupidest, the most worthless and socially awkward. And once that identity is embraced, it’s damned difficult to let it go.
So what happens when all of Heaven and the whole world are showing you otherwise? Suddenly I’m not remotely dweeby, and all kinds of people seem to want to hear what I have to say. And it turns out I’m not a pathetically awkward wallflower after all – apparently I’m a natural born public speaker. Who knew.
A thorough self-image overhaul was clearly in order.
Scared the crap out of me.
Because who will I be if my identity is taken away? It meant working on a way down deep level, agreeing to release all kinds of unconscious ideas that used to make up my belief system. It’s been a months-long process, and I could never have done it alone; it’s Spirit, of course, who makes this kind of profound healing possible.
And now I’m beginning to reap the fruits of those efforts. As my self-perceptions have slowly healed, my fearful perceptions of others have been replaced with quiet trust and a real sense of safety.
Chicken or egg? Is it my forgiveness efforts toward others that has kickstarted my own emotional healing? Probably. The two work hand in hand.
All I know is, I used to be fanatical about preserving my privacy, and was terrified of what others would think of me if they knew about this whole crazy ‘messengering’ thing. I learned those fears were completely unfounded.
And now the beautiful messages are starting to trickle in, more and more each day, from wonderful strangers who have become my friends. They’ve been touched by my book and they want to make a connection with me.
And I gotta tell you, it’s awesome.
So I’ll take ‘open, strong and trusting’ over ‘shy, dweeby and fearful’ any day.
Wouldn’t you?
Learning to live without commercial interruptions
This past month or so has been an extraordinary time for me. My book is released and is becoming a bona fide hit on Amazon; my speaking career is in the process of revealing itself to me. (As in: what the hell might I say to a roomful of listeners? And in what sorts of venues might I say it?)
I’ve also informally partnered up with an amazing producer type guy and we’re collaborating on film and book projects; and in general I’m bowled over by the outpouring of love and support from all sides as I step forward and try my hand at this crazy public messengering thing.
So naturally, it was time for my ego mind to weigh in on this beautiful turn of events. Because that old ego’s been with me a long, long time. It knows me better than anyone else. And it knows with absolute certainty that all this success is just some cosmic mistake – I don’t deserve it and soon we’re going to have to engineer some kind of drastic monkey wrench in the works, something that slows my progress to a crawl.
Because a little love and success is fine, but enough is enough. It’s time to reestablish the natural order of things.
I woke up today very painfully aware of the deep down rage-filled workings of my ego mind. Which was ok with me, because lately I’ve been asking to see (and heal) the entirety of that unconscious mountain of mud. So while I was excavating down in angry, fearful Mudland, I took a good look at my firmly held belief that I can’t tolerate sustained success – and then chose to release that firm belief.
I handed over that very mistaken idea to Spirit. And then got out of the shower and got dressed.
A minute later the phone rang. It was Fran, calling from Sedona. She said she’d been trying to email (bad internet connection) but Spirit said, “Call her.”
She said she wanted to tell me how richly deserved all my success and momentum is. That she’s so proud of me, and feels like I’ve waited my entire life with the ‘pause’ button on, but now for the first time am stepping forward to tell my story with the voice of my true authentic self. (It feels that way to me, too.) And that Heaven can’t help but shower me with its joyous outpouring of ongoing love and support as a result.
Well that took my breath away. Spirit often speaks to me through Fran, but somehow the fast turnaround time really caught me off guard this time. I told her what I’d been wrestling with and she laughed and said:
“Well, those kinds of things will continue to come up from time to time. Think of them as commercial interruptions from the ego. So when it happens, just say you’re not interested in buying the product!”
Well I’ve been laughing with gentle joy ever since.
Sure, there’ll be ups and downs along the journey. How could life in this dreamworld be otherwise? But now I realize I don’t have to watch the commercials anymore.
Kind of like getting a spiritual DVR. Goodbye to unquestioned ego beliefs, and hello to the 30-second skip!
Catching the red eye flight
(Reporting live from Santa Fe) – Ever feel like your life is filled with so many Heavenly blessings you’ve run out of fingers and toes to count them all? That might seem an odd way to begin a story that nearly ended up in the emergency room, but sometimes it goes that way.
Here’s how it started: Due to a whole other series of mind-blowing Heavenly blessings, I was offered the amazing opportunity to come to Santa Fe to be interviewed about my soon-to-be-released book (9 days & counting!) and to meet a couple of writer-heroes of mine, Nouk Sanchez and Tomas Viera, authors of Take Me To Truth. Their book lives permanently on my nightstand, along with A Course in Miracles.
The day before I was to leave for Santa Fe, my right eye started to hurt for no reason. So I took out my contacts, thinking that would fix the problem. Wrong. The eye grew more and more irritated as the day wore on; by nightfall it was red and swollen and streaming tears, and by bedtime it hurt like holy hell. In total darkness the pain was bad enough, but the faintest glimmer of light brought what felt like a parade of stiletto heels stomping on my eye.
Ooh baby, it was gonna be a long night.
Around midnight I started toying with the idea of the emergency room; by 2am I was starting to wonder whether I’d have to cancel my trip? That meant passing up a (literally) God-given opportunity; it also meant I’d be pissing away $1000 or so on nonrefundable travel arrangements.
On the other hand, I was now virtually blind in one eye, unable to function except in total darkness and nearly mad with pain. Perhaps it was not the best idea to drive myself to LA, get on a plane and go to another city for 5 days.
Well I had no friggin’ idea what to do.
One thing I did know: I want to wake up from the dream of 3-D existence more than anything else in this world. And sometimes the best way to help do that is when your back is to the wall and you’re completely out of options. So I let go of all my own opinions and fears about what I was supposed to do in that situation, and I started to pray.
But I was determined not to merely replace the dream of pain with a dream of healing. (After all, I want to wake up from all dreams.) I didn’t pray to feel better. I just handed the whole mess over to Spirit with no strings attached, and asked only for an unmistakable sign whether I should keep my date in Santa Fe or not.
Then something curious happened. Right away the pain sort of dissolved and I fell into a kind of interim state (it definitely wasn’t sleep). 2 hours later, just before the alarm went off at 4am, I snapped out of it and realized my eye felt at least 50% better. Definitely bearable now. Taking that as my unmistakable sign, I rolled out of bed and hit the road.
But as if surrender and spontaneous physical healing were not enough, there was actually another (and far deeper) healing connected to this event.
You know how sometimes you don’t realize how much you’ve changed or grown until all of a sudden you’re thrown into a situation that would’ve been your worst nightmare in the past but now isn’t?
To say I’ve always been deeply self conscious about my looks would be kind of a crazy understatement. I’ve caused myself needless decades of pain and shame over what Spirit has referred to as ‘my self-imposed prison of ugliness.’ And I know the whole thing is stupid, but have always been unable to get at the roots of those deeply held beliefs to be able to heal them.
But as I wandered the LA airport with a blood red eye, glasses and no makeup – not my best look, I assure you – I was surprised to realize my appearance didn’t matter to me at all. At all.
It was as if the door to my prison cell had been hanging wide open for ages, but only now did it occur to me it was ok to step outside (blinking in the unfamiliar and still somewhat painful light). That I was free at last.
Oh, the interview: Fabulous. And meeting all of those wonderful people: Even more fabulous. So fabulous, in fact, that in September Nouk, Tomas AND I will be putting on a 3 day seminar together here in California.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Holy crap, this spiritual journey is fun.
The Meaning of Christmas – random thoughts from a Jewish Buddhist Voice-Hearer
Let me state this right up front: My relationship with Christ has always been complicated.
Messed up, really.
I was born into an Orthodox Jewish family that was still very busy mourning the effects of World War II when I arrived on the scene in 1958. Christ was a complete stranger in our household, Christianity seen as nothing but a dark catalyst for terrifying world events.
My resulting relationship with Jesus is summed up in this story (from the book) called He Who Must Not Be Named:
…On the one hand He looked like a nice enough guy—His blond, blue-eyed portrait smiling down on my sleepovers at the neighbor kids’ house. And of course it was widely known that if you believed in Him, Santa brought you all kinds of magical swag on Christmas.
Yet He was also the reason I wasn’t allowed into some of the other kids’ houses. I was a dirty Jew, or so their mothers informed me, and Jesus wouldn’t like it if I spread those cooties around.
Meanwhile, school brought a whole different kind of challenge. I learned nothing at all about Christ or Christianity at home or in my Hebrew school studies, except that He was somehow associated with unspeakable evil, and so the name of Jesus was never to be uttered aloud.
“Why? What happens if you say it?” I figured it must be bad because nobody would ever tell me. Maybe saying Jesus’ name was what killed those six million Jews?
This was back in the day when public school kids were routinely made to sing religious songs, so for these occasions I was forced to adopt a weird sort of ventriloquist’s dummy approach:
Wag-wag(soundlessly my jaw moved up and down)
Loves me, yes I know
For the Bible tells me so.
…………………….Yeah.
Does it seem insane to you that anyone would teach a child to equate Jesus with Voldemort?
Well, you’re probably right about that. But cultural context is everything.
The Jews who taught these lessons were not the slightest bit nefarious in their intentions. Just scared. Traumatized. And deeply worried that their bacon cheeseburger-loving American offspring were in danger of forgetting recent cataclysmic history.
Now fast-forward several decades to our post 9-11 world, and that 2007 story about the Muslim Mickey Mouse with his own TV show. And we think: How could anyone be so evil? And are they insane, using Mickey to teach children to hate and murder?
Well, yeah. They’ve already proven they’re at least a little insane, if only by ignoring the global reach of Disney’s fearsome legal team.
But the very embodiment of evil? I’m gonna go out on a limb here to say: I don’t think so. I think maybe they’re just wounded citizens of a deeply damaged world, trying to pass their belief system on to their kids.
So. Back to the meaning of Christmas. (Or maybe it’s the meaning of Christ that I’m really after.) It’s taken me a half-century to undo all that well-intentioned cultural conditioning from my early years. But I don’t regret any of it, because that outsider status has allowed me to approach the subject with fresh eyesight.
For what it’s worth, here’s what I think:
There’s no such thing as pure evil. There are only degrees of damage and desperately misguided ways of coping with it.
And let’s face it, we’re all at least a little damaged and a little misguided.
So my personal practice – all year long, but especially now during the Christmas season – is to overlook the damage and the mistakes as best I can, and try to see only the Oneness and perfection that lie deep within each person. I’ve been told (and see no reason to disbelieve) that everybody who’s ever lived is equally perfect and worthy of unconditional love. So, what the hey, I’m giving it my best shot.
Do I slip and forget? Constantly. That’s why they call it a practice. But on the days when I manage it, I’m enveloped in peace and joy and a sense of…holiness, really, that feels like warm cocoa wrapped in a cashmere blanket. Or something like that. To be honest there are no words to describe the feeling, except to say it’s real good.
So I think that’s the meaning of Christmas. Joy. Oneness. Letting the world off the hook for its collective “sins.” From that guy in the SUV who steals my parking spot at the mall (dammit, he SAW me waiting), to the Muslim Mickey who teaches hatred to yet another generation of children.
I’m hoping to let a whole lot more people off the hook as the season progresses.
Because practice makes perfect, you know?
Holy Dirt part 2 – The awesome power of the Travel Channel
I never forgot that church docent’s enigmatic invitation (‘YOU can come back anytime…’) so when Kurt & I returned to Santa Fe 7 years later, in the fall of 2006, we made a point of trekking back up to Chimayo.
To say the place had changed would be putting it mildly. In the years since our last visit, Santa Fe and its environs had been featured on a number of cable TV shows, the kind that focus on travel and the unexplained. ‘History’s Mysteries,’ that sort of thing. And those shows put Chimayo on the map in a big way.
We didn’t even recognize the place as we approached, and had to drive back & forth past it several times before assuring ourselves this must be it. Half a block away we found the parking lot expanded to 5 times its previous size to accommodate the scores of tour buses and cars driven there by eager pilgrims.
Sadly, on approaching what was now a huge complex of buildings and vendor stalls, we could find no trace of the Holy Chile or the shop that once housed it.
In the church I could find no sign of that docent. And I was deeply disappointed to discover that there was now no folk art.
Oh sure, the 19th century pieces were still there. But all the sad, funny, wildly tacky and heart-breakingly sincere stuff contributed by local parishioners had been swept away and replaced by shiny new plastic Kmart treasures, bland and mass-produced and completely without character.
I couldn’t help mourning the loss of the winking Jesus and the papier mache rosary and all the rest. http://twitpic.com/qe4pd
But oh, that Holy Dirt. The Holy Dirt sits just beneath a smallish hole in the church’s floor. On our first visit the hole was cordoned off on 3 sides with a sign warning not to step in it. (Again, oops.)
But this time the hole was thronged 3 deep with devotees patiently waiting their turn to scoop out buckets of that Holy Dirt into baggies or jars or Tupperware containers to take home with them.
OK now, really. If that were truly the original Dirt in that hole (the very foundation the church was built on)…at this rate of removal the Santuario would have collapsed in on itself long before this. Besides, while the Dirt looked like dirt on our first visit, this time it bore a serious resemblance to clean, commercial-grade sand from the hardware store.
I’m just sayin.’
It may sound like I’m mocking the faithful who scooped that Dirt, but I’m really not. I was serious when I named this story The Awesome Power of Belief. In 1858 one person had an authentic revelatory experience at Lourdes, but countless others who later heard her story have also experienced miraculous healings there. Why?
I don’t doubt the initial revelatory experience that happened at Lourdes (or the one at Chimayo). I can say from personal experience that revelatory experiences can and do happen anywhere. I’ve had some of my best ones while driving an offroad jeep in Sedona; in a Parisian clothing shop; and in the ladies room of Wuksachi Lodge in Sequoia National Park, to name just a few.
And I’m not saying it’s the power of suggestion that makes the Healing Waters or the Holy Dirt work for all these later people. It’s way more than that. Belief is a truly awesome (and underappreciated) force.
Let’s consider this for a moment: That we are all One infinite being of unlimited creative power. But that’s a very tough concept to take seriously while we still believe we’re separate minds housed in separate bodies, living in the 3-D world of form.
When we’re awakened to the memory of our perfect Oneness, then together we’re able to exercise our divine creative powers. But we can’t access that unlimited creativity if we believe we’re not One. As separate individuals, our unlimited creative abilities can’t be used properly, so instead we funnel all of that awesome unused power into belief.
If we believe something fully, in other words, it becomes 100% true for us. (All those fans of the Law of Attraction out there would no doubt agree.) And if all us individuals believe in something together, then that thing becomes collectively true for all of us. Sickness is real only if we believe in it; spontaneous healing becomes real exactly the same way. Regardless of whether your Holy Dirt comes from the Santuario de Chimayo or the hardware store.
So I guess the moral of this story would be to always take a good close look at what your beliefs are.
Awesome, powerful you.
Holy Dirt and the awesome power of belief – Part one
Ten years ago, Kurt & I spent Christmas in Santa Fe. Christmas Eve is magical there with Canyon Road lit by the amber glow of farolitos, the air made pungent by bonfires of piñon pine.
Christmas day, a little less magical. Although our hotel staff did their best to make us feel welcome, let’s face it – it was Christmas, for God’s sake, and we all knew they’d rather be home with family and friends. So we got out of their hair and went for a leisurely drive, ending up in a tiny town called Chimayo.
Chimayo is world famous, at least among the faithful. There’s a strange little church there called the Santuario de Chimayo, and it’s got some Holy Dirt in it. But we knew nothing about that.
We stopped there because we were transfixed by a sign on a neighboring shop stating it was THE HOME OF THE HOLY CHILE OF CHIMAYO – VIEWINGS $1.00.
I very dearly wanted to see that Holy Chile (was it in the shape of the Virgin Mary? Did its heat on the tongue cure one’s ills?) but alas, the Christmas Day thing was working against us. So we checked out the church instead.
We had the place to ourselves. A docent greeted us, then left us on our own to explore the church. I love twisted Catholic folk art (the gorier the better), and this place was a treasure trove of devotional folk artwork both high and low.
Solemn 19th century paintings in heavy gilt frames nestled up against winking Jesus holographic Last Suppers circa 1977. Heartbreakingly adorable, this place.
My favorite piece: a gigantic rosary (big enough for a beanstalk giant), each bead made out of what appeared to be wadded up papier mache and spray painted silver, the whole thing draped over a single crutch.
I just love this stuff. Probably because there’s no Christianity in my background, so I can approach the whole thing with the innocent delight of the total outsider. I find it deeply touching, fascinatingly creepy and sometimes just plain hilarious.
So there we were, being bad kids in church (literally), cackling, whispering, shushing each other while Kurt madly tried to document as much of it as possible with his camera.
And that’s how we discovered the Holy Dirt. Because while trying to get a photo of something else, Kurt backed up and stepped in it.
Oops. Who knows what that poor docent lady thought when she discovered the perfect sneaker print immortalized in the Holy Dirt. Luckily, by this time she had her hands full with a tour busload of sight seers who were trouping through the place, so as far as I know she didn’t actually see us do it.
We decided we should go before she discovered what we’d done, so we headed quickly for the door. In that same moment, all those tourists also exited the church and streamed toward their bus.
And the strangest thing happened as we made our way outside.
On that busy walkway, the docent lady stood looking me straight in the eye.
Time seemed to stop for a moment and all the other people seemed to disappear from my awareness as she smiled gently at me.
“YOU can come back anytime,” she said.
(This is the end of part one. I apologize for not including a single word about the awesome power of belief. That’ll show up in part two, I promise.)