Ever since I was small, I was terrified of the supernatural. Back then, I lumped together ghosts and other entities with everything unexplained, including spiritual phenomena. If it didn’t solidly belong to this 3-D world, I didn’t want to know about it.
But then spirituality began calling me rather insistently. And so I revisited the whole question of supernatural phenomena in recent years, and in doing so found that my fear of it had largely been healed.
Mostly. Well, sort of.
Ok, not.
• • •
Recently I spent some quality time in England, where all the buildings tend to come complete with several centuries worth of ghosts.
I can usually tell when ghosts are present, because it feels like they’re sitting on my chest, squeezing the air out of my lungs. But I don’t see them, or anything like that. I’m sensitive, but I’m not that sensitive. (Or if I am, then I do a good job of blocking out those awarenesses.)
But this time I was travelling with two people who see it all. So we’d walk into an ancient church crypt or someplace, and I’d feel my familiar stab of unreasoning fear, followed by what seemed like a medium-sized brick sitting on my chest.
And then one of my companions would catch my facial expression and say, “yes, you’re right. There are ghosts here and one of them was attracted by our light and wanted to come back outside with us. So I said a prayer for his wellbeing, and now let’s get out of here!”
You’d think that would have been the most remarkable thing that happened all day, running into a herd of ghosts and having one of them try to come home with us.
But no. There was so much challenging stuff going on during this European trip, that this ghost encounter made barely a dent. It was just one more thing to deal with.
• • •
Now, I know ghosts and whatnot are not a part of ultimate truth. In ultimate truth, Heaven has no opposite, so anything that’s not of pure light and love can’t really exist. All this dark stuff is just ego fantasy.
And yet.
This unreasoning fear of mine runs so deep, it goes way beneath any conscious understanding I might have about the nature of eternal truth.
It feels like death.
Feels like worse than death.
This deep unconscious terror of all things supernatural needs to be released, before I can really know that ghosts are meaningless in their unreality.
Because to me, right now they’re still damn real. And they scare the crap out of me. And I don’t even really know why.
• • •
So there we were a few days later, at the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey. (And yes, that place was a ghost-and-past-life-a-palooza. I’ve definitely been there before.) And something extraordinary happened, as I sat alone on a bench in the ever-present drizzling rain.
A sudden clear inspiration was placed in my mind, showing me a huge part of myself that is very ancient and deep. And that ancient part of me is deeply connected to that which I label as ‘supernatural.’ And seeing this caused me to respond with a spontaneous vow:
It’s time to stop hiding from myself. It’s time to know who I am and embrace all parts of myself fully, including my own gifts, whatever they may be. I will allow in everything that I’ve always blocked out. I’ll stop resisting and fearing the supernatural.
But that’s an awfully big vow. One I’m not yet able to keep. It’ll take getting in touch with that deep unconscious fear, and then letting it all go and be healed. The vow sets the process in motion, I guess, but the work remains to be done.
And after I’m no longer afraid of ghosts; after I remember all parts of myself and my previous supernatural-prone existences…then we can talk about the meaningless unreality of it all. At that point I will gratefully release the dark stories my past lives seem to tell, and embrace the light of ultimate truth instead.
I look forward to it.
Walking the talk
Fran’s been here visiting with me, off and on for the past few weeks. If you’ve read Long Time No See, you know about Fran from Sedona. If this blog post is your first intro to her, I will tell you Fran is, among other things, a powerful synchronicity magnet.
Translation: When she does that Fran thing of focusing deeply in tune with present-moment awareness, the “divine coincidence” starts to flow all around, as an outward sign of gentle communion with All That Is.
So we were walking on my favorite beach here in Ventura, the other day. There’s something about this place. I’ve had so many spiritual experiences on this beach, I’ve lost count; I even wrote about it in LTNS. And when Fran and I walk this beach together, the synchronicities pile up. New awarenesses unfold. Big stuff happens.
We went there with no agenda in mind. A short walk for some fresh air. It turned into our longest beachwalk ever – and what emerged from it is a new workshop series that Fran and I will be conducting together, here in Ventura. Here at this beach.
The inspiration flowed, and we started to realize we were feeling called to share too much information to fit into a one-day workshop. It should probably be a full weekend. And it really ought to take place within walking distance of this beach so all participants could get here easily, which meant the workshop would have to happen in a nearby hotel ballroom.
I watched my mind as it began making tired old assumptions and inventing stale, familiar stories of lack: People will pay for a one-day workshop, but will they come for two days? And won’t a hotel meeting room be too expensive? After all, only big famous spiritual speakers book hotels as venues. The rest of us make do with funky backroom spaces attached to bookstores or yoga studios.
(It’s not even like I think hotel ballrooms are nice – they have no natural light, pinkish-tan chairs and those Vegas chandeliers from the 1980s. But even so, in some part of my belief system, they’ve been too good, too legitimate, for me and my work.)
And so Fran and I had a very deep discussion about trusting and allowing abundance; about letting go of old mental stories; about doing what feels authentically right, doing what you feel genuinely called to do. And how when you step up courageously and joyfully to do whatever it is you’re meant to be doing, the inevitable response from the universal One Self is always recognition and support.
And I heard it. I felt it. And all those old stories fell away. We were absolutely confident, but more than that, we felt a deep knowing that this information we’re called to share is so truly hungered for by so many. And it’s time to start putting it out there.
So we’ll book the hotel it’s meant to be in, whatever the costs involved. And whoever is drawn to be at this workshop will show up. It was clear to both of us that we should feel absolutely free to create this workshop series exactly the way we feel inspired to do it, and then trust it will come to pass.
Just then we both looked down and saw something lying in the sand. Something round and flat and sort of strange. What could it be? A thin crosscut piece of wood? A plastic disk? Fran nudged it with her toe. Finally she bent and turned it over. It was a sand dollar.
Let me repeat that with a little more emphasis: It was a sand dollar. And I almost didn’t recognize it. Almost left it lying there, face down in the sand.
This, ladies and gents, is a prime example of the language of synchronicity. Is a sand dollar on a beach unusual? No. But this is the first one I’ve ever seen in my 9 years here. This sand dollar’s appearance wasn’t accidental. And it wasn’t saying, ‘Hey, you two can make a buck (a dollar) by putting on workshops together in the sand.’
This sand dollar was a gentle affirmation saying, ‘Yes! Go for it. Be fearless about living your truest self, about doing what authentically brings you joy. And don’t worry about the rest.’
So we listened to that little sand dollar’s message. We stopped at the hotel on our way home, all windblown and sandy, to ask if they have meeting rooms. Why yes, we have meeting rooms. Let us show you our very nicest one.
Our jaws dropped as we stepped into a beautiful sunny room, its glass walls overlooking a sea of sailboats bobbing in the marina. A pair of French doors led to its own private outdoor patio complete with a beautiful rock fireplace.
I looked around and thought: Honey, I’m home.
• • •
Did I mention? We got the room for a price not very much higher than the cost of a fluorescent-lit backroom of a bookstore.
So there you go. It’s a brave new world, and I’m happy to call it mine. Our first workshop will be held in mid-August, by the way. For more info about it, go to http://www.carrietriffet.com/events.php .
I pledge allegiance to…what, exactly?
Awhile back I wrote about pledging allegiance to Love. About making the choice to side with spiritual truth (even though spiritual truth still mostly feels like abstract theory). And against this 3-D world of illusion (even though the workings of the 3-D world still seem so real).
Well. I suppose the decision to choose is a start. But it isn’t much more than that.
Oh, it felt big at the time. But the decision itself only opened a door. And that doorway gave me my first clear view of the road ahead: It’s a hell of a vista.
• • •
Mind you, it’s been a long journey of discovery just getting this far. I would use this analogy to describe it:
It’s like it took me 20 years to realize I had feet and hands. Another year or so figuring out how they worked. Then I was given a pair of one-pound weights, so I spent a few years more teaching myself how to exercise with them.
Much self-congratulation accompanied all this progress. Who was more serious than I, about waking up to the truth of all reality? Who was moving more purposefully down their chosen path toward the constant awareness of Love’s presence?
I exercised faithfully, except when I was too busy. Or too tired. Or too distracted. Or not in the mood. When I wasn’t training, I spent my time watching daytime soaps and eating deep-fried Twinkies. And yet I genuinely wondered why the Olympic Committee never came calling…
All this newfound fitness has allowed me to climb steadily and ever higher, pausing every few steps to admire the valley below and to celebrate having made it this far. Now I’ve finally reached the top of the hill … and it turns out this is just the bunny slope.
I look up for the first time, and notice the commitment to truth that is yet to be honored. You remember…the commitment I made to choose Love instead of the world’s dark fantasies. Yep, it’s still there waiting patiently for me.
It turns out this commitment is a friggin’ mountain, and it goes straight up. My puny muscles are laughably unfit for the task.
• • •
It’s an uncomfortable place to be, this small spot at the top of the bunny slope. The truth is, I hate aerobic exercise, and I’m still damned fond of those Twinkies. Learning to mountain climb doesn’t sound like much fun to a flabby couch potato like me.
And yet.
Heading back down the hill – giving up the quest for awakening, and going back to treating the 3-D world as if it’s real – that would be unthinkable. Not an option.
I’m awake enough to smell what the 3-D world is made of, and it stinks.
No, I could never go back. But on the other hand, I can’t stand still in this spot on this hill forever. Hell, I don’t even want to stand here one more day.
So I guess that leaves me only one choice, and I’d better start seriously gathering my strength.
Because that mountain isn’t going to climb itself.
I pledge allegiance to Love
Funny, how you can hear something said a hundred times, and you think you get it. You think you know exactly what it means.
And then, one day you hear the same statement, and POW! It ignites a flame, a knowing, in your heart. And you realize you had no friggin’ idea, those other hundred times.
It’s an occupational hazard, especially in the spiritual arena. We hear about spiritual truth all the time: We’re all One. This 3-D world is not real. Only Love is real.
Blah, blah, blah. We get ‘truth fatigue.’ We hear it, and it sounds just like the truth we heard last week and the week before that. And so we tune it out. We’re not really hearing it at all.
Well, that’s part of the issue, anyway. The other part is that authentic spiritual truth is entirely beyond words – so the words that describe the truth don’t actually mean much of anything. They mostly exist so our ego minds can latch onto them and assure us we already know what they mean because we’ve heard them so many times before. Which is SO not true.
• • •
Anyway, I recently finished writing my next book, and the time came to ask the lovely Nouk Sanchez to write an afterword. Which she did. And it was wonderful.
Nouk is an amazingly gifted teacher, both in person and in written form. She’s a treasure. But Nouk’s writing (in its raw state) is…how shall I say it…a bit wordy.
I typically polish my own books until they gleam. I edit the hell out of every page, making sure each word fulfills a beautiful purpose. And if it doesn’t, it’s outta there. I’m kind of obsessive about it.
Yet I’ve never edited another person’s work as stringently as I edit my own. When I collaborate with others on blogs or whatnot, I normally try to change their writing as little as possible. I just fix grammar, punctuation and that sort of thing, letting the original character come through almost entirely.
But this was my book we were talking about. My Spirit-inspired, year-long labor of love. No wandering sentences allowed.
Yes, I wanted a beautifully edited afterword that fit in seamlessly with the rest of the book, but I didn’t want my own bossy, obsessive ego to be in charge of the editing process. And I was having a bit of a quandary about that. How to do justice to Nouk’s piece, and my book at the same time?
I wanted to be able to find the ideal afterword within the pages she had written – carefully sculpting away the excess like Michelangelo chipping marble to reveal the masterpiece already present within the hunk of stone.
Hey, I’m good, but I ain’t no Michelangelo. So I did the only reasonable thing: After much prayer, I surrendered the entire thing to Spirit, and let an Editor far greater than me take over.
And the editing became a light, joyful process. And I ended up with a piece that was perfect for my book, while staying true to Nouk’s intention. And that’s not why I’m telling you about it.
This is what I really wanted to tell you: All of that prayer and surrender allowed me to open up to my higher Self and let the editing decisions flow from divine inspiration. But, surprisingly, the same phenomenon also happened in reverse: By being so open while I worked on Nouk’s piece, I was able to absorb what she was saying with my heart instead of my head.
I’d heard her say it many times before: We have to choose. There’s only One truth. That truth is composed of 100% divine Love, and nothing else; we say we believe this, but our actual 3-D experience shows us the opposite. When daily life is showing us disease, unhappiness, lack, or any form of conflict… what is that? It sure as hell isn’t divine Love. Yet we accept this dichotomy.
If reality is Love and only Love, what makes us think a second reality made out of Love’s opposite could ever co-exist side by side with the only reality there is? Two opposing realities absolutely cannot co-exist. It’s Love, or it’s the ego’s delusional version of reality.
SO WHICH IS IT? Put up or shut up – a choice has to be made.
And I heard it. For the first time, I heard that there’s a definitive choice to be made. Right now. By me. And I chose Love.
That means every time I’m faced with proof of Love’s opposite here in the 3-D world (no matter how convincing it seems), I stop and reaffirm my commitment to the only truth there is: I choose Love. Which has no opposite. And I pause to focus all of my intention on this choice until I feel its truth.
Has this choice caused me to permanently see the world through the lens of pure divine Love? Of course it hasn’t; not yet, anyway. I haven’t been able to choose Love consistently with all parts of my mind united. My ego mind is still very much in the picture.
But hey, it’s a start.
The road less traveled
I’ve been planning the cover for the next book, The Enlightenment Project. After viewing dozens of shots of empty roads in lonesome landscapes, I chose an image of the Southwest. An empty highway heading toward some red rock formations.
I could’ve picked any background shot but this is the one that spoke to me, the one that seemed to best hint of the “road” to enlightenment.
Today I got an email from Fran (of InnerVision 12 fame), she was poking around on my website to see what was new, and commented that she loves the computerized image of Monument Valley.
At first I had no idea what she was referring to. And then I just started to laugh.
A few years ago, she and I took off together and did a 5-day InnerVision journey throughout the 4 corners of the Southwest. Lots of mind-boggling spiritual experiences in lots of locations like Spider Rock, Mexican Hat and Valley of the Gods.
But the one place I HATED was Monument Valley. I expected to love it, of course. Who doesn’t love Monument Valley? But it creeped me out, and I thought it was hideously ugly.
To me, it looked strip-mined. A ruined wasteland.
In Fran’s words, “Monument Valley is a powerful energetic reminder of truth. It represents ‘in your face, here I am, no apologies’ presence… It holds a message of ‘stand raw and naked, hidden by nothing.’ Just as the monuments themselves do.”
Well no wonder I hated it.
Fran commented at the time that my extreme negative reaction to the energy of Monument Valley clearly represented something in myself that I’d have to face sooner or later.
I said yeah, whatever, and we headed for the next powerful site. I never looked back.
Pretty funny, then, that I singled out this photo to describe my own journey.
Even funnier: Fran tells me there is no such bright, shiny highway. Somebody photoshopped it in.
And both of these things seem very appropriate. The discomfort I originally felt in Monument Valley was due to very deep fears I hadn’t yet faced in my own life. This book is all about uncovering and facing those fears.
And the fact that the road I picture doesn’t actually exist …
Well, that’s perfect. What could be a more accurate way to talk about enlightenment?
Be the change you wish to write about
My next book, The Enlightenment Project, is almost finished. I’ve been really happy with it so far. I didn’t feel like it was missing anything.
Except for one thing: I had this weird persistent feeling all along that the book was shorter than it was supposed to be. Not by a lot, just maybe 8 or 10 pages. But I couldn’t quite explain the feeling, so I shrugged it off and kept going.
Meanwhile, I’d recently teamed up with Jan Cook, booking agent extraordinaire, so that I can start traveling around teaching workshops. I know that’s what I’m meant to be doing; Spirit has made that abundantly clear on many, many occasions. But I’d been resisting it with every molecule of my being.
I know fear of public speaking afflicts like 93% of humanity. I don’t flatter myself that my problem is unique. I just know it runs really, really deep with me, and its tangled threads of self-loathing are a big part of the distorted fabric of my whole self-identity. Even after all these years, I still don’t like to be seen.
I’ve made tons of progress, of course. I’m fine with writing books or telling personal stories now.
But any form of public speaking (even a brief telephone interview) is enough to send me round the bend beforehand, in anticipation. Afterwards is no better – that brief trip into the spotlight is experienced as such a stark violation, I always need a long recovery period afterward of hiding in darkness.
I agreed to stop resisting all this public viewing months ago. I surrendered it all to Spirit. Yet my October speaking gig in Sedona was still enormously difficult, and interviews since then have gotten harder, not easier.
Now I’m scheduled to teach a one-day workshop in Louisiana in May. I know the information itself that I’ll be teaching (thanks to Spirit) is wonderful. But I hit the wall over the seemingly hopeless depth of my public speaking problem. This isn’t the focus I want to carry with me into that workshop. Self-obsessed shyness and fear and ancient tangled up pain and self-hatred are not what I want the underlying energy of that workshop to be about.
I mean, why get on a plane and fly someplace to teach, if I’m so gripped by mistaken self-perception that I can’t even see the other folks in the room as they really are?
So I made a small shift in my intention this morning. I decided to stop perceiving my problem as hopeless. I decided it’s immaterial how tangled or complex or deep it has always seemed. I don’t need to understand each of those tangled threads; I just need to be done hanging onto them. All mistaken perceptions melt away with equal ease, when truth is honestly desired instead. And now I honestly desire truth instead.
So my change of intention is: This problem is already over with. I’ve given Spirit full permission to help heal my misperceptions by whatever means necessary. No holds barred. The steps involved are of no consequence to me; only the outcome matters. And as a result I know with full confidence this painful self-hatred and fear are already things of the past.
Now I look forward to public speaking with a faint sort of tingly joy. Does that mean the problem has resolved itself already? Oh hell no. The deep forgiveness work is still to be done. Only the intention has changed. Yet now I can imagine how wonderful it will be to teach, when I’m free to care about the wellbeing of the other people present, instead of spending 8 hours in violent self-torment.
And I realized that’s what’s been missing from the new book. First I need to undergo this wonderful transformation, freeing myself from my prison of fear and self-judgment once and for all, and then I need to write it down as a useful example for others.
It should make a pretty good story.
HDTV Forgiveness
Ever feel like daily spiritual discipline is a whole lotta work with no immediate payoff here in the 3-D world?
All this effort to retrain my mind to see the world correctly, you think, yet I’m still reacting to the crap around me in the same old ways. That’s how it feels sometimes, at least for me.
I know all this forgiveness work is hugely powerful in terms of healing my ego mind – I can feel it happening more and more all the time – but somehow divine love never seems to be my first reaction to anything.
Well, until yesterday. That’s when I got the opportunity to see just how far I’ve really come.
My husband, like many guys, is a tech geek. I, like many women, am not. He’s been lobbying for high definition TV for about a year now. Me, I harbor no desire to see the pancake makeup actors wear to cover their pores. Especially when it’s going to cost me an extra $20 a month for the privilege.
Truth be told, I’m not so in love with TV at all, anymore. It just isn’t any fun, watching cataclysmic ego stories of good and evil. But Kurt likes it, and he really wanted that HDTV. So I relented.
And then it turned out it came with hidden fees that made the total more like $32 extra per month. Kurt took it as a personal crusade, spending hours on the phone with the DirecTV people. But they wouldn’t budge.
So he removed the DirecTV satellite dish and switched to Dish Network instead. Dish Network (compared to DirecTV) comes with a user interface straight out of the Stone Age. It’s clunky, nonsensical and needlessly complex, making even the simplest functions a difficult mess. So much so that it puts me off watching TV altogether. That’s how much I hate using that remote on that interface.
In earlier times, I would’ve been really bummed out about that. But what the hey, I’ve been looking for a reason to watch less TV. Now I’ve found it.
Yesterday as I juggled my own hectic workday, in the background I could hear Kurt on the phone with DirecTV for what seemed like hours. He emerged afterward looking flushed and upset; I thought he might burst into tears.
“It’s really terrible,” he said, flinching a little, and I realized he had something he was afraid to tell me; he was bracing himself for my reaction. “I had to sign a brand new 24 month contract when we ordered the HDTV,” he said, “and DirecTV refuses to let us out of that contract. We owe them almost $500 in cancellation fees.”
The old me, the me I’ve been all my life, would not have taken that news calmly. I’d have let him have it with both barrels for dragging me down this HDTV road in the first place, leaving me with a new TV watching experience I absolutely hate, and $500 poorer to boot. I’d have made a major drama out of it, remaining secretly resentful for months afterward every time the TV was switched on.
But it wasn’t the old me. I listened peacefully to his unhappy tale, observed the fear and frustration on his face, and immediately thought: It’s just money. You are the perfect light of heaven, and I have no desire to punish you. Because you’re not guilty of anything.
It wasn’t a forgiveness exercise – that was my honest-to-God first reaction. I then broadened the forgiveness to include all of Dish Network (who would charge the same cancellation fees if we bailed on them) and all of DirecTV. They’re taking our money, but they’re really just calling for love. It’s all perfect, exactly as it is.
Astonishingly, the whole mess has never interrupted my peace for even a moment. And I’d pay a hell of a lot more than $500 for that kind of joyous serenity, any day.
So I guess the moral of the story is: Keep doing those forgiveness exercises, kids. Keep retraining your mind to see the truth of Oneness in everything, because you never know when it’ll actually start sinking in.
Connecting the dots: Making up stories to give the world meaning
Here’s a simple way to describe nonjudgment: You have one dot over here and another dot over there. So, through nonjudging eyes, what do you see? Two unrelated dots, nothing more.
But that’s not how we humans view things. Judgment is the automatic function of our ego minds. We see a dot over here and another one over there, and we automatically connect them. Most of the time we don’t even realize we’re doing it. We tell ourselves a story that seems to fill up the space between those dots, and that story becomes our truth.
But really, it’s a story and nothing more.
Let’s look at a hypothetical example of how this works: I see a dog on a street corner. He has no collar. He looks dirty. I automatically say to myself, There is a stray dog.
It’s a conclusion I’ve reached entirely on my own. And because I historically have an affinity for animals and underdogs, I go on to embellish the story further:
He must be hungry and tired, poor thing.
I wonder if he’s been abandoned on that street corner. I’ll bet he’s waiting for an owner who’s never coming back.
People are so cruel.
So I’ve taken the 3 dots of ‘dog on a street corner’ and ‘no collar’ and ‘looks dirty,’ and I’ve used it as an excuse to weave a present story that reinforces my own past forms of condemnation onto the world.
I do not forgive you for cruelty to animals.
And then the dog’s human emerges from the garage of that house on the corner with a tub and a garden hose – and I see that suddenly the story has changed completely.
It’s still nothing but a story, mind you, as the dog turns and trots after the person, and they both watch the tub fill with soap and water. Now my story involves a squeaky clean puppy whose collar will be returned as soon as he’s dry.
I’m flooded with relief. But I also feel sheepish and ashamed for my earlier wrong conclusion. I attacked that dog’s owner for no reason. Clearly, this dog is loved. He’s cared for. I made a bad mistake.
I’m still connecting dots, but this time I’m doing it to condemn myself for my own misguided prejudices.
Connecting dots may seem like a harmless pastime, but it isn’t. We connect dots constantly, and it’s those stories we fabricate that make up the world as we know it. But the world isn’t as we know it. Not by a long shot. Yet we can’t begin to know the world’s true nature until we stop telling ourselves made-up lies about it.
Our compulsive need to connect dots – to judge random unrelated things and make up stories of good/bad, and right/wrong about them – this is what blocks our memory of Heaven.
As long as we go on making judgments, telling ourselves fantasy stories about each other to give our world meaning, we miss this eternal truth: The world in and of itself has no meaning.
It’s just a whole lot of disconnected dots, signifying nothing.
But if we patiently work, retraining our minds to leave those dots disconnected – to refrain from filling the in-between spaces with our fantasy judgments – that’s when the light of Heaven (which is always loving and entirely without judgment of any kind) has room to filter into our awareness.
To practice nonjudgment is to see the dots, but to resist the temptation to assign them a meaning they really don’t possess.
Nonjudgment is hard for ego minds to get used to. It’s uncomfortable for us to leave the dots unconnected – we’re hardwired for storytelling.
I guess it all just boils down to this: Do you want to know the world as it really is, and see Heaven’s light reflected everywhere you look? My own answer to that question is hell yeah.
And I definitely want it more than I want to hang onto my stories about the world. So for me, it’s time to start doing my best to leave the dots alone.
End of story.
Doing it wrong
A reader sent me a question today on a subject I know oh so well: The fear of doing it wrong.
“It” being spiritual practice, of course.
Back when I first started meditating, I could never get over the idea that I was doing it wrong—and that thought filled me with anxiety. And since I was pretty sure heightened anxiety was not what I was supposed to be feeling during meditation…well that just proved the point. I must have been doing it wrong. Right?
Well no. Not really. It just took time and some very determined practice to get past the stage where my ego mind could keep blocking out all peace by shouting its messages of failure.
The aforementioned reader talks about trying a form of meditation and visualization mentioned by Gary Renard in The Disappearance of the Universe. It involves picturing a circle of light, and then allowing that light to expand freely. It’s a beautiful meditation that’s all about Oneness with Heaven.
Except she don’t see no light. And she’s therefore sure she’s doing it wrong.
Not.
See, this is the main thing to keep in mind: Every human being is 100% equipped to join with Heaven in perfect peace and Love, exactly as we are right now. No ‘extra’ abilities are needed. And it doesn’t even matter whether we want to be equipped for it or not. Perfect divine Love is what we are, and we really have no say in it.
Oh sure, it’s fun to be ‘spiritually talented.’ To see visions and hear voices and dance in waves of celestial woo-woo. But it isn’t necessary. And it’s no reliable yardstick of spiritual advancement, either. It’s just a talent, like juggling or whistling is a talent. And just like juggling or whistling, the ungifted can practice assiduously until they’re pretty skilled at it too, just like the ones who came by those gifts naturally.
So, Dearest Reader, this is my message to you:
So you don’t see lights when they tell you you’re supposed to. No biggie. Concentrate instead on the important part: Do your best to feel the Love and the gentle expansion of freedom that is the true point of that meditation. If you can get focused enough to ignore your ego mind’s critique of your meditation skills, I’m willing to bet you’ll begin to feel that endless Love.
And if you don’t? Ask for Help, and then keep trying it until you do. You’ll get there, guaranteed.
Because no spiritual master who ever walked the Earth has anything on you. You’re the complete package, the real deal. You just don’t remember it yet.
(endless) Love,
Carrie
‘Fearful and Angry’ is not all it’s cracked up to be
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?