The Miracle Way

In many past articles, I’ve identified and reinforced neutrality as the demarcation point between helplessness and personal power.  Only through neutrality can you realize the range of options available to you.  Only through neutrality can you recognize you have both the freedom to choose from among that wide range of options and the power to manifest your intentions.  Calmness becomes the entry point into neutrality and the result of achieving neutrality.  Through calmness you transition from critic to onlooker.  With calmness you release judgment, criticism, blame, guilt, and comparison.  Instead of leaking power, you employ it.  Through calmness, you become the neutral Observer rather than the immobilized Interpreter, and you vastly multiply your personal power

The next exponential leap, the one that moves you from Observer to Partner, is surrender. You more fully own the what – your choices, intentions, and goals; and you totally let go of the how – the ways, the means, the efforts to control the outcome.  With surrender you affirm your partnership with everything around you.  You enjoin with helpers, allies, colleagues, supporters and inspiration.  Awareness becomes the entry point into surrender and the result of surrender.

Surrender is as dependent on awareness as neutrality is dependent on calmness.

Awareness of . . .

Because partner mode is so hugely powerful, awareness covers a lot of territory.  Consider the following aspects of awareness:

Your Self:  Includes everything about yourself – your talents, your preferences, your beliefs, your thoughts, your actions and reactions, your emotions, your perceptions,.

Your Circumstances: Includes any external aspects or influences over which you have no control.

Your Surroundings: Encompasses your physical environments and anything you can access with your senses.

Your Agency: Reaches out to every possibility within your personal sphere.

Your Personal Power: Begins with free choice and swells to encompass the ability to create,   As awareness grows, so does Personal Power.  Once accessed, the only way to lose Personal Power is to shut down awareness.

The Other: Touches anything and everything outside yourself, including:  people, animals, cars, tools, time, tasks, goals.  Awareness of The Other takes in the same aspects you acknowledge in yourself – their circumstances, situation, free agency and personal power.

Your Partnerships: Connects with others.  At this level, you become aware of the exchange of energy between you and others and you sense the nature of those exchanges of energy.

Your Connections: Unites you with your ability to influence the energy exchanged between you and others.

Oneness: Establishes your connection with all things.  The sense that you are an operating part of The Whole, and The Whole is both within and without.

As you become more and more mindful, it’s important to remember that awareness grows from the calmness of neutrality.  It’s reliable only when free of judgment.

Becoming more aware

Awareness at any level comes gradually, much the way a baby becomes ever more self-aware.  Even epiphanies (which often feel like a bolt from the blue) erupt out of a gradual accumulation of observation, or repetition, or exposure, or experience.

It’s fairly easy to see that the more you expand your awareness, the more you shift into higher levels of energy, and the more personal power you access.  However, actually making the shift in some troublesome area of your own life may seem difficult, perhaps impossible.  So here are some exercises to help you move from wherever you are now to wherever you want to go.

If you want to change your awareness of Your Self and Your Circumstances:

1. Take a couple of deep breaths and imagine the air you inhale is inflating your body.  As your lungs expand, let your ribcage expand also.  Lift your head to elongate your neck.  Let your spine, your arms and your legs stretch out.  Broaden your shoulders and your pelvis.  See if you can sense the air reaching your toes and your fingers.
2. Continue to breathe deeply until you feel totally present in your expanded body.  Now take a quick inventory of how your body feels.  Notice any spots of tension, and let that tension escape with your breath as you exhale.
3. Think of one or two positive things you know to be true about yourself.  You can choose something obvious such as the color of your hair or eyes, or something less obvious such as something you like to do or something you’re good at.
4. Keeping the spotlight turned off, recognize and acknowledge your emotional response to your circumstances.  Consciously step out of that limiting energy and into something more expansive.  (If you like, refer to the Emotions List)  If you’ve been experiencing fear, you might move one step up into alarm or nervousness or worry.  If you’ve been experiencing anger, you might move up into irritation, or indignation, or vexation.
5. Mentally turn the house lights up and look at The Circumstance in the new light of your chosen emotion.

If you want to increase your awareness of The Possibilities that spread out before you, employ one or more of the following calming Exercises:

To calm your body:

• Breathe deeply.  Inhale slowly into your diaphragm, paying attention to the air all the way in and all the way out.  Be with your body.  Repeat 4-6 times.  The body relaxes with such regulated and increased oxygenation.
• Open your senses.  Pay attention to what you can hear, what you can see, what you can smell, what you can taste, and/or what you can feel.  Your senses are your access to the world, and compared to your own stress, the world is very stable.
• Be in nature.  Go outside and be open to temperature, weather, plants, animals, and your body’s responses.  Nature is generous, inspiring, settling and calming.
• Expand your body from within.  Become tall, lengthen your neck, broaden your shoulders, expand your rib cage, lengthen your arms and legs, stretch your skin.  When your body is tight, it hoards tense emotions; when your body is expanded, it welcomes generous emotions.

To calm your mind:

• Count your blessings.  Think of five things you’re thankful for and savor them.  Especially be mindful to the blessings and advantages you enjoy that you didn’t earn.  Appreciation of what’s good switches the mind off something you might be judging negatively.
• Laugh out loud.  Chuckle, giggle, tee-hee.  Generate it from your belly, your chest, your throat, your nose, your toes.  Just find some form of laughter inside of you and let it come out your mouth.  Laughter is a very effective medicine.
• See truth.  Think of something you know to be true.  Even small truths work well here:  The sun is shining (or it’s raining); I love my dog (or my child, or my spouse), I am well-fed (or hungry), I like ice cream (or swimming, or a good book, or martinis).  Truth will help you stop any story your mind might be spinning.
• Be present.  Take note of whatever you are doing.  If you are eating, savor every bite; if you are working, focus on the task; if you are walking, observe the roll of your feet, the resilience of the ground, the sounds and textures of the environment.  Focus your mind on what is, and you will find ease from whatever story your brain is making up.

To calm your emotions:

• Smile.  Using MRI, researchers have discovered that turning up the corners of the mouth changes the way the synapses in the brain fire.  Just by smiling, you move your mental activity to a happier location of the brain.
• See beauty.  Notice something you believe to be beautiful and savor it.  Seeing beauty is like seeing truth, except on the emotional level.  Enjoying the beautiful will ease your heart away from any agitation and cool heated emotions.
• Be silly.  Stick out your tongue, wiggle your butt, dance a jig, cross your eyes – let down your defenses.  To be silly for even a few moments will helps you transcend any tension-causing rules that bind you to beliefs and behaviors that may not be true for you.
• Evoke a neutral emotion.  Basically, this is letting go of judgment and becoming the observer.  That transition moves you from stress to serenity.

If you want to increase your awareness of the Partnership opportunities your life offers:

1. Decide in advance the nature of the partnership you want and the energy it would take to create that relationship.  For example, you might want your partnership with your body to be more robust and healthy.  You might want your partnership with your child to be happier and more loving.  You might want your partnership with your work to be more serene and rewarding.
2. Make sure your own emotions are as neutral and free of conflict or struggle as possible.
3. Close your eyes and mentally hold your hand toward the person or thing you want partnership with (much like you would if warming your hand at a fire) and become aware of the energy radiated by your potential partner.  Because people have such a complex range of emotions, you may pick up anything between fear and eagerness.  Inanimate objects are more agreeable unless they’ve been subjected to a steady dose of negative energy from a person.  Money often radiates enthusiasm.  Tools often radiate willingness.  Depending on what’s it’s been picking up from you, your computer might radiate willingness or reluctance.
4. If the energy you feel is positive and full of creative power, absorb it.  Surrender to it.  Let it fill you.  If the energy you feel is wounded, gather up within yourself the energy you want to establish and channel it toward your potential partner.
5. Stay firm with what you want to create, then surrender to the creative energy of the partnership.  Let your energy form half the partnership, let the energy of the other do the rest.

Expansion

Awareness grows.  After a baby becomes aware of her hand she realizes she can move her finger, then grasp something, then put something in her mouth, then move her whole body, then mimic words and then discover the meaning of those words, then convey ideas and use words to create results.

The awareness of Personal Power can grow naturally from the infant’s sense of self to the Creator’s sense of oneness with the universe.  Use calmness to achieve neutrality.  Then use surrender to achieve partnership.

(I haven’t yet discovered the key to achieving Oneness.  As soon as I do, I’ll let you know.)

(I am a life coach.  If you would like personal help in applying the principles I explore in this blog to your own life, please contact me through my web site.)

HAVE YOU EVER NOTICED that some things in your life seem easy and attainable while other things seem difficult, elusive, perhaps impossible?

For instance, perhaps you have an abundance of good relationships but wellness seems elusive because you experience one health challenge after another. Or perhaps money comes easily to you but you can’t maintain a long-term relationship. Perhaps, like me, you’re good with words and colors but struggle with music and numbers. If something comes easily to you, you probably enjoy it, participate in it, nurture it, even indulge in it. If something seems difficult or too far away you may avoid it or procrastinate it – regardless of how much you might want it

Say you want a long-term relationship. Say you’re sure such a relationship is true for you and you’re willing to be true to it. Say you’ve worked through your obstacles and you’re applying positive energy, and you’ve been at it long enough that surely the right person should have come along by now. Since it hasn’t happened, you’re doubting yourself and the universe. You may be wondering if loving someone and being loved in return simply isn’t meant to be.

A recent article in Scientific American online called The Neuroscience of Distance and Desire sheds some interesting light on what may be happening.

Things we consider to be desirable and/or attainable seem closer than they actually are, while things we consider to be undesirable and/or difficult seem farther away than they really are.

The researchers suggest an evolutionary purpose for such misperception – that energy is a limited resource, so something easily attainable is a better use of a limited resource and therefore more desirable than something which is difficult. Perceiving something as closer that it really is reinforces its desirability and motivates us toward it. Perceiving something is farther away reinforces its undesirability and influences us to not waste energy. Additionally, this could be a survival function in that when a dangerous distance seems too far we won’t leap, or when a threat seems too dangerous we won’t confront it.

In today’s world we have so many tools and so much knowledge that some challenges are not necessarily fatal, yet the survival mechanism persists. We know, for instance, that with the right equipment and adequate training human beings can walk on high wires or jump motorcycles across chasms. But we have to believe in our own ability to do so before we try.

Belief Influences Perception

Consider the relationship between desire and difficulty. When you perceive a situation to be difficult, you may have little desire. Desire is natural; most people have it in at least one area of their lives.

Likewise, non-desire is also natural. It’s so natural it’s often selected as a coping mechanism. If something proves extremely difficult, it may be easier to stop desiring it than to keep pursuing it. For instance, after struggling through a challenging illness, someone might decide there are benefits to ill-health; or someone whose coped with poverty may decide to not want what money can buy.

As a teenager, I found it extremely difficult to make friends. I ached for friends, but I perceived myself as not particularly likable. I became more and more reluctant to make the first move and took refuge in solitary activities. I had to start believing people might actually like me before I could perceive friends as attainable.

Any belief of insufficiency or difficulty or inability will make the desired result seem farther away than it really is – even unattainable. If something seems unattainable, the perception of its being too far away to bother reinforces its apparent unattainability and may influence you to not try.

So we have a conundrum: The more you desire something, the closer it will seem. But the more you believe you can’t attain it, the farther away it will seem. And the farther it seems, the more you believe it to be unattainable, and the less you will desire it. Thus, belief can sabotage desire.

Say you want to complete a marathon. You desire it for true reasons: to achieve that level of fitness, for the adventure of it, to prove you can, to feel better about yourself. But if you believe you are too heavy, or not fit enough, or too old, or generally not athletic enough, your perception of the difficulty may obstruct your desire and deter you from mastering one mile, let alone 26.

So, recognizing belief and desire influence perception, how can we turn the illusion of distance to our advantage? Here are some ways to change a false belief, reinvigorate desire and perceive something as more easily attainable.

Healing a False Belief

A belief does not need a factual basis. In fact, false beliefs are more easily acquired than true ones. With amazing agility, the human brain turns repetition into truth, adapts memories to conform to an accepted story, interprets correlation as causation. However, belief is an incredibly strong force. Once the brain processes something into belief, that belief has the effective power of truth. Thoughts, actions and emotions all conform to it – and therefore so do results. Because thoughts, actions and emotions will all engage in perpetuating a false belief, any one of them can be the key to healing.

Begin by identify the three factors:

1. Perpetuating thoughts tend to present themselves as limitations: I can’t. It’s too hard. Money thinks I’m dead. It’s my nature. I was raised that way. (For a full exploration of the power of thought, click here)
2. Perpetuating actions tend to take you in a different direction from where you want to go: Delay, procrastination, substitution, laying blame, resistance, or any form of conflict.
3. Perpetuating emotions include any that reinforce helplessness or struggle.

Chose any of the three factors as a starting point.

1. Change a thought by reversing it and recognizing something else might be true: Maybe I can. Maybe it will be easy. Maybe I have abilities I don’t know. Maybe my parents got it wrong.
2. Change an action by taking the first small step in the direction you want to go: Walk before you run, smile at strangers, put loose change in a piggy bank (or empty your jar of coins into your savings account), join a support group, take a class.
3. Change an emotion by recognizing and naming what you feel and choosing something else.

For help with any of these factors, I invite you to contact me and explore life coaching.

Reinvigorating Desire

With the healing of a false belief, your view of what’s possible will automatically expand. New opportunities will reveal themselves, as will new avenues for moving forward.

There are ways, however, you can close the distance between where you are and what you want. Here are a few:

1. Keep a wish list. On paper, make a list of anything and everything you want – or want to want. Follow the rules for a brainstorming session: write down every idea; use the words that come first to mind, do not edit; do not judge or examine any idea, just write it down; make no attempt to prioritize. Also, don’t think you have to get everything down at once. Keep the list handy and add to it as new ideas come to you.

Include both the grand and the trivial. You might want new drapes for the bedroom and to climb Mt. Everest. Everything goes on the list.

You may want to come back to this list and identify the things you want most immediately – especially if you decide to make a dream board – but it’s not necessary. The real power here is to open your imagination to the possible. Many desires remain buried in the subconscious mind. Naming them is often enough to free them.

2. Make a dream board (or treasure map or vision board). From magazines or from the Internet, collect pictures and words that represent or name what you want. Paste them on a sheet of poster board and hang it where you can see it easily and often. (For examples, click here.)

When you can visualize something, you make it more possible, and pictures help. Remember, when something seems impossible, you perceive it as farther away than it really is. To bring something closer, you must first name it, then you must begin to see it. The more you see it, the more you will believe it to be possible.

3. Affirm what you want. For an affirmation to be effective, it needs to meet the following criteria. What you want must be true for you, and you must be willing to be true to it. You must imagine it as a done deal, stating it in first person, present tense. You must internalize it, feel it in your heart; just keeping it in your thoughts is insufficient to impacting belief and desire. You must keep it pure and undiluted by doubts and misconceptions.

Empowering Perception

When you believe something is possible, it is. When something seems possible, your desire for it increases. When desire unites with possibilities, what you want seems closer than it really is. When things seem closer, you’re more likely to reach for them.

The strongest energies for bringing what you want close enough to grasp are love, which heals, happiness, which creates, and peace, which reproduces itself. Employing these powerful energies brings what you want into immediate existence. Always begin from where you are and step up into the next higher energy – whatever it happens to be. (The Emotions List can help with this.)

THE PAST THREE WEEKS I’ve explored ways the soul communicates: through the body, through the mind and through the heart. There’s one more way you experience often, which I call “gut” communications, for want of a better word. And actually, I read recently some researchers are calling the intestines the “second brain” because they’ve found such a high concentration of neural cells in that part of the body.

When we think of “gut” feelings, of listening to the “gut,” we’re really referring to intuition. When we pay attention and tune in, we will find messages of great value.

We’ve seen that the body often communicates with ailments, the mind communicates with ideas and the heart communicates with the energy of emotion. The gut communicates with intuition, with a knowingness we can’t precisely pinpoint or attribute. When we’re willing to listen, the instincts of intuition will provide valuable insights in the following ways.
Guides Toward Safety

Your soul, being somehow bigger than you are, has an awareness far broader than the reach of your five senses. I have no idea how far the sense of the soul reach, but they are unbound by the physical limitations of space or time. The soul must, however, communicate with us in physical ways. The senses are one of those ways.

Have you ever known something before you sensed it? Known someone was coming before you heard their footsteps? Known something was ahead on the road before you saw it? Known something was burning (or about to) before you smelled it? Known what something would taste like before you put it in your mouth? Such experiences are communications from the infinite, channeled through your intuition.

When you’re willing to trust them and recognize them, you enhance the safety provide by the five physical senses. You become, as Gary Zukav terms it, a multi-sensory individual.

Those people with very sophisticated intuitive senses are often called psychic. You don’t have to be psychic to allow your intuition to expand your senses. Since you already receive such messages, the more likely challenge is to tune into them.

Begin by becoming more sensorially aware. Become more mindful of what you hear, see, smell, taste and feel. Be more present when you eat, when you listen (to music, to the sounds of nature, to what other people say), when you look at something, to smells when you get a whiff of something, and to such textile things as heft, impact, and texture. The more you open your senses, the more intuitive your senses will become.

Your “gut” also enhances your safety by uniting with the messages provided by your body through ailments. If the ailment is a message from the soul, you will not heal from the ailment until you listen to the message. To truly know if some physical ailment is a communication often requires all four modes of soul communication.

1. Acknowledge what’s happening in or to your body – the ache, the illness, the pain, the stiffness, the injury.
2. Think about what the ailment might mean in a metaphorical or symbolic way.
3. Feel the emotion(s) embedded in or reinforced by the ailment.
4. Let your intuition inform the above processes or confirm your diagnosis.

A final important step is to consciously communicate back to the soul that you heard the message and you will heed it.

Attunes to Energy

Everything, everywhere around us, emits energy. Some energetic emissions feed the soul, and some feed on the soul. Not surprisingly, the soul likes the former much better than the latter.

The soul uses intuition as a primary way to recognize, evaluate and attune to these energies.

Intuition is a very powerful way to attune to energy – whether your own or that of what’s going on around you. Like sensory awareness, some people have naturally acute energetic awareness. Most of us have to develop and practice this awareness.

• Start by noticing what you are already aware of. For most people the easiest are the energies of music and/or light. Pay attention to your instinctive reaction to a piece of music: Do you feel more energized? Soothed? Stirred to action? More tense? Loving? Notice your reaction to light and how it relates to your mood: Do you feel happier when the sun’s shining? More thoughtful when it’s overcast?
• Be mindful of the energy conveyed in other people’s voices. You probably already notice this and respond to it subconsciously, practice identifying it consciously.
• Recognize the energy of different environments. Do some rooms of your home feel more welcoming than others? Is it easier to visit the houses of some of your friends than others? What businesses entice you? Are there some of the same type you’ve never visited more than once? Also try this while out in nature. What energy can you pick up from a tree, or a rock, or an animal?
• More advanced practice includes opening your intuition to the emotions radiated by other people. At first, practice in the company of one other person. If that person is willing, you can take turns consciously generating an emotion while the other person “reads” it. (Always start with the strongest emotions because they’re easier to pick up.) As you gain skill, practice by isolating the emotional energy of someone in a group. With mastery you’ll be able to recognize the emotion of someone passing by.

Another way to attune to energy is to pay attention to “gut” feelings.

The communications from the soul through the gut are generally of two types: Pursue this, or avoid this. If you haven’t learned to listen to your gut, it’s easy to get them mixed up.

Take, for instance, butterflies in your stomach. Say you get them before speaking to a group. Does this mean speaking to groups isn’t true for you? Or does it mean you’re stepping up to something your soul wants to learn, or gain, or give? It could be either. To find out which, employ the other means of soul communication.

• Do mishaps or ailments accompany every effort to speak in public? The message is probably to retreat.
• Do you have something important to say, a significant idea to convey? The message is probably to proceed.
• Are you emotionally committed to the purpose of the speech? The message is probably to proceed.

Guides Toward Truth

Intuition fuels all inspiration and all revelation.

Whenever you are trying to learn something, master something, attain something, or achieve something, and that something is true for you, your intuition will play a key role in your progress.

Your mind might be working through a problem, trying to put all the pieces together, stumbling through the processes. You can relax your brain and stop trying to control the process, and suddenly you know. The answer appears. It all fits. Your soul is involved and partnering with your mind through intuition.

Your heart might be confused by something – a relationship perhaps – or uncertain. You let go of expectation, open yourself to possibilities, and suddenly things are clear. You feel lighter, easier, freer. Your soul is involved and partnering with your heart through intuition.

The more you trust your intuition to speak truly, the more your soul can guide you toward truth.

Truth operates on two levels – both your truth and universal truth. Your personal truth derives from your talents, gifts, personality, attitudes, beliefs, and values. Universal truth holds true in every situation, regardless of religion, politics, education, or tradition. When you listen to your intuition, your soul can help you resonate with universal truth without sacrificing your personal truth.

Communicates With the Infinite

People communicate with the infinite in many ways. When I first started realizing the power of emotions, I began to see emotions as “prayers,” as communications with the infinite. I observed my own emotions and the emotions of the people closest to me, and I noticed a cause-and-effect relationship. I saw generosity and compassion result in peace, I saw fear attract whatever was feared, I saw anger cause conflict and division, and I saw love bring about healing. Everywhere I looked I saw emotions creating results that corresponded with the emotion.

Back then, I was still a novelist and teaching writing. I started paying attention to the beliefs and attitudes of my students, and I recognized a similar cause-and-effect relationship between thoughts and results. If someone (myself included) believed writing was hard work, they struggled through their novels. If someone gave more attention to something else (work, family, community, diversion), they experienced more success with that other thing than with writing. I realized beliefs, focus and attention – their thoughts – were also a form of prayer, another way to communicate with the infinite.

I also observed the difference between my results and the results of students who dedicated themselves to writing. (I liked teaching more than writing.) I concluded actions were yet another form a prayer.

So here were three methods of sending communication to the infinite. I began to wonder how the infinite communicated back to us. In each of these ways, the infinite communicates back to us through our results. Through our results we can know the focus and energy of our emotions, our thoughts and our actions. We’re going to get back according to the energy we expend.

We can also know the strength and energy of our connection with wisdom and truth through results of a more general nature, such as:

• Peace. When your soul wants to assure you of your harmony with yourself and with the universe, you experience peace. The peace might be physical, it might be mental, or it might be heart-felt.
• Confidence. When your soul wants to confirm your choices, you will feel confident of your direction, your means, or both.
• Serendipity. When your soul wants to reinforce your unity with your purpose, you experience serendipity. Coincidences, surprises, good fortune, opportunities, connections, synchronicities – serendipity can take any number of forms, and within such experiences you can hear the reinforcing messages of your soul.