Animal logic: interpreting aberrant behavior

Dearest readers,

For the last two years, an otherwise ordinary-looking squirrel has been targeting very specific plants in my porch flower containers and viciously and systematically shredding the plants until nothing remains but the stub of a root. This creature, whom I have dubbed “Psycho Squirrel”, does not eat the plants. He, and I am assuming, perhaps erroneously, based on his deliberate and aggressive yet sneaky behavior, that he is a male, has occasionally garlanded my wooden fence with shreds of geraniums.

Squirrels are supposed to be repelled by geraniums.

My initial response to this squirrel’s erratic behavior was to feel upset and even a bit angry. I love all animals, but I was having difficulty feeling affection for his less than lovable behavior.

When people on my local neighborhood social network regularly vent about package thieves and other nefarious individuals who delight in petty crimes and burglaries in our area, their reactions, while more heated and intense than my response to my rodent visitor, reminded me of my own thoughts about package thieves and such.

Generally, humans are very protective of their property, their belongings, and they become quite angry and aggressive when their territory is invaded. Sending unconditional love to these perpetrators is outside of the realm of most people’s experience and ability.

Since I spend much of my time and energy focusing on raising my energetic frequency and working towards unity and coherence in my body, mind, heart, and energy field, the behavior of this erratic, fluffy-tailed being intrigued me. Perhaps he is not a simple ne’er-do-well bent on tearing up flowers. Perhaps he is a messenger from Gaia (Mother Earth), and his actions have been misinterpreted by me. Perhaps I need to send him (and our relationship) unconditional love despite the vegetation decimation in which he seems to delight.

 

As a gardener on this third density realm of experience, I struggle with the concept that some plants (people, animals, trees) are considered more valuable, more important than others. In my heart of hearts, all beings are conscious and have specific talents, properties, beauty, and energy. No being is more important than another, no matter how humble in appearance.

Some people say a “weed” is a plant that is the wrong place. Perhaps a plant becomes named a “weed” when it is perceived by a lower density being, by a state of consciousness that divides, confines, compartmentalizes, judges. Because we, for the most part, still live in duality while striving for unity consciousness (some of us do!), our gardens are also subject to judgment.

 

The message of the squirrel, as I interpret it, leads me to question my gardening practice. I have written of this dilemma before in this blog. By tearing up my asters this spring, and my geraniums last growing season, the squirrel was destroying the “privileged plants”, who get to live in containers on the porch, with lovely store-bought soil, compost, and plant food. The wild plants, of which there are a great variety who propagate themselves  throughout my front and back yard – and the types of plants also vary to some degree from year to year – are not allowed, for the most part, to live in the designated flower beds or containers.

And while I regret doing it, I do pull up certain plants to favor others. I do not resort to using poisons of any kind. But think about it! In our human societies, we constantly judge certain people. Put them in categories. Decide that some should be punished, put to death. Some enjoy great privileges, while others constantly struggle to survive. Certain body types and appearances are considered beautiful and desirable, while others are judged ugly and unlovable. I believe that when we live from the heart, these judgmental practices fall away. The heart is a great unifier.

This institutional plant racism or segregation does not obey the Law of One. How can I be aligned with my higher self and in service to Gaia and to continue to garden in the old way, with hierarchies of plants, separated beds? Should a New Earth garden be a confusion of weeds and cultivated plants? Areas of intentional planting with other areas left intact? I don’t quite have an answer to this question yet. But the question itself intrigues me. How do we garden in the fifth dimension?

I do talk to my plants, to the trees, the stars, the air, water, rocks, and clouds. I apologize to the tiny trees and seedlings which I remove from my yard. Each time I grasp a tiny stem and pull the roots from their hold in the Earth, I feel twinges of sadness. And I know that Nature herself is quite harsh on small trees. Very few reach maturity. Perhaps I am just one of the hazards in the eco-system. Still, to love the plants unconditionally, while loving myself unconditionally is my goal. My intuition tells me that I simply need to listen to the plants more. Sometimes, I ask certain plants if they could please move somewhere else.

In any case, Psycho Squirrel has inspired a thought process and a questioning of how we, as human beings, interact with our natural environment. I feel much improvement to our quality of life in human societies would come if we did slow down and took the time to listen to plants, animals, rocks, the soil, trees, the air, and the clouds. The ability to understand all of creation is inside of each of us. Of that I am certain. We simply need to be still, and to remember.

From Survive to Thrive: What is in between duality and unity

Dear readers,

2018 is going to be a year filled with turbulence and change. For many, it will most likely be a terrifying year, but my own heart is soaring with gladness. A sense of knowing tells me that the divine feminine is at last anchoring back into human consciousness. The long lost energies of receptivity, intimacy, patience, kindness, but also the darker feminine witch so long relegated to the collective basement of humanity is returning with its creative and healing powers.

The deep earthiness of living in complete alignment with Earth energy and consciousness in a physical body, so familiar to plants and to animals, has become foreign to human beings. Divorced from our bodies, our feelings, from one another, and from the consciousness of all things, we have over a period of centuries and millennia, forgotten our innate wisdom and creative abilities and have given nearly all of our personal power away. Living on Earth has been reduced to survival in conditions which are tantamount to living in the dimension called “Hell” by many religions. We are victims, most of the time just getting by. We rely on ourselves for so little, and our emotions and attention are constantly being manipulated by entertainment, news media, politicians, and a sense that we don’t have the ability to provide for ourselves or to keep our bodies healthy.

How do we move from merely surviving to thriving? How do we move back into our bodies? For me, the answer is both simple and complex. We must learn self-love. We must remember who we are as well as remember the great wisdom and awareness of the plants, the animals, and the Earth herself. Our cultures allow us only to consciously love and accept only a very small part of ourselves and of one another. The majority of our thoughts, feelings, impulses, ideas, desires are not acceptable to other people. And for the most part, our bodies are also not good enough to be loved as is. We are taught to  judge self and others mercilessly from the time we are still in diapers.

Yet taking back our power and returning to a state of full empowerment requires our willingness to understand that everything is alive and conscious. The conventional education of all children conditions us all, regardless of the cultural background in which we are raised, to perceive the totality of the world which presents an extremely limited and mythological view of life. Thriving requires us to shed the skin of all that we once believed to be real and true and forces us to live in the now.

Here are some examples how all of us give our power away:

1. We entrust the state of our health to doctors, thinking that so-called experts know more that we do about our own bodies and what we need to be healthy.
2. We allow other people, also “experts” to tell us what we should or should not eat.
3. We give away our self-love to people who tell us what is beautiful and what or who deserved to be admired or loved. We begin to criticize the way we look, and our hearts feel sad. This is very detrimental to our health.
4. We believe that we cannot make a living doing the work we love, using our talents. We give away the majority of the waking hours of our adult lives to doing work that is not satisfying and which does not benefit the well-being of all people, animals, plants, and the planet.
5. We rely on yet other “experts” to tell us how to relate to other people, including in intimate relationships.
6. We condition our children to fit into a system, criticizing the parts of their personalities and behaviors, and even medicating them so that they will fit in. By doing this, we give away large portions of our psychic energy.

Before we can fully take back our power, there is a lot of work to be done. Much of this work we can accomplish by looking within our own hearts and minds and by learning to embrace the parts of self that we have neglected for so long. This is a healing process. We can change our own DNA and modify our own cellular structure by releasing energetic blocks caused by patterns of living and thinking that are harmful to the human as a creative being.

The Earth, as a conscious planetary being, is also evolving and healing, and this evolution involves some turmoil. It is easy to observe the chaos around us as our political, religious, financial, educational, and other institutions and established ways of being that embodied survival, manipulation, and exploitation founder and collapse. This cultural paradigm which required that we allow ourselves, the plants, the animals, the water, air, minerals, and soil to be used as resources is quickly shifting and deconstructing, as is the planet herself.

The transition between survival and thriving is made more difficult by the fact that most people are still not conscious. There is a lot of fear, anger, and aggression embodied in people and in our institutions and way of life and being. For example, in my neighborhood, there is a considerable amount of crime. Break-ins, car theft, etc. The convention of duality that is so ingrained in people is hard to break. Those who steal embody disrespect of others and lack of self-love. By their actions, they speak a language which expresses that they feel the need to take from others what they feel they don’t deserve or cannot earn. They implicitly believe that the universe is not abundant, but they want to experience abundance through disrespect. Those who are victims of the thieving express fear and anger. They want to protect their way of life and their property. The possibility of a world in which there is enough for everyone and where everyone respects self and others seems unreachable, impossible.

How can this gap be breached? To create a way of life based on love and respect, it is necessary to face the monsters inside of each of us which prevent us from living together in a loving manner right now. Not everyone is ready to make the leap. Even those who are educated and who believe themselves to be spiritually evolved are not necessarily any further ahead than those who have been less privileged.

The divine feminine has been suppressed from our cultures, institutions, from the light of day for thousands of years. All of the wisdom needed to create a balanced human being and balanced social structures have been kept from our awareness and out of reach of our love or of our intellect. To become creative beings once again and to let go of the passive-aggressive culture of a repressed feminine will take some work and some time.

In Dolores Cannon’s 2011 book “The New Earth: The Three Waves of Volunteers”,  she explains that while the Earth undergoes extensive turmoil in the form of mudslides, volcanic eruptions, and possibly a meteor which causes much of land to be temporarily submerged by water, many people will be taken temporarily to another location (another planet?) to weather the storm. I have heard several predictions that seem to indicate this possibility, though the state of our consciousness does seem to determine which timeline or outcome we will choose to experience during these times of turbulence. It will not be the same for everyone.

There is some impatience within me, as I would love to see more people eager to take a great leap forward, embracing the ability to look inward and to use our consciousness to create new realities from within and with one another. We have such huge potential for love and for the creation of realities which benefit all people, animals, plants, and our beautiful planet. From chaos to a new order does not seem like such a great leap to me, but, then again, I know it is for most of us, who cannot yet imagine a world without struggle or fear. Most people still believe that reality is something fixed that is outside of self, that we do not have the power to change. How wrong they are!

I am very much looking forward to life on New Earth, and I know that in 2018 my mission will begin to fully unfold and be unveiled even to myself. I hope that I will have the courage to live without compromise, fully aligned with my purpose and my mission to help humanity and the planet in this challenging transition.

 

The name of the rose: unconditional self-love and healing

Dearest readers,

In western cultural iconography, the rose is the equivalent of what the lotus flower embodies in the eastern hemisphere. Like the lotus, the rose is a symbol of love, the heart, of unconditional love, and of unity consciousness.

 

In our current cultural paradigm, healing means fighting disease. As if there were a part of self that needed to be eliminated, a part of self not worthy of love. When I choose to hate some part of myself, such as toenails infected with fungus, what I am really saying is that there is a part of myself that does not deserve my love. By hating that part of myself, what I am really doing is not fighting the “illness”. I am perpetuating the illness by increasing the lock-down of those blocked energies that no longer serve my total health and well-being. I am creating a quarantine in my own body, setting up a barrier in which disease, fungus, viruses, or bacteria thrive, and with my implicit permission, create chaos rather than harmony. The heart, like the rose, is a creator of coherence. Coherence is a term used to denote a pattern of energy that embodies a high vibrational frequency in which all parts create a harmonious pattern.

Lower vibrational frequencies, or energies that are not organized by a conscious, loving intention, are chaotic. This is not bad in itself, but these energies, like cells in the body, if not always receiving messages of conscious, intentional unconditional love, will obey unconscious or social messages as directions for their behavior or patterning. If our cells, the air we breathe, the water that we drink are chaotic or absorbing the lower density energy patterns of fear, division, duality, chemical poisons rather than those of unity and unconditional love, our bodies shift and organize themselves according to these patterns. We feed these patterns and blueprints into our bodies through the food we eat, the water we drink, the air we breathe, the thoughts that we think, and the feelings we allow to course through our hormonal systems.

In a culture based on division and duality, we are always fighting some part of self. Total love and acceptance of self seem like a challenge so huge as to be impossible. We generally believe that unconditional love for self and for others is practically out of reach for human beings grounded in a physical body on the Earth plane.

Yet if we wish to heal and to live whole lives in  harmony with self and others, we must master self-love. Unconditional self-love.

The rose carries the pink ray – a light encoded frequency that speaks the language of unconditional love. If you speak to your body and use rose water, or imagine roses or a pink light healing your cells, you are unifying your cells, your body, your emotions, your heart with the unified field of all that is. By consciously creating coherence, you are choosing to return to integrity and wholeness. This is healing. It is our true nature to be actively and consciously connected to the entirety of creation.

With the language and love of the unity that is the rose, it is possible to heal our bodies, our lives, our minds, hearts, our communities, our relationships. What part or parts of your body do you find difficult to love? Where do you judge yourself, and what do you judge in others? By asking myself these questions, I can begin to perceive the parts of myself and the areas in others on which I project judgment of self as the targets for self-love. Where I am lacking or believe I am not good enough, not beautiful enough is where I hurt myself. The parts of my body which constantly love and support me are not being supported by my consciousness.

When I fail to give full gratitude to my body and cellular structure for the magnificent work that is done in my behalf every moment of every day and night since birth and until the death of this physical body, I am failing myself. I may ingest chemicals or plant-based substances, hoping to heal my body. But if I am fighting or opposing what I perceive as lack, disease, a part of self that is less than perfect, then I cannot heal. The medication is not so important as the intention that is administered at the same time as the medication  is ingested. I may eat only organic foods, but if I fail to love myself unconditionally, my health may still be impaired.

Healing is totality, holism, harmony of all parts. Disease or dysfunction is where blocked energy and lack of self-love become ingrained in the cellular structure. If I choose to give unconditional love and gratitude to these areas of my being, physical, mental, emotional, then I can also give permission for these blocked energies to be released back into the unified field and transformed back into light forms that can be used as effective creative energy for new purposes.

All is light, all is energy. The rose is a flower, but it is also an energy pattern which holds healing properties, if we allow ourselves to tap into the energetics of unconditional love.

Self-love is probably the most challenging type of love to master. As long as we think of ourselves, as we have been taught, to judge self very harshly and to judge others somewhat harshly, we will live in separation and find unconditional love out of reach. Our bodies, our emotional well-being suffer when we live outside of self-love. We struggle, we feel we are victims, and creative mastery of our lives and fully intentional living remain in the realm of hopes and dreams.

I choose to speak aloud to my skin, my scalp, my hair follicles, my spider veins, my toenails. With the image of the rose, rose quartz, and with naturally perfumed rose water, I apply not only the essence of the flower, but also the message of the flower into my cellular structure. Using affirmative words of unconditional love, I release all judgment of self. All blocked energies from ancestral family patterns, childhood conditioning, social instruction are consciously and intentionally released and transmuted back into love and pure light.

We have all been living our entire lifetimes in a very difficult, dense, fear-filled world. This collective reality is heavy, and it is hard for sensitive, empathic beings to function and flourish in these energy constructs of unbalanced masculinity, suppressed femininity, lack, and division.

Bringing in the energy of the rose, the divine feminine, and balancing of the masculine and feminine energies is very healing for the body, mind, and the emotional body.

I choose the heart-centered life. I choose to talk to my cells, to my plants, even cut flowers and herbs. They all have awareness and consciousness. They know when they are loved. Unconditional love is the power that heals and extends life. Cut plants thrive longer when they are spoken words of unconditional love.

The rose teaches a powerful and beautiful lesson that is simple and within reach for all of us. Unconditional love is not other-worldly. It is part of our human heart and an innate ability that each of us carry. A return to innocence allows us to speak to all of the plants, animals, to all of the trillions of cells in our own body. As a child does, we can play with these energies and know that invisible worlds live inside and around us. We have the power to create new worlds and to play, to enjoy our lives and our bodies, just as they are, with gratitude and love.

Daimons and demons: mediators between the earthly and the divine

Hello dear readers,

In the ancient world, people actively maintained relationships with ancestors, animal spirits, and cosmic entities. The human imagination played an active role in communicating with the natural world. At some point, humanity was diverted from our connection to nature. I believe that when Christianity was established as a religion, in a diversion from the original teachings of Jesus, the church as well as certain political and economic forces made a concerted effort to demonize nature, the feminine, and humanity’s connection to our personal higher self.

Shamanistic healer and psychotherapist Dr. Steven Farmer explains that the daimon, a sort of genius and animal spirit that was a revered protector in many societies around the world, was transformed into a feared “demon”. The natural world and all that was earthly or below ground was transformed into a shadow arena, relegated and downgraded to being the realm of only dark energies: demons and the devil.

Suddenly only the cosmic arena, the male pole of spirituality, was considered a source of good, light, and salvation. Thus, heaven became relegated to the sky. The spiritual became distant and separate from our bodies and the world we live in every day. And nature, women, the feminine, the animal and plant kingdom and those who were versed in the healing arts of plants, animals, and the imagination became evil and were feared.

Women, who had once been the highest priestesses and sources of great wisdom were suddenly considered inferior, with smaller brains and lesser abilities than men. Nature and the bowels of the earth became the domain of hell, torture, dreaded punishments. Sexuality and the body, which came from the Earth, were included in this litany of evil. Man and woman were officially divorced from their own bodies, their own intuition, direct connection to the personal higher self, and from a consciously loving and connected relationship with our planet and with nature.

In fact, the daimon (Greek: in-dwelling spirit), of which spiritual writer, psychotherapist, and historian James Hillman speaks in his wonderful book, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, is the voice of our higher self. As we live in our temporal earthly bodies on this planet, we are always, if we so choose, connected to our higher self through our intuition and our imagination. The pineal gland in the brain, also known as the third eye, is the gateway to our higher self. Images of the pineal are ever-present in ancient art, architecture, and sculpture. The winged snake symbolism refers to the connection of the earthly to the cosmic realms. Mystics believe we all have many spirit guides, ancestors, and other wise and benevolent sources of energy who accompany us along our path. Because we are born onto this planet with free will, they will not interfere with our lives unless we call upon them for help.

Like the daimon, Earth herself is alive and seeks to communicate with us. Shamanic wisdom teaches that there are three worlds: the lower world, which is located inside the earth – under the ground; the middle world, which is where we live; and the upper world, which would be the cosmos or heavenly domain. The shaman is trained to navigate all of these worlds. He or she has special guides or helpers which are often in the form of animals. These spirit or power animals would have been called daimons (Greece) or geniuses (Rome) in the ancient world.

By grounding ourselves in our bodies and connecting to our planet Earth, it becomes easy to recognize that all of creation is one family. When we become aware that the lower realms are just as sacred as the middle and higher realms, we gain increased wisdom and balance. Our current society is in chaos. For too long certain factions in our society have suppressed necessary knowledge about ourselves and our reality from us.

The human being is a very powerful creator. Once we reopen our hearts, imaginations, and balance our minds, bodies, souls, and spirits, we will intuitively  embrace and revere the feminine once again. We will understand that the sacred feminine is equally important to the sacred masculine, and humanity will become more cooperative and compassionate. It is my hope that by restoring credibility to intuition, emotion, and to the feminine, our health will improve, and our societies will become more peaceful.

The feminine point of view is all encompassing, nurturing, and intuitive. The female brain uses both lobes and makes connections between apparently unrelated ideas, thoughts, feelings. The creative conceptual mind is necessary for the advancement of technology, social structure, and for the health of our planet. Knowing that all people, plants, animals, and the planet herself are interdependent is so important. People who are religious often talk about going to heaven. Do they know that home is inside of each of us? We are here on Earth to learn to love self and one another. This is true purpose of life: love and consciousness. Our insight is a dear friend, not a demon of whom we should be afraid. By demonizing our inner wisdom and our higher self, we are cut off from our own power and our own ability to heal our own bodies, hearts, and spirits.

I think it’s time to rehabilitate the daimon and take back our power to see within and beyond the veil.

A new paradigm on Earth

 

We tend to think of reality as something that is stable and which changes independently of our own will. Reality is outside of self, and if you believe in a creative source, most likely you have been taught that this powerful being is also outside of your self. This vision of reality implies we are separate from one another. We are weak actors struggling to compete with others for resources and for our personal survival. Above all, we play a role of adaptation rather than one of creation.

In the new paradigm, into which humanity has been evolving over the last thirty years, every person is a creator, actively participating in the manifestation of reality. A conscious actor, the human being uses intent in thought and feeling to shift energies across the planet. Entanglement and other concepts of quantum physics are allowing us to realize that we are much more powerful than we once thought.

We now know that consciousness is not limited by the brain. The mind is not contained inside the skull, and our thoughts are not protected by bone, muscle, flesh or hair. When we allow a negative or judgmental thought about ourself or about another person enter our mind and we don’t consciously reject that thought, the negative thought or belief then is authorized by our intent to create reality. This negativity influences how we feel about ourself, how we feel and act towards others. But more than that, this negative thought emanates from our body into the unified field around us. It has infinite repercussions. And because we are all connected to one another within this unified field, the object of our thoughts also feels impacted by the thought.

When we become aware as conscious creators or artists of reality, we immediately realize how important it is to be responsible for our thoughts and our feelings, as well as our actions. We begin to think about the possible consequences for our thoughts or feelings and beliefs. This affects how we choose to think at every moment. Once we begin to choose positive and loving beliefs and thoughts for ourself and all of those in our sphere, our attitude and even our health begin to change. We become more loving and compassionate…of ourselves and of others.

We can no longer be tricked or manipulated by politics, advertising or news. Our minds and hearts become calm, and we are not sucked into drama.

We begin to encourage others and absorb the beautiful, loving energies of our planet and the universe into our bodies and our being. And we actively reject negative, hurtful, or non-beneficial energies from our minds, hearts, and bodies.

Most importantly, we realize that we are powerful. We are creating reality. One thought at a time.