In just a month from now on November 17th Gary and I will be married with our combined families as witnesses in a beautiful cabin the Smokey Mountains of Gatlinburg, TN. The cabin overlooks the mountains and all the splendor that especially comes in the autumn in the “Smokies” bring. I will feel the presence of your spirits with us on that day.It is a giant step for us both. I have been single for over 23 years. Learning to be in relationship has been quite a growth opportunity! Our children didn’t want us to elope (their words) and have opted to join with us as we unify as a couple and as a family. I appreciate your sending us your well wishes, prayers and love.
“Meeting the Great Mystery” my first meditation CD and downloadable MP3 is for sale. It was well received at the Reiki conference in Washington DC last month. I appreciate Tom Parish for helping make this dream come true. Use this link to hear a preview and/or purchase. Doing this has certainly stirred my creative juices.
http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=1249135
Project Health Update
We are still so excited about the continued results we are experiencing by taking the wonderful substance Frequensea…over the past months I said that Gary immediately stopped having the constant bowel complaint he has lived with for over 40 years, in fact he is stable since starting to take Frequensea, that his hair is turning darker; he is not as gray anymore, he also had dental surgery and had been on liquids for over two weeks and maintained his weight, even gaining a few pounds. He has certainly been given a new lease on life in just weeks. I continue to feel as if I am coming into balance from the inside out. I continue to take my increased dosage of one ounce of Frequensea twice a day.
I believe so strongly in Frequensea and how it can help people to “live healthy”. I know it can be something everyone can benefit from, because of this I will continue to keep you informed of our progress.
Please check it out for yourself. Go to: http://www.forevergreen.org/videos/AnotherDay_dsl.html there is an excellent video entitled “Another Day” when you watch the video you will see how the Marine Phytoplankton was grown and harvested in a one of a kind $30 million Sea Farm.
By going to my personal web page at Forever Green you can order the product by signing in. http://www.myforevergreen.org/566187/home.html we both highly recommend it. And it can be a great opportunity to earn extra money.
I thought this was a good reminder….
"Priority-wise, it simply makes sense to take care of yourself before you start searching for your higher meaning or trying to live your higher purpose. You aren’t really much good to anyone else if you’re totally unhealthy, a financial burden, or an emotional basket case. Begin the work on yourself first before you turn outward. It’s best for everyone involved, starting with you."Scott Raymond Adams, in The Dilbert Blog: The Meaning of Meaning
Here are some great stories to uplift you.
"A wise woman who was traveling in the mountains found a precious stone in a stream. The next day she met another traveler who was hungry, and the wise woman opened her bag to share some of her food. The hungry traveler saw the precious stone and asked the woman to give it to him. She did so with a smile and without hesitation. The traveler left, rejoicing in his good fortune. He knew the stone was worth enough to give him security for a lifetime. But a few days later he came back to return the stone to the wise woman.
'I've been thinking,' he said, 'I know how valuable the stone is, but I give it back to you in the hope that you can give me something even more precious. Please give me whatever you have within you that enabled you to give me the stone in a way where it obviously didn't cost you anything.'"
-- "The Wise Woman's Stone," Author Unknown
This extract from an on-board magazine and is attributed to Loren Eisley:
“The journey is difficult, long, and sometimes impossible. Even so, I know few people who have let these difficulties stop them. We enter the world without knowing for sure what happened in the past, what consequences this has brought us, and what the future may have in store for us.
“We shall try to travel as far as we can. But looking at the landscape around us, we realize that it won’t be possible to know and learn everything.
”So what remains is for us to remember all about our journey so that we can tell stories. To our children and grandchildren, we can tell the marvels that we have seen and the dangers that we have faced. They too will be born and will die, they too will tell their stories to their descendants, and still the caravan won’t have reached its destination.”
Bounded By Wellness
Send Healing To Yourself
Most people, when given an opportunity to aid someone in need, are eager to do whatever they can to be of service. Those of us who have chosen to make healing the world a vocation are grateful for any occasion to send light and love to people in our immediate spheres of influence and beyond. As we apply our passion and our principles to this altruistic endeavor, we often forget to send ourselves the same bountiful gifts of wellness, though we ourselves may be in dire need of it. We overlook ourselves, not because we forget, but because we fear that focusing on the self is an indicator of selfishness. It is moreover much more difficult to heal oneself than to heal others because the seeds of uncertainty are more easily banished when we act on another's behalf. When we send healing light to ourselves, it is important that our intentions and our self-trust be stronger than ever to counteract doubt.
As we bless ourselves in this way, we serve as both an active channel and a passive destination. This should not change the way we interact with the valuable energy we wish to receive, however. Though we may be tempted to consciously direct or influence the manner in which light impacts our lives because we know ourselves most intimately, we should not try to control its path. When we draw the white light of protection and purity to our bodies, taking it into ourselves with each inhalation, our belief in the fact that it will naturally move toward areas of dysfunction will ensure that it flows through every muscle and organ. And when we fill our spaces with this light, our environments are cleared of all the negative energy that can sap our strength and our spirit. Surrounded inside and out with healing light, we feel safe and protected, healthy, relaxed, and content just as those who regularly receive such loving gifts from us do. If you sincerely believe that there is a part of yourself that exists independently of upset and illness, the love and light you send yourself will help you connect with it. You will see the affirmative impact of this connection almost immediately when you include yourself in the recipients of your healing gifts, as life's frustrations become more tolerable and your bliss becomes ever more palpable.
Below The Surface
Finding Deep Strength
We have all faced moments in our lives when the pressure mounts beyond what we feel we can handle, and we find ourselves thinking that we do not have the strength to carry on. Sometimes we have just gotten through a major obstacle or illness only to find another one waiting for us the moment we finally catch our breath. Sometimes we endure one loss after another, wondering when we will get a break from life’s travails. It does not seem fair or right that life should demand more of us when we feel we have given all we can, but sometimes this is the way life works.
When we look back on our lives, we see that we have survived many trials and surmounted many obstacles, often to our own amazement. In each of those instances, we had to break through our ideas about how much we can handle and go deeper into our hidden reserves. The thought that we do not have the strength to handle what is before us can be likened to the hard surface of a frozen lake. It appears to be an impenetrable fact, but when we break through it, we find that a deep well of energy and inspiration was trapped beneath that icy barrier the whole time. Sometimes we break through by cutting a hole into our resistance with our willpower, and sometimes we melt the ice with compassion for our predicament and ourselves. Either way, each time we break through, we reach a new understanding of the strength we store within ourselves.
When we find ourselves up against that frozen barrier of thinking we cannot handle our situation, we may find that the kindest choice is to love ourselves and our resistance too. We can simply accept that we are overwhelmed, exhausted, and stretched, and we can offer ourselves loving kindness and compassion. If we can extend to ourselves the unconditional warmth of a mother’s love, before we know it, the ice will begin to break.
B e i n g L o v e
Baba Ram Dass
The most important aspect of love is not in giving or the receiving: it's in the being. When I need love from others, or need to give love to others, I'm caught in an unstable, unsustainable situation. Being love, rather than giving or taking love, is the only thing that provides stability and self-sustainability. Being love simply means seeing the Beloved all around me.
I'm not interested in being a 'lover.' I'm interested in only being love. In our culture we think of love as a relational thing: 'I love you' and 'You are my lover.' But while the ego is built around relationship, the soul is not. It wants only to be love. It's a true joy, for example, to turn someone whom you didn't initially even like into the Beloved. Mother Teresa has described this as 'seeing Christ in all his distressing disguises.' When I realized that Mother Teresa was actually involved in an intimate love affair with each and every one of the poor and the lepers she was picking up from the gutters in India, I thought to myself, 'That's the way to play the game of love.' And that is what I have been training myself for the last past quarter century: to see and be with the Beloved everywhere I am.
One of the interesting aspects of seeing the Beloved in this way is that it doesn't require the other person to see him or herself as the Beloved. All that's necessary is that I focus on my own consciousness properly. It's interesting to notice, though, how warmly people respond to being seen as the Beloved, even if they don't even know what's happening. Of course, it all assumes that your feelings are genuine and that you aren't compelled to act on them or to lay any sort of trip on the other person. The idea is simply to live and breathe among the Beloved.
The way I work at seeing others as the Beloved is to remind myself, 'This is another soul, just like me, who has taken a complicated incarnation, just as I have. I don't want to be in his or her incarnation any more than he or she wants to be in mine. But since I want to rest in my soul and not in my ego, I would like to give everybody the opportunity to do the same.' If I can see the soul that happens to have incarnated into a person that I don't particularly care for, then my consciousness becomes an environment in which he or she is free to come up for air if he or she wants to. That person can do so because I'm not trying to keep him or her locked into being the person that he or she has become. It's liberating to resist another person's opinions, yet still see him or her as another soul worthy of love. That's what Krishna meant when he said, 'I'm not going to fight, because they are all my cousins on the side.' We may disagree with one another in our current incarnation, but we are all connected souls.
A story I have told many times reinforces this point. Some years ago I put out a set of records called "Love, Serve, Remember." The records - which had music, readings from the Gospel of John, and all kinds of neat things - came in an album with a beautiful booklet with text and pictures. It was a wonderful package, and we sold it by mail order for about $4.50. I showed the album to my father. Dad was a wealthy Boston lawyer - a conservative Republican, a capitalist, and, at the time, the President of a railroad. He looked over the album and said, 'Great job here! But, gee, you know - four and a half dollars? You could probably sell this for ten, maybe fifteen dollars, don't you think?'
I said, 'Yeah, I know.''Would fewer people buy it if it were more expensive?' he asked.
'No,' I replied, 'probably the same number would buy it.
''Well I don't understand, then,' he pressed on. 'You could sell it for at least ten, and you're selling it for four - fifty? What's wrong, are you against capitalism or profit or something?'
I tried to figure out how to explain to him how our approaches differed. I said, 'Dad didn't you just try a law case for Uncle Henry?
''Yeah,' he replied, 'and it was a damned tough case. I spent a lot of time in the law library.'
I asked, 'Did you win the case?'
And he answered, 'Yeah, I won it.'
Now, my father was a very successful attorney, and he charged fees that were commensurate with his reputation. So I continued. 'Well, I bet you charged him an arm and a leg for that one.'
Dad was indignant at the suggestion. 'What, are you out of your mind? That's Uncle Henry - I couldn't charge him.''
Well, that's my problem,' I said. 'If you find anyone who isn't Uncle Henry, show me, and I'll rip them off.'
The point I was trying to make is that when you see the Beloved all around you, everyone is family and everywhere is love. When I allow myself to really see the beauty of another being, to see the inherent beauty of soul manifesting itself, I feel the quality of love in that being's presence. It doesn't matter what we're doing. We could be talking about our cats because we happen to be picking out cat food in the supermarket, or we simply could be passing each other on the sidewalk. When we are being love, we extend outward an environment that allows people to act in different, more loving and peaceful ways than they are used to behaving. Not only does it allow them to be more loving, it encourages them to be so while teaching them how to be so.
In 1969, I was giving a series of lectures in New York City. Every night, taking the bus up Third Avenue, I got the same extraordinary bus driver. Every night it was rush hour in one of the busiest cities in the world, but he had a warm word and a caring presence for each person who got on the bus. He drove us as if he were sculling a boat down a river, flowing through the traffic rather than resisting it. Everyone who got on the bus was less likely to kick the dog that evening or to be otherwise hostile and unloving; because of the loving space that driver had created. Yet all he was doing was driving the bus. He wasn't a therapist or a great spiritual teacher. He was simply being love.
Remember, we are all affecting the world in every moment, whether we mean to or not. Our actions and states of mind matter, because we are so deeply interconnected with one another. Working on our own consciousness is the most important thing that we are doing at any moment, and being love is a Supremely co-creative act.
Finally, I am giving you a link to watch a precious evoking video. http://www.gratefulness.org/brotherdavid/a-good-day.htm I encourage you to take the time to watch it for yourself, the potential from watching it is that everyone you meet will be blessed. Have a great day, until we meet again.
Love and Blessings,
Mari
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