"Authentic spirituality awakens the soul, reconnects us with the sacred, and fills us with the passion of life. Spiritual development is not about religious rituals and practices; it is about waking up to the wonder of life." -- David N. Elkins
"Allowing the truth of who you are--your spiritual self--to rule your life means you stop the struggle and learn to move with the flow of your life." -- Oprah Winfrey
Let Yourself Be CarriedThe Flow of the Universe The flow of the universe moves through everything. It is in the rocks that form, get pounded into dust, and are blown away. It is in the blossoming of a flower born from a seed planted in the spring. The growth cycle that every human being goes through is part of this natural flow, which is also the current that takes us down life’s paths. When we move with it rather than resisting it, we are riding on the universal wave that allows us to flow with life.
Many people live struggling against this current. They try to use force or resistance to will their lives into happening in the way they think it should. Others move with it like a sailor using the wind, trusting that the universe is taking them exactly where they need to be at all times. This flow is accessible to everyone because it travels through and around us. We are always riding it—it is just a matter of whether we are willing to go with it or we resist it. Choosing to go with the flow is often a matter of relinquishing the notion that we need to be in control at all times.
The flow is always transporting you where you need to go. It is merely a question of deciding whether you plan on accepting the ride or having it take you there with your feet dragging. Learning to step into it can help you feel a connection to a force that is greater than you and is always there to support you. The decision to go with the flow takes courage because you are surrendering the belief that you need to do everything by yourself. Riding the flow of the universe can be effortless, exhilarating, and unlike anything you ever expected. When you are receptive to being in it, you open yourself to possibilities that exist beyond the grasp of your control.
As a child, you were naturally swept by the flow. Tears of sadness falling down your face could just as quickly turn to tears of laughter. The mere tiniest wave carrying you forward off the shores of the ocean could transport you into peals of delight.
Our souls feel good when we go with the flow of the universe. All we have to do is make the choice to ride its currents.
Going Back By Going WithinHealing Childhood Wounds Events from childhood, our first experiences, have the power to shape our lives. Some do so immediately, offering us challenges to overcome and encouragement to make use of our talents and interests. In the process character is built, and we make the first steps upon our personal paths. Other events seem to lay dormant until adulthood, when our closest relationships help to bring out the deepest aspects of ourselves. This is when unexamined lessons can be put to use and untended childhood wounds make themselves known in a call for healing.
We may discover issues of trust coming up, or perhaps we find ourselves mirroring actions from our past instinctively. No matter the case, we have the power within us to heal ourselves at the deepest level. With the wisdom of an adult, we can be the loving parent or guardian we needed as a child. Knowing that we are each whole spiritual beings having a human experience, we can nurture ourselves from that wholeness, and then reach out to others as well. We can recreate scenarios in our mind’s eye, trying different outcomes and following them to their logical conclusions. In doing so, we may be able to imagine possible reasons a situation occurred as it did, and even accept that it could not have happened any other way. With the wisdom born from age and experience, we might be able to see events from a different perspective, bringing new understanding and freeing ourselves from any hold the past may have on us.
Life offers opportunities to clear these weeds in the gardens of our souls. However, when we want to focus on easier and more pleasant tasks, we are likely to pass up the chances, leaving the wounds to continue to drain our energy and resources for living life fully today. We might find we need support to face the events of the past, so turning to a trained professional who can offer tools for healing can be a valid choice. As long as we remember that the child we were lives on within us, we are always free to go back and right old wrongs, correct mistaken perceptions, heal wounds, forgive, and begin anew.
Asking And ReceivingPrayer And Meditation Prayer and meditation are similar practices in that they both offer us a connection to the divine, but they also differ from one another in significant ways. Put simply, prayer is when we ask the universe for something, and meditation is when we listen. When we pray, we use language to express our innermost thoughts and feelings to a higher power. Sometimes, we plumb the depths within ourselves and allow whatever comes to the surface to flow out in our prayer. At other times, we pray words that were written by someone else but that express what we want to say. Prayer is reaching out to the universe with questions, pleas for help, gratitude, and praise.
Meditation, on the other hand, has a silent quality that honors the art of receptivity. When we meditate, we cease movement and allow the activity of our minds and hearts to go on without us in a sense. Eventually, we fall into a deep silence, a place that underlies all the noise and fray of daily human existence. In this place, it becomes possible for us to hear the universe as it speaks for itself, responds to our questions, or sits with us in its silent way.
Both prayer and meditation are indispensable tools for navigating our relationship with the universe and with ourselves. They are also natural complements to one another, and one makes way for the other just as the crest of a wave gives way to its hollow. If we tend to do only one or the other, prayer or meditation, we may find that we are out of balance, and we might benefit from exploring the missing form of communication. There are times when we need to reach out and express ourselves, fully exorcising our insides, and times when we are empty, ready to rest in quiet receiving. When we allow ourselves to do both, we begin to have a true conversation with the universe.
Analyzing The PathRecognizing Happiness Those of us on the path of personal and spiritual growth have a tendency to analyze our unhappiness in order to find the causes and make improvements. But it is just as important, if not more so, to analyze our happiness. Since we have the ability to rise above and observe our emotions, we can recognize when we are feeling joyful and content. Then we can harness the power of the moment by savoring our feelings and taking time to be grateful for them.
Recognition is the first step in creating change, therefore recognizing what it feels like to be happy is the first step toward sustaining happiness in our lives. We can examine how joy feels in our bodies and what thoughts run through our minds in times of bliss. Without diminishing its power, we can retrace our steps to discover what may have put us in this frame of mind, and then we can take note of the choices we’ve made while there. We might realize that we are generally more giving and forgiving when there’s a smile on our face, or that we are more likely to laugh off small annoyances and the actions of others when they don’t resonate with our light mood.
Once we know what it feels like and can identify some of the triggers and are aware of our actions, we can recreate that happiness when we are feeling low. Knowing that like attracts like, we can pull ourselves out of a blue mood by focusing on joy. We might find that forcing ourselves to be giving and forgiving, even when it doesn’t seem to come naturally, helps us to reconnect with the joy that usually precedes it. If we can identify a song, a picture, or a pet as a happiness trigger, we can use them as tools to recapture joy if we are having trouble finding it. By focusing our energy on analyzing happiness and all that it encompasses, we feed, nurture, and attract more of it into our lives, eventually making a habit of happiness
Here is a great article written by a friend of mine “Anna of Cyprus”. In fact her entire newsletter is wonderful here is a link to it because what she is writing is amazing.http://bl129w.blu129.mail.live.com/mail/mail.aspx?wa=wsignin1.0&n=2096135276
FORGIVENESS Well it's time overdue to write about Forgiveness, because when we are unable to forgive, it is we ourselves that we imprison with and by our memories, and we ourselves that become or stay stuck in the past. And as we stay stuck, our people around us reflect this too; because we are all inter-connected.
Stuck energy is something that does not grow, it literally looks like a hairball or glue ball or something similar in the subtle, or energetic planes. When we have this in our system, the life force cannot flow through us and in many ways we shrivel and often die, emotionally and mentally if not also physically.
It's neither easy to forgive nor it is an easy subject to write about. All of Life, as with all of our experiences, is highly subjective and we deem someone to be 'right' - or not - in terms of how our experiences, conditioning and views have shaped our own lives.
So we nod our heads and agree with, or not, with someone whose actions can be defined by ourselves as 'right' or 'wrong', 'good' or 'bad'.
When someone does or says something that does not agree with this, or we allow invading our personal space in any way, we deem them to be 'wrong', or 'bad', and this can be basis of grievance that can last literally for years, if not for lifetimes.
I see this so often and it can be so, so sad all round.
For the person who nurtures any grievance, this means that they are holding onto an energy that is eating them up, literally. How? Because all grievances are held in the mind - and by extension also our physical bodies - and are locked therein by the energy of Anger and its projection, Judgment. Sometimes also the energy of guilt is present, although not in every case. But anger and by effect, judgment, is always, always present.
Anger, originally designed by nature to be a motivating force for change, is something that mankind has for thousands of years used as a weapon to destroy (usually each other, but mostly ourselves).
In the physical body in simplistic terms, anger is often the reason why a single cell might change form to enable a virus to be born or held in our bodies. It can also impact the immune system so that such a virus might grow and spread. It can be a basis of fever and any kind of inflammation, and can also be a cause of cancer. Having said this though of course there is never any one single reason why anything 'could' or 'should' happen to anyone - we are all the sum total of our experiences, genetic, karmic and spiritual histories and everyone is different (even though we are all One). In any case, the body is a hologram and this especially must also be taken into account.
Anger is often masked by Depression, mostly because we don't usually know how to manage ourselves when we are angry, especially when we've been taught that it's wrong to be thus. The energy used in screwing down anger within the physical body is immense and can suppress much other energy - causing 'depression'. When we have a lot of depressed (and secretly angry) individuals (and all medicated against it), we can have whole societies that are depressed (and heaving with rage, within); this can explain why different velocity of different dis-eases present as themes in different societies.
When we are unable to forgive, we find quite often we replay our issues in our minds, again and again, speaking often of them and communicating them subliminally too in between our words and thoughts, as they are embedded in the light cells and subtle energetic grids with which we do our real communication. It's as if there is a video constantly playing in our minds about what so-and-so 'did to us', which is able to trigger the same anger and associated emotions in us whenever we remind ourselves about such-and-such.
Few people, though, recognize that there are often many different sides to a joint experience, as many perspectives as there are people (and observers!) We can usually only see one side of the story, that is, our own, and we are usually unaware of what part of our energies have fed into any given situation.
At personality level we can of course speak of many different reasons why things happen in the way they do and many of us spend a lot of time doing this, usually in a coffee shop or tea-house. At a deeper, soul level though, there is no such thing as a co-incidence and that everything always happens for a purpose.
Going directly to the deeper level then, remember the concept that All is One, and that there is no external reality. Everything therefore is a projection of our inner selves and if there is any sort of disharmony inside us, these are projected for us to see, experience and therefore know ourselves differently, and to harmonize within ourselves, consciously, if we so choose. This is both an understanding and acceptance of the God/dess within us all, part of the natural order of Life, and is also the Journey of the Soul.
If we are willing to see Life from this perspective, then we might also be able to open ourselves up to many other different perspectives too, including the one of the perpetrator of whatever is was 'against us'.
When we are willing to do this, we might come to a different sort of understanding of events as they might have been. From understanding often comes compassion, which in turn leads to acceptance of Life as it really is, for many, not just for us. With this then, we might be able to bring ourselves to forgiveness, so that we can clear the energies and can all move on.
To forgive after all means "to give so that we can move forward", there is no co-incidence in the word as it is written in English. In order to have clearance at all levels, someone has to give something to enable stuck energy to flow. If other people are not as aware as we are - or even if they have done something 'so terrible against us' - if we do not have compassion for either their state of being or their pain, it is we ourselves who remain stuck and forever in that energy, usual in pain. We've seen it so often in people around us, in almost every case it is we ourselves who are in this place too.
How do we apply this spiritual principle on a human level? It's true that I've sat often with many of you as you've shared your stories of joint experiences and my eyeballs have fallen out of my head with disbelief at man's humanity to fellow man. I've been in that place myself too where I have allowed people for whatever reason to choose to use me for target practice. For me in the past, sometimes it's been a call to practice for discernment, which means I deliberately determine for myself what I will allow to happen in my Life (or not); sometimes is about conscious and respectful application of personal boundaries and at other times it has been about trust issues (leading back to discernment).
It has never been just about the other person, it has always at some level been about me too. I have usually been out of integrity with myself in some way for these situations to have occurred. I recognize and own this.
With the above spiritual principles in mind, when there has been anger, I have recognized too that it has been always been an anger against myself for having allowed such-and-such situation to have occurred in the first place.
For forgiveness to start, we have to first of all transmute the anger. To do this we have to feel it by being in it, and then to express it appropriately. The latter word 'appropriately' is a huge response-ability for us all because few people know how to do it this way. What I usually do is to tell someone how I felt when a certain situation occurred. I am very careful not to blame, because blame anchors us in the past and creates victims where there can be none.
What we are doing here is clearing energy - usually old - so that we can be fully present in the present moment rather than rooted in the past.
Sometimes I can do it direct with the other party, sometimes I feel I need a third party to help me hold space whilst I do this. These friends, sometimes healers, sometimes not, only need to hold the space with me whilst I go through the emotion. I do not need them add to the flame with their own judgments - this is not usually helpful to the understanding and ownership of different perspectives. Usually all that is needed is the phrase "I can understand how/why you feel this way." That's all. We just need to be heard. It normally takes me about 7-10 minutes to transmute particularly the energy of anger. Then I can let it go and get on with Life.
If the other person has moved on, or passed on, we can still do the same thing by writing a letter, or asking a friend to step into that person's energy in order to assist. For the latter, though, I would suggest this be done by a healer who is very conscious of which energy is coming up for release and when. It's extremely powerful work.
If an apology is forthcoming, that greatly facilitates the process, but often it is not, so we have to find creative ways around this in order to free ourselves from bondage to anger and judgment (our own, that is).
It's all about resolution at the end of the day. Without this, a coming to terms with Life and an acceptance of All That Is, Life - our lives that is - will forever be full of conflict. It will continuously reflect an inner judgment that we are not good enough, that people might not like us, etc….too much, too little, not enough, too young, too old, too new, too big, too small, too dirty, too clean. The internal chatter goes on, and we take it all so personally. Otherwise, 'it' wouldn't be an issue.
When we are able to come to an acceptance of All That Is, of all that is Life, we can come to an acceptance of ourselves too, and vice versa (remember, Life is a hologram and always interconnected). Forgiveness is really all about acceptance, of our ability (and fundamental desire) to let go, to live in the present moment by resolving our past and allowing our future to take care of it. That Unconditional Love that we all essentially are is then able to express itself freely, and the energies will start to flow again. When we are quiet, peaceful and in acceptance within ourselves, and the energies are starting to flow, which means our lives are flowing nicely, how would our external world be like for us to live in then?
I hope the above has answered some of your questions about forgiveness on an individual level. At community and national level, it is a little bit more complex - but not by much. If you have any more please do just ask and I'll do my best to help you find answers.
Anna of Cyprus (anna@onetouch-centre.com)
Check out this link:http://www.hasanyonetoldyou.com/
Enjoy watching this and know that we are one and you are LOVED by me!
Last but not least here is something that I am putting up in my office
'Life isn't about how to survive the storm,
but how to dance in the rain.'Blessings and Love,
Mari
This is the 13th year of the 21day virtual Usui Retreat. 
