I wonder if Time is still really money? I think it is, but to say “Time is money” sounds so absolute! I wonder how many times Time really passes this test? I also think Time is other things now, too–like creativity, for example. Being creative definitely consumes Time and when it is guided by inspiration, it’s that timeless kind of Time. Or what about soulful conversations? When we get lost in these kind of heartfelt, super-charged-relationship-changing kind of talks, doesn’t Time seem to be unimportant? When we are engrossed in our creativity or in the midst of a soulful talk, or knelt down in prayer, or deep in meditation–measures like the passage of Time or whether the Time is productive are insignificant details. What is really important is that our soul opens and is nourished.

So then what is money? Time (in theory) could be money. Creativity could be if the result is monetized. But soulful conversations, prayer and meditation miserably fail this test. We don’t engage in these things with the result of money in mind.

So maybe money is completely beside the point. Time is Creativity=TRUE. Time is Soulful Conversations=TRUE. Time is Prayer=TRUE. Time is Meditation=TRUE. Time is Money=SOMETIMES.

I started wondering how many of the things I do, I do because I should being doing them vs how many things I do out of a authentic desire to do them?

I think somewhere along the way, I might have got brainwashed into this “should” business. I really hate that feeling when I am doing one thing, but unable to be fully being present while doing it, because one of the committees in my head thinks I should be doing something else.

I am finding that sometimes that feeling is rooted in the character defect of people pleasing, but other times it’s because I’ve procrastinated on something to the point where now I HAVE to do it or I’ve said “Yes” when I really meant “No” and overcommitted myself. My most humorous discovery is that sometimes I make my own misery because I have an idea about something before it’s really time to do it. Everything has its own timing. And I can’t count the number of times I have had a thing to do on my list for weeks, or sometimes months, allowing it eat at my conscience and then all of the sudden, a very naturally arising desire to do this very thing bubbles up and Voila!, I get it done!

I see clearly now all this is the Superwoman Syndrome cleverly disguising herself, thinking I won’t recognize her! Once again I get the reminder from the Universe of whose in charge and it’s not me! Regardless of what’s on my To Do list, when I am willing to be faith-filled in my actions at all times, everything get done precisely when it is supposed to get done and I have alot more peace!

I wonder why we push our loved ones to pursue the things at which they seem naturally gifted?  Is what appears like encouragement really our own selfish desire to avoid the pain it causes US to see a loved one ‘piss away their talents’?

This seems like such a ‘normal’ and healthy thing to do for a loved one and we do it under the guise of ‘encouragement’.  But where do we cross that invisible line from being encouraging to creating a ‘should’ for them–unintentionally making the things at which they are naturally gifted an obligation to meet our expectations, rather than a pursuit of joy?

Should we not all have the opportunity to genuinely pursue our interests for the sake of their intrinsic pleasure and be free from our loved one’s expectations?

Someone told me once “Say it once and that’s fine, but if you find yourself saying it repeatedly, that’s controlling.”  Do we try to control or loved ones and make it look like ‘encouragement’?

New Definition of Encouragement for Loved Ones:  Create space and opportunity for them to pursue their interests and let them do with it as they see fit, even if that appears like nothing.

I often wonder why I will sometimes choose to not act upon a creative urge.  I will feel the inner lunges of the completeness that could be mine–the kind of peaceful feeling that you’ve said what you needed to say, you’ve done your work, you’ve done what you needed to do–In that way that only the creator can measure, it is ‘done’.  Yet, in spite of the lusciousness I know this feeling brings, I will still sometimes pass the creative urge on to find another creator and I wonder why?

I once read a story about a girl in college that was stumped on a writing assignment.  Her assignment was to write a 500-word essay on a historic Theatre on Main Street in the town where she lived.  After days of groveling, she could think of nothing that would be worthy of writing.  She was blocked.  Uninspired.  She went back to the professor for guidance and he suggested she start with the brick in the top left corner, describe that brick and see what happened.  The girl left in a quandary certain that she did not want to spend her essay writing about brick.  But at a loss for anything else to do, she followed the directive of her professor.  She wrote about the first brick and then for lack of anything else to write about, she wrote about the second brick and just as she was finishing her thoughts describing the second brick, however mundane they were, she felt something inside her open up and she was able to write, actually not stop writing.  She wrote a 5000-word essay on the intricate beauty of that old historic Theatre!

So as this is the nature of creativity.  Being blocked artistically, I think is really a clever disguise for choosing to be a victim of our own procrastination.  I have found this experience to be mine over and over.  So many times over, that it was too obvious for me to see. It was too obvious to see that the reason I will sometimes choose to block creativity in the interest of other ‘life’ things, is because subconsciously I know that once you respond to the drip, it quickly becomes a flood.  And thank God it does!  Otherwise, some of the greatest works in history would have never seen life.  The flood is hard to shut off.  And once I get into the flow of it, I don’t really want to shut it off.  It feels good to bathe in urges of creativity.

So I’ve learned that creative impulses are cunning.  They’re fantastically therapeutic and render great works and they are tricksters at the same time.  What it really comes down to at the moment of choice is this:  Am I willing to bathe in the floodwaters of creativity or am I just wanting to shut up this thing in my head?  If the latter, the solution is simple–just deny it life and it will go find another creator who is willing to bring it forth into being.  And I can rest assured that if I am the only artist suitable for the job, it will not cease.  Creativity that is frolicking in the wind riding its currents is content with any creator that catches her drift, but creativity that has already chosen her master is relentless!

Do you ever feel like you’ve been sprinkled by the rule fairies?  It’s that feeling of being boxed in by all the things I should be doing and all the expectations I should be meeting. Or when I’m working on one thing, but don’t have any peace because I’m thinking about all the other things I should be doing instead.

For me, this feeling occurs as a result of primarily two situations, both of which I create:  1) when I’ve said “Yes” and I really wanted to say “No” and 2) when I’ve procrastinated on something to the point of it becoming urgent either because I didn’t really want to do it in the first place (see Situation #1) or didn’t prioritize the things to which I did say “Yes”.

So I end up feeling overcommitted and resentful because I feel like I’m doing what’s important to everyone else and nothing that’s important to me.  It’s like indentured servitude for which I’ve volunteered!  I get caught in this endless loop of missing the opportunity to do better because I’m trying so hard not to do worse.  Yuk!

But I know a solution!  When I am working a plan based on the inner guidance I have available to me, actively setting priorities, conscientiously evaluating opportunities to determine if they are right for me at the moment they are presented, and have some semblance of when enough is enough, I feel healthy and balanced and grateful and vibrant and engaged in life.  Yeah!

Then, amazingly enough, I have time for things that aren’t ever in the plan.  Like when that friend calls and wants to do a last-minute lunch because she’s in town, or my grandmother calls because she is lonely and just needs to talk about nothing, or when I unexpectedly run into someone I know and feel free to chat a while, or the trip to the store took way longer than I thought.  When I’m already in the loop of “Yeah”, these kind of “life things” don’t have the power to throw me into the loop of “Yuk”.  Yeah!

The danger of not being or having gone very far down the scale is that it makes it easy to rationalize a continuance of what we were already doing, thereby perpetuating a longer stay in the neighborhoods of frustration, exhaustion, despair, difficulty, bewilderment and terror.  At best, we get a situational band-aid.

The danger of being or having gone far down the scale is the risk of getting stuck in a morass of self-pity so great that seeing any hope of a better life becomes impossible.

The grace in either is that our only hope for recovery from these experiences is assistance from God.

Do you ever have this experience when your “ego-self” looks at your “God-self” and wonders why you are not acting like a maniac over a situation that would normally throw you into fits?

I am completely intrigued with this idea of remembering what we already know.  I believe we have all the answers to our unique life lessons already lurking within the residence of our Spirit and the process of maturation is really a process of discovery–like a treasure hunt where we are finding our personal truths along the way.  At first many of these truths relate to the laws of the physical world–how to get fed, how things work, how to ride a bike, etc.  As the process of life continues, though, much of our discovery becomes a spiritual quest, whether we realize it or not.  Things like choice of career, how to raise a family and seeking a deepening in understanding the role of God in our lives start to become the object of our thoughts.

The laws of the physical world remain and still hold evident.  They do not suddenly become untrue just because we enter into a strata of life that is spiritual in nature.  We still have to abide by physical world laws. And we now get to transmute these laws into a spiritual application while residing in a physical world. We learn to apply the laws of our physical world into an understanding of how to interact with our world from a spiritual disposition.

So how does this relate to anything having to do with practical everyday living of life on life’s terms?

As I have continued to have personal clarity on this philosophy, or theory if you prefer, I have concluded that my level of peace is directly related to my level of acceptance of this natural transcendence of life–from physical into spiritual.  I am finding that perpetual quietness of heart comes with a willingness to let this process take its natural course.  So many of those things we learned to hold evident in the physical world are really metaphors for spiritual applications and yet we have to first know the lessons in the context of the physical world before we can apply them in any spiritual context.

As we mature in years, our serenity and that feeling of comfortableness in our own skin becomes directly linked to our willingness to surrender the living of a life only by that which we can see and predict; and instead live a life by faith.  Living by faith is really a way of letting ourselves be guided by what we already “know”.  It adds a new dimension to our lives.

If we do not remember the past, are we condemned to repeat it? I think what is emerging true for me is “No, we are not condemned to repetition by forgetting; we are doomed to repetition by choosing to not accept the natural transcendence into a spiritual strata of life.”  When I am not practicing this acceptance, what I am really doing is putting the brakes on any spiritual growth and condemning myself to be stuck in the physical world; and then I am doomed to perpetuating the same cycles out of which I despair.  Let me explain:

Living in only the physical world as we mature works, and it is by design.  We have spiritual grace without any effort on our part. Our minds and bodies are consumed with making sense of our surroundings and how to interact with them.  And then we reach a certain point where there is this deep longing for something more.  Beyond that point, the physical world does not sustain us in the same way it did before.  There must be more.  Our sustenance must begin to come from a higher place.  And once this process begins, any time I put the brakes on it out of fear I am essentially limiting myself to what is familiar (i.e., the physical world) and thereby choking off a new source of sustenance.

This new source of sustenance (i.e., the spiritual strata) is so rich in nutrients because its entire nature is predicated on a type of “coming home”–an honoring of what we already know, a coming into our true selves, an acknowledgment and acceptance of what we have always known and have temporarily forgotten–a remembering of what we already know.

Recently, I crossed paths with a friend and we were talking about my recent blog post, The Reality of Perception.  As I was listening to her verbal commentary on the idea of creating your reality by taking responsibility for your perception, I heard myself say aloud “I know, it’s like we forget what we’ve already learned, like we fall asleep or something.”  And in that moment, a light bulb flickered on for me.  Our physical sleep/wake cycles are a metaphor for our spiritual sleep/wake cycles.  My frustrations with supposedly making no progress in certain areas of my life and the feeling of constant do-over’s was not some spiritual learning disability on my part, but rather it was the nature of the cycle of spiritual learning.

In the same way our physical bodies must have sleep so that we can experience “wake”, and we must have “wake” so sleep has purpose; new realizations about our personal life lessons only have meaning in the context of having had a period of “sleep”.  I have to keep “coming back” [to life] to remember what I already know!  Everything is always revealed in its divine timing. Sometimes I have heard the same thing from many different messengers before I finally “got it”.  It has nothing to do with the messenger whose message finally “sticks”.  They are just an instrument for the divine voice-mails I needed for that moment in time.  At that precise moment, I was capable of hearing and receiving my personal, divine messages, because everything that led up to that moment prepared me of being capable of recognizing something that rings as a personal truth for me.  Alas, a moment of clarity–a new realization, the finding of the puzzle piece for which I’ve been tirelessly searching!  And yet, as holds true to spiritual law, I will temporarily forget that moment of clarity until either that lessons cycles back around or I find myself in someone’s path that is in need of that morsel of clarity.  In sharing it with them, I am reinforcing my own spiritual learning.

Wow!  What grace!  And how about that for an answer to my frustration?!  Accept and embrace the nature of the process instead of participating in my own frustration by attempting to bend the natural course of a spiritual process to what I think I need.  The way I try to bend it is not really how I want it anyway.  I really like it better the way it is.  There is more grace in that.  It is the way it’s supposed to be.  We are all exactly where we are supposed to be, doing exactly what we are supposed to be doing, even if we don’t like it or understand why.  We all get to experience life through its lessons. Thank God for do-over’s!  Maybe now I can stop participating in retarding my own growth!

Have you ever heard someone say “People’s perception is their reality.”?  I have heard this practically all of my life, but in the last few weeks I have been thinking about it on a deeper level as I have wiggled my way thru a cocoon of change.  I am discovering that I choose my reality–my experience–by being vigilant over my perceptions.

For many years, I have wanted to see different results in several areas of my life.  Wanting or wishing for different results is not the same thing as actually being willing to do the work necessary to get the result.  Change is always an inside job and much of that change has to do with the neighborhood of our inner thoughts and perceptions.

If, for example, I am thinking about how hard a project is going to be, I am really sabotaging myself and setting myself up to see only the difficulties and frustrations.  If, however, I am thinking about how exciting a project is going to be and focused on all the gifts in store for me, then I am setting myself up to see only those things, which in turn minimizes the difficulties and frustrations, or at least my perception of them.  It’s not that the the gifts don’t exist in one scenario or that the difficulties don’t exist in the other; they both exist in the essence of the same project.  The only thing that changes are those things on which I choose to focus and it is precisely those things that determine what my judgement of the outcome will be–good or bad, enjoyable or miserable, fruitful or disasterous.  As an aside, praying for happy memories at family functions was some of the best advice I think I’ve ever received.  It truly makes all the difference in the world!

So I can choose to believe in the result I desire, direct all of my thinking toward that result and it is likely that eventually I will get that result.  Or I can let the fear of the undesired result dominate my thinking and eventually I will get that result.  I am discovering, though, that some desired results take longer than others, even when pumped with consistent focus.  It is not always a matter of thinking the thought and Presto!, that thought becomes a reality.  Sometimes that is the case, but not always. Sometimes, there are other iceberg beliefs that, in the process of focusing on my desired reality, will get untangled so that the focus of my thoughts can become a reality.  There is some stamina required here.  I have learned to keep focusing on the result anyway and surrender the ultimate timing of its arrival.  And I have also learned that, because it is not predictably always the case, I enjoy the element of surprise sometimes when the Universe does grant me the desires of my focus quickly.

I have always known that I have choices; we all do.  We all have the power to choose our realities.  But where I have fallen short is in being able to choose the desired results in the face of fear so potent that I can feel the feelings in my body as if the circumstances are presently happening.  At times like this, the possibility of being able to believe in something different, especially a more desirous result, seems virtually impossible, if not bleak.  However impossible it may seem though, it is critical to my getting out of the fear, even if it is a “start and start over” process.  To me, this is where faith enters the picture–believe even when it seems bleak.

I’ve discovered that I must be conscientious and vigilant over my thoughts at ALL times.  Doing so affords me insurance–a sort of mental insurance that when the fear of life’s circumstances shoves me on its merry-go-round, I can say “No, thank you”, get off and choose a different reality.  Those trips on the merry-go-round of ugly and scary thoughts that feel so good or even prudent at the moment are, in fact, an erosion to my mental insurance.  Without this insurance, I have very little reserves of stamina.

The reality of perception is that I choose the perceptions that become a reality in my life and the reality of my life is on the inside of me, not in the circumstances outside of me.