Dec. newsletter: From Resistance to Resilience

Years ago a popular television commercial featured a maternal manicurist who would soften her customers' hands in Palmolive dishwashing liquid. The theme was both arresting and funny. The patron, upon learning the contents of the cuticle-softening dish, would jerk her hand away and gasp: "Dishwashing liquid?" Madge would calmly pat her hand back down, reassuring, "It's Palmolive!"

I was ruminating on how such a commercial might play in the metaphysical realm: "Resistance? You're soaking in it!" And it doesn't soften the journey, but cooks us to a crisp - even when we think we're coming from an enlightened perspective. READ THE REST!

How to Become a Magnificent Manifester

"Start a huge foolish project, like Noah."

~ Rumi
What do a purple sweatshirt hanging from a tree branch, a loaf of freshly baked bread, a dead car engine on a stormy night, and a magical forest cabin have in common? They're just a few of the inspiring stories I frequently share about the role of synchronicity in our lives, and how learning to recognize it, embrace it, and nurture it can be the key to changing the way we live.

Carl Jung described synchronicity as "meaningful coincidence." One teammate defines it as, "Your file is open and on God's desk." It's about transforming the "efforting" in our lives into ease. Synchronicity happens when we're living in flow rather than in force. And its literal manifestation can be quite humorous. Once, when I was deeply into my own spiritual awakening, I had been imploring the universe, "I want to serve, show me how to serve!" Soon afterward, I received a summons for jury duty.

As we learn how to listen to the "still, small voice" inside us, wondrous events begin to transpire in our lives. One of my best manifestation stories involves finding a secluded mountain cabin to rent when I lived in New Mexico, by following a tapestry of meaningful messages leading me, literally, to the door. The string of synchronicities was so strong that, had I written the story as fiction, I imagine an editor would have rejected it as "too coincidental for readers to believe." But real life is always more amazing — and amusing — than anything we can invent. READ THE REST!

Gratitude Guide: Six Simple Ways to Give Thanks

Allow yourself to be renewed by gratitude, both that you give and that you receive. Here's a handy Gratitude Guide for these tumultuous holiday moments. May it serve you well.

Is Your Life a Banquet?

Thanksgiving is about food the way Christmas is about presents. In modern life, neither expresses the true spirit of the holiday — although the potential is there. Because at core level, the real issue is always love.

Is there enough love to go around? The answer is yes, and — we must awaken to this truth on our own. We become "the Light of the world" first within our own beings; then we're able to shine this radiance outward. It's like any other learning process: we can only serve others from a well that runs full and deep. READ THE REST!

Going Wireless: Taking the Risk You Fear Most

"Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing."

~ Helen Keller

Though we live in an increasingly wireless world, most of us are hardwired to feel an impending sense of doom when a "deadline" looms: when we experience ourselves as being down to the wire.

The irony is that there is no wire. In the shapeshifting movie, The Matrix, one of the magical children mentally manipulates a spoon in midair. When the film's protagonist, Neo, questions what he's seeing, the child responds, "There is no spoon."

Later in the film, when Neo and Trinity need to ascend an elevator shaft minus the actual elevator, Neo grasps the cable, intones, "There is no spoon!" and up they fly. This image burns in my memory as a perennial reminder: you can never be down to the wire, because the wire doesn't exist. READ THE REST!

Enough

It's almost that time again in the U.S.: Thanksgiving. We celebrate the Pilgrims' gratitude for the kindness of their Native American neighbors, who taught them how to plant and harvest enough food to survive in a new world. It's an appropriate moment to reflect on what "enough" truly means. READ THE REST!

A 100-Word Formula for a Soul-Inspired Life

In the current issue of my e-newsletter, What Shines, I write about how surrendering to Love, with a capital L, leads to the experience of oneness we simultaneously seek and fear. I quote from Neale Donald Walsch's final book in his Conversations With God series, Home With God.

Synchronistically ~ because synchronicity is one huge sign we're living in the flow and in the know (and in the now!) ~ a few days later I discovered EverydayOasis.com, and another pivotal passage from Home With God that I'd forgotten ~ a 100-word prescription for living a soul-filled life. READ THE REST!