Category Archives: Perceptual filters

True North Off

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A friend of mine has been getting intuitive prompts to move. It started in late 2019 and by early 2020, she and her husband had stored most of their belongings and staged their home for market. Then the pandemic hit. They put the brakes on moving or even thinking about it. Understandable, though ironic, since 2020 was a great year to sell a house.

Recently, she’s been getting this prompt again. I don’t know what she’ll do with it this time, but I hope she takes action. Intuition asks for action.

Before she told me about the revived idea of a move, she lamented that her life felt really flat. Intuition requires action. Moving can feel scary. If it were me – at another time in my life, I do not have the option for it now – I would have felt the fear mostly by way of wary thoughts, meaning things like “what if this doesn’t work out?, “what if I miss the people I know and the places I like?,”I already know where to go for all my needs here, why move?”…and so on.

The thing about fear is that it is often mistaken for wisdom. The two are not the same. We are so conditioned to be cautious and over-intellectualize everything that we think fearful beliefs are sensible, prudent and wise. But however “crowd-sourced” and approved certain beliefs are – “how can you move at YOUR age??” – they are still beliefs rooted in of fear. Like crooked trees with roots of fear.
If you say “yes” to fear and “no” to your intuition, it puts your life on a fearful footing, fearful rooting. I call this “inner positioning.” You position yourself internally in fear and it acts like a compass guiding your whole life and being.

Life coach Martha Beck uses the term “true north” to describe what it is like to live in a way guided by intuition and spiritual truth. When we insist on saying “no” to this spiritual guidance, we are taken off (we take ourselves off) our true north. It’s like we are True North Off. We pay a price for that choice; loss of vitality is a big one.

The good news: it is completely your choice and changeable in a heartbeat…before your next breath.

Understanding Comfort

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Most of us conflate a “comfortable” life with a version we have of success and being a certain kind of human: smart, lucky, competent, desirable, right-kind-of and most of all, worthy.

A so-called comfortable life only means as much as the consciousness of the person living it. And it only means what we think it means because we’ve bought into someone else’s idea of what it is, who should have it, who should not have it, what it looks like and, most importantly, how it comes into manifestation.

Many people I know live good lives, but they protect their way of life at a cost. They allow their attachment and fear around it (circumstance and their identifications) to stunt their creativity and willingness to take risks.

Woven into the idea of who deserves a good life is the illusory idea of a “meritocracy.” People fill in their own beliefs and self-identities about the nature of a meritocracy. There are many versions of it.

What I propose is this: a human born onto this planet under any condition, time, circumstance, location, body, creed, namely ANY person simply born here on Earth has all the merit they need and will ever need to have a comfortable, luxurious life with the freedom to express their creativity and fulfill their desires and never have to earn the right to it. That is the only meritocracy that exists. Everything else is a belief system, no matter how outpictured it is or has been in the collective dream. A belief is entirely mutable. This whole system is built on puffy wisps that can blow away in a gentle breeze. Then all humans will live a good life and that will be a very good day.

What lengths will we go to before we accept our power?

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We are still escaping the brutal Colorado cold and are now in Santa Rosa, NM. A small, sleepy drive-through town that is on the original Route 66. It is like a place that time forgot as are other towns on the old route. I can’t help but wonder what these towns were like 60 or 70 years ago?

Here in Santa Rosa, I am contemplating the inner power of the human. I know I am only grasping a fraction of what it is, but today I am wondering what others think about their inner power?

I am watching YouTube videos about the labor strikes in the UK. I feel an empathy with individuals who are not valued monetarily for their efforts as that was often my experience in the past. I “get” having the desire to change the situation and how going on strike makes sense in the context of so-called society, but the issue is bigger and deeper. It is much bigger and much deeper. ALL the change, disruption and perceived difficulty going on, on our planet now is meant to accomplish one thing and just one thing: to get the human to accept their inner power.
It only takes this “one thing,” because this one thing will unlock the infinite. Once the infinite is unlocked, what more could you need?

I do not think circumstances on our planet needed to be as harsh as they are (and they probably will get harsher), but that is another matter. Each individual has a vote on a soul level, each one chooses, so people can have it any way they want it. The majority of people on this planet have chosen a path of difficulty to wake up. I hope they choose differently as soon as they get even a whiff that it’s a choice.

We have become attached to this matrix on Earth. The beloved icons, the ways of doing things, the beliefs about the nature of reality. Giving all this up can inspire feelings of sadness. I’m feeling some of that sad today. I’m in a new, more intense shift of my outer reality and I find myself feeling sad and wistful about the things of the past, the way of life of the past, even the foods of the past (actually the foods of the past are a big emotional attachment and fondness for me). I get it. But the process is – you have your moment or two of sad and then it’s on to the next step of shifting. The feelings are not a cue to take yet another inner/outer side street or detour, as it were, to deflect from the issue. The power is within you. It has always been. It does not matter how much you doubted, disbelieved and empowered something or someone else instead.

I wonder what it will take for people accept this fact? It requires a complete shift. There is no more maneuvering the outer world to obtain the power you think you lack. No more strikes, bargaining. There is only acceptance that all power is within you and you turned your back on it. Now it is time to face it, embrace it, own it. What will it take?

Alchemical Cauldrons

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This time is about alchemy. This time in my life. This time on the planet. Many of my posts will be about alchemy. A friend is struggling with physical illness. Physical illness can be a powerful alchemical cauldron. I use that term to mean any experience in life that serves as a vessel for the process of alchemy. There are many in life and physical illness is one of them. Parenthood is another. I have no kids so I have not experienced the alchemy of parenthood firsthand, but my imagination is good, so I can imagine.

I am in a different alchemical matrix. One that is more of an alchemical bootcamp. I will title (several) future blog posts this way.

In my life, the rug got pulled out. It was a kind of merciful pull-out in that my husband and I had some time to work with. It was not like the kind where people experience floods and fires and lose everything they own in an hour or two. My pull-out gave me some time to work with. I used it.

I moved, with my husband and two cats to a rock. A Mesa, 8600 feet in the air in the southern Colorado desert. We have no water (that I know of) or electricity on site. We live in two 490 sq ft yurts that are connected and our very handy RV, which is a source of some so-called normalcy, having a toilet and some kitchen applicances. Keep in mind, though, that none of these things are powered or resourced the way your kitchen appliances and toilets (likely) are. Sadly…so sadly….poop doesn’t magically disappear into some municipal water supply. We are accountable to our own poop. Bet you want to sign up for this life right now!

Yesterday, I wanted to cook rice and I did not have much water. I only had what was in my water bottles and that was running low. Once the bottled water is gone, there is no more.

I googled whether I needed to rinse rice or not. Alchemy point: I have always rinsed rice. That is how you do it. Seems small, but not rinsing rice is a challenge to my sense of “the right way to do things.” THAT right there is the main alchemical axis of this kind of life. Constantly challenging the “right, safe, good way to do things.” You’d be surprised how much of your power and identity are caught up in this. It is caught up in innumerable ways in your sense of self, your life and how you live it. So many ways. It is at work almost every moment of every day.

Overwhelmingly Google contributors said to rinse rice. I knew the reasons why, but I wanted to see if there might be a lone voice in the wilderness daring to say it was okay not to rinse. Rinsing the rice to reduce arsenic and dirt convinced me to try.

For days now I’ve been looking for my fine-mesh sieve. It is what I use to rinse rice and quinoa. The mesh is small enough so the grains don’t fall through in the rinsing. Alchemical Point #2: It is what I always use. “Always use” feels very comfortable when you can keep it going, but it is not alchemical. What the fuck do I do now? That’s the voice of alchemy. I’m pretty sure the sieve survived the scorched-earth packing of the final minutes of the move from the townhouse we left, but I do not know what box it is in. We had to rent some storage units, some the size of closets, it is likely in one of them.

For a couple days I did not cook rice because I did not have the sieve. Old me. Has to do it the way she likes. The way it “should” be done. Finally, I punched some slits into a plastic cup and used the smallest amount of water to rinse the rice. Alchemy. I used our Instapot for the first time on the Mesa. I wasn’t sure the solar generator would accommodate the electrical demand of the pot, but it did! Hooray! The sun cooked our rice. We had rice for dinner. It was delicious.

The gap between the Identified life and the Free soul

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I have lived in two realities most of my life: one – the divine unfettered soul; the other, the ego-identified human. My lived experience has been more in the ego-identified state, while the unfettered Divine has been mostly intuitive. Nonetheless, the unfettered Divine has been a forceful guide in my life.

The unfettered soul is free of ego attachment. I have contemplated this state for decades. As best I can tell, reaching the state of irreversible soul freedom is something that is initiated by the soul, the Divine. Though the build-up can take years – often fraught with great discomfort – it seems that the soul, not the human who yearns to be free, pulls the mysterious “ lever” that finally releases the human of ego attachment.

Because this spiritually-free state guides me, I sometimes view people’s difficulties with what could be called a “Nandaka” consciousness. Nandaka was the sword of the Hindu deity Vishnu. It was the “destroyer of ignorance.” The Nandaka wipes out spiritual ignorance with the swift, decisive strokes of the sharp blade of Truth.

However….

The process of shedding illusion tends to unfold very slowly, not quickly and often with epic amounts of struggle. Rarely is there a momentary flash of truth where the entire consciousness of the person is permanently transformed.

The gap between the attached and untethered is huge when one is in the grips of ego. There is so much sense of loss.

On this subject, I am routinely humbled by my own life experience.

In the last year, our life – my husband’s & mine – has radically shifted in the areas of housing, job and community. Social supports have changed or disappeared with some people passing away. Much of our old life has come undone, fallen away.

Lately, I feel I am in free fall. I crave a safe place to land and remain.

At the same time, the planet is undergoing massive changes and dissolutions with, I sense, much more to come.

Until I reach the free-soul place on all levels, I will still try to cling to what feels like terra firma, despairing when it seems out of reach, passing me by. I live in that gap.

How you construct reality

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Early this morning I was fretting over the changes going on in my life and how I was going to get the things I need and solve future problems. These are the sure signs of the ego at work. Nonetheless, this process can, and often does, create misery that looks and feels very real.

Then the realization happened: this maze of seeming problems – “How will I get the cats cared for? What will I do if the car breaks?” – is just another thought construct. My brain runs itself ragged going from apparent problem to apparent problem, but often there is no questioning of the process and the reality of the problem. “Is this really what it seems to be? Is this really how it is?”

I don’t go so far as to question the reality of the car or the cat, because I have found that to be a waste of time, but it is useful to question the ego-brain’s assumption about the nature of problems and especially, how they could be solved.

By letting the thoughts and the seeming “hard-edged” physical reality be a construct and not an absolute – as it is presented by most of the world – you start to not only relieve the experience of stress in your mind and body (no small thing), but you also start to see options for solutions you would not have seen. Let me repeat that: you wouldn’t have seen them.

You open your eyes.

Solutions appear.

That’s valuable.

Spirare 1

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Spirare. To breathe. The breath of life.

This insight is not quite formed, but here goes…this inner knot that has been with me my whole life and probably lifetimes and dimensionalities beyond. It says I will lose everything. It chatters that constantly. It grips my gut and wakes me up at night.

But it is an illusion.

I think if I really got that, it would dissolve and delude me no more. But I do get it. Maybe not enough? The knot has enough energy and seeming-life to grip me so.

It is a is a weird place to be. That knowing but not knowing. Knowing in such a way that finally you – ah! – see the roots and yank that weed out of your psyche and soul. I live there alot.

Birthing the Middle Ground

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For reasons not entirely known – who can say? – in some areas of my life the middle ground is hard to accept.  This difficulty gets expressed in form, so, for example, I need to restrict what I eat for health reasons.

Since all creation starts within, can I embrace the middle ground within and smooth out some of the conditions in the physical?

(More) on perceptual filters

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We are wired to gauge the “rightness” of something by how good it makes us feel.  This is not always what we should use to measure the rightness of an action or path.  Please understand, I am not saying we should ignore feelings that indicate something is wrong.  We should not do that.

However, we might be taking the right action at the right time and it doesn’t necessarily feel good.  Feeling good is a perceptual filter.  If we use our wisdom (our own wisdom) we might benefit from some investigation about the value of an action or experience if we look beyond the feeling state it engenders.  The feeling state might be an old habit.  The action or experience might be something beyond the known. And perfect for us right now.