Grace Notes: Other Mothers and The Mother of All

I didn't send my Mom a Mother's Day card this year; she made her transition in January. I did send a trio of cards to a beloved 100-year-old friend who's been a spiritual mother my entire life, from the days when I'd paste my artwork on the kitchen window she'd pass on her way to work (and to which she'd respond in poetry), to our adult friendship spanning four decades. Ellie and her husband never had children, yet I don't think that's why so many "young people" (as she characterized those in their 50s when she was 92!) have adopted her as a surrogate Mom. It's because, by her very essence, she engenders the deep love and appreciation we associate with mothering.

I've been blessed to enjoy this kind of relationship a few times in my life. Another was with a woman whose husband I met in the park, not long after I'd graduated from college. He brought me home to meet his wife as though I were a flea market find, and the three of us became fast friends during the year before I moved to California. I was just launching my life at 22, and Sten and Ethel provided the support and encouragement I needed to thrive — right down to lending me their old car for the final weeks prior to my relocation, so I could get around town once I'd sold mine. Ethel had multiple sclerosis (MS), and her optimism and sunny disposition in the face of her illness seem even more amazing to me now. For her birthday that year I sent a singing balloon-a-gram; the center balloon was shaped like a heart. She told me this balloon kept its helium for weeks and followed her around the house! That's the power of Love.

Another spiritual mother for 26 years and counting is Louise Hay. An old friend gifted me with Louise's signature book, You Can Heal Your Life in 1988, the same year I was blessed to meet Louise in person when she held a "Hay Ride" event in San Francisco. Her breakthrough personal growth work has sustained and healed me on many levels since then. Louise is just nine months older than my biological mother, so in many ways she really does feel like my Mom.

Who are the "other mothers" in your life? Mother's Day is a beautiful moment to let them know how much you cherish their love, their support, their wisdom. Whether they know you personally or are a public figure who's helped you via their planetary service (Oprah springs to mind), take a moment to acknowledge this gift. In the level playing field of the digital age we can connect with almost anyone, yet your thank you needn't be splashed across the social landscape unless you so choose. If you send your message via the quantum field, it will be received — at an even more profound level.

If you can and want to connect in 3D, that's always a delight. I'll call my 100+ year-old friend in the morning, and thank her again for shining her Light in my life.

Finally, there is our collective Mother, Gaia, in all her (wo)manifestations. During my awakening journey I realized how profoundly I yearned to nestle into the nurturing archetypal arms of the Great Mother. I found her in trees, in our animal kin, in metaphysical bookstores and sacred ceremony, and in the wisdom of those who had gone before me and could give a name to this longing.

Reaching our Light means daring a descent into the dark, to the ancient womb of Mystery that lives within each one, calling us to awaken and claim our power. Men and women alike are capable of this kind of birth, which knows no gender — only the willingness to open to the immanent truth of our being.

Everything arises from this awareness: how we move through the world, how we effect change, how we define what "matters" (which comes from the same root as "mother".) Uncloaked, we are cut from whole cloth — "material" in its original sense. When we abide in the Mother, who we are matters — and we are always Home.

Mother yourself, today and every day. That's the greatest grace note of all.

~ Much Love to you ~

The Velcro Factor: How to Speak in the Language Others Can Hear

You know how to talk. You've been doing it for decades. But are your listeners hearing your intended message?

Learning to speak in the language others can hear is a critical task many of us never master, because it requires putting yourself in the receiver's role and asking if the way you're presenting your information makes sense to this particular audience.

For example: if I began a talk on personal growth by saying, "When I emerged from the womb after my dark night of the soul, I felt reborn, and ready to give my gift to the world," many people might completely comprehend what I was trying to say — but there are many, many more whose eyes would glaze over in confusion.

But what if I started with, "After a long illness during which I began to question the purpose of my life, I began anew with a deeper understanding of who I am and what I'm here to do." Is this clearer? I'm expressing the same thoughts, but for two distinct audiences. Sharing the second introduction with a group more attuned to the first message would be as ineffective as the reverse.

I grew into this awareness of learning to speak in the language others can hear slowly. One terrific though unwitting resource was my brother. When he was deep in the throes of his awakening, I eagerly sent him a book that had been given to me at a pivotal time in my own growth: Louise Hay's classic, You Can Heal Your Life. I've read it hundreds of times over the years and integrated her teachings into my life in numerous ways.

My brother added my offering to "the pile": books he'd already been given by well-meaning friends. Clearly, it didn't speak to him.

Not long afterward, I attended a weekend workshop on personal mastery. The trainer highly recommended a book that imparted spiritual principles through the lens of basketball, Sacred Hoops. I made a mental note to check it out.

As I held the book in my hands and glanced through its pages, I couldn't imagine why I'd want to read it. Basketball doesn't interest me in the slightest. Plus, I was already familiar with much of the content from other sources. Then I realized with a grin and an "Oh, duh!" that I was supposed to send the book to my brother, who loves basketball and, in his forties, continued to play at every opportunity. I bought the book and mailed it special delivery, without a note.

Less than a week later I received a four-page letter (this man is not a letter-writer! And this was before we were all on daily email), saying the package had been waiting when he'd come home from work that Monday evening, "after the worst weekend of my life." He wrote, "I can't put it down, I'm already halfway through it and I wish it was 1,000 pages long." I nearly wept with joy and gratitude that I'd been guided to send him exactly what he needed, at exactly the right time. All I had to do was get my own preconceptions out of the way, and speak in his language — in this case, basketball.

Actress and playwright Elizabeth Fuller calls this awareness, "The Velcro Factor": being so specific with her examples in a performance that audience members can recognize themselves in what she and partner Conrad Bishop share. Thus, the message "sticks."

Sending my brother Sacred Hoops was a Velcro Factor experience for me. Choose what you use, learn to discern. Communicate in the language your audience can hear.

Woo-Woo in a Wow-Now World:Living As a Practical Mystic

"Only those within whose own consciousness the sun rises and sets, the leaves burgeon and wither, can be said to be aware of what living is."

~ Joseph Wood Krutch, US naturalist and writer

What does being "conscious" actually mean? My online dictionary defines it as, "awake, aware, supraliminal…". Now there's a word to roll trippingly on the tongue. Supraliminal. It's the exact opposite of the subliminal media messages we're bombarded with daily.

Supraliminal means above the threshold of normal sensation. So, instead of being anesthetized by the jackhammer rhythm of life in the third millennium, a supraliminal person moves to a different cadence. You live an aesthetic life — in tune with the beauty all around you — rather than an anesthetic one, numbed out on sensory overload and emotional angst. This is being conscious, and we get to choose whether to walk this path, every day.

It doesn't mean we have to live "woo-woo" in a wow-now world, however. There's a way to "walk the mystical path with practical feet," as one of my own great teachers, Angeles Arrien, often says. Her lucid book, The Four-Fold Way: Walking the Paths of the Warrior, Teacher, Healer and Visionary draws upon her vast experience as a cross-cultural anthropologist and educator to show us how indigenous wisdom can help us live richer, more joy-filled lives, both personally and professionally. The approaching winter season corresponds to the way of the Warrior, or leader, whose challenge is the right use of power. Angeles reminds us that Native peoples use the words "power" and "medicine" synonymously. If we fully express who we are, we are "in our medicine."

Earth herself offers us a bountiful opportunity to grow, by planting ourselves in presence. Louise Hay, in many ways the founding mother of the personal growth/self help movement, says being in nature, nurturing the soil, and growing her own food is a kind of meditation for her. She lived in New York City for forty years, so she knows what it's like in the asphalt jungle, and feels especially blessed to be able to garden on her acre of land in California now.

Louise says, "My garden sustains me a lot. It is nature at its most abundant and beautiful. And what I do primarily in the garden is build soil. I do everything that I can to make the soil better. I have a big chipper shredder, and not a lettuce leaf or a leaf from a tree leaves my property. It's all ground up, nature makes it into wonderful rich soil, and I put that back into the soil. And it's the same thing with the people, with their own lives. You know if you enrich yourself, if you pull the weeds out, if you get the rocks out of the way in your consciousness and enrich yourself with good reading, good study, good meditating, understanding — then life takes care of the rest."

As the Northern Hemisphere turns inward now, it's a good time to compost any aspects of ourselves that no longer support who we're becoming. And perhaps, as we continue to build our inner soil, enrich our soul, and live a more conscious life, we'll also lose our fear of the next threshold.

Awareness Into Action:

What practical steps can you take this week to build your own soil, to live your medicine? Choose a specific action and put it into practice with everyone you meet, all week long.

More Power to You!

I've been reading two classic books about power: Power vs. Force by David Hawkins, MD, PhD, and Power Through Constructive Thinking, by Emmett Fox. Both authors are master teachers with a spiritual focus; Fox, whose work saw its heyday in the early part of the 20th century, reminds me of Florence Scovel-Shinn, author of The Game of Life and How to Play It, which has helped me immeasurably on my awakening journey.

While there is much useful material in Fox's book, I wasn't finding anything particularly new at this stage of my evolution — until I came to the chapter on Reincarnation.

I've long believed that we select our birth families based on the Earth lessons we've chosen to learn this time around. This is Louise Hay's (You Can Heal Your Life) premise, and she's been one of my foremost personal growth guides for decades. But Emmett Fox brought me up short when I read, "Of course, we do not choose our parents. We go to the parent whose nature and conditions correspond with the state of the soul when it incarnates. And often that family is anything but what we would choose at that time." It's a very subtle shift, but a crucial one.

He goes on to explain how we assimilate the mannerisms and characteristics of our family members, but that there is no such thing as "heredity": instead of "inheriting" any conditions or predispositions from our ancestors, we gravitate to families where similar conditions already exist: like attracts like.

When I got this on the subtle level, it caused a primal shift in my awareness. For many years, ever since I first became conscious, I had evolved from "blaming" my parents for conditions in my life, and instead sought to see how I could heal what did not serve them, in myself first. I felt I'd taken on many of my mother's fears (e.g., deep water, dogs, public speaking) and had been overcoming them one by one in my life, reasoning that on some level, this was also healing the issue for her, since I was her daughter and had received these imprints in the womb or as a young child.

But now I understood that, far from taking on her issues, I had simply incarnated into this family because these fears mirrored my own! In a twinkling all residual feelings of holding my family in any way responsible for anything I experience, dissolved in a pool of Light. No wonder that it always seemed, when I mastered something and shared the details with my mother, that she was innately cheering me on, even as her words barely registered comprehension of the spiritual overlay.

It's challenging — even as a writer — to translate this core awareness into prose for you. If you can, pick up Fox's book and read that chapter, the most powerful (for me) in the book, and perhaps you will experience the same transmutation. It is quite literally, alchemy. I feel a step closer to living from true power.

More power to you, beloved. Blessings!

Shopping for a New Reality

Here's a refreshing take on Life, the Universe, and Everything (fans of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy will recognize the preceding phrase as the title of one of the latter book in this inimitable series by Douglas Adams). Instead of shopping till you drop, contemplate celebrating Black Friday as a Black Hole, and shine your light there:

The Illusion of Reality by Bret Burquest.

Many thanks to fellow lightbearer Violette Ruffley for the link!

Another Hay Ride: Listening to Louise

Every month, master coach and bestselling author Cheryl Richardson hosts a telegathering featuring someone whose work is helping to advance human evolution. Last week, her inimitable guest was a woman who catalyzed my own initiatory journey, along with that of millions of others: Louise Hay, one of the pioneers of the personal growth field.

I first met Louise in 1988, not long after my friend Susan had gifted me with a copy of Louise's classic, You Can Heal Your Life for my birthday. Louise's gatherings were known as Hay Rides, and indeed, it's a life-altering excursion.

Here's the recorded call for your elevating pleasure.

I scribbled Louise's core affirmations that she shared on air, and have been singing them this past week. (I find affirmations just naturally lend themselves to music without any effort, and make them easier to remember). What a marvelous refresher!

All is well.

Everything is working out for my highest good.

Out of this situation, only good will come.

I AM SAFE.

In addition, Louise recommends gratitude at all times. It's fine to be grateful in advance of receiving what you seek. Then, Life says, "Yes, I love you, too!"