Archive for category: Consciousness/Thriving

Do you think everyone else is going to have a wonderful Thanksgiving except you? Does it feel like you are the only one who isn’t going to be having a warm and fuzzy time? You are not alone! There are so many people who feel alone and isolated over the holidays while others are all about eating, drinking and being merry. It’s a terrible feeling whether you have no invitations and will be spending the holiday alone or you will be spending yet another Thanksgiving alone in a crowd. The truth be told, whatever your circumstances, it is all a matter of perspective that determines how you will experience your situation.

I’ve spent many holidays alone and done everything from being miserable, feeling sorry for myself and making others wrong for not inviting me to preparing myself a full-on Thanksgiving feast for one. I’ve also spent many a Thanksgiving at someone else’s table feeling lonely and pathetic — being taken in because I didn’t belong anywhere and someone was kind enough to invite me. Basically, I’ve had just about every kind of Thanksgiving there is — even the wonderful kind. Each one has come and gone. The best ones, I have found, have not necessarily been merry and delicious, but rather the ones when I learned something about myself by fully experiencing and taking ownership of what was true for me without blaming or judging myself or others. I just accepted and worked with whatever my truth and circumstances were.

If you find yourself on a trajectory of anticipating an awful Thanksgiving one way or another, consider what you might do to change that. Ultimately, how you experience that day or any other is largely a reflection of your attitude which will determine the options you see or don’t see. If all you see is that you are alone and you are busy feeling sorry for yourself, then your self-fulfilling prophecy will be that you are sure to be alone and unhappy. On the other hand, given the same prospect of being alone, but being willing to make the effort to be with others (if that is what you want) then you might consider the following options:

• Is there someone you could call and ask to be included in their gathering?
• Call around and find others who will be alone and host a gathering.
• Where might you volunteer to help provide a nice meal to those who can’t afford it otherwise?
• See if there is a restaurant that has a large table for people who would otherwise be alone to share a meal together or find a community group that offers a similar possibility.

If the prospect of being with others is not what you really want this particular year, how about asking yourself what you could do to experience the spirit of Thanksgiving on your own? For example, you might make or buy or have delivered your favorite meal, which might not be turkey. You might rent a movie or read a book that helps put you in touch with what you are grateful for in your life. You might create a sacred ritual for yourself that enable you to claim the riches of your life and take the time to really connect deeply with your gratitude. The possibilities are as grand as your imagination.

The truth be told, many of those who are gathering together are wishing they were somewhere else. If you tend to feel alone in a crowd at Thanksgiving, what could you do differently this year? Is there someone in that crowd you might sit with and have a meaningful conversation. If there are children there, might they lift your spirits? Play with them. Or, maybe you could help out in the kitchen and feel good about being of service to your host. The point is to find something to do other than feeling sorry for yourself.

If this is a tender time for you because you have recently lost a loved one, pay particular attention to your needs. Be kind and gentle with yourself. Maybe being with others who might try too hard to compensate for your loss might not be what you need this year. If you need to be alone with your grief, then let it rip. Stay in your pajamas for the day and eat cold pizza and cry if that’s what works for you. Be true to your own experience — whatever it is. But, know that you have choices and choose wisely what will serve you best.

The point is that you are a powerful creator and have but to choose to create a wonderful Thanksgiving for yourself. So, if things aren’t shaping up to your liking this Thanksgiving, do something about it. It’s not too late to choose to make the most of any situation. One way or another you are going to spend your time and energy. It’s your choice if you want to see your glass as half empty or half full. My wish is that you be very good to yourself this Thanksgiving and if you aren’t going to be with people you love and enjoy being with, then take a good look at yourself in the mirror and love yourself upside down and sideways!

If you are hosting a gathering, take a moment and think about the people in your life who might be delighted to have an invitation to join you. A simple act of kindness goes a very long way — especially during the holidays.

I encourage readers to add comments and suggestions below to help inspire others to find their way through this holiday season with compassion and kindness.

If you would like to know more about me and my work, please explore my website here.

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Below the surface of many family holiday gatherings are mini dramas playing out, contemporary grudges and resentments and unresolved childhood issues. Nothing hurts with such emotional depth as these familial battles. For the tender-hearted, this can be a psychological mine field while self-righteous bullies reign unchallenged. Many silently suffer through these events while dutifully and unconsciously assuming their childhood role as the family black sheep or underdog. Those in secondary roles are often either complicit or oblivious, leaving the underdog to fend for his or herself. Here are seven strategies for doing it differently this year.

Strategy 1: See it for what it is. The bottom line of these battles is that they are mere reflections of the level of consciousness of the participants involved. Most bullies and tyrants have failed to evolve psychologically past their childhoods and are simply functioning out of a juvenile state of consciousness. Typically, they are caught in a win/lose mentality that drives them to perceive themselves as a winner at the expense of someone else. Putting you down is driven by a desperate attempt to put themselves up. In this sense, you are simply a means to an end and their attack on you is really nothing personal. You cannot evolve another person’s consciousness for them. Any attempt to address the matter head on with them will simply further ignite their battle position. On the flip side of this, is there any merit to the accusations and judgments lodged against you? If so, are you willing or able to change? If so, only do so for your own highest good and not to seek the approval of others.

Strategy 2: Stay conscious in the present and study how the dynamic works. Remember, it takes two to tango. Play detective with the situation and notice how this other person gets to you. Is it through sarcastic remarks? Giving you the silent treatment? Disdainful looks? Just how do they communicate their rejection and judgment of you? How do they hook you into their game? Pay attention to your own behavior as well. Do you comply by feeling and behaving like a victim? Do you try to defend yourself against their attacks? Does this drama dominate your entire experience? How do you buy in to this other person’s point of view?

Strategy 3: Stand tall in your own integrity and truth. Be at the cause of your own behavior rather than at the effect of others. Stop behaving in relationship to this person. Don’t buy into the familiar emotional territory of your childhood. Be your own grown-up person. Stop focusing on them and focus on yourself. Be who you know yourself to be rather than jumping into the underdog or black sheep costume of your childhood. Get out of reactionary mode and simply be yourself. By moving your attention away from the bully, you stop feeding on or into the situation.

Strategy 4: Stop wanting or expecting the other person to change. Before entering the situation, psyche yourself up. Remind yourself that this other person is probably never going to change his or her behavior toward you. Make your consciousness big enough to let that happen without being the center of your attention. Make peace with it. Let it be so without trying to change it in any way. Focus instead on learning how to stay true to yourself in the presence of someone who belittles you. Stop giving them your power. Remember that both of you have the freedom to choose how you will behave. Take the high road and don’t expect them to join you.

Strategy 5: Practice forgiveness. If you find yourself having a hard time with the situation, launch yourself into forgiveness mode in the privacy of your own mind. Forgive yourself for judging yourself for any judgments you have against yourself or the other person. Keep doing this as judgments come up. Neutralize them with forgiveness. If you don’t really feel the forgiveness, do it anyway — fake it till you make it.

Strategy 6: Step free of the drama and choose to have a healthy, good time. Setting and holding to the intention of doing it differently goes a very long way. Choose out of the drama and into having an authentically good time. Give more of your attention and interest to other people at the gathering. Help out in the kitchen. Just find some way to do it all differently. If you typically sit in a corner, get up and mingle. Find a buffer — someone you can engage with to shift your focus. Just do whatever it takes to keep moving your attention away from the drama and into finding new ways to be with your family. By doing it differently, you will elicit different responses.

Strategy 7: Strike out on your own for the holidays. If your family gatherings are simply unbearable for you, don’t go! There is no law that you have to spend the holidays with your family. What does the holiday mean to you? If it is about being with your family — then figure out how to do that using the first six strategies above and evolve a place for yourself that nurtures and supports you. If the meaning of the holiday is about the deeper religious message it brings, then find other people to be with who share your beliefs. Maybe you just want to have a light-hearted time. If so, then give yourself the gift of creating that for yourself with our without other people. Take ownership of your own experience and create a happy and blessed holiday for yourself.

The holidays come and go every year. Don’t stay stuck in a bad emotional drama. The willingness to do it differently will always create the means and ability you need. Trust yourself and have the courage to step free. Happy holidays, everyone.

If you would like to know more about me and my work, please explore my website here.

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Dictionaries specify that the word “judgment” refers to the process of forming an opinion after careful consideration. Judgments have their place in a court of law where, by social agreement, authority is granted to a judge or jury to determine whether or not someone’s behavior is or is not in accordance with the law. However, while no one has granted us the authority to play judge and jury in our personal lives, most of us make snap judgments all the time declaring our approval or disapproval of whatever and whomever we are observing or experiencing. The problem is that these snap judgments forgo careful consideration, and are typically merely the automatic expression of our personal prejudices and pet peeves. They happen so fast that we often have trouble distinguishing between our judgments and reality, and sometimes we are not even aware of the fact that we are judging ourselves or others. These little judgments, whether we say them out loud or not, are often extremely damaging to those we judge.

Typically, our point of view is built upon thousands of little snap judgments and assumptions we make about who and what we encounter in our lives. This amalgamation becomes so familiar to us that we seldom question its veracity. Here’s an experiment for you. Spend about five minutes observing your mind chatter while out in public without judging what you hear yourself thinking. Notice how often you make snap judgments. For example, “He could afford to lose a few pounds,” or “I really love the color of her hair,” or “Oh, yuck, it’s raining.” Now, you might say those aren’t judgments, they are observations. On closer inspection, notice that each of these statements probably carried with it a level of approval or disapproval, which is what makes them judgments. Observations have no emotional charge — no personal vote for or against what is being seen or experienced. For example, “It’s raining. I’ll get an umbrella,” has no charge.

Snap judgments are a form of positional thinking — right/wrong, good/bad, desirable/undesirable. Energetically, each time we make one of these judgments, we are either accepting or rejecting someone or something. When the vote is positive, there is no harm unless it occurs in a relationship where one person’s sense of self-worth is dependent upon the approval of the other. When snap judgments are negative, they are a form of emotional pollution and depending on the intensity of the judgment, they can impart psychic violence. For example, just recently, I was with a friend and her husband. She did a few things that annoyed him. While I understood why he was perturbed, I was shocked by the vehemence of his verbal reaction to her. I literally felt my body automatically contract in fear, and his remarks were not even directed at me.

Whether spoken or not, snap judgments have a powerful influence on us and the emotional environment we share. Psychologists and linguists have estimated that about 80 percent of communication is nonverbal, with one UCLA study finding that as much as 93 percent of communication is dictated by nonverbal factors.

Energetically, imagine how much damage all these judgments are doing to people. Consider the overweight man. Don’t you think he knows or feels that people are judging him? What would it be like for him if he received an overwhelming amount of compassion rather than judgment? Do you think he would notice the difference?

For many, judgment is a way of life. Did you ever meet one of those people who thinks he or she is always right? They can be very convincing and so emphatic that it can be disarming to stand in a different point of view. Even without an audience, we can be so used to our own points of view that anything or anyone who doesn’t agree with us can be immediately seen to be false and be rejected like a knee-jerk reaction, without consideration of possible merit.

Imagine what might happen if we all started to hold ourselves accountable for the impact our snap judgments have on others. What if my friend’s husband observed her behavior with more neutrality and saw the situation as a time when he needed to dig a little deeper to access his love for her rather than thoughtlessly attacking her in front of her friend? We always have kinder options available to us. The trick is having the sense to choose them. This takes practice, but just as snap judgments can become a habitual behavior, so can kindness. We just have to choose to be conscious and responsible for our behavior and practice, practice, practice kinder reactions to each other.

A negative snap judgment carries with it some kind of rejection and punishment. It may simply be the act of pulling ourselves back from the other person, creating separation. Or it can involve the spewing of a lot of negative attitude and lack of cooperation, or fists might fly. The kinder alternative is to establish the habit of reacting with greater neutrality by simply observing what is happening and calmly communicating your concerns and preferences with clarity and kindness. People aren’t wrong because they don’t agree with you. They just see things differently from their point of view. Cultivate an attitude of curiosity to better understand why others look and behave in ways other than what you prefer. You might be surprised how much compassion you feel when you choose to contribute to a safe emotional environment for everyone.

If you would like to know more about me and my work, please explore my website here.

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“There is a struggle that is more interesting than pleasure or ego satisfaction… There is something far more interesting than what money can buy.” — Jacob Needleman

I find it fascinating that 92 percent of Americans claim belief in God yet current politics suggest that only 1 percent of us have it all while the other 99 percent share in experiencing not enough. If we are all equal in the eyes of God, how come we are so far from that in the eyes of man? What have we created, promoted and allowed to happen here?

All major religious and spiritual traditions urge us to live our lives from the inside out, expressing outward into the world instead of in reaction to externals. We are urged to ground our consciousness in the core of our being where we find a oneness with others that allows us to be together in a loving, caring and cooperative manner. Whether one believes that this core of our being is God or love or something else, when we touch into this place an urge to unite is aroused. Some fear that this urge to unite is diametrically opposed to personal material wealth and comfort. Others suggest that as in the two parables of the loaves and the fishes where Jesus is said to have fed a multitude with just a few small barley loaves and fish, compassion creates possibilities that are invisible to those driven by self-interest.

Since we are social beings, we are individually and collectively faced with an existential challenge regarding our level of concern for the welfare of others. Each collective, whether a family, a country or our entire global community, contributes to the state of our consciousness through the creation of a particular set of social systems and culture. Each collective encourages us towards certain beliefs, desires and behaviors, and discourages us from others. Each inclines its members towards competition or cooperation in relationships with others.

Unfortunately, in contemporary American society the two major relationship models are co-dependency and competition. Neither fosters a strong sense of self-worth, equality or caring for one another. As a result, most individuals end up as losers in these models.

Money and material wealth have become the language and measurement of human value. Our economic system, which necessitates growth to survive, serves as the bedrock of society. The structures and norms of our society are designed to ensure the survival of our economy and have cast us in the roles of producers and consumers, ceaselessly barraged by commercial enticements to stimulate and indulge our desires. This entraps us in a system that serves too few at the expense of too many and leaves us with little time or energy to explore other dimensions of our selves. For too many of us, our material success has brought with it a poverty of spirit.

Distracted by the external world, we lose sight of the intimate dance of the relativity of our mental, emotional and spiritual selves with one another. Yet, it is the social dimension of our lives that gives moral meaning to our individual and collective choices. Perhaps this is why the fundamental teachings of all the major world religions contain a version of the Golden Rule to guide us in our social interactions.

When we look outward instead of inward, it is easy to become disconnected from a deep sense of the relevance of our being and our connection to one another. Too many of us are caught up in the illusion that our personal happiness and success in life will be achieved through the acquisition and accumulation of monetary wealth and possessions. Yet, ultimately, we come to realize that financial and material riches are empty and unsatisfying in the absence of a state of consciousness that deeply connects us to others. Indeed, a diamond ring or a Hummer is of little comfort on your deathbed.

Ultimately each of us is responsible for the priorities we set in our lives, the choices we make and the effects they have on ourselves and others. We come to realize that financial and material riches are empty and unsatisfying in the absence of a state of consciousness that deeply connects us to others.

Many of us, disillusioned by the empty promises of the gravy train, are instead boarding the generosity train, delighting in its riches of loving, caring and sharing and are finding ourselves humbled and surprised by the abundance that is achievable when we first ground ourselves in a consciousness that is concerned about the highest good of all concerned. As the signs and wonders of this powerful shift in consciousness take hold, it manifests in new attitudes, beliefs and actions and a commitment to reach for something higher and nobler within and among ourselves.

In Buddhist teachings, greed, hate and ignorance are considered three poisons in human consciousness that lead to the evil we create in the world that is the ultimate source of our suffering. The practice of generosity is the first stage of the Buddhist spiritual path and an opportunity for any of us to reverse a greed-based view of life. Giving with a kind, loving heart opens the human spirit to fulfillment through nonattachment and loving kindness. It lightens our mind, makes us more available to insight and sets us free from our greed.

Perhaps I sound like a Pollyanna socialist to some. I assure you, I am neither. I am simply someone who thinks we have taken a devastatingly expensive wrong turn in our search for happiness. My goal is to raise consciousness about this so we can do something constructive that has the potential to bring us a whole lot more happiness in our lives.

I have a request — please watch the following two videos about generosity.

• Nipun Mehta — “Designing For Generosity”
• Sasha Dichter — “The Generosity Experiment”

If you would like to know more about me and my work, please explore my website here.

Also, if you know anyone who might get value from this article please email or retweet it or share it on Facebook.

Sometimes, I walk through this world and just marvel at the fact that we are all souls with individualized karmic agendas. Our lives and stories are woven together in a perfect complexity of clearing our individual and collective karmic accruals. It is as though we have a kind of karmic DNA built into our physical, mental and emotional makeup, as well as our identity as male or female, our socioeconomic circumstances, relationship patterns, membership in a particular family, race and religious tradition. I have come to believe that before we incarnate each lifetime, we, as souls, choose the role we will play on the world stage that offers us the best possibility of clearing our karmic accruals.

I have always puzzled over the idea that we are all equal when our capabilities and opportunities vary so greatly. Prior to comprehending that we are divine beings, I thought equality was a nice idea destroyed by human greed. In fact, our equality exists regardless of human greed because it is as individual expressions of the divine that we are truly equal. Spiritual energy flows to us and through us as an equal-opportunity employer — like the sun. However, given our unique karmic accruals, we vary in our awareness of ourselves as spiritual beings and in our capacity to open ourselves up to the wisdom, guidance and upliftment of the divine. It is, therefore, for the highest good of our respective souls’ progressions to select unequal status in human form in order to work through our unique karmic agendas. So, on a spiritual level, a drunken bum is equal to a wise king, yet in physical and social status, he is not. Our equality is spiritual and manifests itself in physical form as an equal opportunity to fulfill our personal karmic agenda.

Our families usually provide fertile ground for encountering some of our heaviest karma. I was in my 50s when I started to see some of the actual karmic patterns and lessons presented to me through my family and woven into our lives together. Things that never made sense about our relationships suddenly made sense, and the childhood emotional wounds I had carried until then melted away in the light of this spiritual perspective. A resonance of truth and inner peace replaced all the years of anger, fear and frustration I had built up, especially in relationship to my father. I came to appreciate that we needed to be exactly as dysfunctional as we were in order to be presented with the opportunity to heal the karma involved. When I finally looked at my family relationships karmically, I saw them in an entirely different light which shattered many of my previously held beliefs, illusions and judgments about myself and my family members.

Here’s a specific example. Early on, I learned to give my father a wide berth. It was as though we had a personality allergy to each other. I could never get his approval, and spent a lot of time seeking it. He was a my-way-or-the-highway kind of guy, and I was one who needed to walk to the beat of her own drum. It was a strained relationship at best and I never felt loved by my father. Then, in my 50s, several years after his death, I had a spiritual experience where I encountered him in the theater of my mind. I was blasting him for never having shown me any love, and I watched as a tear formed and fell out of his eye and rolled down his face. This disarmed me, as I had never seen him cry in real life. He looked me straight in the eye and told me that his assignment as a soul in relationship to me was to be my father and to never show me any signs of love or affection. This was intended to serve me in learning to turn inward and upward to find my truth rather than seeking it out in the world. My anger fell away, and something let go within me that had restrained me all my life. Somehow, I knew that what he was saying was true. I also knew that for the first time in my life, I was seeing my father as a soul. We were communicating soul to soul, and that changed me forever after.

The reality of our essential identities as souls came through in that moment in a way that redefined me and my history with my father. I no longer saw him as the heartless, self-centered ogre who could not and would not love me. Rather, he was a fellow soul, who in the most extraordinary act of love, took on this awful role in my life, knowing that I would hate him, and that he could never demonstrate his love for me or receive love from me. A deep root of anger, tension and self-rejection was pulled out of me as I rose into my soul and knew us both as innocent and pure souls rather than as damaged people. We were right on course with God’s perfect wisdom, timing and plan, balancing our karma and learning our lessons.

Where or when I incurred this spiritual debt, I do not know or need to know. What is clear is that it was an enormous blessing and I had to walk through the karma to prepare me to recognize the truth when it was finally revealed to me. So, when I looked into my father’s crying eyes in that momentary eternity, I was looking into his soul from mine and seeing a truth far more real than all our battles as father and daughter over the years.

I don’t obsess about karma, but it has completely changed my way of understanding our lives. There’s karma, karma everywhere and I’m beginning to see it as the compost of our learning, growth and spiritual upliftment.

Australian Aborigines are reputed to go on a six-month walkabout as a rite of passage when they are 13 years old. Spiritually, I now see us as a bunch of souls on a great, karmic walkabout on planet earth, where we are given the opportunity to learn important spiritual lessons as balancing actions to our karmic debts. We are so many souls traveling side by side, passing each other by, perhaps connecting with one another and reaching into that oneness that is so familiar — for a moment or a lifetime — yet elusive somehow. Each of us marches to the beat of our own mysteriously unique drum. As fellow travelers in a giant cosmic labyrinth, we take the same journey into the heart of it all and out again, ebbing and flowing, alone, yet one. Day moves into night and night to day. We are born. We live and learn. We die. We are recycled.

If you would like to know more about me and my work, please explore my website here.

Also, if you know anyone who might get value from this article please email or retweet it or share it on Facebook.