As I said earlier, once you start paying attention to all this stuff, it just keeps appearing before you. I have never seen any of Russell Brand's movies or performance but I keep coming across interviews with him that are totally brilliant. I love how easily and succinctly he expresses it all. Click the link to watch him explain it all in mere seconds.

As promised (to myself) I'm trying to be more disciplined about my daily practices.
When I decided to get serious about meditating a couple months ago (though not for the first time) I spent a couple weeks using a recorded guided meditation from the fantastic Dr. Joe Dispenza's website. I first learned about his work when I read his book Evolve Your Brain which absolutely amazed me and confirmed and expanded many things I had long suspected about life and health and my own potential. I can't even begin to share with you the amazing information in this book, if you're interested you'll just have to read it yourself, I'm sure I'll be talking about it more in my future posts.
I wanted to mention this because meditation can be very hard. My mind doesn't want to be quiet and clear, it wants to fabricate scenes and possibilities and thoughts, which is great, the problem is that unless I put some work in it just keeps recreating the scenes, possibilities and thoughts it already knows. It's hard to learn to generate new and original ones, and to enable change in your life and world you really have to learn how to generate new and original thoughts.
I generally would do the meditation at night before bed and again in the morning after breakfast. For a few weeks it was great. I'd get really excited about my before bed meditation and was really finding a great routine in the preparation and practice of it. But after a while I found that, maybe because I had come to know the recording so well, it wasn't working for me the way it used to. Sometimes I would fall asleep mid-way, sometimes I'd get annoyed with a particular stretch and my thoughts would creep in and interrupt.
My morning meditation practice was following a similar path but I was sticking with it (it was a little easier to not fall asleep, at least) until some guys started building a deck in my neighbors back yard and my morning meditation became impossible. Once the routine was broken I found myself forgetting to make time for it when it was quiet and possible but I had found some great books to read that were providing me with other exercises to work with so I felt that at least I was doing something and I was certainly making progress. This leads me to one of the things that really takes discipline: not only making time for my practice but having the flexibility to implement more into my practice, to not just choose meditation or list making but to find a way to place these throughout the day in a balanced way. (In fact, though I was really great with my meditation last night and this morning, I totally slipped up on my lists -maybe I'll talk more about in the next post.)
Moving on! After reaching a point where the recording had become more of a repetitive distraction than an aid I changed my meditation practice. As I said, it's very hard to keep a clear and quiet mind for an extended period of time but since I'd learned some techniques from the recording I decided to use something else to accompany me: binaural beats. Binaural beats are a really interesting concept. I've read quite a bit about them now and I'm not entirely sure what's true. Some people claim that listening to binaural beats stimulates the creation of specific brain waves and allows you to retrain your brain using their influence, others say that at best they aid relaxation. Either way, I'm interested. Using binaural beats to meditate gives me something to block out the subcity noise that's all around, it gives me something to focus on when my brain wants to be more active than it should be during meditation and it encourages relaxation all in itself.
So that's my up date for this morning on meditation and discipline. I might add that trying to get my thoughts organized enough to write these posts is also a discipline I'm not entirely accustomed to yet so I hope that the information I'm sharing is useful and inspiring and I promise to alternate between topics like this, which I think are toward the practical, and topics that deal a little more with the magic of life.

The most amazing magic that's been happening in my life lately is synchronicity. It seems that all I have to do is exist, as I naturally do, and some perfect piece of information, inspiration or guidance finds me just as I need it. 

This evening I read a spiritual forecast for the month of July on a website I found via a friend posting to facebook an article from the same website they were sharing with another friend. 

The forecast for July talks about the energies for the month, which are Expansion, Discipline and Magic(!). 

The first reason I love this so much is because there is a voice in my head telling me that I always have to push and work hard for even just bits of gain. There's no logic behind it, it's simply the mainstream notion that this is the only way to create anything in your life: make happen by action. What I'm really working to master is making things happen by intention and understanding that it is my intentions that determine what my actions should be and that, in fact, my intentions will generate the need for action rather than action generating the need for action.  

So I was really excited when I was reading this article but it was a little bit conceptual at the same time so as I read my thoughts were kind of wobbling between, "This is exactly what I've been working on!" and "Maybe I don't understand what they're talking about..." the latter thought encouraged by the section on Discipline that I hadn't yet reached. But as I did reach it I found that the Discipline that was encouraged was the Discipline to continue working on Expansion and my heart smiled and I felt... justified?

Which brings me to why I'm writing about my experience of having found and read this post (and why I decided to write about all this): keeping focused on any kind of work can be really hard at times. Sometimes it's hard to make yourself clean the house, sometimes it's hard to make yourself work on something for your job, there are times when what we know we should do feels hard. What I'm working on that is feeling particularly hard these days is my faith in my self, my intuition, and my values. These are all really important things, obviously, but some days when life isn't going quite the way I (really, really) need or want it to, it's easy to wonder if it's a total waste of time to meditate or write lists of what I'm grateful for twice a day or get myself someplace where I can be immersed in nature. 

Just as I've begun questioning my practices and everything that I believe in, I find something that tells me that what I'm doing is important and so important, actually, that now (when it's just become so difficult to focus on) is the time to not just keep at it but to make of it all a discipline. 

Resurrection, Rebirth & MAGIC!

If you've been reading this site regularly you may already have a general idea of my what some of my beliefs and values are. I'm an avid student of astrology and have even begun to develop my own theories about it, after spending more than ten years consuming all that I could. I feel very strongly about the power of belief and all things that are created in the mind. And I see how obvious it is that all of nature and the world and it's millions of bits and pieces are one massive, complicated, bizarre organism.

Over the past two and a half years I left a job I worked at for fourteen years, had a bit of time off, went back to school, got my cosmetology license and became a hair stylist. I'm now about six months in to being entirely self employed -although, not entirely by choice- and when I'm not working, I'm working on ME. Partly because, ofcourse, I want to be fantastic in every possible way both for myself and for everyone else in the world and partly because I believe in what may just boil down to magic.

I use the word magic lightly and only because I can't think of a better word to sum it all up. A lot of my reading and research and learning brings me into contact with various shades of the idea that your life is simply what you imagine into fruition. And I love this concept and am working with it as much as possible. But there does seem to be a learning curve and it's all kind of a big experiment anyway, right?So what I aim to do from here on is continue to share information that I find and tell you in as much detail as possible how I use the information, what practices I introduce into my life and how it all works out.

I hope that the results will be stupendously amazing and I think that in order to see the transformation I will have to tell you exactly what's going on with me now so that as things unfold you will see the contrast, and the magic.

I now present to you: all the gory details.

As it stands now I have about $100 in the bank and maybe $25 in my wallet. I pay $150 per week for my hair studio and have a couple small monthly expenses related to my website. I also live in a very affordable apartment and have all the usual living expenses, minus a student loan payment, cleared that a while back. 

Clearly, where business is concerned, things are not developing as quickly as I'd like them to be and I am often pretty uncomfortable with this. I'm working really hard with as many marketing tools as I can find, constantly looking for more and better ways to grow my business. I'm also searching for additional sources of income both traditional and creative which is part of what has brought me to this point.

For years I've read about and experienced manifesting miracles. (This is when the "magic" starts.) And the thing about it is that it's really hard. It all seems to happen in that moment when I feel that there is no hope and I have no idea what to do next. 

One of the first times I experienced this in the recent past was last summer. I was taking care of a families pets while they were away on vacation (one of my other sources of income) and one evening when I arrived I found the saddest and sweetest dog hiding in the alley behind their house. He was in terrible shape: had awful scars all over as if he'd been used for fighting as well as some fresher, though minor, wounds. His fur was sparse and dry and he was so skinny you could see his bones sticking out all over. As I passed by his hiding spot my eyes were immediately drawn to his and I tell you it was a religious experience, I have never seen anything like them. Obviously I took him home with me. In the time between finding him and arriving home we'd already encountered a lot of people and a number of animals and his behavior was excellent. I could tell he was pretty scared but he seemed to trust that I wasn't going to let anything happen to him. I already knew that (even though I really wanted to) I couldn't keep him, I already have two dogs and a cat, but I figured I'd take him home and figure it out from there. He was not going to the shelter under any circumstances.

Unfortunately this is when I learned that my younger dog would not accept any new family members. I must have gone terribly wrong somewhere because although he has always been sweet and friendly with all people and animals we've encountered before and since, for me to escort another animal into the house is forbidden and met with crazy gorilla behavior that I find utterly unbelievable. Sadly, I put my dog back inside and took the street dog down to my local pet store to ask about local rescues. There are so many active in my area that I thought surely someone would be connected, willing and able to help me find a place for this poor dog to stay but their best advice was to take him to the shelter and I felt that was simply not an option. So I sat down outside not knowing what to do. I literally did not have a thought in my head. I couldn't go home and I didn't know where else to go. My only hope at that point was that someone passing by might stop and have some better advice for me. 

In less than five minutes a neighbor I knew only slightly passed by, out with his own dog for an evening walk. He paused and shared a treat with the street pup and I told him the story. He asked me what I was going to do and I honestly told him I was stumped. After considering the pup for all of 30 seconds he offered to let him stay in his garage and in that instant I felt I'd experienced a miracle.

The way I see it, it all comes down to this: you do everything that you can possibly think of, you never give up trying in whatever way there is even if it seems you're getting nowhere. And when finally you pause and give up and stay open (this is key: you cannot pause and give up and close, closing is when you feel like you know what is going to happen -in this case if I had even considered taking the dog to the shelter that's where he would have ended up but I knew it would be a terrible and I refused to even consider it) the miracle happens.

I have since miracled up $16,000 -literally out of the blue- which allowed me to pay off my student loan and last years taxes, take some advanced classes, start my business and helped me support myself for the last seven months. I was in a similar situation to where I am now: working as much as possible but making nowhere near what I needed and with no idea what to do next. 

So you see, I'm now working on creating a similar miracle but also a more sustainable one. Staying positive takes a lot of discipline when you're not sure how you're going to pay your rent or feed your pets or yourself. I have a vision of what I want to create but I know that I have to stay open to surprise developments that may take me on a different path. I am exercising every creative muscle in my mind and body at all times and I've decided to share it all with you here. 

This here is a fairly new idea for me and one of the challenges is sharing all this personal information but I believe that if I do and if everyone who reads, is at the very least somewhat entertained and at the most inspired, sends a kind and supportive thought to the universe for me it can only help strengthen whatever wonderful life I am working toward and, hopefully, it will also challenge people to create more for themselves. So check back for new stories and all the great practices I'll be writing about. 

(Photo's are of my sweet street pup who is the most wonderful dog I've ever met. He still lives very happily with the neighbor who took him in and has a very good and happy life.)

In Six Months I'll Be Long Gone and Deny Ever Having Been Here

If I walk away from anything for long enough I will not even recognize myself in it when I return. I think it's been over six months since I've been here and I've just come back and want to delete most of it. I don't see the purpose of anything I wrote. I think at the time I believed that if I just emptied my head here once in a while A) it would be entertaining for me and B) if anyone actually read it maybe it would be entertaining for them.
I think this is my "big problem" with myself: I change often and once some time period of my life has passed I don't want evidence laying around reminding me of it.