Lenses of Our Own Creation

"Hot and cold, pain and pleasure. Come and go, come and go. Oh my dear one, manage to endure them." 

So says the Bhagavad Gita, and such is the reality of life on this earth; the ups and downs, the highs and lows, the good days and bad days. In this world of duality, we gain understanding of one end of the spectrum by experiencing the other.

For those that have already read Timeless Waters, you know it is a story about the realization and discovery of three different lifetimes; an experience I believe to be on offer to us all. As relevant and life expanding as that experience was, years later I realize that one of the greatest things I gained was a deeper understanding of the degree to which my perception shapes my experience.

That sounds like old information for most of us, yet so often we contribute to our own emotional dramas because of our perception of events and the meaning we place on them. Figuratively speaking, we see the world through specific lenses of our own creation.

Unfortunately, not only are many of us not aware of the specific lenses through we perceive the world, we may not even believe we have lenses at all! Until we can acknowledge that we do, we may find ourselves in a perpetual loop of "mis" perceptions. We will talk more about where the "glasses" we each wear originate, from our thoughts to the mystical, next month. But until then, begin to observe your experience and the emotions that come up for you most often for they are the key.

The hot and cold, the pleasure and pain will come and go as certain as the sun will rise and the wind will blow. But with the desire and commitment to examine the glasses through which we are viewing the world, the difficult times will likely be fewer and perhaps even a little easier to endure.

Blessings,
Sheryl

Look for Sheryl's workbook "You Hold the Key to You: Understanding Self and Your Incarnational Past" in 2013.

Do Something

I’m personally a believer that the important thing in life is to just be doing something; anything, really. I like shaking it up; my exercise routine, health and nutrition, form of meditation. You name it. A dear friend of mine once said in response to my most recent report of something I was trying was “you’re always into some crazy thing!” My answer back was “all that matters is that I’m doing something.”

The same philosophy applies for personal growth and spirituality. There are many paths to self awareness and living a more balanced life. Do I believe there is a holy grail of how to do that? No, I don’t. Life happens. Our life lessons are just that—life lessons. We will be faced with them throughout our lives. Self awareness is like an onion peeled back one layer at a time, and you often find the same issues in the first layer are going to reveal themselves to you in a different form in the next layer, all the way to the core.

Over the course of our lives, we may be exposed to multiple spiritual modalities and disciplines. Should we find one and hold that particular viewpoint for the rest of our lives? Well, that depends on if your personal viewpoint stays the same for the rest of our lives. Expanding experience has a way of expanding the way we look at the world, which includes the way we interpret our spirituality.

For some, this ever changing world view may present a problem; we as humans do have a tendency to want the “right” and “true” answers. But I find it exciting, and I imagine many of you do as well. It may look to others like we are frogs jumping from one lily pad to another, desperately in search of the “right” path. But we know better, don’t we? We change, our lives change. Our understanding of universal truths reaches new depths, and we gain new awareness of our place in the universe. What matters is that we are doing something.

Blessings,

Sheryl

Transcendence

     “a state of being or existence above and beyond the limits of material experience”

Just as we are all dichotomies, so we all have characteristics that can be viewed as both our blessing and our curse. One of those characteristics for me is my ability to feel deeply. My ex-husband would watch on with both frustration and awe as I covered the spectrum of human emotion in a matter of minutes, and then with ease, could carry on with the rest of my day. He once said the sky I saw was much bluer than the one he saw, but that the pain I felt was deeper too.

            Living life that way is a rich experience, and one that can enable a person to not fear what lay within him or herself. But sometimes when a person is handed too much over a span of time, he or she shuts down emotionally; a coping mechanism.

At the time I didn’t realize it, but it happened to me. I handled the experiences being handed to me with an “evenness” previously unknown to me. And so it was for several years, and it occurred to me that maybe I had learned transcendence; the ability to rise above and beyond the limits of material experience.

Then one night as I sat gazing at the stars, I realized my sense of awe was diminished. As I thought about many of the events I had faced over the previous few years, I also recalled that I had never shed any tears. The words to the Eagle’s Desperado played in my head-- “You’re losing all your highs and lows, aint’ it funny how the feeling goes away--” and I got it; I was numb. While the absence of the lows was nice, life without the highs is a flat life indeed. With that recognition, the tough exterior that shielded me for several years began to soften, and I got hurt. I sat on a friend’s couch sobbing, recalling how awful it was to feel something so deeply. Later that night, a favorite phrase from Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, came into my mind:

        “The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.”

            Gibran’s poetic wisdom both gave me pause to reconsider the concept of transcendence and reminded me of the richness that exists in this physical experience we have chosen. Human emotion is a critical part of that experience. With that awareness, maybe healthy transcendence is not so much about responding to what life throws our way by immediately rising above it. Perhaps it is ultimately about how we respond when we find ourselves in that deep well of human emotion.

Blessings,

Sheryl

This Above All

                                                                                         

I took a chance. The cards I was holding so closely to my chest no longer felt like they should remain there. My heart had opened, and in order to be fair it was time to be honest, authentic and real.

It was not for a few days that I began to question my judgment. Awareness of my exposure slowly crept over me and as it did, it became larger than I was. In a tailspin of vulnerability, I took my honest words back; made it clear I had made a big mistake.

All of this was done out of fear, of course: Fear of playing the fool; fear of getting hurt. Sound familiar?

That day, as I went about my daily life, I came across Shakespeare’s quote “This above all: to thine self be true,” three separate times. I might mention that I don’t recall ever coming across this quote outside of an English Lit class, yet it came to me from three different sources in a twenty-four hour period. Even stranger was that its original source is Hamlet; a personal favorite of the person who I had courageously handed my “cards” in the first place.

I’m not a believer in coincidence. With a deep breath of acceptance, I closed my eyes and thanked Spirit for leading me to the information I needed to transcend the vortex of emotion I was experiencing.

How often do we miss the messages we are given; the communication from Spirit that shows up in forms we fail to recognize?

It is not yet clear what the outcome to my personal story mentioned above will be, but of one thing I am certain; “to thine self be true.”

Blessings,

Sheryl  

Becoming

“I must be willing to give up what I am in order to become what I will be.”                                                    Albert Einstein

Such was the quote that I posted on the Timeless Water’s Facebook page. Based on the number of “likes,” it was evident that I was not alone in recognizing the degree to which I get in my own way when it comes to personal transformation.

In response, I posted a reference to the hidden beliefs that shape our lives and realities being like bars on a window. We look through the bars not even seeing them or realizing they are of our own making. I had hoped people would respond with the same shared recognition. No, not so much….

After writing Timeless Waters, rather than seeking to promote it, I spent the next few years considering what, after having this remarkable experience, I was really going to do with it. As I began to delve further into the reality I am creating in this lifetime and the parallels it holds with other lifetimes I can recall, it dawned on me that this lifetime is where the rubber meets the road. In fact, it’s really the only one I have to work with! So why not start there?

So why is it so hard to give up who we are in order to become what we will be?

The usual things come to mind: fear of change, not seeing an outer edge to our comfort zone, and old habits die hard. All so very true for me! But there’s more. To a degree, the person I hold myself to me is just a set of ideas rather than a fixed way of being, or change would be impossible.  That recognition then leads one to ask: what are these ideas that shape us and as well as our lives? They are beliefs; beliefs we often don’t even know we have.

The notion that we create our own realities is not a new one, but we most often operate in the realm of conscious thought when applying that idea to our own lives. Yet there is so much more behind our conscious awareness that is shaping who we are. Giving up what we are in order to become what we can be, in essence, requires letting go of the idea we have created about ourselves. That can be some tough work, and it begins with understanding beliefs.

Ram Dass wrote “there is a grief that occurs when who you thought you were begins to disappear.” But on the other side is the person we will be, and that is well worth it, is it not?

Blessings,

Sheryl

Look for Sheryl’s workbook, You Hold the Key to You: Beliefs, Reality and Your Incarnational Past, in early 2013.

Patterns

           If you have read Timeless Waters, you are already aware that it is a story of what felt like a space-time convergence leading to the discovery of three different lifetimes. These lifetimes spanned several hundred years and were all related to a specific location in New Mexico. What an experience it was! And while finding clues and documentation supporting my dreams and intuitions is what made the ride so unbelievable, it was the recognition of reincarnational patterns that has impacted my life the most. The stories, while relevant in their own right, are simply the backdrop; they are the vehicle through which the patterns are demonstrated. The patterns are what we carry with us through space and time, beckoning us to seek understanding.

            What I am still learning, however, is that just because I know about the patterns, and have detailed knowledge about other incarnations related to those patterns, it doesn’t mean I get to be finished with the pattern. The older I get, the more I see that life patterns are like an onion. You make your way through one layer of the human experience and shed your skin, only to find with the passage of time that—oh, there is it again in the next layer! And so it goes over the decades.

            One of my patterns is loss. It has come up over and over again in a variety of forms. Success in dealing with this pattern is not going to be demonstrated by the eradication of loss in my life and a cheer from above that I finally figured it out. Rather, it is about how I respond.

            I once heard someone say that life lessons are just that; for life. They are the crux of the work we as individuals are here to do, and no one is exempt. The challenge then, is to recognize what is happening when faced with your own particular pattern and each time you are, reach deeper understanding of the wisdom that can be gained from the experience—even when it renders you a pile of rubble.

            I write this as a reminder to myself as much as anyone else, as I am yet again faced with the challenge of one of my patterns. I know the past lifetime that the pattern relates to, and I even know the players. Yet I still struggle, as do we all. Does this mean we are failures or somehow less evolved? I don’t think so. It means we are here, having a human experience, engaged in the work we came into this life to do. 

Blessings,

Sheryl  

Changing the World

I recently had a conversation with a lovely woman who is entering the field of energetic medicine and healing. She said it had been pointed out to her that her new work was really about changing the world, and what a big responsibility that was. This made me smile; her background was in a social work related field, and in my opinion, she was already changing the world!

I do have to agree, however; changing the world is a big responsibility. But is this monumental task left in the hands of a mere few? Echoing what I wrote last month in “Spirit Work,” our very lives are Spirit at work; yours and mine, from the Reiki Masters and gurus to the plumbers and cashiers at the gas station. Changing the world can’t happen at the hands of a few designees. It’s going to take everyone, or at least enough of us to create a critical mass.

This, of course, is part of the Paradigm Shift. The question is, how can we contribute to this shift? Sorry folks, we can’t all take to the vortexes of Sedona to live the life of the mystics. And what would happen to the world if we did?

The real answer to the question of how we change the world is not very glamorous or even mystical. When I say what I’m about to say, my sons would say “Mom is getting all Man in the Mirror,” but Michael Jackson’s lyrics were right: “take a look at yourself and make a change.”

The most critical place we can start is with ourselves. We can begin to get honest about our own inner conflicts, control dramas, and fears. We can begin to evaluate the realities we are creating every day and the hidden beliefs and assumptions we hold that create those realities. It is only then that we can begin to understand why “reality” exists as it does and begin the alter it- from the inside out.

That’s how we change the world.

*The song "Man in the Mirror" was written and composed by Glen Ballard and Siedah Garrett.

Spirit Work

There are those in this world who have chosen to take the “spiritual path,” by which I mean their focus and how they make their livelihoods is based in what we might call “spiritual work”. A part of me yearns to be one of them, and has for the better part of two decades. As a result, I became a massage therapist that intuitively incorporated energy work, I learned Reiki, I taught meditation groups, I have written a book. For heaven’s sake, I’m writing this.
 
But you know what? I am a social worker by education and profession. I love it, and quite frankly am good at what I do. Most important, it pays the bills! I am a woman torn between two lovers; torn between the reality of supporting my family and a life I view as the equivalent of communing with the divine while living on a mountain top away from stress, …..Deep sigh.
 
Snap out of it, Sheryl! The reality is that our very lives are Spirit Work.
 
There have been years that my connection with Spirit was blatantly evident by the amazing experiences I was having; Timeless Waters as a prime example. Then I have had years of what seemed like very little connection to Spirit; on the treadmill of life, day in- day out responsibilities. These are times when Marilyn (aka Malory in TW) would ask if “anything was coming through” psychically or if I had been working on Timeless Waters. My answer would be “No, I guess I’m just living it.”
 
Every part of our lives is Spirit made manifest; from mowing the lawn to answering the email from your boss to paying the water bill to tucking your kids into bed at night. And on the many days that I am rushing out of the house at 7:45 in the morning to get to work without the opportunity to meditate, I find myself in the car saying “Spirit, I didn’t get any time to connect, but I am you made manifest—help me hear you today.”
 
It’s when we realize that the very fabric of our lives is Spirit Work that life gets richer. It’s where we find empathy for others. It’s where we find wisdom and understanding, and it’s where we begin to get a glimpse of what it means to live a physical life on the earth plane.
 
Rich work indeed.

Journey of Self

There are forms of adventure that are the opposite of thrusting one's self outward.  They are quiet, perhaps unobservable to the outside world, and sometiems so subtle that one doesn't know the magnitude until  it has already passed.  Such is the journey of Self - the multidimensional self; the totality of who we are.