Trust the Truth of What You Feel

Dear Friends,

When the glamor fades and the complexity is dissolved, the true, the necessary and the important can come forth. We are all like crows, attracted to 'shiny', and like children, sometimes impressed by big words and bamboozled by complex ideas. Disasters often hide some essential truth in their complexity, yet can also bring to light a deeper truth, as in who your friends really are and what matters most. If we can look beyond, not under the rubble, there is some truth that is trying to be born.

It's more simple than the complexity that's trying to hide it. It's less glamorous than many solutions currently offered.

What lies deeper in our current crisis is how we've allowed others to make money off our needs and wants. Our eyes have been bigger than our stomachs, our wants larger than our pocketbooks. We have trusted in the glamor of credit cards and the complexity of loans to 'make' our lives better when they don't really work. We have believed in a system that says you can just borrow and pay it back later. We have done that and now truth comes, knocks on our door and says now we owe more than we ever realized we would.

We are in an energy crisis. We have been trying to get our energy from something outside of ourselves. We've all been taught this so it's not a crime, just something that maybe we're ready to be done with. Maybe it really is time for a change in how we see ourselves and how we can take responsibility for ourselves in a new world that's different than the old. We are trying to birth a new world and the old one is crumbling down around our ankles, catching many of us with our pants down.

All the energy you will ever need is inside you. We have been taught it's outside of us, in another country even, but it's not. It's in us, in you and in me. We are self generating energy machines and we can learn how to nourish ourselves and not feed off of others.

How to even begin? Trust is what can take us to the truth of what we believe. When we really feel into what we believe, we can parse out the falsities and discard the 'shiny' for a more real perspective. It can feel overwhelming and strange, to trust yourself. Each of us will never know everything, yet we can begin to feel what is right and what is true. I can feel what's right for me. You can feel what's true for you. We can respect our differences and our commonalities. We can come clean about our childish whims and act now with greater compassion and responsibility.

We can step into the now and feel out the truth of what's before us, step by step. There are big problems all around us and fear like a hungry wolf stalks us daily, especially if you listen to the news. Yet what lies deeper is a new world trying to be born in each and every one of us. You are the awakening consciousness of the new world. One breath at a time, one day at a time, one truth at a time. This is the only way it can happen. In you are the keys and the opportunity to be part of the present and thus a path to all our future. It's not going to come from outside of us (even if the aliens land!).
We can do this, I can do this, you can do this.

Listen, it's speaking now, like a whisper in the trees.

Blessings,

Laurel

Opening a Heart Space

On the last post, I wrote about the heart and the mind and how their perceptions are very different. For most of us, getting out of our minds into our hearts is not easy. We are very used to living in our thoughts and only allow ourselves to feel something occasionally. A feeling may surprise us into tears or laughter. We may even daydream about feeling something strongly but don’t actually let ourselves go there, to feel it.

This was a long road home for me. My Mom was the overly emotional type who was always in tears about something. My Dad, being the practical and logical type, dealt with the world through his head. Being shamed for crying too much, I tried to be like my Dad. It looked easier. Don’t feel, don’t cry, don’t even talk about it. Zip it! Or at least hide until the crying stops.

Yet I was the super sensitive person who felt everything, especially with nature. So I spent alot of time outside, thank goodness, with the flowers, trees and animals. My healing process began when I allowed myself to feel, as scary and overwhelming as that was. There was no trust of what I felt and it was painful and scary to feel I was becoming my Mom. With people I trusted, I cried. I began to feel the dismissed hurts, the minimized needs and unmet wants I’d had as a child. It felt surreal at times and I questioned my sanity. Do I really have to do this? It was a way back, I’m sure not the only way, but because I sat with those who respected my tears and feelings, I began to do the same. I had spent most of my life discounting, minimizing or avoiding how I felt. Sounds familiar?

Culturally, we regard the mind and our thoughts as the supreme answer to eveything. Yet when it comes to some things, it falls so short. I have witnessed this especially in parenting. A 4 year old child asks a question and the parent tells her an answer that is just a mental explanation. Children under seven don’t understand the difference between fantasy and reality and are not cognitively very developed yet. The answer given doesn’t access the feeling level the child lives in so the child continues to ask the question or seek an answer. The parent gives a linear, logical answer to an emotionally based child. You can see the gears spinning in a child’s head as they try to understand what is being shared. You can feel the disappointment in the child’s heart. So a child is taught to process everything mentally (ie safely) as soon as they are able. Children don’t want their parents to feel uncomfortable and learn to suppress, parents want their children to be happy.

This is not an uncommon story, mine or the child’s. Yet nowdays we hear alot about emotional intelligence. How can we raise ourselves and our children to be astute emotionally? We begin by allowing ourselves to listen to what we feel right now.

Let yourself feel whatever you are feeling. This makes sense and sounds so easy, but try it when your mind comes storming in and says if you feel this, you’re going off the deep end, or making a mountain out of a molehill, or you just don’t have time for this right now. The minds’ job is to keep you safe so now it shames you just like your parents did. Intellectuallizing, explaining, shaming, whatever works to keep you safe from feeling that hurt like when you were a child. Now the mind runs riot over you and doesn’t allow you to feel any at all, or just the ‘good’ ones.
If we open our hearts to all of who we are, this is not some fantasy daydream world. This is deep dark soil where the loam of the new you can be born. Born out of the patience and persistence to own all of what’s in you, light and dark, up and down, you begin to piece together the fragmented emotional body. You begin to own a clearer sense of what works for you. You don’t feel everyone elses feelings and not your own. You live in you, not through others. You begin to know how to feed yourself because you know how you feel about what’s in front of you, or know to take the time to feel it out.

Here the mystery is regained; the fullness of trust in self. This is what it takes, step by step, allowing yourself the gift of this next feeling to grow compassion for yourself and thus for others. We all want to be compassionate people yet our minds are often not. Learning to live truthfully and listen to our emotions begins to bridge the way back to the heart. This is a feminine (not female) way. This honors the half of each of us that is now ready to come forward to take a place in the world. This is true intelligence, a clear heart supported by the subservient mind.

Blessings,

Laurel

The Call for Change- Monday, August 25, 2008

As the US political parties gear up for our Presidential elections and everyone is calling for change, I want to propose a call for change also. We’ve not just had 8 years of movement backwards, we’ve had lifetimes of it. It’s time to really move forward by staying in the same place and not doing anything! It’s time to take your life back.

For thousands of years we have left the garden believing we can use our minds to solve our problems. For lifetimes we have left behind the heart as our personal ruler, falsely believing it could not understand enough, fight the fear enough, to save us from the spin put on the world.

The heart is considered weak, ineffective, not really having the power to change our world.
The mind tells us it has the answers, it can solve the problems we face, yet it hasn’t and can’t. More information and more manipulation of information never solves anything. More details about our fears doesn’t change our fear. We’re given a false sense of security to having more and doing more and knowing more yet we are only really content and secure when we’re seeing the world through our hearts.

The mind has held dominion over our hearts and poisoned our view of what it is and the power it has. Maybe the fall of man is just this, the takeover of command by the mind, leading us to be puppets to information and fear. Our current world is all about fearmongering and scarcity. We no longer see the truth of the abundance of our planet and our lives and so this falsehood is perpetuated and we see our world destroying itself. Man can only solve the problems he has created, giving himself the illusion of control.

We attempt to remain mentally positive and generate some good feedback from that yet the foundation of that is not grounded. The heart’s view unfolds a true reality, the mind’s realities only appear real. We easily slip back into fear and trying and work even harder at believing that we can affirm our reality to be what we desire.

I’m not saying that postive thoughts aren’t beneficial, because we know they work alot of the time. Just not all the time. Why? Well because we’ve been taught that we are less than, not enough and weak, etc and the mind doesn’t want to lose control so it sabotoges the love we really are so we’re constantly working at our lives. Maybe you don’t believe that anymore so now it generates distrust of others or your safety in the world. It looks like a gerbil on a wheel and feels like it also. It’s time to get off the wheel dear ones.

“Consider the lillies of the fields, they toil not.” Why? They know they are love, as do the animals and the trees and the earth. Really. Honest. When you are in love, the whole world looks and feels very different. How about us? Who are we?

The trees teach us we are the masters and commanders of our lives, that we are LOVE incarnate. Through the love we hold for ourselves, our lives and our planet, we open to a higher understanding of what we are here for and how to live on this planet. Yet we don’t know how to do this because the mind, which is supposed to be our servant (a brilliant one at that) has become the master and commander. It lies to us about how ineffective the heart is to maintain control.

In the teaching from the Council of Trees, the heart is our center and holds seven levels of understanding and power. It is the key. It informs the foundation of who we are and how we are in the world. It provides us with safety and security because it connects us to the deeper rhythms of all of nature and the universe. When you are in your heart, you lead your life without judgment and you want what’s best for all, naturally. You sit in your heart, BEING all of who you are, having the natural intelligence of the universe creatively avaliable to you. The heart generates trust and the world responds in trust of you. As the heart is present in time, fears from the past and of the future are neutralized. You go home to Eden, to heaven on Earth. From this place you can respond to life with care and wisdom, drawing from a deeper intelligence, the one of your heart. The mind becomes a good servant, as it was originally intended to be, and relaxes, no longer spinning tales of doom and gloom.

This is a change I believe in. This is the only way that works in my life. A thousand years of peace begins in you and reverberates through your family and around the globe. We can do it, saving ourselves and our planet through our love and compassion.

Blessings,

Laurel

Direct from The Council of Trees- Friday, June 20, 2008

Looking at the evolutionary history on our Gaia, we see that many species of plants and animals have come and then gone extinct. You may be glad there are no dinosaurs nowadays yet reasonably concerned with the rumors that the bees are beginning to leave.

Please understand that every plant and animal here carries a vibrational frequency that benefits the whole. We said ‘Benefits the Whole’. Let’s leave the subject of humans until later, for as you can imagine, this is questionable.

So each polar bear, each honey bee, every plant and tree carries a frequency that allows the whole planet to stay in balance. As the planet evolved, some animals and plants left, some evolved into more complex species and some stayed the same. There is no coincidence here and there have been no mistakes. All the animals and the plants on the Earth hold the frequency of renewal and rejuvenation for each other. There is an unseen cooperative system here that happens on all levels of being: physical and energetic.

Humans have come to think of themselves as being beyond their bodies and separate from nature and their Mother. Nothing is further from the truth. Even with all the knowledge of ecology, humans tend to ‘think’ themselves separate, literally! Thinking has been very beneficial for humans for planning and executing complex tasks and creations, yet it has become the dominant way of being. Humans stay in their heads and forget their bodies and senses, distancing themselves from the very help they desperately need for health on all levels.
When birds sing creation awake in the morning, they are literally doing just that! When animals buzz, caw, huff, mew and bark they are singing their species and a frequency and partnership that all participate in. Even animals that don’t make noises that humans hear are in constant communication through the wavelength they resonate on.

Humans have stopped listening and few are resonating in partnership to benefit the whole. It’s not only that we don’t hear nature around us, it’s that we don’t hear OURSELVES. We are at war with ourselves and therefore with the whole planet. We can try to ’save’ the planet but the planet will die without us! We are inheriting the dominion of the earth now and we are to be responsible for carrying the frequency of health and cooperation for the whole planet. Let me repeat that:

We are inheriting the dominion of the earth now and we are to be responsible for carrying the frequency of health and cooperation for the whole planet.

We tend to see nature as self-regenerating and self-sufficient and come up with simple (or complex) solutions to save the planet. Yet we are the ones who are lost and we are the ones that need saving!! Denying our bodies, our feelings and our senses; the frequency we put out to the rest of the planet doesn’t support life. Sending out a meditative wave once a month or even every morning doesn’t make up for living in your mental body all day long. Thinking needs to begin to take a back seat to feeling (which can be accessed through breathing) and being present to nature’s resonance.

We know this is not easy. It is an unused skill and can seem unnecessary even. Yet the only real way to save the planet is to take this all very, very personally. Fight the war within yourself, otherwise it is projected outside of you. Be present with yourself so that nature can speak to you, commune with you and heal you. Yes, there will be painful and sad times. Take responsibility for healing yourself by being present to what is yours. Learn to love yourself and to have compassion for yourself. This simple act will do more for the total health of the planet than you can ever imagine!

Wash the thousands of lifetimes of each human on this sacred planet with forgiveness and compassion. Begin with your own. This is what will ’save’ our Mother, this is what will save us.

Blessings,

The Council

Comments:

What exactly does this mean? We are inheriting the dominion of the earth? ruling power, authority, control? This is a huge responsibility, and true. We all need to hear this and respond with gratitude, strength and the ability to persevere with great determination in all our thoughts and actions. We do need to come from our hearts in all our daily tasks and choices to give this earth a beautiful and healthy future now. Thank you for the reminder, let us wake up and shape up!!
Asia
Hi Asia,
I felt overwhelmed after this message came through. I knew there was a part of me that wanted to see the Earth as just doing fine without me so I could think I wasn’t responsible. But that’s the point of this message..it’s important to be part of the Earth, to heal ourselves and allow that new level of connection to guide us in our ecological efforts. We can’t control the Earth any more than we can control each other. We can foster health and strength through understanding and respect. We are part of the ecology of the Earth and our planet will represent our health and wisdom or our dis-ease. We choose with every conscious breath we take. Laurel