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I am reading Earnest Hemingway’s book The Old Man and the Sea.In my 50 + years I have never read that book. It popped up on my son’s reading list for next year so I decided I better read it so we could discuss it. In a way it is a strange book in that it involves a different culture than we in the United States live in; a simpler life, a life that involves getting up, drinking some coffee and going to work. No spouse, no children (except the boy who was apprenticed to the Old Man, a very helpful child), coming home eating a little, maybe reading the paper and going to sleep. It is a rather predictable life, one without very many obligations. But even in that life, he is still hit with a major life challenge. He wrestles with a huge fish and after catching it and strapping it to his boat the sharks come up and eat it! All he takes home is a skeleton. How ironic.

Is his life really that different from our daily lives? We get up and usually have a more elaborate morning routine than just drinking coffee. Then we go to work and wrestle with problems and people (usually not fish). Every once in a while we have a major event in our lives, a dark day of the soul if you like, that we have to wrestle with and either come out victorious or it kills us; it may not kill us literally but it may kill our spirit.

Usually these types of events end up changing the person involved. The involved person, evolves. This is where Hemingway lost his chance at a more in depth character development. How did this experience change the old man?

This idea of character change is very interesting to me. Jane Austin does a good job of showing the evolution of her characters in her book Sense & Sensibility.That is one of my favorite books because it portrays real well how a person is always growing and changing as they work through the major challenges in his/her life.

Don’t think of the hardships in your life as limiting you. Think of them as changing you so you will be better equipped to change your world.

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Shakti Gawain has a couple of workbooks that I have used in the past and continue to use even now. I bought Living in the Light Workbook (which is actually a supplement to her Living in the Light: A Guide to Personal and Planetary Transformationbook) and The Creative Visualization Workbook (which is a supplement to the book Creative Visualization: Use the Power of Your Imagination to Create What You Want in Your Life (Gawain, Shakti)) when I was going through a yearlong depression in 1992. I was seeing a psychologist but it was not work with her that made the breakthrough it was my work through these workbooks that had the most impact.

In Living in the Light Workbook: Guide to Personal and Planetary Transformation, Shakti leads you through a number of exercises to help you access your intuition. In our western world we are often taught to ignore our intuition from an early age. This intuition is very valuable and really needs to be a part of your life. This workbook requires a lot of writing and some drawing but it is great at accessing your intuition in a number of areas of your life and through different techniques. Some of the section headings are “The World as our Mirror”, “Feelings”, “and Daily Life” etc.

The Creative Visualization Workbook: Second Edition (Gawain, Shakti) provides a lot of examples and some simple techniques leading you through the creative visualization process. The book is divided into 5 sections with each section leading you through different areas of you life such as setting goals, clearing out negative belief systems, looking at each individual area of your life and connecting with your intuition and creativity. This is meant to be a fun workbook and it is.

If you are searching for answers in your life, these are some great workbooks to use.

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I feel I need constant reassurance that God is there and cares about what is going on down here on the material plane. Sometimes I think God is only concerned with the Spiritual.

But no, the spiritual and the material are both tied together. The spiritual is important because it continues after the material is gone, after the physical is gone, after the relationships are gone. All these; physical (health), relationships, and material (wealth), are reflections of the spiritual or the ongoing soul.

Are they different aspects of the soul?

It is like a bud that cannot contain itself any longer and it burst out into a flower; that is what the spirit is doing. It bursts out into something you can sense better, something physical be it a relationship, wealth or health. Sometimes the spirit is troubled or not on the right path. I hate using the word ‘right’ as there is no true wrong or right path, it is more of not being true to whom you are (a child of God) and things we don’t like crop up in our lives. This is a form of manifesting.

The spirit is an energetic force, a vibration. This force creates feelings and emotions. These feelings can have a direct impact on our health. Many illnesses have been linked to negative emotions.

Our relationships are definitely linked to our emotions. Try to have a close relationship without any emotions! It won’t happen. You may have positive or negative emotions but you will have emotions.

For the physical, the new rage is the law of attraction and that involves feelings. You attract more of what you are feeling into your life. If you are feeling hopeful and optimistic more comes to you to give you hope and optimism. If you are feeling worried and scared more comes to you to emphasize those feeling.

We are constantly evolving personally and as a species. It can’t be helped. We are all generating things on this earth, that is why nothing ever stays the same but all is constantly changing.

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In the past I have written a lot about change. This is not the jingle in your pocket but change in life.

Last year I was constantly seeing number sequences, this started in February 2009. Usually I would get the urge to look at the clock. At first (according to Doreen Virtue’s book Healing With The Angels)the sequence revolved around change, preparing me for a change, some big change. I had no idea what that change could be.

Then around November 2009 the sequencing changed and the meaning was that change was immanent. I kept anticipating that change. But now I believe it has occurred.

For one thing I have not seen any sequencing that points toward change for several months and the second thing was that I experienced a major change more than two months ago. Lying in bed one night, I awoke in a panic but this time I started thinking how I have had some form of fear all my life. I went back through my life, checking into the major fears I had during each life phase. Then I thought about my past lives that I knew about and the fear that was present in them. It was then that I realized I would always have something to be afraid of so I decided that was ridiculous. At that point calm crept over me starting in my legs and spreading upwards. I have not written about it until now because I wanted to make sure it would last and it was the immanent change I was waiting for.

Since then I have still been seeing number sequences but they are related to something else; manifesting. That is a whole different topic.

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If you could manifest anything, would you? I have heard of some ‘masters’ in India who can create out of thin air. The things they create can be quite valuable, gold items, exotic gems etc and all of these they give away. Yes some of the items created have been tested and found to be of the highest quality.

I don’t believe any of these people live a life of opulence. Even though they can create what ever they want they don’t create much of anything for themselves. That in itself seems to give them less credence in our materialistic world. I can hear it now “If they are so great and can create what ever they want, why don’t they live in a palace?”

Think about it a little. If you could create what ever you wanted, when ever you wanted, would you be in any hurry about creating any more than you really need. I don’t think I would. The pressure would be off. I would know I could have food, housing, clothing anything I needed whenever I wanted it so I would have no need to create it right now. I would have more fun creating ‘trinkets’ for others and giving them away, just like these people do.

There is so much material available concerning manifesting and the law of attraction. Much of the material is being rediscovered from published works in the early 1900’s. It does seem that what the masses concentrate on comes about. This makes me wonder if more and more people will be able to manifest what they want at will. Maybe this is the great change that the December 2012 date is pointing toward. It is interesting to contemplate. The whole dynamics of society would change.

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Yesterday I wrote about how saying certain words out loud with enthusiasm can make you feel better. Then I wrote about how your facial expression can lead your feeling, in-other-words, your feelings don’t have to lead your facial expression.

Today I want to throw in another possibility. If you can change your attitude by changing your facial expression does that also work with other characteristics that are expressions of who you are? The one that comes to mind is graphology, or handwriting analysis. The way you write can tell a lot about you. It can say if you are honest, if you are hiding something, if you can keep a secret, it can even tell someone if you have a bent toward wealth. If you can change your handwriting, can you change your characteristics? I believe you can.

This world is very symbolic. That is why if you tend to see the negative in things, more will come to you that is negative. If you are feeling stuck in some area of you life, you toilet starts clogging or the garage door starts to bind and get stuck. Your hand writing is just another symbol of your life.

It is not easy to change your handwriting. I have tried. I have practiced making certain letters a certain way but I tend to fall back to my normal writing when actually using the letter. When I allow myself to feel the emotion associated with that letter formation, I do make the letter easier. I think there is some basis to this but just like in yesterday’s blog with the man learning the facial muscles and expressions; it takes a lot of concentration and work. I will keep working on it and see if that one change takes place in my writing and in my life.

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I have been really into positive thinking lately. Recently I have realized how negative my thoughts had become. It was like I was swimming in a sea of negativity. I have been determined to change things.

By changing your thoughts you can change your life. Do something with me right now. Say the word ‘Awesome’. Now stand up and say it with feeling ‘AWESOME’. Did you feel a shift in energy? I know someone who did a lot of stage presentations and he said that he would stand in front of a mirror before going on and say ‘AWESOME’ with feeling three times. Another good word to say before you have a presentation or meeting is ‘YES’. Say that if front a mirror three times with hand movements and excitement and you will definitely have a shift. If you actually did that, don’t you feel better?

There are many ways to shift your attitude. I read about a person who started experimenting with facial expressions. You have heard that smiling can lift your spirits. Well he had heard that also and wanted to learn more. This person learned about all the different muscles in the face. He discovered which muscles created which expressions. But he did not stop there. He and a colleague developed facial exercises to learn to work each muscle individually! He found that when he moved the correct muscles to make a specific expression, he experienced the corresponding emotion in his body! Isn’t that wild? There is basis to ‘smile and you will feel better’.

This led me to think about other ways that can change our feelings or even our character. I will go into that tomorrow.

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Yesterday I wrote on the benefits of suffering. I talked briefly about the superficial benefits of suffering; the attention, the pampering, the excuse for not doing something you don’t want to do. I wanted to expand on this some.
Some people experience suffering in all its glory (it may feel more like gory at the time) and they are molded and changed by the experience. Others only seem to experience the superficial benefits of suffering and may even become bitter from the experience. Why the two different reactions?

I have head it said that there are two types of clay. One type of clay when left in the sun gets soft and moldable; the other clay will get hard and brittle. You see, hardship and suffering may not necessarily build character but it sure reveals it. An amusing example of this is to consider two golfers. How does each react on the course? One may get angry with each poor shot, blaming the course, blaming the designer, blaming the water trap, blaming his clubs. The other golfer sees the challenge the course lays out and takes the opportunity to improve his game. The second golfer may make the same poor shots the first one did but he will handle it differently. One sees it as the world is against him, the other sees it as an opportunity to experiment and learn.

Which type are you? Are you flexible and open, willing to learn? Or are you hard and brittle and stuck in your ways, seeing everything and everyone as being against you. You may not realize it, but you have a choice.

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Did you know that suffering has benefits? I am not talking about the surface ‘benefits’ that are not true benefits. You know what I mean; benefits such as attention, being catered to, having an excuse. These can actually prevent you from obtaining the true benefit of suffering.

Are you confused yet? Suffering that comes from hardships and illness can have a major positive impact on a person’s life. Yes of the impact is judged as bad but a lot of it is actually desirable. This suffering builds character; it creates a means for growth. True spirituality and insights can come to the person who goes through such a trial.

Our society tries real hard to eliminate the benefit of suffering. We pity the person. We try to make the person more comfortable sometimes to the point of knocking them out with drugs. We don’t even want to mention or acknowledge the problems a person is suffering through – to their face. Oh we talk to everyone else about it but if we come face to face with this person we tend to talk about superficial things like the weather.

The sufferer has much insight to give us on what is truly important but we have to be willing to listen.

When the sufferer finally comes through to the other side of their suffering you will often hear comments from them such as “I could not pay me a million dollars to do that again but nor would I take a million dollars to give up that experience.”

As a society, we need to honor our suffering and look for the benefits we can obtain in it. If you are in the midst of a suffering cycle right now, know that there are benefits. You may not be able to see them now. But when you are finally able to distance yourself from the current pain and it is all in the past, you will be able to look back and find the diamonds the experience left you with.

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Have you ever ‘known’ something was going to happen – and it did? There have been times I saw a door prize and ‘knew’ it was mine. I would be out of my seat and about to head to the front before my name was even called. I always wondered if I was creating the event or exercising intuition.

This can also apply to unpleasant events. Once my husband and I were outside watching our two-year-old ride his new bike. I was close to the house and Paul was by the end of the drive where there was a three foot drop into the bar-ditch full of muddy water. Jesse had ridden to within five feet of where Paul was and stopped. I ‘knew’ Jesse was going to head for the ditch but I thought ‘Paul’s there and will stop him’. Sure enough, Jesse gave a little banzai scream and headed for the ditch, and Paul just stood there. I was pretty frustrated with Paul at the time (we ended up in the emergency room – but Jesse was ok). But now I think I was picking up on intuition about that event when Paul was not.

Then there are the times I just knew it was time; time to get a job, time to go on a retreat. The feeling was one of resignation, a letting down of an energy that was keeping the status quo. As soon as I let the energy down the event happened. For example: I had moved to Austin with my new husband and had been searching for a job. One day while driving around I felt it was time to get a job. There was an energy shift. When I got home, I received a call from some one who had received my resume and I knew from their tone that they were going to hire me. Another time, my husband had talked me into signing up for a 3 day retreat. This was a women’s retreat that had a six month waiting list. I was not totally sold on going when I signed up but two weeks later while driving around town I decided it was time and I really did need to go on this retreat. When I got home, my sponsor called and said there was a cancellation for the retreat happening that weekend and could I go! As soon as my shift in thought or energy occurred the event happened!

I have been playing with shifting energy lately and it is hard. The resistant energy resides at the bottom of my heart and just above my stomach. I can feel it. But letting it go is difficult. I can’t seem to force it to leave; I have to let it go or release it. I would be interested in knowing of other people’s experiences.

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