A Changed Heart Can Change The World

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By Jillian

My 17-year-old daughter recently spent a week in Mexico building a house for a single mother with six children. She went on the trip through Live Different, a non-profit organization dedicated to hosting Canadian high school students on humanitarian trips to build facilities for people in need around the world. Last year, she went to the Dominican Republic, which was still in the throes of intense trauma from the Haitian earthquake. Her trip included a heart breaking day spent in the local garbage dump, picking out recycled products from the trash with locals who do this every day to feed their families.

With these two experiences, my daughter’s compassionate humanitarian heart has been awakened by the local people she’s met from these struggling countries. It’s amazing what her group has accomplished in a very short time frame to make these people’s difficult lives easier. She’s also been profoundly touched and inspired by them. The children are open, friendly, affectionate, and their parents self contained, grateful, hard working, and humble. She’s fallen in love with the people she is “serving” and, in the exchange, been served herself.

She has formed connected, passionate, and close relationships with her fellow students on these trips. United by the pay offs of hard work and generosity, these students become a “family”, connected not by blood but by heart. A deep intimacy forms between them, a palpable one even to those of us not there, that seems to transcend beyond just the shared experience but becomes one of the shared value of living in the moment- loving, laughing, feeling, doing, giving, receiving, experiencing.

Removed from the routines of school and the distractions of technology, they are present to each other and to life. It’s no surprise that deep romantic relationships form from the trips as two souls normally busy with school and social pressures are freed up to see each others’ true heart, authentic spirit, and feel bravely supported to pursue love. Indeed, love and connection become the priority.

I’ve found myself deeply inspired and captivated by my daughter and her friends as they share and digest from their trip. They are like a bonfire, alive with their experience and their connection with each other. I’ve learned from them and felt my own inner 17 year old come alive in response to their desires and passion. I wish that their and our daily lives could offer this sort of transformational experience all the time with every moment felt as a meaningful one.

I feel that the Divine invites us to experience life this way; to let in love; to feel passion; to allow our desires to arise; to serve; to receive. That we can go on a “trip” any moment to share our hearts and our gifts in exchange with others. We can prioritize intimacy and connection; we can feel alive and purposeful rather than deadened by routine, obligation, and achievement. We can appreciate life as a gift rather than a burden.

Thank you to my daughter, her friends, and the Live Different folks for bringing this reminder of the sacred nature of life and the human heart this week.

Petropolis: Stopping The Tar Sands

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Every Canadian…every consumer of gas, should watch Petropolis, a film from Green Peace that offers a stunning aerial perspective on the Alberta tar sands. There’s very little narration as miles and miles of scarred, gouged, poisoned, and stripped land are juxtaposed against pristine and breathtakingly beautiful images of the still untouched acres of the Boreal Forest.

The abuses of our land, of our planet, so poignantly demonstrate how we are out of balance as a species- expressing our male shadow side…..achievement-based, short-sighted, dominating, and greedy….following urges and unchecked impulses in masochistic and saddistic ways without feeling compassion, remorse, or the bigger context of the impact it has on our world and the world our children will inherit from us.

While watching this film, I often gasped, near tears, “How can we let this happen to our earth?”, shocked by the destruction and devastation depicted in the images. Wayne replied (also disgusted but less shocked because he had seen these tar sand images before), “Out of sight is out of mind for most people. Remember too that the Tar Sands are a really lucrative industry for Canada.”

This film puts what is out of sight into the mind and, hopefully, into the heart and into the awakening consciousness happening around the world. Yes the demand is there for fossil fuels and it can be answered this way…but at what long-term cost for such temporary gain?

Information below is from the film’s website about the dangerous effects of this relatively new and expensive (the cost much beyond a financial one) means of meeting the world’s demands for and ever decreasing supplies of oil:

Located beneath 4.3 million hectares of boreal forest in Alberta, Canada, the tar sands are a mixture of sand, clay and a heavy crude oil called bitumen that is either mined in open pits or extracted from underground by injecting superheated water.

Getting the oil out of the tar sands uses roughly three barrels of water per barrel of oil, or as much water as a city of two million people. After use in tar sands processing, 90 per cent of this water is so contaminated with toxic chemicals that it must be stored in tailings ponds so huge that they can be seen from outer space.

Tar sands oil production releases five times more greenhouse gases than conventional oil production. Tar sands projects will release an estimated 40 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent in 2007 and ensure that Canada will continue to be one of the worst greenhouse gas emitters per capita in the world. – From Petropolis

The Collapse: Helping Us Find Our Way

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By Wayne

For over a year now, investors around the world are holding their breath watching the drama unfold over whether the Greek Parliament will choose to default on its’ debt or instead to ‘kick the can down the road’ by complying with the IMF’s crushing austerity demands in return for yet another ‘loan.’ Everyone in this power play knows, but won’t admit, that the newly loaned money cannot – and will not – be paid back. So, why all the fuss getting Greece to accept new loan money? Because this would buy a bit more time and delay the seemingly inevitable collapse a bit longer. It would buy a bit more time to scramble for a bigger scrap of control or power.

Authorities are ever reluctant to simply state what they know, especially in this case with Greece: ‘This ship will sink.’ When a leader hits a wall and can’t get through it, their leadership is in complete jeopardy and the power advantages that come with it. A true and genuine leader should be able to say, ‘I’ve hit a wall and don’t know the way through, but I’m looking for it.’ This admission, this confession, would be honest and transparent, but would also probably cost the leader their following. People generally choose the leader who gives them best feelings, even if (and especially if) they are not based in reality.

The Bigger Picture is not:

The bigger picture is not just about the economic collapse of Greece and all the dominoes that would fall as a result of it; or the global unrest of the Arab Spring countries; or the riots that just occurred here in Vancouver over our beloved Hockey (the way we Canadians like to relate with our suppressed rage); or about our contracting economies; or Obama’s ever expanding wars; or our oil reserves drying up; or mother nature’s unprecedented (in our lifetime at least) droughts, floods, tornadoes, tsunami’s and nuclear catastrophes; or the mass animal deaths that have occurred this year. The bigger picture is not even just that life as we’ve known it and created it is moving unstoppably now on a conveyor built towards profound change that will affect every last one of us, everywhere.

The Bigger Picture is:

The bigger picture is that what isn’t REAL is collapsing and what is real is being reborn. And if this process doesn’t continue happening, the truth is that you and I don’t really want to be here on this planet.

So what is ‘Real’ ?

Is how you relate to money real? What about how you relate to time? Are your face-to-face friends real? How about your Facebook friends? Is your career and the feelings of security it affords you real?  Is your sense of the Divine real?

‘Real’ – when it all boils down – is about something being ‘Real-er’, as in more real. A walk is more real than playing a video game, for instance. And, more real yet is a walk in a forest over a walk in a shopping mall. More real still is feeling, while being in the walk in the forest, the interconnectedness of all life, instead of focusing on achieving your exercise regimen in less time than yesterday.

Your existence is as much a profound mystery as the thousands of year old trees you and I are conditioned to be mostly oblivious to. But profound mysteries are hard to draw nourishment from, to feel as real, and to let in as things that can make us feel good and alive about ourselves in our everyday lives. So we accept abiding with lesser things as real; we crave drugs and false perspectives to help us get by. Lesser justifications such as ‘I owe, so off to work I go’ or ‘I don’t have the time for that’ or ‘I have to get ahead.’

Here’s where The Collapse comes in.

And, it’s good news.

You and I don’t have a hope in hell of ‘making’ ourselves or others more spiritual, or more contemplative, or more connected to nature, or more engaged in what really matters. The truth is most of our efforts to become more centered or more engaged in what really matters actually achieve the opposite because they are rooted in the belief and culture and lifestyle that we are in fact not fully connected right now to the Divine.

In other words, you cannot become any more connected to the Divine than you already are, but you definitely can become more aware and conscious of that reality, just as you can feel a whole lot less connected to the Divine by making an effort to become closer.

And herein lies the rub: How THEN does that effort to become more conscious of our already existing connection with the Divine not just become another self defeating religion and internal and externally played out conflict?

The truth is we are too deep in the soup of our falsely created world now to find our way out by ourselves. I can’t tell you how we will find our way. I can admit, however, that I can’t tell you, and that’s more than most will afford you. I guess I am a little proud of that fact, and that helps to mask the hurt I feel of feeling so largely alone in this choice, to seek realness over influence.

The Collapse, however, can tell us and lead us in the way out of this soup. It can sort us; it can let die what must die in order for our ‘realer’, ever emerging, truer us be given the permission to arise.

The chaos and hell you and I and this planet are about to go through can only be felt as arising goodness if we can feel that the collapse is not malevolent (intending to harm us), but rather a passionate and compassionate bringing us back to finding our way.

And when we do find our way, I can assure you, we will look back in gratitude for what we would never have consciously dared to ask for. We will no longer envy our pets for being more connected to nature than we are. We will not be disconnected from each other or from the Divine in the way we have become now.

In the meantime, be kind with yourself and the pressure you are about to feel and are already feeling way more than most people let themselves feel. This is cooperating with the Divine in creation and in sometimes necessary destruction. Cooperation comes in the form of an invitation to connect with your daemon- your divine guide and guardian, who can offer humanity comfort and clarity during these troubled time in our evolution.

I feel this is our true reason for being here on the planet at this time. A time like no other.

Connecting With The Most Sacred (And Defended) Part Of Yourself

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Oh, you resist and you twist. You beg and plead. You promise and you negotiate. You compromise and you sacrifice. You give up and you give in. You hold back and you conform. You project and you idolize.You give up on passions and you learn to live with good enough. You enroll in a mission and resent the cost. You want nothing to change and yet to be transformed. You ache for love and yet won’t risk letting it in. You suffer a self punishing exile and yet won’t accept forgiveness. You feel sexual desire and yet are afraid to let your heart and genitals connect. You justify being stuck and yet long for movement. You expect the good love juice and yet don’t want the pain that gets pushed up from letting it in. You yearn for a relationship with the Divine yet won’t let in how much It loves you.

This “you” is our deepest defenses- our most loyal protector, our devoted guardian- both at the existential/soul level and in the everyday, strategic, practical, self image-based level. This “you” is most likely so much part of your personality, your choices, your profession, your intimacies, your lifestyle, your spirituality, your relationship to money, that you don’t know who you are beyond this version of yourself.

This “you” is given all the support of societal and social conditioning. It is groomed in an educational system that emphasizes achievement and conformity. It is nurtured in a family culture that expects obligation, duty, sacrifice, and withholding of truth. It is initiated into spiritual and religious systems that promise salvation and eventual enlightenment, promote transcendence, pledge allegiance to middlemen priests and gurus, and continue to support that truly intimate and personal connection experiences with God/Oneness/Source are not possible. This “you” is encouraged to enter into romantic relationships that allow for security and comfort in the long term over aliveness and intimacy that arises only from moment to moment.

We call this version of us a “daemon”, which was a term used by Socrates initially and many others over time to describe the inner guiding voice and presence that comes through during moments of need and urgency. Others, including some major religions, describe this as a guardian angel or the holy spirit. New Age spirituality has become more fascinated and drawn to angel work and connecting with our spirit guides. I don’t know if the primary daemon that I’ve experienced in myself and others is just one of many spirit guides (which maybe all will eventually need to communicate and heal with us) or if we are only assigned one or if all of us are even given a daemon to watch after us. Some teachers, including Socrates, have suggested that those souls who have incarnated with a sense of purpose, leading a spiritual offering or teaching, would be given the “help” of a daemon to follow what they’ve signed up to do in this lifetime.

It seems that somewhere along the way, as human consciousness developed and yet we become more and more separated from God, each other, our planet, and animals, our daemons were forced to become overly invested in our journey and our lives. As they became overly invested, they began to feel more and more separate from Divine Source and more involved in human struggles, pain, and emotional wounding.

The daemon itself started to carry a legacy of pain that moved forward with every incarnation and with every human that it was assigned by the Divine to incarnate with. The daemons have become fairly helpless to assist us in our human emotional pain and wounding, in addition to being unable to heal their own pain, feelings of isolation and abandonment, and often violent and tortuous experiences from past lives. They are torn between their own needs getting met (for the first time even realizing that they have needs!) and their “mission” from the mysterious Divine (which they feel disconnected from) to meet the needs of the human they’ve been assigned to protect.

It seems now (which I have discovered through the exploration of a years-long relationship with  my daemon who calls himself, “Sebastian”,) that they need us. They need us to connect with them, to feel them, help them heal, and to trust life is safe enough for them to share with us the past life experiences and legacy that they have carried. They need the human heart and its capacity for compassion and love. They need to feel us holding and healing our own human emotional pain and young childhood aspects of ourselves that are hurting. They need to feel that there is a centered us there that can respond to them, be in practical daily life as a sacred practice, and connect with the Divine in a grounded and intimate way without turning it into a belief system, paradigm, or fundamentalist religion. They need to feel the invitation to rest and surrender that the Divine is offering to them and can only seem to accept this if they feel us getting what we need and if we are actively negotiating with them.

There seems to be an expression of the daemon that interfaces with daily life, practical concerns, and particularly with family members- an expression that we feel is what is called, “Ego” or “Self Image driven personality.” This expression of the daemon is sometimes so prevalent that the “soul expression” aspect of it has been almost completely buried and covered over. Or, the soul expression has formed into a spiritually identified person perhaps lacking balance in navigating practical life and intimate relationships. In our work with people, we respond to whatever expression comes forward, and guide you in feeling and communicating with this daemon aspect of yourself (along with any other parts that come up.)

Over time, you’ll become more fluid and comfortable with this communication and a relationship based on mutual respect and negotiated needs develops between you and this beloved guardian aspect of your being. We help to identify the expression of your sacred self from the expression of your daemon and its defensive reactions. We discover and uncover with you why it has developed the strategies and coping mechanisms that it has; we’ll listen to the past life stories that it becomes increasingly more trusting to share with you and with us. The primary ground of the relationship is between you and you; we are here to support, guide, and model for you along the way.

You are sovereignly in charge of your own process, even as there may be moments where we challenge you and your daemon to feel something difficult, painful, and invite you into deeper levels of surrender to God/Oneness/Divine Mother. You will be offered choice points along the way that invite you to feel into all aspects of your life, including your personal and family relationships. This invitation is from the Divine and can be accepted, negotiated, or rejected.

The deepening of this relationship with you and daemon can lead to profound changes in your life- in an internal way that opens up inside of you, yet also externally related to your professional and career choices, family and personal relationships, habits and coping mechanism, and even your physical appearance. The depth and level of change is up to you (and your daemon), yet the amount of transformation seems to be limitless, and also paced at a rate that you can move through without overly suffering.

The “you” that is currently, mostly subconsciously, at the helm of your life may be ready for this kind of change; for life to become more in flow and less resistive. May be ready for the love that flows in abundance and the alive and joyful frequencies that are possible in any moment. May be ready to connect deeply and intimately with the Divine in both feminine and masculine frequencies.

Divine Feminine Invitation To Love

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By Jillian

How do you write from stillness? From stillness that asks you to communicate nothing; that requests nothing of you; that is indefinable? How do you write about nothing and the invitation of the ever arising moment that is both nothing and everything? How do you write about the invitation to be and not to do?

The words I’ve written in the past (many which are no longer published) have tried: the effort was in every syllable and every sentence. The effort was in the collaboration of them into a book form; the effort was in needing others’ to read them in order for them to feel real; the effort was in the need to inspire and to influence without being fully authentic to how I was really feeling about the people I was serving.

How do you write of process without the alluring promise of attainment and enlightenment? How do you write of the process that is being with the feminine aspect of God in the moment where the future is unknown and the past is being asked to be let go of? And beyond writing about it, how do you offer this process to others as it is; as it is a state of being and not doing? There is nothing to attain here; nothing to gain as an achievement. How do you offer something that promises nothing and yet asks for so much to be given up? How do you offer the divine feminine aspect of God to a world which is so dominated by patriarchal male god frequencies?

These have all been pressing questions for me. Yet, lately, the question for me is deeply personal: What is BEING with her? This is new, it feels like, being with this question in a way that is not about doing anything, defining anything, making a paradigm out of anything, needing to prove anything or give up anything, teach others anything, or attain anything.

She is made of veils; She is mystery. Her face is shifting, arising, and familiar all at the same time. I can’t stand in absolute truth behind what I’ve written before about Her in the past. I can’t state definitely that she appears only in four faces and which of those faces is associated with which season. She will not be paradigmed or systemized; this is all I can seem to know about Her. She is like ash slipping through any fingers that try to contain or hold Her.

I thought I was to light incense; I was to pray; I was to learn and receive and give “Reiki”; I was to write about Her and how to be with Her and Her four faces; I was to hold circles and “workshops”; and I was to hold other people in this process too. As much as I resisted a paradigm, I felt pressured and compelled to make one out of her. I have no desire for doing any of that in the same way. I cannot find or experience her in any of those things or in any doing other than responding in the moment to what is offered without needing to carry out a ritual or to wrap my experience of Her into a mental bubble of understanding.

I cannot define anything beyond calling it, “love” that She is holding the possibility for in every single moment. A “love” that is organic, natural, real, and not as separate as it once felt to me to be. A “love” that moves between the wondrous man called Wayne who has linked his life and journey with mine. I feel her hold the container for the exploration of this love in every moment.

As I let go of understanding and defining her, I have surprisingly begun feeling her lately in people drawn to our meaningful connections group. Her essence flows in their association with Her, in their past experiences in other lifetimes, in their religious conditioning. I felt her in the tender relationship of a young girl part raised Catholic living inside of a vibrantly intuitive and spiritual woman. I felt her in the powerful energetic frequencies of a sensitive and beautiful man. I felt her catalytic force rumbling possibility through the defended layers of a marriage. And, I feel her in the steady invitation to Wayne and me to transparently lead with our hearts open, our boundaries set, and our desires flowing.

She is the canvas that holds the picture of life and the womb out of which life is created. I accept her without a name or a story or a creed or a cult or a gospel or a paradigm. I accept her as a feeling, as a deeply personal experience, as related to intimately by every soul whether they are conscious of it or not. I accept Her as the invitation to love.

Letting in what we really want

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By Wayne
Without realizing it, we configure life and relationships in such a way as to only get part of what we want, and to try to leave the rest of what we want off our radar.  Just enough to feel safe. Having more fulfillment than we are used to doesn’t feel safe at all. Drawing what we really and most deeply want in life is not the impossibility, or the matter of chance as we’ve made it out to be.
Drawing what we really want is difficult because it starts with letting ourselves have the want, admitting to ourselves and others that we are not happy with what we have, and seeing how we have played a huge role in setting up and maintaining the unfulfilling picture, and then taking steps towards what we really want. And then even though today is a continuation of yesterday in your life’s configuration and situation, you’ve changed direction, and you’ve changed the air quality, and you’ve changed the energy.

And those closest to you will likely not like it. If the friendship or relationship got it’s good start around an unspoken agreement to be a coping mechanism for the lack of fulfillment in your life, then the bond needs to hold to that in order to survive. Loyalty is often held up here as the greatest of all virtues.

I feel this consternation at times with Jillian. We both regularly reach out for more with each other. But we hit a wall inside of ourselves to let in what we discover. If Jillian finds more of herself and her fulfillment in life, how will that affect her desire towards me? If we find levels of fulfillment together that were before off our radar, how do we expect to maintain that? How do I expect to find that again if I were to lose Jillian? It pushes up a big performance piece for a man. If I held the space of passion and leadership, and did my part for this to arise, and it worked somehow, how do I expect to keep that happening? As a woman, she will probably let herself want that more than I am ready to as a man.

Sex is a really good place to see this vulnerability.  A man can dream of being with an attractive and sexual woman and all without feeling how he would never let himself truly have that as it would be crazy on many levels to be around.

Having more of what you really want is way more about letting it in, than finding it.

It starts with finding and getting to know the part of ourselves that resists letting in more.

The Powerful Healing of “Parts” Work

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By Jillian and Wayne

There are many practices and teachings which offer a model of identifying parts of ourselves in order to gain space from our reactions, to heal deep emotional wounds, and to build a centered adult part of ourselves. We have personally and professionally experienced the gift of self love that engaging with this type of work can bring.

We are not currently affiliated with a specific teacher, paradigm, or practice as it seems to be the phase of us offering our gifts from our own autonomous hearts and from our passion for the healing power  that intimacy with self/others/God offers people. However, what has remained from our years of dedicated self-to-self practice in which we paid a facilitator to hold this space for us and in which we received multiple years of training and practice in offering this work to others, is a core belief in the experiential reality of “parts” inside of people.

Each part inside of someone is a different age and has clear likes and dislikes, preferences, values, hurts and wounds, fears, and desires. There seems to be a core young part, popularly referred to as “the inner child,” which is a young version of us that is often stuck in immature (yet reasonable considering their age!) reactions, victim feelings, strong hurts, and sometimes deep attachments. There is an older part, the crone or male equivalent, which is negotiating life from often a cynical yet wise perspective, world weary and tired, eager to teach and be heard. There is a guardian part of us, sometimes judging of others and self, always protective and eager to keep us safe. There is a higher self, the seat of our soul, holding our connection to the Divine, our soul struggle, and the reason we are here. We call this our “Daemon” or divine guide- a name that Socrates gave to his inner voice of guidance. There can be many others which ,again, are often at cross purposes from each other with different goals, desires, and fears.

In the identification and negotiation process, you would begin a journaling dialogue with a part, which is then shared with us in (typically) a paid session where this part’s needs are met if possible, their desires, fears, preferences, and pains are felt. It’s about tenderly getting to know a part of you and differentiating that from what you’ve been previously assuming is “you”. The results of this process are a growing adult center of yourself that embodies reasonable reactions, a sense of peace, joy, goodness, connection to the Divine, capacity to inhabit intimate relationships with others, and, if reactions do come up, a means for which to navigate your emotions.

Your growing adult center embodies your actual age, is emotionally mature, and living from your soul bigness, expressing from your seat of humanity and healthy gender expression. The younger (and older) parts integrate into this center, their frequencies not being lost but rather flowing into the personality qualities of the adult center in an integrated way.

We feel this process is an ongoing one with ebbs and flows of intensity and focus depending on where you are at in your current life phase. In the beginning of this work, the feelings and reactions from the initial parts that come up and make themselves known can be very strong, disorienting, and even quite resistant to the process. Or the beginning phase can feel like a beautiful honeymoon of self discovery and deepening self love. This self to self intimacy is what allows and draws a deep and loving intimacy with others. It is what draws us external circumstances, including passion work, that reflects this love for ourselves.

The parts identification process is a powerful and beautiful one that we feel honoured to offer to others and with ourselves. Through multiple years of engaging with this process, we both now communicate and negotiate with one main guardian part of ourselves (the daemon). Rather than experiencing young part reactions or deep emotional states that are unexplainable or just feeling numb most of the time, communication with this one core part seems to move most reactions and open up our hearts to ourselves, others, and in our relationship.

There doesn’t seem to be a state of attainment with this work, yet rather a deepening sense of the core goodness of yourself and of life itself. And rather than create a fractured person, it produces an integrated and holistic person able to navigate practical life, emotional reactions, intimacies with self and others, and experience a personal and deepening relationship with the Divine.