Sunday, July 31, 2011

KS&L 360 Role Models - Tools of Karma Part 3 Positive Role Models

Positive role models are so much easier to identify. The big strong older brother who always looked out for you may have been your first role model, or your Dad, always that wonderful kind guy who was the rock of stability for the entire family. Perhaps it was your Mom or Aunt, grandmother or neighbor. Whoever this first person was, you remember how you felt about them, and why, to this very day you still have this person on a pedestal of admiration.

Even if you did not have a single family member that you could even hope to emulate, because their behavior was so bad [we have all seen these families!], think back to who you did admire. Sometimes you may not know the individual personally. Boys often focus on a sports figure someone larger than life who came from a greatly disadvantaged background to becomes someone of wealth and power. Some boys have decided that if he could do it, so could they. Girls look at movie stars and hope that one day, that glamour will be theirs and they can be removed from their dreary surroundings.

Some young people find a coach or teacher to copy and some people simply pick a figure from a movie or television show. Super heroes abound for a reason. Super heroes overcome tremendous odds to save the day and make the world a better place. Super heroes are never victims! They know how to get around the most difficult odds and sometimes the obstacles are tremendous! There is a security in realizing that a super hero can rise above even the most terrible, evil threat.

If you are fortunate enough to have read fairy tales as a child, you may have come to understand that awful things happen in the land of make believe. Maleficent witches, diabolical sorcerers, and cruel parents have terrified children drifting off to sleep. Only the brave prince or the kind fairy was able to save the day. Perhaps that kind fairy, that good fairy was the role model you chose to emulate. Perhaps you decided that to escape your childhood you had to become that handsome, daring prince, willing to take a chance on confronting the scariest thing around. Again, if the mortal person or spiritual fairy, or angel in a book could do it, that may have opened the door for you to believe that you could also overcome your childhood or your difficult family. Maybe you hoped that another family could adopt you out of your misery. Maybe you even created that reality and you were finally adopted out of a bad family situation.

Hazing, rites of passage, initiations all included overcoming a terrible hardship. In each of these, there is someone to show the way, provide the path, and open the door. Eventually, you become the role model for another person to follow. As you find your own inner strength, the light that now shines from within you, may be just the light that will shine for someone else. Sometimes, without realizing it, you become your own hero.

To do this, you have to realize how far you have come, how much you have grown and how you are climbing the ladder of spiritual as well as practical success. Sometimes, people never realize it. Other times people do come to understand how far they have come because someone else puts them on a pedestal and tells them so. Who knew you could become the dawn for someone else’s awakening!

Perhaps you have used the role models in your life to form your life in a wonderful way. How many times have you quietly expressed gratitude to these people for what you learned? Perhaps as you thought of them thousands of times, you did say a quiet prayer of gratitude for their being there for you, for being in your life.

When you can look at a role model, any role model as a tool of karma for your greater good, then you have taken a giant leap forward in your own soul evolution. You will have dropped the cruel, crushing, cloak of victimhood and donned the magnificent, measured, mantle of potential greatness and accepted the karmic insight that was offered to you. This concept represents tremendous spiritual growth in one lifetime. Anyone can do this. Everyone is presented with these opportunities.

Decide to do this, look at what each positive and negative role model taught you from a dispassionate place. Take any emotion attendant with your relationship with that person and set it aside and then look at what you learned from this person. In part four of Role Models, we will explore some poignant examples.

Sunday, July 24, 2011

KS&L 359 Role Models - Tools of Karma Part 2 Negative Role Models

Next we will look at negative role models and the powerful roles they play in your life. Remember the schoolyard bully - you know who he is - you well remember how humiliated he made you. He always instilled fear in you with his intimidating and abusive power. Or perhaps you wince when you recall the mean girl in school. She was a role model of what shallow, pitiful, petty, power looked and felt like. You and the rest of the world will always be reminded of the hated schoolteacher who was so cruel that you could not believe she was allowed to have access to children. Sometimes your negative role model was a cruel sibling, parent or grandparent. Family members have a tendency to teach us often, bitter lessons of what toxic behavior looks and feels like.

All of these personalities are each tremendously important role models of behavior that can hurt and harm. However, it is important to remember, that karma never wastes any energy and the energy of that experience happened for a critical reason.

That purpose was to teach you to stand up for yourself, to learn to find your strength and courage. However, if you did not learn that lesson at home or in school, the lesson repeated itself in college with the abusive professor or roommate, or even boy or girlfriend. Still didn't learn that lesson of standing up for yourself? Then your brutal spouse or boss would be put into a role to keep trying to teach you. Still didn't learn that lesson? Wait, do you see the pattern here? Karma put each negative role model in front of you to teach you a lesson and each time you walked away from the lesson, karma put a new teacher in front of you. Did you notice that the lessons kept getting harder and harder?

In this scenario with very negative, toxic role models, karma used each person as a teacher for you and when you choose to ignore the lesson, instead of understanding that it was a lesson for your higher good, you decided to become a victim personality. “Why me?” you probably asked, “What did I ever do to deserve this?”

One of the key elements to consider is that when a student is ready, a teacher is placed in front of them. Sometimes that teacher is malicious, perhaps even brutal. However, if you want to learn how to stand up to that merciless person, you have to seek out a positive teacher to help you. The synchronicity of finding that teacher is not merely serendipity but spiritual timing at its finest.

When this person appears, you will be most wise to see if you can recognize him or her and take full advantage of the offer of help.

Karma is always fair, always just even when it does not seem that way. You know intimately who your negative role models are, but ask yourself, did you recognize the fact that karma also placed inspiring role model(s) in your path? Did you allow the detrimental people in your life the power to cripple your life or did you use those same people as steppingstones to climb the mountain of life with strength and courage as well as love as compassion?

We come for spiritual growth in each life and difficult people are placed in front of us for the purpose of helping us to grow, not merely to harm us. Sometimes, your facing them with inner power and fortitude teaches them a lesson. You are teaching them that they cannot continue to behave in this fashion. Ultimately you become a tool of karma for the other person’s growth as well. Karma never wastes a moment of energy, neither yours nor anyone else’s.

In part 3, we will explore positive role models!

Saturday, July 16, 2011

KS&L 358 Role Models - Tools of Karma Part 1

The concept of role models is very important for each of us to consider. Many people are extremely fortunate to have a beloved parent or sibling as their role model or even a treasured grandparent or teacher. Sometimes you emulate a person you admire without specifically considering them a role model, but in essence, that is just what they are. You tend to think of a role model as a wonderful person.

The criteria for a role model, is varied. Sometimes a person's ethics make them a role model. Sometimes it is their compassion. For another, the person he or she admires may be especially loving or giving. For someone else, his or her ideal could be a financially successful person, the one who made it to the top.

However, sometimes role models represent the absolute worst that a person can be. Hard to believe that someone like that could be considered a role model, but it is possible. The Tibetans note that your enemy is your greatest teacher precisely because of how much we can learn from this person. Role models come in many forms and influence us in a myriad of ways. However, there are some universal aspects that make a person a role model:

1. The person has to epitomize being the best or worst at something, and that 'something' could be anything from pie making to mothering, leadership to moneymaking and an entire plethora of theme and variation of all traits.

2. The heights the person has attained, whether good or bad, have to be achievable. You have to feel that you can or could get there or end up there, yourself.

3. The characteristics the person epitomizes have to be unique and stand out.

4. Who they are either inspires or revolts you on a very personal level.

5. Their behavior is consistent – he or she does not change over time. If he is very good, then he’ll remain so and never leave that glorious pedestal. Conversely, the very fact that a role model with some terrible trait never changes is part of why you so remember them. Their terrible behavior sticks in your memory.

6. You remember her for your entire life. No matter how old you get, that personality is part of your life experience.

7. There is an event associated with this personality, one quintessential moment in time is seared in your memory by how he or she acted, reacted or behaved in a given moment.

8. You never forget her name.

9. You never forget his behavior.

10. This person in some way causes you to change your behavior for better or for worse forever.

11. You find that you will always be grateful to this person when you think of him or her, for the powerful lesson(s) he or she taught you.

12. The person may or may not know that you think this way about him or her.

13. One or more of your role models can create the desire in you to become that kind of role model for someone else.

14. One or more of your more sordid role models can inspire you to never become like them!

Think back over your life. You know these people. This is why you can have more than one role model. No one lives a long, rich life full of valuable experiences without having many role models of all kinds, in their emotional scrapbook. Part two will explore the position that negative role models play in your life.

Sunday, July 10, 2011

KS&L 357 Sometimes the Answer is No

When people pray to God, they are expecting God to answer their prayers.


When people talk to God, they are expecting God to help them to find answers to their questions.


When people solicit God for answers to their prayers, questions, longings, hopes and dreams, sometimes, the answer is not what they want to hear.


Sometimes the answer is no.


Sometimes when someone is praying that their loved one be spared from the ravages of a disease, cancer, a heart attack or stroke, they feel that God has abandoned them when their loved one dies.


When a child drowns in a pool accident, anxious parents are pleading with God to allow their child to be revived and when death comes, these parents feel betrayed by God.


A job candidate is asking God to allow him or her to be the selectee and when this does not happen and another rejection letter comes in, the job seeker feels that God was not listening.


When a huge storm is approaching an area, people pray that the storm will miss them and make landfall somewhere else. But ‘somewhere else’ may be just as deadly for another town or village. When the killer storm devastates an area, people feel that somehow God is punishing them.


The truth is that sometimes God’s answer is no.


No your loved one’s spiritual contract is up and it is time for him or her to return to the heaven world, no matter what the person or child’s age. The aftermath of this soul’s death will echo out in a karmically correct way and all the players in this drama will come to terms with death, will have to learn how to heal. Sometimes, in some exceptionally poignant cases, the answer needs to be no. The person really wants to return home to the heaven world and God understands this. Sometimes God is listening to another mortal voice ask to leave. In that case, God’s answer is yes because the karma for their continuing here on earth has ended.


The person who needs the experience of a particular job will get that job, or win the contest, or receive the promotion. Sometimes God answers yes to those people.


The approaching storm will shake everyone’s foundation to their very core and offer them profound, unanticipated lessons of love, loss, compassion, cruelty, miracles and hope. The sheer range of emotions will focus everyone’s mind on the core values of what is ultimately important to them.


Everything happens for our greater good, even though often it seems profoundly ‘unfair’ to us.


Sometimes God says no because that seemingly negative answer is ultimately for our greatest good even when we cannot imagine that something good can arise out of such profound tragedy.


The wisest person comforts each person according to his or her needs and then gently guides the person to a place of greater understanding. Everything really will be resolved according to the Divine Plan. While we may feel that we are not privy to that plan, we can be part of it if we look for the lessons.


Sometimes the answer has to be no because it is better for the suffering soul to leave and for the storm to come and for the promotion to go to someone else. Sometimes the issue is beyond our vision. Developing Divine sight takes eons of living and dying, grieving and hoping, learning and evolving.


Ultimately, we will get all of our answers of ‘why did this or that happen or not happen the way it did,’ and then we will be allowed to understand the mind of God a wee bit more.


Sometimes the answer is no because that is ultimately the best answer for everyone’s karmic path.

Sunday, July 3, 2011

KS&L 118 Freedom

Have you noticed that they seem to be showing the movie Independence Day over and over? If you haven't seen this film, it is about the alien bad guys trying to take power from the earthling good guys. Seems we have seen this scenario lots of times.


As a point of comment it is good to remember that aliens have been here for a very, very long time, eons actually and they have yet to take ownership of this planet. Pretty much they leave it to us, no matter how tempting it seems to be to those pesky off-worlders.


For any movie to sell tickets we seem to have to be fighting against something to figure out what we value and who we are and to have an opportunity to really think outside the box. Which brings up the concept of freedom. What is it and why are we so willing to die to preserve it?


Freedom is a karmic opportunity for self government always very hard won at usually an extremely high cost. It is so precious and the truth is that we don’t take it for granted. If we did, why, we could just live anywhere, it wouldn't matter. However, if you want to live overseas, seldom do you think about living in a country that is NOT free. You would know immediately that freedom here, in North, Central and South America, Northern and Southern Europe and the newly freed old eastern block countries was won at a high cost and that all of us who live in these areas value it highly.


No one wants to willingly live in North Korea. So, perhaps it is fair to say that no one consciously takes freedom for granted. We live it, enjoy it and wear it within us like the life blood that keeps us alive. Non free countries are slowly dying. Free societies are growing.


Back to that wonderful scientist, Dr. Bruce Lipton who noted that a body is either in a state of growth or decline - that there is no middle place. Perhaps this is also true of societies. Societies that are free grow at an amazing rate, sometimes stumbling on themselves, making lots of mistakes, pissing off their neighbors and generally plunging ahead are ones that are struggling to move forward.


Societies that are leaving oppression behind have to break out of their stagnant, standstill economy and begin to move forward. People hate change. People who were clinging to control of the stagnant economy don’t give up easy. It is incumbent upon people fighting for freedom to know what freedom costs - that there is sacrifice. That which you sacrifice for, you appreciate. It lets you know what you value.


When we were fighting for our independence, the French and Germans sent some of their best generals to help us and they did an amazing job of organizing a rag tag army to support General Washington. These two countries helped bank roll our fledgling country. Many Germans and Frenchmen died helping us win our freedom. Their deaths were probably not too popular back home. However, many of us are grateful for their sacrifice to us. Stories of one country sacrificing for another to enjoy freedom are growing in the last two to three centuries. Sometimes you just have to have help. Sometimes someone has to believe that you can escape oppression and can achieve freedom and they have to be willing to endure sacrifice to help you get there.


So, to all those aliens who do in fact leave us to work out our own karma and learn what freedom is, what world cooperation can be, thank you for not overtly meddling!


Next, to all those countries who helped us to be free and to establish our fledgling government, to all the native Americans who fought along side us, to all those immigrants who sent their family members to give the ultimate sacrifice, thank you.


And to all those who continue to offer their military service so that someone else can enjoy what we so value: Thank you beyond words!


Happy Fourth of July