Sunday, September 25, 2011

KS&L 60 De-cluttering Your Life

There are all sorts of books out there on de-cluttering your home and aspects of your life. It seems like such a daunting task. You open the junk drawer in your kitchen, and heaven knows we all have one, and you just sigh and shut the drawer. What do you do with all that stuff?


We have emotional junk drawers full of stuff too. Often we look at it and then just shut the drawer - too hard!


So, where do you begin ‘de-cluttering’? Which do you do first: physical house or emotional house? Here are some suggestions.


• Truly, as you do one, you do the other, so make an appointment with yourself for an hour a week, with your house - start there first. If you can make an appointment for a hair cut, you can make an appointment for yourself.


• Just do one drawer or cabinet. Don’t take on the entire garage – that is way too daunting. Also, don’t assign a task like that to your spouse and then get angry when he or she too, finds it daunting and puts it off.


• If you find an old memory in that drawer or box, take some time and decide how you feel. Are you happy with it, angry, ready to let go, need to talk to someone about it - what is the feeling?


• Make a list on a piece of paper of what is not resolved on an emotional level, in that drawer.


• When you have done several rooms and have a respectable number of things on your life list, then make another appointment with yourself or a professional and work through each one.


Imagine what your life will be like at the end of the year. It is wise to remember that as you clean out anything, you make way for new and wonderful things in your life. Sounds too simple. I heard that. . . However, just try it - what if it works?

Sunday, September 18, 2011

KS&L 364 Take Me to Hell - Please!

Getting into hell is so much easier than getting into heaven because all hell requires is the feeling of guilt that an exceedingly large number of people have at death.


If you have lived a good life, been a good person, friend, spouse, parent, sibling, child, employee, then there should be no problem in making that glorious, light filled transition into the heaven world. What stops you? Guilt stops you.


Guilt is the slayer of many a good heart. Guilt, the classical purveyor of fruitless ‘what if’ and ‘if only’ offers all souls a gold plated, first class ticket on the guilt train. And that train’s ultimate destination is the lower realms, the various dimensions of the worlds of hell.


If you think about it, hell has a purpose and that purpose is to offer all of us the punishment that we doggedly seek. Guilt always seeks punishment, so the spirit world has to offer us what we seek, the experiences we need to evolve as souls. So if we seek punishment for what we perceive as ‘sins’, horrible mistakes, or chronic bad actions or choices, there has to be a place to live out that punishment. Actually it starts in the mortal and continues into the afterlife.


The concepts of sin, hell, and punishment frequently begin, ironically, in church with the twisted concept of being born in sin and dying in sin. This means that at an early age a person believes for their entire life that they are to be punished because they were automatically born in sin and they already believe that they are going to die in sin. If that is the case, why try? What’s the use? You’ve already been branded as a sinner!


What if a more meaningful concept could be offered to all souls?


What if we are born to work through past karmic actions, not as a sin or punishment, but to balance our lives and the lives of the people with whom we constantly interact?


What if mortal life is an opportunity to walk a different path because we have been born again into this life to heal the past and pave the way to a better tomorrow?


What if we know that while we may not get it 100% each life, that the very act of seeking to be a good person every day helps our karmic path and enables us to move up a notch on the karmic ladder a bit more each time?


What if God realizes that we are trying, that sometimes we fail but that we keep going?


What if God uses karma to balance the scales and then, no matter what, we can be welcomed with love and compassion into the heaven world?


What if at death we showed remorse for the things in our life we didn’t get quite right and we asked God to forgive us for those things. We could then also ask God to welcome us home so that we can spiritually evaluate that life, learn from it and then reincarnate with a new opportunity to have a better life the next time?


What if we don’t have to be guilty at death?


What if the next stop after our deathbed isn’t hell, but walking the path with either a loved one or an angel, into the heaven world?


What if someone is already in hell, how do they get out? When you don’t need an experience anymore, it can stop happening, on any realm. When you don’t need guilt, you can be released into the heaven world.


How long to do you need to be punished?


Well, just how guilty are you?


Release guilt in your life, no matter what happened. When a student is ready, a spiritual teach will appear to help you find that spiritual path, release that guilt and prepare for the heaven world, no matter where you are. Now, isn’t this concept infinitely more hopeful?

Sunday, September 11, 2011

The 9/11 Time Anchor


There are those shattering moments in life that define time and space. We all have them. These moments anchor our memory at certain points in our lives. We connect memories to them like pearls on a necklace. The energy of those moments may affect us indirectly and yet directly because after each of them, we are never the same. We change because the world around us changed.

I was in 8th grade English class in Greensboro, North Carolina on November 22, 1963 when President Kennedy was shot. I remember that the PA (public address) system came on and they interrupted class and made the announcement. I remember Walter Cronkite’s voice cracking as he pronounced the fate of the Kennedy family, the changing course of a nation and the reality that our illusion of living in a safe world was forever shattered.

On January 28, 1986, I was a Lieutenant Commander in the Navy, stationed in Norfolk, Virginia. I was home with the flu that day. I was resting when the news came on that Challenger blew up. I could not fathom such a disaster in the macrocosm being witnessed by the world and in the microcosm being witnessed by all of the astronaut’s families. My husband was Captain of a Submarine Rescue Ship that could perform salvage operations. He volunteered to immediately begin search operations with his ship. His ship USS Kittiwake, (ASR 13), eventually recovered that damaged ‘O’ ring that physically caused the accident. Looking back, I find it so strange to be connected to this event in its aftermath. Yet, in a thousand subtle ways, we are all connected.

I was sound asleep on September 11, 2001, when my sister called me from Virginia Beach. California is three hours behind the East Coast, so she was sure I would be asleep. Her frantic voice penetrated my sleep as I listened to the horror in her words. I rushed downstairs and turned on TV. My husband was at sea. I started calling my friends and neighbors. My friend Karen Ward came over and together we watched our world change again, and again, as each new piece of information came hurtling to us that not just the twin towers were hit, but the Pentagon as well and possibly the White House was next. There was a fear that one of the planes was headed to the West Coast to crash into some big building in Los Angeles.

Karen and I watched all the channels on television for most of that day. It was as if our world came to a halt. I will always be grateful that Karen shared that moment with me, that neither of us was alone watching this. The companionship of a wonderful friend or family member, helps to mitigate the initial trauma of any powerful event.

When any of us watch real life horror, we suffer trauma, to greater and lesser degrees, depending on who we are, where we are in relation to the event and how we approach life. Bad things happen to good people. The indelible memory is forever etched in our brain as well as the date, time and place of a national trauma. This becomes a time anchor. We will remember other events in our lives in relation to that time anchor.

Perhaps one of the hardest things about national traumatic events is the blunt reality that we are never really going to know for sure what actually happened that day, whether it was ‘that day’ in 1963, 1986 or 2001. If we are wise, we reserve judgment for the whole story is seldom what we think it was. Unlike the Tsunami of Dec 26, 2004, where we do know the cause was an undersea earthquake, the other events are man made. Maybe that is the hardest part. Natural disasters as bad as they may be are part of the ‘act of God’ scenario that we know we have to accept. But when one person deliberately harms another or is negligent then there is a huge sense of injustice.

In the end, the only way to balance the illogic of injustice is to remember that karma balances everything, whether we can perceive it or not. So today, the time and place anchor that is 9/11 will remind us where we were, who we were with and how we felt when our world stood still.

Sunday, September 4, 2011

KS&L 363 Who Gets Into Heaven?

Someone once noted that all dogs go to heaven and probably most cats too. How about people though, do all people go to heaven? Human beings talk about going to heaven, seeking entrance at the Pearly Gates and then sitting on some lofty cloud while looking down on the rest of the miserable mortal population struggling to make it through each day.

Frankly, that scenario is doubtful. The truth of the matter is far more complicated and hopeful. People have to seek heaven. When it comes to the spiritual side of life, nothing is automatic. Human beings have to want to find the light of the Divine on the other side of mortal life.

However, when your days are packed with making a living, raising children, caring for a family, having and being a friend, the thought of heaven seems like a distant concept best left for that occasional Sunday in church. And honestly, does any church really help you prepare for heaven?

Churches are social clubs with a hierarchy, politics, rules, regulations, and expectations. The texts that are used are tailored to that particular faith’s belief system. Few church organizations welcome too much elasticity outside of the accepted norm of spiritual structure, [accepted] scripture, or sociology. Even specific religions have branches of faith, more accepted than others. Many small towns only define you by what faith you ascribe to and how you demonstrate that faith by church attendance.

Nothing in the paragraph above talked about preparing for or going to heaven. You would think that would be the focus of church: preparation for tomorrow by interpreting the actions of today, but that is seldom the case.

Who gets into heaven is entirely dependent on the following factors:

• What do you believe to be true about yourself?

• What relationship have you cultivated with the Divine?

• What is your belief in an afterlife?

• How much are you able to love people, and life itself at the end of each day and ultimately at the end of your own life?

• What is your personal definition of hope, reincarnation and love?

All of our lives, we hear people talk about love and yet, at the end of our lives, how much can we say that we loved ourselves, our families, and our friends? Many people who own pets freely adore them with a tremendous level of unconditional love. However, those same people may find that they have significant difficulty applying that same level of unconditional love to the people in their lives. People hurt and disappoint us. We hurt and disappoint ourselves, and the sheer volume of this hurt and disappointment acts as an impediment to moving into the heaven world. Most of us would like to get there, but we are the stumbling block to our own spiritual progress an uncomfortable percentage of the time.

Human beings will be welcomed into heaven because we are all children of the same loving God. No matter where in the world we are born, no matter what faith we cling too and no matter what our method of death may be we can all be welcomed home. The truly great Masters who have walked this Earth have tried to share this ‘good news’ with us. Are we listening?

Most people seek to be a good person every single day. Not too many people wake up and say “Gee, I think I will be a stinker today and make the world a nightmare.” Perhaps there are those people out there, but mostly, the world is made up of good people. [I know, I find them everywhere I go!]

We can be lovingly embraced at the point of death and transition into heaven if we believe that we are and have been a good person throughout our lives. It is an exciting time, this transition. However, for many people that time is fraught with pain because of one single word: Guilt, yes, Guilt, with a capital ‘G’! Part 2 Getting into Hell