psgrout

Beyond the message of culture

May 16, 2024 15 Comments

“Everything will be alright if we just keep dancing like we’re 22.”—Taylor Swift

I grew up in a traditional Christian home. Until I was 16, when my minister father left the family for another woman, I attended Sunday services on the regular.

While my beliefs have evolved over the years (isn’t that the point—evolution, expansion?), I am beyond grateful to my early biblical education that emphasized miracles.

I learned that manna fell from the sky, water could be changed into wine and a few loaves and a couple fish could feed 5000 hungry folks.

Life provides few certainties, but knowing that “impossible” things happen is the most important lesson I’ve ever learned.

Things I can’t even imagine happen every single day. New portals of energy open up all the time.

That’s why it’s so important for me to connect with this higher truth, this yet-to-be realized truth first thing every morning. If I start my day with the narrative fed to me by the internet, the news, “the known,” I miss the possibilities. And possibilities are everywhere — wild, dazzling possibilities.

Maybe I can’t overthrow the system, but I believe I can supplant it with my openness to new, to possibilities, to the allowing of the force field that wants to speak through me, through you, through each of us. And, yes, it helps to question the limitations, fear and shame we’ve accidentally learned.

The picture with this post is a mandala I made this morning with fallen petals in my yard. Like a sandcastle, it won’t last long. But that’s not the point. I’m here to notice and create beauty. And then be ready to notice and create a different kind of beauty tomorrow. Or later this afternoon. Or whenever life calls.

I’m not here to lead anybody. I’m just here to support the life force that is evolving and expanding and repeatedly trying to tell us we’re not broken, we don’t need to be saved. We simply need to listen to the still beating Truth that exists beyond and beneath the message of our culture.

#222 Forever!

Pam Grout is the author of 20 books including E-Squared, E-Cubed, Thank & Grow Rich and her latest book, The Course in Miracles Experiment: A Starter Kit for Rewiring Your Mind (And Therefore Your World)

What I want to know

May 9, 2024 45 Comments

“With a small shift in awareness, the world starts to speak in a very different way.”—James Bridle

Where we direct our attention creates our world, both individually and collectively.

What I want to know is why do we permit the superpower of our attention to be sucked into a vortex of negativity…

…when it rains diamonds on the planet Saturn**

…when the call of a mother humpback whale can travel 600 miles through the ocean.

What I want to know is why do we direct our attention to old white guys wearing suits and spouting inanities….

…when there is a fairy trail outside Milburn, New Jersey with 100 tiny, whimsical cottages, lovingly created by a mother who wanted a safe place for her autistic son to explore the wilderness.

….when a Sumatran orangutun recently healed a wound on his right cheek by making an ointment out of an herb. He didn’t go to the doctor or buy an advertised pharmaceutical. He simply listened to the hum of aliveness that calls to us all.

What I want to know is why do we focus on news, social media and political ads specifically designed to distract, enrage and make us fear each other… ….

….when a flash mob danced to “Let it Go” at the Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris.

…when clematis and iris and columbine are putting on the show of their life right now.

Rather than waste our attention on mediated content, let’s go outside and tune our superpower to Mother Nature and her teeming aliveness. It’s humming all around us.

#222 Forever!

**More than 10 million tons every year.

Relentless love, abiding peace and other facts of life

May 5, 2024 31 Comments

“Truth gives its strength to everyone who asks in limitless supply.”—A Course in Miracles

See that epigraph at the top of this post? The one promising limitless supply?

It’s the exact opposite of what most of us believe. Words like unlimited and infinite aren’t really included in the script we pick up at birth.

Which is why I’ve been tuning into a higher signal every morning, communing with a frequency that keeps pointing out that I’m cherished and adored exactly how I am.

We’ve all heard concepts like this, that we are nourished by an inner light, that joy is our natural state (heck, I’ve been writing about these ideas for twenty years), but the thing about starting each morning with the Two-Way is that is has moved from being a pleasant theory to a very present and direct experience.

The Cosmic Concierge with whom I consult every morning urges me to accept nothing less, nothing below 100 percent, undiluted, whole enchilada love. I am not a little bit loved. Or a little bit innocent.

It tells me that until I entertain no substitute for limitless, inseparable, immutable love, I will continue to see the world as less-than-perfect. Everything I see out there is a reflection of what I believe in here. Even if it’s a teeny, tiny speck of not-love, it clouds my vision of the world. It obscures life as it truly is.

And that’s why the Voice sometimes seems like a broken record. You are loved. Everything is okay. There’s nothing to fear.

Not long after I first shared the Two-Way, the wonderful writer and illustrator Sue Shanahan who once interviewed me for her porch light series (she also profiled Brandi Carlile, Martha Beck, Rainn Wilson, Dolly Parton and others) wrote to tell me about a similar project Elizabeth Gilbert was doing.

Every week on Elizabeth’s Substack, she writes a letter to herself from unconditional love, a practice she has been doing for decades. She also invites subscribers to submit their own letters from unconditional love. So if any of you want to take it further than the 30-day experiment I proposed here, I invite you to check out Liz Gilbert’s “Letters from Love.”

I’m finding it inspiring and beautiful. (I already adored Liz’s books) And well, her project reinforces the idea that life is speaking to all of us, that it will never stop reminding us to listen to our hearts, to let its still, small voice offer refuge from past beliefs, old injuries and outdated scripts. Thank you, Sue, for pointing me in Liz’s direction.

Today marks 30 days (and it’s okay to start any time) of the experiment I invited you to try. I’d love to hear how it’s going in the comments section below. I’m especially interested if, like Father Bill W. promised, that once you log 30 days in a row, you’d never dream of going solo again. I know I’m quite relieved to accept help from a generous and relentlessly chatty universe.

I love you all and I hope you remember that being human is something we experience, not who we really are.

#222 Forever!

Two, two, two (222) tales in one

May 2, 2024 36 Comments

“You can’t go wrong if you’re dancing, singing or laughing.”—Betty Shaffer

My 90-year-old friend Betty was taking a nice, hot bubble bath last week. She rarely locks her door, but for some reason she did that morning and for some reason, her boyfriend, who had left earlier, came back to retrieve something he’d left behind.

Betty, of course, wasn’t wearing her hearing aids, so when her beau knocked, she didn’t hear him. She was blissfully oblivious that he was outside her door, panicked and banging furiously

He rushed to the apartment office, explained his dilemma, his intense alarm that something horrible had transpired.

They hurried back to her door, clumsily inserted the key and threw open the door to find a completely nude Betty dancing with wild abandon.

I love this story for two reasons. It shows how unfounded most of our fears are. It demonstrates how quick we are to assume the worst and to forget that life is always working out for us.

The other tale relates to our bodies and how we perceive them, how we decide certain things about how they should work, how they age. We listen to medical doctors who sole job is to look for problems and pretend to have answers, some of which, of course, are really helpful.

I just wish more of them knew that our bodies are simply condensed energy providing a vessel in which our spirits can express and grow. Our culture tells these bodies what they should do, what their limits are, who they should love. Docs even provide statistics and predictions on how they should react to various calendar years.

Sadly, most of us are at war with our bodies, wanting them to look different, be a different size.

But as Betty demonstrates, a body is simply something to enjoy while you’re lucky enough to have it. From what I can tell, they’re here for us to notice and relish beauty. And, when we can, to use for dancing, singing and laughing.

Betty, by the way, is my friend who when she hears someone’s body is perhaps on the way out, is quick to think, “Oh, I’m so excited for them.”

I love you all and I love your bodies. Hope you use them to see something beautiful today.

#222 Forever!

Life shows up new every morning

April 30, 2024 24 Comments

“The noise of life and the density of matter can draw us in if we don’t deeply align first thing in the morning.”—Lucy Grace

Those of you who have been following my blog for a while know I’m a HUGE fan of ServiceSpace. I was invited to their Ghandi 3.0 event last year in India. I volunteer to transcribe their weekly Awakin Calls and Taz and I (through the 222 Foundation) chose to gift our yearly award to them in 2022.

I’ve been inspired by their work and their commitment to the gift economy for years. I’ve mentioned it before, but when I pitched a story about their founder Nipun Mehta to my editor at People magazine, she just kept asking, “But how does it work?”

She just couldn’t grasp the concept of an organization that believes so strongly in the abundance and goodness of the universe that they give everything away. It was so far removed from the script we all pick up at birth that it just didn’t compute.

I’m bringing this up now because, last weekend’s Awakin Call with Lucy Grace was Exhibit A in what I’m hearing from IFL. (The indestructible life force is what I’ve been calling my morning collaborator lately).

Lucy found the voice when she was just a child in New Zealand. (I also love that she’s from New Zealand, because Taz, whose birth father was from there, had a second passport from New Zealand and well, I’ve always loved the place.)

Lucy was born into poverty and, because she didn’t have the resources that many have, she learned to listen to this other voice that kept telling her she was loved exactly as she was, that absolutely everyone and everything is loved just because they exist. She said while she might have had a hungry stomach, she didn’t have the hungry heart that sometimes afflicts the well-off.

She says, “I always had the company of God” only in her book of poetry she calls it This Untameable Light. (Hey, another brilliant synonym to add to my collection.)

Lucy said she could feel the aliveness in all of life and that she always possessed a deep sense that all is well.

The voice is here for all of us, except some of us have the volume turned down. The practice I’ve been enjoying is my way of restoring the natural volume.

I decided to post the video of this week’s Awakin Call interview, because well, it’s way better than anything I could ever say. Take it from Lucy, all of us are always supported and guided and held.

#222 Forever!

In praise of irrationality

April 25, 2024 49 Comments

“No matter how upside down it all may appear, we have no fear, because we know this secret: all of creation is conspiring to shower us with blessings,”—Rob Brezsny

I just ordered a replacement AC adapter for my laptop (because mine malfunctioned after I accidentally dropped it), so I’m going to try to write this post before I run out of power. Fingers crossed!

I’m writing today in praise of irrationality. In celebration of things we can’t see, in things we can’t understand with our brains.

These mysteries (like disembodied voices telling me how deeply I am loved, how innocent i am and always have been) are my most treasured gifts.

Reason, logic, data and evidence certainly have their place. They’ve advanced society in countless ways. But for now, I’m happy putting my faith in the imagining of a new reality, in advancing a sweeter, kinder truth.

And while I can’t begin to empirically explain this voice to which I’ve surrendered my life, I just know I feel lighter, more compassionate and better able to trust in a world where life itself thrives. And anybody who tells me differently, I’ve noticed, has a hidden agenda that always has something to do with lack and fear and separation.

I’ve also noticed that whatever I pay most attention to becomes my higher power. If I pay attention to rational, measurable things, I’m stuck with a very limited point of view. But when I pay attention to creativity and possibility and beauty, those things quickly take over my life.

So call me irrational, ridiculous, a wearer of rose-colored glasses and I’ll just say, “Thank you. Thank you for noticing.”

#222 Forever!

In vibrational cahoots with the Divine

April 22, 2024 41 Comments

“This is the season of exquisite redemption, a slam-bang return to joy.”—Barbara Kingsolver

Happy Earth Day, friends! I bow in gratitude to Mother Nature, I accept her bounteous gifts and I vow that I will never stop noticing her beauty.

I also want to rave (you know how I am!) in appreciation for your comments and experiment progress reports. I hesitated to use that term, because “progress” is a word from the old paradigm. Like we’re all supposed to make progress, get somewhere, do something.

When in reality, we’re really just here to delight in life’s stunning gorgeousness.

I noticed a theme running through some of the comments. Like you wondered if it was really the Great Cosmic Concierge talking to you or if was just your imagination.

JUST YOUR IMAGINATION?!!!, my imagination retorted. “What am I, chopped liver?”

I, for one, value my imagination and believe it speaks on behalf of my Higher Power. Like all humans, I tend to overuse the left hemisphere of my brain. So when I slip into the creative, intuitive hemisphere, it shuts down the cognitively overdeveloped side. Which is where those old, crusty stories reside.

As for the same messages repeating themselves, I found that when I started doing this, I desperately needed to hear over and over and over again that “I was loved,” “that everything is going to be okay.” The Course says that in order to experience miracles—which are natural and happening ALL.THE.TIME—we must see ourselves as wholly innocent.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve accrued a lot of messages over the years that said just the opposite.

So in the beginning, my voice was a broken record of compassion and acceptance, reminding me again and again that I was loved, that my true nature was joy. Its quiet power and consistency eventually convinced me it might be on to something. Its increasing clarity made it impossible for me not to listen.

But by far the most important bennie of my morning powwow is that it hooks me up to a loving vibrational frequency before I even start my day. It sets the tone for an amazingly awesome, extraordinarily epic 24 hours. And, that my friends, is all I need.

Enjoy the Earth wherever you are today! And I wish for you a deep communion with your own personal Cosmic Concierge!

To life!

#222 Forever!

Invoking a new possibility

April 19, 2024 96 Comments

“The part of your mind in which truth abides is in constant communication with God whether you are aware of it or not.”—A Course in Miracles

Little Pammy Sue here on yet another fabulous Friday, hoping to hear from those of you doing the experiment. For that matter, I’d love to hear from any of you.

I’m thrilled to report that, while ordinary human thoughts continue to play in my mind like elevator music, I’m becoming better able to tune into a deeper, more loving reality.

Over and over, I keep hearing that the inherited programs of the world are no longer necessary, that all they do is block the higher transmission.

Overriding the old story takes practice. I sometimes find it rather daunting and hard to believe the depth of the love and the total lack of judgment. Surely, all those rules I was taught had to mean something?

But no, I keep hearing, “I only love you. I only see your beauty. I only recognize your light.”

“The old thoughts,” it tells me are way beneath my glory. And that stepping off the merry-go-round of the ego is part of the evolution of humanity.

I’ve heard from some of you about the joy of being back in touch with your best friend, that you’re excitedly “dropping some light.” As I said, I’d love to hear in the comments below how your experiment is going.

Have you settled on a name for the higher thing? Have you started to trust its voice? Are you getting any guidance?

Barry Taylor, the former road manager for AC/DC, once joked that the name, God, is just a blanket we put over the ever-changing, always-loving life force.

Here’s to allowing it to bust out of its manufactured confines.

Tell me, tell me. Below, below.

Someone recently called my posts a newsletter, so this next bit is what I think newsletters normally do. Announce some offerings. The first comes from Hay House. Between April 21 and 27, they’re offering the new eBook edition of E-Squared for $2.99. And then from April 28 to May 4, they’re offering The Course in Miracles Experiment eBook for $1.99.

The last announcement (and I love that others out there just do these things, since I’m so NOT a promoter) is from Mike Dooley’s Tut. A couple years ago, he and I offered a Magical Mystery Manifesting Adventure. He’s offering it again for a sizable discount. You can check it out here:

So, here’s to Fridays, love and the true sense of belonging to life.

#222 Forever!

For the sheer joy of it

April 12, 2024 16 Comments

“You are the teacher and healer you’ve been waiting for.”—Byron Katie

Perhaps my favorite line from my book, Art and Soul, Reloaded, is this: “The only book that will ever change your life is the one you write yourself.”

Admittedly, it’s not what a marketing consultant would want me to say. Doesn’t really encourage robust sales.

But that’s one of the traps we’ve been stuck in, the Skinner’s box that trains us to mindlessly, habitually react.

For far too long, we’ve been listening to directives from people who…well…want something from us, who believe the more, more, more narrative. We’ve totally bought the idea that “something is missing and that somebody out there, some THING out there is going to provide it. Better keep looking.”

We really don’t need all the things we’re constantly encouraged to need.

Especially when everything we really need—including answers and ideas and healing—resides right here, immovably inside us.

I laughed at one of the comments about Neale Donald Walsch’s book, Conversations with God. Rebecca said, “It never occurred to me to have my own conversation.”

Right now, collaborating with…I still haven’t settled on just one name for this loving Chatty Cathy…is the most rewarding part of my day. I’m finding it to be a loving and wise partner.

Mostly, it’s a huge relief to realize that something that’s not me is looking out for my good. It’s comforting to feel the presence of an invisible energy realm that actually seems to like me. That, from what I can tell, has always been there, hiding quietly behind my habits and mindless reactions, waiting for its moment to have the floor.

Have a fabulous weekend, you gorgeous you’s!! Make it the best—yes, it can keep getting better—weekend of your life.

#222 Forever!

Who ya gonna call?

April 10, 2024 44 Comments

“Every choice we make is a kind of prayer that aligns us with a certain reality and a certain future.” –Charles Eisenstein

Although I’m not quite as prolific as “Sybil,” who allegedly had 16 different personalities and voices, I notice two distinct thought patterns vying for my attention.

The first, often called an ego, constantly tries to keep me safe, points out lots of things I need to improve and basically repeats old stories, old ideas that toe the party line. Never have I noticed it telling me anything new or exciting or revelatory.

The other voice, which I’m discovering is every bit as present and available, speaks a whole different tale. It tells me I’m loving, loved and that my love is needed, important even.

The kinder, gentler voice claims to have always been there, but because it’s not pushy (love never is), it had to wait for my invitation. Which, as you all know by now, I’ve been doing every morning. Inviting it to dish!

Today, it assured me that its voice is my real voice and that the other voice—the one that has berated me off and on for my whole life—is just borrowed nonsense from a culture that lives in fear.

It even went so far as to say that it perceives me as perfect.

Say what?

Nobody has ever said that before, except maybe one of my old boyfriends in the early throes of romance.

And it also mentioned that as I begin to recognize this perfection in myself, I’ll see it in everybody else. Now that’s something worth having because as this point, I still seem to see a few things out there that I don’t rank as a perfect 10.

So I’m happy to be what the Course calls “a glad receiver.” And I’m becoming more and more willing to surrender my allegiance to the old thought system that a) never seemed to have my best interests at heart and that b) is made of creaky old tapes that I no longer need.

Hope y’all are enjoying your budding love story with your own correspondent which I’m told by my correspondent thinks you are perfect, too.

#222 Forever!