Here’s to a different matrix of success

“Chasing wealth is not the answer. I’ve crunched the numbers. And sitting in a cheap fishing boat with my family is so much better than sitting on an expensive yacht.”—Nick Offerman

While I joyously soaked in Gandhi’s wisdom during the January retreat in Ahmedabad, India, I also learned about his protégé, Vinoba Bhave, whose book Moved by Love is one of many seeds I brought back with me.

I finished his book yesterday and can genuinely gush that I am now officially a Vinoba Bhave fangirl. He’s most famous for walking the length and breadth of India and inspiring wealthy landowners to give away 4 million acres of land to the less financially fortunate.  

But the thing that most moved me was his approach to creating change, starting with a goal of freeing society from the bondage of money. I’m pretty sure Taz had a hand in this book coming my way.

Bhave was very clear that money is incapable of solving problems. Believing it is (and aren’t we sold that story from birth?) blinds us to real possibility. A revolution, he says, needs Spirit, not organization and structure.  

One man, rooted in Truth (what Gandhi called ‘soul force’), is all that’s needed for Spirit to move, all that’s needed to create societal change. Bhave’s mission was to root out discrimination of every kind and for wealth and property to be shared by all.

I mean, who doesn’t want that really? It is only fear and our belief that we are separate that keeps that beautiful vision from being a reality.  

Bhave was fearless. Because he knew he was more than a body, he had no need to protect it. Again, it’s the polar opposite of how we‘re trained from birth. He was able to give everything he had—his labor, his intelligence, his time and his thoughts–to this magnificent vision because he knew who he represented: the highest spirit in all of us.  

Never did he coerce anyone to give up their land. In fact, he made it clear that if privileged landholders didn’t feel inspired to donate a piece of their property, he didn’t want it.  He was giving them an opportunity. Because that’s what all of us really want—to give, to love, to make our hearts large enough to include everyone.

I could never repay even a fraction of the blessings I’ve been given in this lifetime, but at least I can share stories like this one. Hope you feel as inspired as I am right now. #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) that has just been turned into an app. Badass ACIM (badass-acim.com)

Happy 222! Celebrating possibility and miracles since 1993

“Let your broadcast of love bless the world.”—A Course in Miracles

Reading through E-Squared to update for the upcoming 10-year-anniverary edition, I was struck by the opening dedication: For Roosky. May your light forever shine.

Roosky, of course, is one of Taz’s gazillion nicknames: Taz-a-roo which led to Roosky which led to the dedication and my hope that the light and love she so clearly conveyed would bless the world. At the time, I was assuming its broadcast would continue here in the flesh.

But as Virginia Francess Sterrett said, “As long as space and time divide you from anyone you love, you simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time and, furthermore, to win.”

That’s the goal of the Taz Grout 222 Foundation. Not so much to battle, because well, battling just keeps the crazy going, but to defy space and time by keeping alive Taz’s incredible light. Every year on February 22 (that’s today friends!), we give a gift to an innovative project or person with a big idea to change consciousness and therefore the world.

In times such as this, it’s vital to recognize that behind-the-scenes, beneath-the-news there’s a completely different story going on. There are so many of us who only want to love and serve and who really believe with our entire hearts and souls that a more beautiful world is not only possible, but is right now, as we speak, gathering breath.

As usual, the foundation got lots of great pitches for lots of worthy projects. And as always, I consulted Taz (I’m just her ground crew, after all) to finally settle on the following projects for this year’s 222 Foundation gift:

I. I have fallen in love with Bill and Pat Taylor who started the Southeast Asia Foundation to, as they say, give back to the Universe for the countless blessings they’ve enjoyed in their lives. Not only does every single penny go to their mission (all operating expenses come from their own pocket), but they show up themselves, boots on the ground, to make sure every one of their projects begins with and is guided by locals. They take their inspiration from Lao Tzu, insist on both sustainability and religious inclusion and act on the words from an oval river rock Pat once gave to Bill for his birthday: “You cannot do all the good the world needs, but the world needs all the good you can do.”

Thanks to Bill and Pat’s beautiful work (their tagline is “It takes a girl to raise a village”), the 222 Foundation has chosen to fund seven libraries in rural Siem Reap, Cambodia: four for kids, two for high schoolers, one for university students and one for the community. Taz LOVED books and worked at the Grinnell library when she was at university so having access to books, rare in rural Cambodia, is a must for promoting literacy and providing access to new possibilities.

We’re also funding a chess club and providing filters and fuel for water purification towers in Siem Reap. Mostly, we want Bill (he even shared a wonderful 222 story from when he was a 9-year-old Boy Scout) and Pat to know how much we appreciate their open hearts, generosity and unflinching belief that “it’s not merely about the money. It’s about each girl knowing that somebody some place in the world loves her and cares about her and encourages her to make something of her life.”   

2. The other project Taz led me to support (isn’t she just brilliant?) is Craftroots, an artistan collective I was able to visit twice when I was in India last month. Once again, I fell in love with their mission. Yes, I fall in love A LOT!

Craftroots works with more than 17,000 artists in rural villages, keeping alive 72 ancient Indian arts and crafts. They aren’t out to scale their model or grow profits or production. Their aim is to bring a conscious shift in society by putting beauty into everything.

The artisans, mostly underprivileged women, aren’t viewed as laborers. Rather, they make up a sisterhood where each artist is genuinely respected, celebrated and encouraged to see their work as an offering to the divine—the divine in themselves and the divine in all life. Artisans pray together, read inspiring quotes each morning and focus on Truth: oneness, belonging and kinship.

Founder Anar Patel (to the right) also participated in ServiceSpace’s life-changing Gandhi 3.0 and says working with rural artisans is the greatest privilege of her life. She described it as her form of worship.

The 222 Foundation’s form of worship is looking for creative ways to burn through our culture’s prevailing trance of scarcity and lack and to provide a pinhole through which new possibilities and ways of being can shine. We are honored to support the above two projects and to remind everyone that there is light waiting for all of us to find. Happy #222!

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

The joys of being abnormal

“We’re all quietly aching for something to celebrate.”—Mark Nepo

I just ordered Gabor Mate’s new book, The Myth of Being Normal, and can’t wait to read it. The nearly 80-something physician argues that society trains us to suppress our own needs and authentic selves in order to fit in. 

I always called it following rules and cultural paradigms and I’m proud to say I spent most of my life avoiding the biggies.

I refused to take on a job that had no meaning or purpose just for the sake of money.  I refused to believe that having a ginormous house or a fancy car would make me happier or that the celebrities on Instagram were worth emulating. Even on my recent travel assignment to Lake Geneva, I couldn’t help but look at all the Gilded Age mansions and wonder, “Don’t all those big yards and 28 thousand rooms just separate you from other people?”

Disconnection, after all, is the exact opposite of freedom when you no longer trust others or the universe or the life force that thrums through us all.

As Mate points out, we evolved as communal creatures in close contact with each other. But now, because we live in an economic system that depends on growth and bigger, better, faster, we’re running roughshod over our basic human needs. Loneliness is at epidemic proportions.

But the biggest diversion from “normal” are my views on death. Tomorrow would be my daughter Tasman’s 29th birthday. Yes, I’m sad that she’s not here in physical form (we reveled in a lot of pretty amazing Tasmanfests over the years), but all the real things—the love, the closeness, even the conversations continue. And, as my friend Martha Creek pointed out, sadness is just a disguise for love.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that, as a culture, we celebrate a lot of things that aren’t good for us. In fact, a lot of what we think is desirable is flat out dangerous. And when celebrations of wealth, manufactured, one-size-fits all beauty and what’s billed as safety is considered “normal,” it resists scrutiny.

What I’d rather celebrate today is creativity, connection, having conversations that matter and that all the love we so long to enjoy already inescapably exists.

Have the very best weekend of your life, my friends. #222 Forever!

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

Everything leans on everything else

“The only true privilege in life is to love.”– -Justin Faerman

I’m totally jazzed about meeting some of you at this Sunday’s Amazingly Awesome Benefit Concert for the Taz Grout 222 Foundation. It’s such an honor to be surrounded by so much support, so much love, so much possibility. Even if you are on the other side of the globe.

Because remember – it’s impossible to step out of the ocean of wholeness. There’s literally nowhere else you can go.

So thank you one and all for so richly blessing me on this wild and crazy ride. From wherever you might hail.

I’ve already gushed here on the blog about my joy at writing a song with THE KAREN DRUCKER! She of Tarzan calling fame.

And I’d be remiss in not mentioning one of the other musicians who will be joining us on Sunday. Greg Tamblyn and I have been friends for eons. When I taught a journalism class at Avila College, he kindly showed up for my student reporters to interview.  I wrote about his hilarious song, “The Shootout at the I’m Okay, You’re Okay Coral” in my book, Art & Soul, Reloaded. And it was Greg who first introduced me to Evy McDonald who I’ve written about on the blog and, if memory serves, in one of my books. It’s a story about stepping away from the ego’s limited narrative and returning to the present and the wholeness of who we really are.

Here’s the scoop:

In 1980, Evy was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease. By the time doctors finally determined her illness, she was, to use her own words, “a bowl of jello in a wheelchair.” The doctor told her, at best, she had six months to live.

After raging about the unfairness of it all for a day or two, she had this thought: “Since I’m dying anyway, why not use the short time I have left to finally learn to love myself unconditionally?”

For years, she despised her body. She was overweight, for one thing. The polio she’d had as a child left her with two withered limbs and well, she was hard-pressed to find anything she really liked about her physical body.

But she was determined. Three times a day, she’d roll her wheelchair to the mirror and sit naked. She wouldn’t leave until she’d find new positives to add to a list. Her hair was pretty, for starters. She decided that whatever it took, she was going to learn to accept herself. She also resolved to give all negative feelings and thoughts over to the bigger thing.

At some point, she crossed some kind of miraculous threshold. She actually began to feel love and compassion for herself. She began to see her body as a miracle of creation, to see herself as a blessed being who could experience joy.

Strength began to return to her limbs. She eventually began to walk, to feed and to clothe herself. She became the first person to completely recover from ALS and 40 some years later, she’s still ALS-free.

So whatever fabrication you believe is ultimate reality, be open enough to consider it might just have a few glaring holes.

Here’s the song and one more invitation to join us this Sunday in our extraordinarily epic quest to change the consciousness of the world. #222 Forever!

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

Practice being fictional

“And you too have come into the world to go easy, to be filled with light and to shine.”—Mary Oliver

Do I look like a badass or what? I blame it on my selfie skills!

My daughter, Taz, is such a genius. Even though she no longer has a body, she’s able to send the most miraculous signs and messages my way. And that’s saying something since her mom, me, the recipient of her messages is still more or less trapped in the primitive belief in space and time. But even so, she’s able to get one of her many emissaries to deliver a hedgehog every first of the month.

This month, I’m in Mexico so she whispered the following to my light-filled friend Dawn: “Hey, you know that sweater you were wondering about? The one you couldn’t figure out where it came from? And what in the heck is that weird animal on the front?

Well, the reason that ended up in your drawer is because when you “just happen” to run into Pam and her friends eating crème brulee at Alex’s, you are going to remember it and say to Pam, “I have something for you. Stop by my place when you’re finished here.”

Dawn told me that as soon as saw me, the guidance was very clear. But then Dawn herself is very clear. I’m sure that’s why Taz asked her to deliver this beautiful, beautiful gift.

I love knowing there are realms way beyond anything I can see, that there are angels and otherworldly beings acting on my behalf. I love recognizing that this world, the one that seems so solid and immutable, is just a figment of my imagination.

This is not something I tell just everyone. It tends to trigger people, especially those with an extreme allegiance to problems and crises, all of which are fictional sequences created by a loud, insistent, distracted mind. When I suggest an oh-so-easy, six-word solution to a disturbance (Simply remove it from your thinking), people tend to look at me as if I just asked them to show me their underwear.

As for me, I’m thrilled that the more I surrender my beliefs and conditioning, the more I recognize that this world is illusion, the the more I feel Taz’s brilliant presence and the radiant joy and unspeakable peace that is my true nature.

FYI. If you’re anywhere near Kansas City, put this on your calendar:

#222 Forever!

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

222 Forever: A revolution in consciousness

“What we need now is more people who specialize in the impossible.”–Theodore Roethke

Happy 222, my brilliant, beautiful friends! As you know, today is the always-auspicious day where we celebrate Taz by picking a project with the vision and the chutzpah to radically shift how we see the world.

I’m overjoyed to announce this year’s recipient. It’s an organization that stands for every single principle of the Taz Grout 222 Foundation. It radically overturns all cultural beliefs about money, about how systems work and especially about what motivates people. Spoiler alert. It’s not what economists have been telling us.

ServiceSpace, an all-volunteer organization with more than a half million volunteers from around the world, is so subversive that my editor at People magazine could never wrap her head around it when I pitched it to her. “But how does it work?” she kept asking.

It works on the daring spiritual principle that Taz stood for, that I’ve made my career writing about. Namely, that the world is wildly abundant and that people, above all else, want to give. You know that economic maxim about people being selfish and wanting only to maximize self-interest? It’s complete and total B.S.

ServiceSpace has been defying the big fat lie of scarcity for 23 years. It all started in April 1999 when Nipun Mehta, a Stanford-trained engineer, decided to give up his cushy dot.com job to follow his heart’s urging. The standard narrative of success felt so hollow, he said. Why not go for the longshot?

A fan of Gandhi, who urged us to “be the change we wish to see,” Nipun started “giving” as an experiment. He started with money (he gave to charity), moved to giving of his time (volunteering at a hospice) and then decided he’d go full-time, giving of himself unconditionally. No job. No strings attached.  

If nothing else, he has proven that acts of revolutionary generosity are generative.

ServiceSpace today is a network of more than 600,000 volunteers who purposely chose projects you can’t monetize—like kindness, compassion, love. They’ve been an incubator for free restaurants, a free news service (good news, that is), a network of free inspirational speakers, a free rickshaw service and they’ve given away hundreds of millions of dollars in free tech services.

ServiceSpace operates on three principles:

1) Everything is strictly volunteer. Money is NEVER charged.

2) No one ever ASKS for money. Many charities do good work, but they end up spending much of their energy and resources in fundraising. That creates a field of neediness, the exact opposite of ServiceSpace’s unwavering belief in abundance and the goodness of mankind.  

3) They focus on small actions. Let’s take care of whatever we can touch, give to whatever is in front of us.

But mostly, they upturn deep-seated assumptions:

What if we decide to trust people?

What if we completely drop the quid pro quo?

What if we defy what the business world calls success?

What if we create a whole different kind of ecosystem?

What if generosity actually generates more generosity?

I’ve written extensively in my books and here on the blog about the gift economy, but I’ve come to appreciate Nipun’s wording better. He calls it a gift ecology because ecology creates a deep web with branches spreading everywhere.

I’ve been volunteering with Service Space for several years now. Among other things, I’ve helped transcribe the inspiring, beautiful, makes-me-soar Awakin Calls that bring together tens of thousands of folks around the globe every Saturday. I’ve taken part in numerous ServiceSpace pods and feel so blessed to be a small part of the deep shift in consciousness this gritty, ragtag team is giving to the world.

In closing, I’d like to rerun a piece I wrote many years ago that features Taz and, to my way of thinking, fits right in with the ServiceSpace values.

But mostly, I want to thank all of you for believing in me, in my magical Taz and the profound 222 consciousness that IS bringing light to the world.

Let’s do this thing:

The world is a magical place. What we’ve been offered so far is anything but.

Let’s start with our current economic system. It’s made up. It’s a random agreement we’ve all agreed to participate in. But it’s not real.

It was designed by the reptilian part of our brain, the part that’s scared, the part that hollers, Danger! Watch out! Protect yourself!

It’s based on artificial lack and rampant, unsatisfying consumerism. It can never give us what we really want. One of its key tenets, in fact, is to encourage us to seek things we already have. To keep the economy growing—the holy grail, according to the current paradigm—we’ve been forced to monetize all the gifts we were given coming in . . . things like health, water, entertainment, food.

Even self-help books promote the very peace and well-being you already have—or did, before we laid our economic story on top of it.

Until our financial paradigms got all up in Mother Nature’s face, we were gifted with everything we could ever need.

When you build anything, particularly an economic system, on faulty information, it should come as no surprise when it fails to satisfy.

 Here are a few of the bald-face premises on which dogma of the Western world is built:

  1. That we face an indifferent universe. Everything we do, everything we believe, is predicated on the idea that we live in an indifferent and sometimes even antagonistic universe. To be successful, we think we must bend it to our will. Exert control, use discipline. To believe the universe might know what it’s doing, to think it might actually love us and have a plan for our lives, is antithetical to every lesson economists teach.

Is it really just a chance coincidence of random molecules that we are conscious and breathing and listening to Israel Kamakawiwo‘ole play “Over the Rainbow” on a ukulele?

2. That there’s scarcity and lack. The current economic system touts insufficiency and promotes the preposterous notion that important things are missing in your life.

Once it supplied all your basic needs (food and shelter, both of which were originally provided for free by Mother Nature), it was forced to come up with fake stuff to sell you—things like deodorant, plastic banana slicers, dancing Santa decorations, and other things that don’t serve human happiness. In many ways, the economy Adam Smith helped create is little more than a government-sponsored pyramid scheme.

The assumption of scarcity is one of the central axioms of economics. It’s regarded as objective truth. However, like most “objective truths,” it’s nothing but a projection. Like the people watching shadows in Plato’s cave, when we break free from our chains, we can see very clearly that the world is wildly abundant.

And I’m not talking just metaphysically. Vast quantities of food, energy, and other resources go to waste every day. Yes, half the world is starving, but the other half throws away more than enough to feed them. There is more than enough to go around.

Even more abundant than the material world is the spiritual world: the creations of the human mind—songs, stories, films, ideas . . . all the stuff we call intellectual property.

Once we take off the blinders, throw overboard the story we’ve been sold, we can see how truly abundant the world really is.

3. That we’re separate. The current financial system is based on the idea each of us is an isolated fragment, disconnected from each other and from nature. It operates under the false assumption that what happens to someone over in Africa has no bearing on you or me. It’s based on the idea that we can pollute this river over there or extract that ore down there without affecting ourselves.

Any Economics 101 professor will tell you that maximizing self-interest is normal, that competition is in your DNA.

But when we give up our cultural story that it’s a dog-eat-dog, every-man-for-himself world, we can’t help but notice that human cooperation is actually the norm. People love to help each other. Ask for directions if you don’t believe me. People will fall all over themselves to help.

I would argue that giving to your fellow man is a human need.

Tim Cahill, founding editor of Outside magazine, told me this story when we were in Namibia a few years ago:

While walking to the Swakopmund Convention Center for a presentation he was giving to the Adventure Travel Trade Association, he asked a local, balancing a basket on her head, for the quickest route.

Noticing this stranger was on foot, she asked him, “What time do you need to be there?”

When he told her, she immediately pivoted and said, “C’mon. Let’s go back for my car. Otherwise, you’ll never make it.”

This is who we really are, lovers of life just waiting for the chance to help.

My daughter, a card-carrying member of Oxfam, helps host what the international confederation calls a Hunger Banquet at her college every year.

Upon arrival, each guest draws a random ticket assignment to a particular “seat” at the world’s economic table. Fifty-six percent (representing those who live in dire poverty) sit on the floor and get maybe a handful of rice and dirty water. The 42 percent who represent the middle class might get a sandwich and a card table. The remaining 2 percent get white tablecloths, china, and a feast fit for a king.

The purpose of the banquet is to open our eyes to the fact that economic disparity and location, income, and available resources depend a lot on randomness and dumb luck.

But what ends up happening (and this is where our notions of the world get seriously threatened) at these Hunger Banquets that Oxfam has staged in dozens of countries is that the 2 percent, when faced head-on with the 56 percent sitting on the floor, end up sharing their gnocchi, asparagus, and artichokes in pesto cream sauce.

Given the chance, people consistently do the right thing. This is what’s true. This is what our inner impulses instruct us to do.

Once we let go of our ridiculous notions of “the way the world works,” we get ample proof that there’s absolutely no need to protect ourselves from each other, from nature’s cruelty, or from our own inner impulses.

4. That our purpose in life is to value things that just don’t matter. The economic system, as it currently reigns, encourages us to go against our highest nature. It encourages us to seek money above all else. It creates a hierarchy that certain people are better than others. It tells us that having more stuff makes us happier. It teaches us to hoard resources, to value a big car more than, say, an old-growth forest. Anyone who has ever spent time in an old-growth forest can tell you there’s a lot more satisfaction to be found under a 2,000-year-old redwood than in the Lincoln MKX Matthew McConaughey drives around in TV commercials.

Our overblown consumer culture is a massive exercise in missing the point.

What the current financial paradigm offers us is not natural. It’s not what we really want. The best things in life, as the old saying goes, are not things. Derek Sivers—the brilliant entrepreneur who started CD Baby and sold it for $22 million, 95 percent of which he gave to charity—said he’d love to buy trained parrots to fly around every mall in America squawking,

“It won’t make you happy. It won’t make you happy. It’s not what you really want.”

What we do really want is to give of our gifts and talents, to be of service. We want to love. We want to be generous. We need to do these things. It’s what makes us happy, what brings us alive.

Real security lies in becoming more of who we really are, in traveling light, being free in mind. Money, which is nothing but a bunch of green paper and plastic cards and numbers in a virtual cloud somewhere, is temporary, ephemeral, malleable. It’s a symbol and works best when it’s circulated. It gets stagnant sitting in one man’s hedge fund.

As Nipun likes to say, “Love is truly a currency that never runs out. #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) that has just been turned into an app. Badass ACIM (badass-acim.com)

Holiness is your superpower

“I want this now to be the now where we save our place, your place, our earth.”—Louise Erdrich

Do you feel it? The powerful shift in consciousness? Not only have we just entered the Year of the Water Tiger which encourages each of us to take big risks, but it’s the 2nd month of the 2022 year. Hi, Taz!

Big things are abrewin’!  For myself, I’m hyper aware of just how little interest I have in the “old story.” The story of scarcity and consumption and fear has zero appeal. Zip.

I’m being drawn even more to stories of love, of openness, of miracles. And they’re everywhere. I’m hearing stories about indigenous people who can retreat into a cave for a few days and come out without cataracts or say, a broken foot. They simply leave the quantum superposition where that was a “reality” and step into a new reality. In fact, any story that doesn’t have an “anything is possible” narrative at its core goes poof in my brain.

What’s this you say?  War? Disease? It’s just not of interest anymore. It like a bad movie that is begging to be clicked off.

Especially when so much beauty and love is happening right now, in this and in every moment. Just looking deep into the eyes of another human should convince you of the enormous potential, the infinite light that exists within each one of us. All we gotta do is dive below the crust of the psyche. That ego story isn’t real, guys.

The line “holiness is your superpower” from yesterday’s Course lesson really stuck out to me. Every single “problem” that our culture tells us to fear can be healed right now. We don’t need a politician or a product or anything else that society tells us we need. There’s no limitation. There’s nothing we’re not connected to.

I must admit that, as I’m writing this, I feel a little crazy. Or rather, I’m admitting to all the world that I’ve officially departed the bounds of normality. I’m no longer tethered to any semblance of what I’ve been “trained to believe.”

But why would I choose to live in a culture where these truths are considered the provenance of a crazy person.

This whole rant sorta kicked off February 1. As you know, Taz always sends a hedgehog on the first of each month—in really weird, supernatural ways.

I was scheduled to be in surgery all day and was curious, “how will Taz deliver this month’s hedgehog? For one thing, I’ll be under anesthesia.” But lo and behold, I get home from the surgery center and waiting on my front porch is a stuffed hedgehog and a box of chocolates. Keep in mind that this was sent from someone I’ve never met who had NO IDEA I was having surgery. The chocolates were an especially thoughtful touch, don’t you think? 

I believe Taz has emissaries all over the world. As we all do. This connection is so strong right now and I feel so many beautiful souls from what we call “the other side” stepping up to free us from the old story that anyone with a nose can plainly see is breaking down.

Anyway, beloveds, it’s almost 2/22 and, in the meantime, I’m out there employing my superpower to heal every water system, every soil system, every belief system that no longer applies. Consider yourself invited to join in. #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) that has just been turned into an app. Badass ACIM (badass-acim.com)

When your reality gets out of control

“To be empowered—to be free, to be unlimited, to be creative, to be genius, to be divine—that is who you really are.”—Joe Dispenza

So I’m back from Mexico after a month of mountain hikes, glorious mighty companions (that’s what we Course students call each other) and lots of fresh air, fresh food and fresh ideas.

In my absence, my garden beds have been starring in their own reality show, “Plants gone wild.” Nothing makes me happier than seeing what nature does when left to its own devices.

As I’ve been weeding and taming and wrestling the plants back into their borders, I got to thinking how reality, too, can get out of control. Especially when we leave the country of who we really are. When we supersede the love we were born from and still essentially ARE with cultural narratives, media hysteria and emotional attachments.

As I repeat, ad infinitum, the reality we see is nothing but a mental projection resulting from a conglomeration of our beliefs, thoughts and history.

What we see and experience is a real time neurological interface with particles and waves that we have condensed down to matter with old programming. Even though, in the quantum world, we are completely new and different than we were one millionth of a second before.

So my focus right now is returning to proto-Pam, the true Self before the beliefs and programming and what my friend, Jay, calls societal implants were installed.  

Every morning, I go out and lay in my backyard, flat on the ground, connecting with who I really am before Newtonian paradigms and 65 years of history took over.

It’s actually quite beautiful. I find nothing but love and light. Hope you’ll go outside today, feel the truth and join me in returning the world back to its original creation. #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) that has just been turned into an app. Badass ACIM (badass-acim.com)

It’s a-shining in me…now

“The ego is the party pooper that prevents us from dancing into the middle of the ballroom floor.”—Francis Lucille

Buenas dias, mis amigos! Spending a month in Mexico’s Sierra Madres is the perfect antidote to hot Kansas summers.

Long mountain hikes, $1 green juices and, of course, the Namaste community makes for an easy dive into today’s Course in Miracles lesson: The peace of God is shining in me now. It’s also making me toy with the idea of resuming my travel writing.

As I’ve shared before, I had no idea (always the preferable plan) how I was going to realize my intention of traveling the world, but Source knew just how to work it out.

Ever since that editor at Ladies Home Journal called to ask if I did travel writing (and I very wisely answered “of course” even though I wasn’t totally sure what that meant), I’ve been writing about foreign cultures, countries and ideas. And, in the process, traveling the world.  

Which brings me to the word “try” and why I avoid it by any means necessary. As Thomas Keating said, “to try to accomplish things by force of will is to reinforce the false self.”

The false self, of course, is the part of us that believes life is hard and that we have to seek to find what makes us happy.

Although I’ve repeatedly said “the biggest secret in the world is that we all really love each other,” another biggie in the lies-we-believe department is that happiness is out there somewhere. When in reality, happiness, joy and, yes, peace is our natural state.

And every time we try to attain that, we forget that we already have it.

Take my beautiful new website, for example. It was pretty clear my old site needed an update, but rather than work to find and interview designers, the perfect designer came to me. Out of the blue.

Out of the blue, by the way, is a synonym for the Dude, at least in my vocabulary. Thank you SO MUCH, Ioana Stoica, a Romanian designer who read one of my books and emailed me to volunteer.

So today, no matter what big plans you have, I hope you’ll take today’s Course in Miracles lesson to heart. And here to make it easy, is Jimmy Twyman’s song, “The peace of God is shining in me now.”  #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) that has just been turned into an app. Badass ACIM (badass-acim.com)

Still swimming in the waves

Appreciation is a wonderful thing. It makes what is excellent in others belong to us, as well.”–Voltaire

Happy Thursday, my brilliant beauties.

A series called False Positive (I haven’t watched it, don’t even know what it’s about) recently debuted on Hulu.

But the title got me thinking how often we invest in the opposite: false negatives.

All things we judge as “negative” are false. For that matter, all things we judge period — be it negative or positive — are false. Or rather non-existent.  They’re nothing but false simulations that our crafty brains devise to keep us from experiencing the astonishing now.

What can I say? The brain likes order and consequently fill in empty spaces with its own interpretations, all of which reflect beliefs from the past, beliefs that no longer exist.

I was going through some of Taz’s art journals (the girl was prolific and profound) and found this wonderful piece of art. I was startled by how relevant it is for the book I’m currently writing.

Yes, I’m finally writing a new book.

I love that I continue to surf in the incredible waves Taz left for me in this particular time-space incarnation.

The girl’s thoughts (in the bubble) are all false negatives. If only I was smarter, more interesting, etc. These are the ego’s thoughts that keep us so garbled up in distress that we miss the truth, the light, the love. But the more pronounced words “if only…I was free” are what’s real, what’s true, what’s our inheritance.

I’ve also been thinking about how we so often ask the wrong questions. We inquire about data. How much did your newborn weigh, how long was he, as one example. We could be asking “Tell me what it was like for your miraculous body to grow this new being, nurture it and then release it into this world?” Instead of focusing on data (how long? How big? How____?– substitute any piece of irrelevant data), we could be asking, “What profundities have you discovered? What mischief have you perpetuated? What is your biggest grandest vision for our planet?”

So, my friends, on this clear, beautiful Thursday, I leave you with those exact queries and I hope you’ll take a moment to answer in the comments section below.

Love, always love. #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) that has just been turned into an app. Badass ACIM (badass-acim.com)