“If you allow it, your life will flow into zones of astonishment you could never invent.”–Martha Beck
Happy Friday, my wonderful cosmic tribe! I’m heading to Scotland tomorrow so I wanted to check in and tell you how grateful I am for each and every one of you. Please know your support and love keep me afloat.
I also thought I’d share a couple pictures from the dedication of the Taz Grout Memorial Library in Nepal that “just happened” to occur on her birthday, unbeknownst to HANDS In Nepal, the wonderful organization that arranged it all.
There was a tikka ceremony, kata scarves, flower necklaces, dancing and well, let’s just say it was a worthy birthday celebration. Funny how that works.
As I’ve said before, it’s pretty miraculous being the ground crew for Taz and her bigger perspective. One of the ideas she recently “led me” to is the importance of rescinding all beliefs in mind-controlled thought forms. You know, thought forms that tell us what is and isn’t beautiful, thought forms that tell us to fear, thought forms that tell us we must work really, really hard to fix problems and that, if we want to access our spiritual power, we must pray, meditate, visualize and write a bazillion affirmations.
What about the inalterable fact, Taz went on, that you are already spiritual, that you can’t NOT be? What if it’s only your gaze on the distorted illusion (those mind-controlled thought forms) that blocks the intensely alive energy field that surrounds and flows through you? And what if there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, you have to do? Except live in the awareness of the Divine frequency. And what if when you do, you can’t help but bless all life around you? Without working hard, without changing anything. But by simply being who you are and saying thank you.
So thank you, wonderful blog tribe, thank you Dude and thank you, as always, Tasman McKay Grout. #222 Forever!
“If you think bending spoons is cool, wait until you learn to bend your whole life.”—Martha Beck
Back in 1981, Bud Tribble, who at that time was a new hire at Apple, suggested that his boss possessed the superpower of creating “reality distortion fields.”
What he meant is that Steve Jobs could take what everyone else believed was utterly impossible and inspire his teams to do it anyway. Tribble said he got the term from an episode of Star Trek where aliens created new worlds using mental force.
What he didn’t bother to mention is that this same superpower is engrained in all of us. We all create our world, 100 percent of the time. Except instead of using our imaginations and going for what others believe is impossible, we get up each day and compress our world back into the mold we used yesterday. And the day before that.
The Course in Miracles says it like this: “I see only the past.”
Talk about a waste of a superpower. We could literally imagine into existence a more beautiful, just and compassionate world, one that works for everyone. The past story of scarcity and separation is getting creaky and old. All the forces trying to hold it in place are literally falling apart.
That’s why it’s the perfect time to use our superpowers of imagination, creativity and love. If we refuse to fall for the story that impossible things can’t be done, we can literally regenerate everything.
But we have to give up our training, our rules, our old, sad story. Each of us is a whirlpool of individual consciousness inside a vast universal consciousness. If we can give up the past, meet each moment anew and ask for help from what I often call The Divine Buzz, things that were once dubbed impossible can become “well, duh!” Here’s to regeneration, imagination and peace. #222 Forever
“Look for the little hints of magic glittering at the corners of your life.”–Martha Beck
As a grounded travel writer, I’ve had to use my imagination this year. Instead of exploring new countries, I’ve traipsed through my little town’s 54 parks. Instead of elephants on the savannahs of Africa, I’ve oohed, I’ve aahed over giant local tortoises. I’ve hugged a lot of trees—which, believe it or not, often hug me back.
But mostly, I’m practicing living in magical realms. In different dimensions that have always been here, but I’m frequently too busy to notice.
It takes some dislodging of old patterns, of recognizing that looks can be deceiving. Readers of my books know I have a thing for quantum physics. Studying the science behind what I think of as “reality” helps me escape the trap of form. As I said in E-Squared, the material world “aint what it’s cracked up to be.”
Rather than detracting from life, learning about my illusions actually enhances it. I’ve said it before, but I have to keep reminding myself that nothing is solid. Physicists exposed that fallacy more than 100 years ago. Things we see are 99.999999999 percent empty space.
Those “things” we think we see out there, according to David Bohm, are “a phenomenon of connecting light rays which go back and forth, freezing them into a pattern.” Our brains literally make up a story based on our frozen patterns. Everything is actually energy.
Even my body is not solid or stable. At a cellular level, it’s in constant flux. My stomach lining is replaced every five days. Skin is reformed every two weeks. I have a completely new set of lungs than I did six months ago. The very oldest cells in my body are at most 10 years old—which, come to think of it, could explain my behavior at times.
At an atomic level, this turnover occurs at breakneck velocities. And my eyes trick me. As one rather startling example, this big rock known as Planet Earth is whizzing through the galaxy at 67,000 miles per hour.
Which gets me to the headline of this post. Rather than depending on what my eyes show me—an illusory world at best—I’m leaning in to the kingdom of magic, the world of infinite potentiality where anything and everything is possible. Once I let go of my brain’s many fabrications, I begin to notice all kinds of miraculous things. Perfect solutions show up. New adventures (which can be had anywhere, at any time) unfurl before me. I even get messages from Taz who according to conventional old school thinking is nowhere to be had.
Starting tomorrow, like I always do, I’ll begin Lesson #1 from A Course in Miracles. The first 50 lessons are there to help me unravel illusions, to transcend the fear that insists my number one goal should be protecting the body. I’m reading a wonderful book by a Buddhist teacher who suggests repeating this four-word mantra: “This is a dream.”
I’ve been repeating it a lot and even saying it “out loud.” It’s amazing how much lighter everything feels when I approach life this way, when I recognize that all my problems are just fascinating dramas that I literally concocted out of empty space and frozen light patterns.
Perhaps the children’s song, “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” says it best. “Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily. Life is but a dream.”
That merry river is where I’ll be in 2021. I hope to see you there. #222 Forever
“There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”—Toni Morrison
The new “cover” for the Course in Miracles app that debuts soon.
A couple days ago, I wrote about how Taz radically changed my life. Martha Beck, who I met years ago when we were both speaking at a writer’s conference, also had a child who upended everything she thought she knew.
I decided to catch up with Martha and discovered three miracle stories that I feel indebted to share.
Fair warning. They’re all a little woo-woo, but as Martha says, the law of attraction is “inane and bizarre, but it keeps working for me.”
Recently, she’s been “attracting” animals. Like the Nature vs. News experiment I wrote about in E-Cubed, Martha gets most of her important intel from the natural world. And this is a woman with three degrees from Harvard.
She noticed lately that when she imagines a certain animal, it shows up. She was driving across the wide expanse of Wyoming and thought, “I’d love to see a pronghorn antelope.”
She’d never seen one and because it’s the only antelope native to the U.S., she wanted to rectify that glaring deficiency. Almost numb from a long day of driving, she noticed what she called a “smudge” on the horizon. So she stopped her car. As the smudge got closer, it turned into a giant herd of pronghorn antelopes, whipping up dust as it galloped across the open plain. This herd screeched to a halt right in front of her car and stood there for a while. She said she cried.
“These are the kind of things that should not happen in the mechanistic world,” she said. “But they do.”
Another time, she was in Sedona, Arizona for a quick meeting. She thought to herself, I’ve always wanted to see a javelina, but it was an “in and out” trip with no time to tour or do anything so “oh well.”
She and her assistant were in the hotel suite doing the interview when they heard a knock on the door. The assistant goes to the door and screams, “It’s a pig.”
Sure enough, it was a javelina (how does a Labrador-sized pig knock on a door?) that was soon joined by a whole family of javelina.
“These things shouldn’t be happening according to Newton’s worldview,” she says.
The last thing I want to share is a video Martha created. I love it so much, mainly because she puts into words the answer to a question I’ve been pondering (and I know some of you have been pondering) for a very long time. What in the heck is happening in our world?
Enjoy, my friends. And, as always, go out and have the VERY BEST weekend of your life. #222 Forever
“Perceptual bias affects nut jobs and scientists alike.”—Martha Beck
India won its freedom from British colonial rule in 1947. Mahatma Gandhi, who led the nonviolent battle, used to say, “India will be independent as soon as its people can see it in their own minds.”
In other words, they had to focus not on what they saw, but on what they wanted to see.
As long as we feel beholden to outside circumstances, put stock in the world as it appears to be, we are stuck in small emotions, small visions.
The world is changing at warp speed. We’re in the midst of the biggest planetary evolution of our time. Those of us who know that an invisible energy realm (what I often call the field of infinite potentiality or the F.P.) governs the material realm are the pioneers who must call forth the new world. A world where everybody belongs, a world where everybody is fed and nurtured and loved.
I realize it doesn’t exactly look like that now, but we–with our thoughts, emotions and consciousness—are being called to play the starring role in the new world that’s being born.
It’s up to us to tap into the world’s natural abundance and joy. It’s up to us to change the story from lack and scarcity to plentitude, from transaction to trust, from fear to love, from separateness to unity. Love and possibilities are everywhere around us except where we suppress it with limited perception.
Everything we need is already here but we must fine-tune our seeing. We must bring forth that which we can’t see yet with our eyes.
Who’s game to join me in this new vision, from problem state to possibility state? Let’s fall in love, let’s be dazzled with the world we’re calling forth. #222 Forever!
And for those who are interested, here are a couple recent podcast interviews.
“People love their mental prison cells because it gives them a sense of security and a false sense of, ‘I know.’”—Eckhart Tolle
I LOVE this picture with 15 of God’s adorable angels. It was sent to me by the inimitable Becky Buckman, who is teaching the principles of E-Squared and E-Cubed to inmates at a maximum security prison in Nashville, Tennesse. As she says, “I love teaching LOA to these ‘tough on the outside” men who are continuing to expand the way they think and empower themselves.”
I was so thrilled that my fabulous publisher, Hay House, donated books for their next session beginning November 8. I also want to thank Becky for inventing a new word from my name. She now says, “She is groutful, which is one step better even than being grateful.”
I hope she’ll report back with results of this upcoming eight-week class, but in the meantime, here’s a blog post (as I mentioned I’m in Helsinki this week, rocking the casbah at the Glo Art Hotel) from Linda Ford, a Martha Beck master coach who has blessed us here on the blog in the past. Take it away, Linda:
THE POWER OF NOT CLOSING DOWN
Remember when you were a kid playing with your friends, and you lost the game you were playing, or you came-in last at the race, or you realized that you just couldn’t keep up or compete with your friends? Do you also remember walking away with a temper tantrum and saying out loud in frustration: I don’t want to play anymore!
We may be grown-ups now, but many of us still react this way when life doesn’t give us the relationship we’re longing for, the job we desire, or the house of our dreams. And unfortunately, many of us see our disappointment and frustration as a reason to close down, especially if you’ve been waiting a long time. It’s the grown up version of I don’t want to play anymore.
I have a client (who I’ll call Mary). She’s gone through years of feeling frustrated and despondent because she never seems get what she wants. Life is one big struggle. She recently experienced a huge disappointment when a job she had high hopes of getting and which she had invested a lot of time interviewing for, didn’t pan out. Here’s what she told me:
I feel as if I’m back in the trenches, starting all over again. Other people don’t seem to go through this prolonged crap that I go though. How long is this going to go on?
Mary’s tendency to want to close down when she doesn’t get what she wants is a pattern that also shows up in her relationship life. She goes on dates, and ends up feeling depressed and disappointed that the guys aren’t a match for she’s looking for.
What Mary and many of us don’t get, is that when circumstances don’t match up to our desires—when we experience red flags that something is not quite right with a job or a date—it’s not because we’re unlucky or unable to attract, or because we’re not favored by the gods. It’s just that we need more fine-tuning and personal alignment. We need to do the inner work.
We don’t get what we want because we continue to play out a vibration with our words and feelings that tell the universe that we don’t want to play anymore. And in that moment of disappointment (and it’s a pivotal moment!) we make the decision (and the huge mistake) for the umpteenth time, to close down and let our negative emotions sweep over us and dictate our energy. And once again, the door to everything we want gets slammed shut in our face.
What if instead of seeing your disappointment and frustration as just another indication that you’re unlucky or cursed, you saw it as an opportunity for fine-tuning your desires? What if you saw the job or relationship you didn’t get, as an opportunity to line up with a bigger and better version of what you want? What if you saw your defeat as an opportunity to practice unconditional self- love? What if you saw the let down as a way to get CLARITY?
People who are getting what they want in life don’t go off in a temper tantrum. They stay in the game. They don’t buy into the thought that they’re unlucky, or that life is out to get them. They prefer to hang out with and stay attuned to their desires rather than their disappointments. They are grateful for the clarity that’s emerging.
As savvy as we all are about the principles of the law of attraction, many of us still hold onto the belief that there are outside (external) forces that are blocking our success. We just love to pass the buck and blame something, anything but ourselves. We still secretly love to believe that some people are favored by the gods while others have been left out. We still partly believe that it’s about the family we were born into or the boss who keeps denying you that promotion. These old paradigms of thinking from the outside-in—even if they occupy just ten percent of our thinking—interfere with our ability to manifest the life we crave. Why? Because we end up NOT taking full responsibility for the quality of our thoughts and feelings. We resist doing the inner work.
What if you could finally accept that whatever is manifesting for you in life is one hundred percent because of the way YOU think and feel? What if you could finally start living from the INSIDE OUT?
The brilliant Joseph Campbell said: The gods will give you want you want, but you have to be ready for it.
I love this quote because it reminds me that I am in the control box. I am steering my own ship. And the only thing I (and Mary) have to do is get ready for the delicious life that’s waiting for us to step into.
Linda Ford is a Master Coach, personally trained by Martha Beck. Her mission is to help people get out of their own way and THRIVE. http://www.attractalife.com
Pam Grout is the author of 17 books including E-Squared: 9 Do-it-Yourself Energy Experiments that Prove Your Thoughts Create Your Reality and the just-released sequel, E-Cubed, 9 More Experiments that Prove Mirth, Magic and Merriment is your Full-time Gig.
“This is the zone of reality creation: regularly picturing delights that don’t yet exist, emotionally detaching from them, and jumping into action when it’s time to help the miracles occur.”—Martha Beck
Just a quickie today! I had an utterly delightful breakfast with my Spiritual Entrepreneurs group and I’m now off on a road trip to visit my daughter at the farm where she’s interning with political refugees. Not only does she love it (duh! How could any spawn of mine not be giddily blessed), but she’s meeting beautiful people from Bhutan and Burundi and Burma, helping them take their fresh produce to farmer’s markets.
So….I’ve been thinking today about little tweaks I’m making in my consciousness, little adjustments that keep the airplane of my life en route and heading towards a joyful target.
Here are three itty bitty belief tweaks that have made an enormous difference in my life:
1. There’s more where that came from. Most of us have a tendency to believe in limits. Instead of realizing the infinity of our Source, we put the brakes on and worry there’s only so much to go around.
2. If it’s not fun, it’s not sustainable. Who isn’t talking about sustainability these days? The realization I’ve come to is that, in order to continue on our path of growth and self-awareness, it has to be viewed as a good time. As Esther Hicks like to say, “It’s always a good idea to sit at the fun table.” Every morning, I pre-pave a day that’s deliciously fun in every way, filled with adventures and blessings.
3.Everything flows smoothly and easily. I’ve talked before about the word “hard” and how, in my opinion, it’s the most dangerous four-letter word in the English language. If we expect things to be hard, we can certainly create life that way. As for me, I prefer creating a life where I simply open the doors and windows and let Source and all its accompanying blessings flow freely in.
Have the best day of your life!
Pam Grout is the author of 16 books including E-Squared: 9 Do-it-yourself Energy Experiments that Prove your Thoughts Create your Reality. She also writes for CNN Travel, Men’s Journal and Huffington Post.
“I’ve known for some time that staring at objects while holding pictures in my head makes reality oddly responsive.”—Martha Beck
Martha Beck, who I met one year at an author’s conference in Kansas City (we both had new books out), wrote an article for O Magazine about vision boards. As she said, “Some results are so successful that the hair on the nape of my neck prickled for months.”
Anyone who has read The Secret (a group that includes pretty much everyone on the planet) knows about vision boards where you cut out pictures of things you’d like to invite into your life for dinner.
However, today, I’d like to talk about an even more important practice. Instead of making lists (and vision boards) of things you’d like to receive, how about composing a list of things you’d like to give? Of things you’d like to create?
And before that, make a list of all the things you already have. Things you’re grateful for NOW.
Gratitude (or amazing awesomeness, as I like to call my practice) is the oil that lubes the channels of the world’s beneficence. If you’re not playing with and appreciating “the toys” you have now, why expect new ones? Why even want new ones?
The other day I was walking my dog (lots of things happen when I walk my odd-looking bassador—that’s part Bassett Hound, part Lab) by a railroad track. It’s junky, not exactly a spectacle for the eyes. I’ve walked this route countless times. But earlier that morning I’d been reading Blue Iris, a book of poems and essays by Mary Oliver. Most were about flowers.
In about three blocks, next to what many would describe as an eyesore, I found at least seven species of teensy little flowers. Teensy little flowers that I’d undoubtedly marched by many times and never noticed. I plucked one of each and pressed them between waxed paper and into a big, heavy book. I figure they’ll be a good reminder next time my ego decides to launch a new campaign around lack and fear.
They aren’t the big showy blossoms florists stock, but each one is ridiculously beautiful and I am embarrassed that I walked by so many times without noticing.
So, yea, vision boards are great. But right now, I’m too busy making lists of all the ridiculously beautiful things I already have.
Tell me in the comments below: What ridiculously beautiful things do you already have?
Pam Grout is the author of 16 books including E-Squared: 9 Do-it-Yourself Energy Experiments that Prove Your Thoughts Create Your Reality.
