Vacationing on the Shadow Side of Life

The Shadow Side…it’s that place you thought you were meant to stay forever and ever

Nope. We are not meant to stay in the shadows. No way – we need the Light and we get it from the Sunny people who share our lives with us. Yet that is beside the point. As spiritual beings we were never meant to live and to camp on the Dark Side of Life forever, only to visit, and the people who we visit with are either meant to be there with us and learn, or are simply meant to be there with us to learn also as well as to teach us. When their lesson for us is finished and we have been taught something, and when they have learned from us what they are meant to, even if that  lesson is placing hurt on someone else, that is when our time with them in the shadows is done. It is at that point where all those emotions that we have or had when we were in their presence come into play for us, and that is when we are meant to ponder the things that we are feeling, rather than only going through the motions of emotion.

The Motions of Emotion

Whether it is that we need to learn to not hurt other people, or if we need to learn how to deal with our own hurt through them, the Shadow Side will always teach us what we need to learn, and the Shadow Side will never lie to us, and the Shadow Side is always very appealing to us especially while we are learning from it. When we learn from it is when the parts of our Spirit that we cannot deal with NOT looking at – the part that tells us that it is inviting us to play in the realms of the darkness, to visit where we have been, where we are comfortable, and where the most damage to our Souls come from- this is the purpose of our Shadow…so we can see, ever brighter than before, our own Light of Spirit.

The most damage to our souls comes from that place where we kept these people who we loved, who we trusted, who we have and had much in common with. On my end, I was given the keys to unlock the reason why I do not do certain things with certain people, and I found out dearly and through nothing more than my asking…actually my Soul asking, for that lesson in what it is that I do NOT need. This is where the majority of us has been these last few months, and in that time we have allowed the people who we most shared time with go their way and learn their lessons, and in my case, that lesson came in the form of someone who I share heritage with, who I dearly trusted, who I thought had my back…then the truth happened. I found out that they could not be trusted, and that it was not for more than what the ego wanted, and it came in the form of arrogance and hit me in the head, heart and soul like so many bricks through a window.

It hurt. They’re gone. I learned. What did you learn? I am betting a WHOLE LOT, and that you just do not realize it yet, but it will come to you. It always does, the lessons we learn on the Path that only the Fire-Walkers know.

Like a ton of bricks

When we leave for retreat, go on vacation, we prepare ourselves for relaxation, not learning. Yet, in the time that it takes us to get to that point of where we are going, we find out that there was a lot of work that happened prior to our arriving at our destination. We go through the motions, are excited at the thing that is before us, and then we go on our way, and in this case we were on our way back from the Shadow Side of Life, on our way back from the longest time ever that anyone has spent at “The Resort of Learning,” and we were served up with the most important lesson of all, and it was not that we could not trust someone else, but that we could trust anyone at all. The lesson came in the form that we could trust someone else, could put ourselves out there for their world to see, and did our part in the process of bringing the lesson to ourselves and when we did that, we learned more about us than we did about the people who taught us. This is as it is meant to be. Unless we know ourselves, how can we think that we will ever know other people?

Yup…that’s right – while you were in the Shadows with these people, you learned more about you than you did about them. They were just who showed up and showed you who you are according to them, and my only thing to say about that is that when they showed up, you were not the same person who you are now, and in that time they were able to mesmerize you into believing what you would about THEM but not addressing that you existed. Of course, they KNOW you were alive, but to have learned from them what you have in the time that you did you see that you are now more polished and way more refined than you were prior to the discovery that what you went through sucked but was needed. 

What you lived through and made yours IS yours, because you can never NOT go through those things – you can never not have heard what you were told, and you can never not see what you saw, never not feel what you felt, and never not know the pain of the truths that they brought to you. You have learned about what it is like to hurt through another’s actions, through another’s ways of being, and in that shadow you saw yourself there, and while it might have appealed to you, throughout the time you were learning from them, you knew then like you know now that while they were awesome teachers, their time is over with.

I knew this when my Soul started screaming at me, that there were better things and better people in my life than the last teacher who hurt me BADLY did. I knew that in order for me to know who I am, that I needed to be in the awareness that was them that was also me, so that I could get through to my own Self the message that I am way better than the messes that I have encountered, that I no longer need to be that one person who is willing to give away the heart, the soul, the creative nature within, that those things are mine and mine alone and that it is MY option to trust others with it. NO ONE can say that what they went through was more harsh than this or that, because the truth in it all is that it is ALL harsh, but when is learning which is required by the Soul NOT harsh?

It is harsh because without the harshness there can be no way that we will see what is the more agreeable softness that is our truth. Without the harshness and without the nature of that pain and without those people who we grow in closeness with, we will not learn. Teachers, if we can recall back to the day when we had them in high school, are not meant to be soft. They are meant to be creative in the way that they teach us, and when talking of things that are of a creative and spiritual nature, it is our teachers of and in Spirit who come to us in the form of a friend, or a stranger who becomes a friend, and is they who give to us those lessons that we so dearly need and for the most part have chosen for a long, long time, NOT to see the similarities that are there from teachers who came to us from our past. They might have within them the idea that they are on the take, and this is the energy that they will bring with them and will hide from us, and this is the lesson that we will learn, and this, too, is the Fire-Walker’s Path that we will be led by them on…and of course, this is the thing that mars us the most.

We are marred by their actions, by their lies and by the things that they bring to us in the form of those nasty little habits, those adorably magnetic temptations that bother us in our sleep and which bring to us that deliciousness that is the Flesh. The deliciousness that is the Flesh can be in the form of anything that is…I don’t know…any one of the Biblical Seven Deadly Sins. Where it is that we need to hang back, these teachers bring to us the energy that is overdoing things. Where we need to stop hiding our selves, this is where these teachers will bring to us the energy that is exposing ourselves so that we can finally see what is there that others see that we are refusing to see. This is what it means to be tempted, in the most Biblical fashion, by the people who are brought to our lives through our Souls. We think we know what we need, and the people who come to us think they know what we need, too, and while they are in our awareness, it is our Soul that makes us see things that we need to see, but it is our Ego that makes us want what we know is not good for us or our growth.  They show up in the manner that is “friend,” because of the need for the Ego to trust what the Soul already knows is the right thing, is the correct energy, and mostly, is the greatest most reliable teacher for us. In sticking with the idea that we have been vacationing on the Shadow Side of Life, these “friends” who visit our awareness can also be thought of as being our tour guide as we walk through this part of the Path, as we follow the Fire-Walker’s Path.

Then one day, we actually “see” them…and what scares us so much as that we also see ourselves there as well. We see their Souls and we are affected by the sadness and the darkness there, by the idea that they have dragged their own selves through the flames of life but most surely have not bothered with the Path of the Fire-Walker. And it is vehemently, absolutely, completely important that we all take the walk of Fire, that we bother with the pain that is there, and most of all, that we realize that we were meant for the pain, meant for the lesson, meant for the thing that ate our lives for a little while and then regurgitated us with a newness that is foreign but at the same time, familiar.

The Shadow Side of Life can be thought of as being akin to Sin City, to the things we see happen and the things that insult our Souls, and most of all, the things that rocked our world. But unlike things happening in Sin City staying secret and staying there, the vacationing that we each do in the Shadows is not meant to be hidden but meant to be seen and known by the world and the renewed Soul who we each are – that is what is meant to be seen, and that is why we walk the Path of the Fire of Life….so that we can be refined by the Fire of Life and so that more than before, we can see who we have been and more than that, who we no longer are. We find that the difficulties we walked through made us sharper and more refined, much like the refinement that polishes diamonds in the rough which also go through the fire, through the cutting away by the jeweler’s hand that which is no longer needed.

This is what our little vacation in and on the Shadow Side of Life has given us as the trinket, the souvenir that we did not realize was the thing which our Soul begged for….it begged for the Shadow, and the Shadow drew us out, told us its secrets, gave us what we needed, and then suddenly, we came back to our Selves, back to our purpose, and most of all, back to the reality which is in manifest for us, and by us.

Viva Las Shadow Side !!

I Love You All !
ROX

Camera Artistry by Randy Jay Braun

Please visit RandyJayBraun.com today !! 

Integrity -The Soul’s Currency

No matter what, integrity is what matters most in matters of the Soul

We can think of things in this manner when we are thinking about how it is that we reciprocate our energies with others. It is an exchange, really, of integrity. Integrity is not just something that can be thought of as being an “aside,” and by this it is meant that things that are optional we will know that they are optional, and things that are required will make themselves known as being so. Integrity is one of those things which will scream louder than a whole lot of other things and ways of being will ever, and it is because our level of integrity is sort of our guide, our gauge, if you will, for things that are either thought of as being “right” or “wrong”, and it is the rightness or wrongness, not that we do to or with others, but the rightness or wrongness that includes our conscience and makes us know that there is a level of some sort of Spirit that we need to maintain in order to know that who we are depends, dearly, on our very level of integrity.

We hear about how important it is that people maintain their professional integrity, and this is fine and good and right, but what about our personal and Spiritual integrity, which is the energy which screams at us when we know within our soul that who we are and the choices we make our level of integrity dependent on that choice. When we set out to utilize the energy of other people and we have no intention of reciprocating even in some small way, this lessens our level of integrity. When we are willingly operating from an already low level of integrity and we hide this about ourselves, and then we go out into the great big world and start spreading our ilk to others, not even bothering with the emotional pain we will cause to them, let alone the rest of the energies that we give to them that are in manifest according to the intention set at the onset of the thought we had when thinking about things in a spiritual sort of way, this is when we create our own Karmic imbalance, a Karma Debt, if you will, and not only is it a Karma debt that we create when we are more willing to take and take without the thought of ever giving back, we create a whole new energy, not only within us, but also, outside of us, in the material world.

A Grand Sense of Mistrust

I know mistrust well, because there is a lot that I have to not trust a lot of people about. Mistrust is like a deficit, is like our being overdrawn in the bank. It is born from infractions to the Soul that either were given to us by someone else, or that we gave to someone else and ended up having to deal with the pain and the heartache that spawned from the action. Mistrust is brought to our lives through the lesser-than integrity-filled words and actions of others. We are taught how not to trust others by the way that they keep their word. True, some people will keep their word but at a minimum, and will honor their word so long as it is at a minimum cost of real trust to us. Then there are the others who give us the energy that we can trust them, that our hearts and souls are very well kept and that they have our best interest at heart, and all the while, all the time that they were giving us their words out of their mouths, and even though at some point and in some way we knew that somehow, something was not right. Then the day happens when  BANG! we are unhappy and disappointed that we were right about something being just not right. We are given the seeds of mistrust early on, and through the course of the events which arise we find that the thing that we thought was there in the beginning was all ego, was all on the outside and was a mask to cover up the rest of the truth about the person or people who we trusted. 

We find out that yes, what they brought to us was the truth, the good part, that is, and then slowly, over time, we are given the other side of the story, the side that we would have been happier just not knowing existed, and there soon after ensues the thing that we did not want to face which was the truth in manifest all along and was the thing that told us very early on that there was something just not quite right about the things that we have been told, that what we have been told, even though it might be the truth, is missing something…that something missing is the integrity. We place so much on what others tell us is the truth and it is because we know that when we are telling someone else the truth, that it is indeed the very truest truth. We go out into the world of misinformation and untruths, our truth worn on our sleeves like our hearts end up being, and then the ugliness that is the truth of someone who was not playing fairly to begin with, who was not upfront with their shadowy ways. It is the shadow side of life that sometimes, we are more drawn to, and it is with purpose that we are, because in the knowing of the Shadow side we also have the balance of the truth which is born of the integrity, or lack thereof, within us.

It is like being told you are meant to do something, then you do it, then suddenly, that which you were meant to do becomes more like a grocery store sample table – everyone wants some, the person giving away the samples is not someone who really knows what the hell they are talking about and all they really do know is that they really like this …whatever it is…and why doesn’t everyone just have a try at it?

Because not everyone is privy to the trying, and not everyone is possessed of the Soul which is rich with its own leaning toward integrity, that’s why. Not everyone’s intentions are good, and even though there are a lot of us who are very, very good in the Soul and filled with this Spirit rich with Integrity, there are many who are still sharing the air with us who are up to no good, and I have had a lot…LOT of experience with those who will say one thing with their mouths, but with their actions they are lying to us. There are a lot of people who are reading this right now who have gone through this sort of thing recently, and who, like me, are not so much at a loss for words as much as we all are at a loss, period. And dearly we are feeling these losses, because they were not just losses that we could handle, like losing a cell phone or 20 bucks. These are losses where the deficit is in the Soul of us, where the pain has caused us a no-turning-back sort of mindset, where who we meet from this day forward will automatically have to live, at least in a short-term way, in the energy that was given to us in return for our own integrity. Because someone else damages our sense of trust, those who will follow the ones who caused the ache will initially end up being tested and questioned and everything else that we would do if it is that we have learned not to trust.

Integrity is not something that can be bought, but surely it can be sold. When we operate from a place that is whole and is meant as what it is supposed to be – the Currency of the Soul- we find that more times than not we are met with others who are just as right in the soul as we are. But there are always going to be people on the planet with whom we share our lives, albeit temporarily, who will operate from the rawness that is the unrefined beforehand of what it is to live on the edge of right and wrong, moral and immoral, light and shadow. Our job is not to try to fix other peoples’ sense of integrity, and it is not to teach them how to use theirs.

Our job is truly only to bring to the surface that which, in other people, can be called their level of integrity, or lack thereof.

I LOVE YOU ALL

ROX

What Surviving Emotional and Physical Abuse taught me about Respect

Respect isn’t something that is just automatic (but really, it needs to be…I’ll explain)

“RE- SPECT! WALK ! ARE YOU TALKIN’ TO ME?” (Pantera’s “Walk”)

I think I am sick of the idea that we have to earn respect. My thought is that respect should just be a given and that should the other party not live up to the energy that is the respect given by us, then it should be that the other person needs to earn it back.

I sense the raising of the eyebrows with this idea that respect is not something that we should feel the need to demand, or command, or even earn from someone else, because at first meeting, it should just be a given, and it should just stay that way, but always human nature is what it can be, and most of the time, we lose respect for other people because somehow they made it so that we would have a lesser feeling and energy of respect for them. We all do it – we all have, at one point in all of our lives, lost respect for someone else because of an infraction to our very easily-bruised Souls. We were either hurt by their words or actions or we were offended by them. Either way, as we can all attest to, prior to the infraction, we all have respect for others unless and until they prove us to be right in that they are not worthy of that respect.

Then of course they have to earn it back…duh…

Respect…from a Survivor’s perspective

I love saying that I feel like I have survived the greatest hell on earth known to man that any person can go through. For a long time it was my inclination to believe that what my mother told me was right, that her father commanded respect and that she demanded it. While I never got that energy from her that she was not willing to give it so long as she received it, the words seemed to hurt me in some manner and until now I did not know why. The reason that those words hurt me so much is not because of anything other than that since it was that both she and her father commanded and demanded respect, I was programmed to believe that I had to be this way, too. Couple that energy with the idea that the person I married demanded everything, but more than anything else, and even while he never really knew and still does not really know what the truest meaning of Respect, I was not too inclined to stray from the belief that was instilled into me as a child growing up in a very religious home. I was not interested in angering people who demanded or commanded things out of others, and it was because I thought that if they had the nerve enough to demand or command it, then surely they were worthy of it. So, I just gave them my respect.

Fast forward to my adulthood, and we see that all of my life I was bullied and messed with, all the while and because that was my own experience to be bullied by my caretaker as a child, and yes, those same words coming out of her mouth that came out of my mother’s- that she, the caretaker, demanded respect, because they were both taught by their father that this is the way adults are and that adults should just be handed respect because they are adults. This is the reason that any child would grow into an adult who would have a good chance at being confused when it comes to things as important, as valuable, as one of the most vital things in communication between human beings, as Respect.

Respect is not something that can be had easily once it is gone. Trust and respect are alike. It takes so very little to break either one of them that once it has been fractured it is difficult for us to just have it right back.

Respect is not a bargaining chip even though that is how it was presented to me as a child, and it was done so out of the idea that we need to be bullied, to be made scared of other people and losing their love if we did not simply just give respect because other people demanded it. You can demand all you want, but that does not mean that it is just going to be handed over – no no no….in fact, the reason that you might feel like you are somehow owed respect makes me think that you have little, if any, self-respect, and by that I mean that if this is you, then you are likely one of those people who needs to be worshiped, and that is not being respected – that is being feared. That is you being afraid that if you do not bully someone else into the kind of fear-riddled respect that you think is the reality of respect, that you will end up being just as ridiculously expectant of something that is not real. If you have to bully it, command it, demand it, feel it is owed to you, my friend, the issue is NOT that you are not getting it, but that you think that you need to be worshiped.

Demanding anything at all denotes that you feel like you are owed, all the time, by someone, and if you are owed then that also means that somewhere in you there is a deficit and that deficit is what is causing you to be this way. Respecting someone does not come without its price, and that price is that you have to respect them back when you are respected. This is not something that you do not know, and it is not something that your mom or dad or whoever taught you what respect is also did not know about when they were teaching you their way of being respected. The way that you ‘earn’ respect is simply to have it for yourself wherever you are and no matter what. To respect one’s own self is to be able to know what respect really is.

What respect really is is not as important as what it is not, and I think that there are just too many people on this planet who think they know what it is but in fact they have no real clue and yes, it is that one group of people who feel like they are entitled to people kissing their okoles. When you need someone to kiss your rear end and make you feel like you are better than everyone else, and when you need someone to worship you and do everything within THEIR power to make you feel like you are being respected, you are anything BUT being respected. When you feel like you have to bully another person into the “fear of God” type of respect that so many people regard as being respect, you are not being respected – at that point you are demanding that people worship you, that they fall at your feet, that they do what you want. That is not respect. That is fear. Abuse survivors are the most adept at rifling through the bullshit and getting to the fear of a person, and we do it because we can, and people respect us because we have been through a lot but more than that, they respect us because we know what it is to NOT be respected.

We know that placing hurt into the Spirit of another person is not respect, it is bullying. We know that to put a person off, to push them aside until we are ready to give to them what they so readily gave is not respect, but rather is expectancy of another person making time for you but you not making time for them, and when it is this way, and you get angry because the person who you commanded respect from is just not there and giving it willingly or in large form as they did, this is called your Karma calling your numbers. We know that it is rude, not right, uncool, not okay, a pain in the ass to make other people give respect, so rather than just taking it for granted that everyone else on the planet will make us pay heavily and hard if we do not show respect, we just choose to have and to show and to be the epitome of that which can be called “respect.”

We ARE respect, the majority of us, and we are the greatest teachers of showing respect, and more, getting respect, not because we are owed it, not because we command it, and not even because we have earned it, but mostly, because we know too well what it is like to NOT be respected. We are aware of what it is like for another person to throw themselves at our abuser, in front of us even, and we know what the heartache that spawns from it feels like. We know what it is like when our abuser talks at us, down to us, mostly in front of other people, and we know what it is like to have to get out of that feeling that is akin to nausea brought on by someone else trying to make us look bad and shaming us into that belief. We know…oh my Goddess do we EVER know what it is like to suffer the indignities within our own selves caused by blatant disrespect.

And the disrespect happened to us and was meant to be bone deep, and it was…but there is always that flip side, that part of the story that tells everyone that we are the real deal, that what you see with an abuse survivor is totally what you get, and all of it, for the most part, is awesome. It is awesome not because we bounce back, because not one of us will tell you that that is anywhere near the truth. It is awesome because we live it, every single day of our lives, and because, too, we know the meaning of having to earn what we should never have lost in the first place, from day one, even.

Simply put, the reason why most people have a whole lot of respect for people who have been through a whole lot of different kinds of abuses not only to them, but also, to their soul, is because from the moment that we knew what we did not like, we also knew what the truth of us was, and the truth of us remains to be that we give respect from the get go, because we know that we should not judge a person based on what we see with our eyes alone. We know that to be respected that there must be that show of respect first given. There is not one abuse survivor who does not know this as the truth and more, who is not willing to live it, all the way down to the Bones of the Soul…

The old version of commanding, demanding, even, in some cases, earning respect no longer mean anything to anyone unless you sleep in a military barracks and are expected to cover the front lines of battle when called upon…in which case, again, those guys already have my respect.

Think about it…

I LOVE YOU ALL !
ROX

Camera Artist Randy Jay Braun 

Please visit his website by going to randyjaybraun.com

Soul Search

Eventually comes the day when we have to go within and mean it

“Go within and mean it.” I say these very words, or I type them, at least a dozen times a week. They are written for those who seek their own answers and who, for the life of them, refuse to address that it is not their mind or their bodies which initially ached, but their Soul that still does. If there is one thing that I am adept at, it is the inclination toward helping other people dive on into their very own Souls and look at what is there and find out for themselves why it is that they hurt so very much. Normally what is found there is so far removed from the truth of what they thought they would find that once it is that they can actually look at it and see it as the part of them that needs attention and healing that is not from an outside source they actually begin to accept the challenge which they also set up for their very selves.

I am no stranger to hurting, not virginal in the area of having one’s heart broken, of having one’s self be shaken to the very core middle of one’s self, and always, there are people who come seeking the advice, not of a Sage, but of someone who simply has just been there in terms of knowing what to do with the ache which permeates both the body and the Soul. Always we know that there is someone else on the planet who can relate, but the problem is not finding them, but opening up to them when Spirit sends them in our direction. We can only see what is the outer part of them, and that is how we called them into being for the purpose of helping us get well in the Soul. At this time there are many people who are ailing in the Soul, and there are many people who are not seeing it, not addressing it, but the ones who are addressing it, who can see, this is for you guys. You know who you are, and these last few weeks I seem to have had a majority of people who have dirtied their Soul somehow, be it with negative thoughts or through the exchange of energies, no matter how that exchange happened, with someone else who is dirtier in the Soul than they know they are or are willing to believe they are.

A dirtied Soul is nothing to shake a stick at because it is also a cause for actual physical ailment, and no one who I know likes being physically ill, and most of the time, when we are ailing in the Soul, the body is not long to follow. This is not something that I made up, and it is not something that is not the truth. When we hang onto things which no longer serve us, we are who pays in ways that none of us could imagine we would have to, and make no mistake – if it feels like you are at some sort of deficit, and you feel rather spent, this is not a trick and I am not one to send detrimental energies to anyone…you are causing you to be sick. Think about it this way, it is easy for a negative person to get what they want from a group of people because they do not realize that they and all of their negative energies are projected outward to everyone. They infect the rest of their own world and the people who share it with them with that vibration. Everything that they have, you will also have if you are not careful with the way that you are tossing your soul around.

Not a lot of people know that this is one way how people get physically ill – by being around people who are negatively charged in the Soul. If you thought long enough about the last person who was in your own realm of energy and how dearly you were affected by that person’s energy and the weight of it but you still chose to be within that thought, you are now infected. On the other hand, if you were with those sorts of people and then were around other, happier and right in the Soul types, you would find that the opposite effect would happen. You would find yourself lighted up in the Soul, and there would be no energy of physical effects whatsoever. It is like when children go to school with a cold – eventually all of the children come home sick. This same thing is what happens when we are around people who are up to no good, with people who cannot or refuse to be honest with people about who they are for real, namely themselves, with people who are whining about everything that is not right in their lives, and anyone else who tends to bring a malicious or negative energy to our awareness. I will not go so far as to say that you will not ever share company with people who exude negative energy – the world is a great big place and we are bound to come across them. It goes without saying, though, that it is in anyone’s best interest to try to steer clear of people who are negatively energized.

Nothing good, really, other than a lesson, can come from it. Nothing good can from our partaking in things and activities with people who we know will drag us down into their energetic field. If we are not careful and we continue this madness, we find that we have either “muddied” the positively charged people in our lives and make them not want to be around us, or we end up alone because those good people in our lives who bring us positivity cannot continue to wash their own Souls from the crap that is brought by other people who are somehow finding their way, through others, to us.

Again, we cannot avoid them, at least not entirely. But we can learn not to derive from them anything other than a lesson. It is not easy, but anything worth anything at all rarely is.

The Soul gets a bit dirty from time to time

Our Souls are that which we truly are, and at the moment there are plenty of us who are sitting in hopes that what we see daily and how we feel about who we are in relation to the things that have transpired over these last few months is somehow going to make sense one day. And all of us has this thing about us, this…”one day”…thing, that makes us believe that we are meant for greatness, and that “one day” we will get there with a little bit of luck. To our chagrin, “one day” keeps getting put off and put off until we get to that point where the Soul requires us to be so that we are forced by our own hand and our own Self to meet up with our “one day.” It’s that thing we all know as Karma, and the more we dirty our Souls through other people, the more Karma we create for ourselves to have to cleanse and heal from.

It is this “one day” where we either are able to hash out what is living within us with someone else, or it is this same “one day” that we just decide that today is that “one day” where finally, we will begin the process of releasing what was so that what is can become what it is meant to through us. It is also this “one day” when we have to take the time to think that for the life of us, while we did not ask directly for all of this stuff that is now ours and must be cleared out, we called it into being by thinking about it, by trying hard to not focus on it, by doing everything that we could have OTHER than just not focusing on what might NOT happen for us.

We cloud ourselves with negative thoughts about us and they are thoughts which are brought to us from other people, and these thoughts, no matter what, affect us, and dearly so. It could be the transfer of energy from a person who likes their dirtied Soul. It could be in the form of our empathically reaching into someone else’s awareness with or without their knowing, and feeling every bit of their energy and sometimes that energy is confused energy and that dirties the Soul. It could be anything that brings us the thought that we are not good enough, that what we have to offer to ourselves is somehow not as great as what is offered to someone else, even though it is the same thing. It can be in the ultimatums that we give to other people, and the only thought I can think about that is that if there needs to be an ultimatum made all bets are off because that is just more weighted energy that we need to clear and why? Because we expected others to do what we want them to do on our behalf without respect to what they need to learn and to go through.

Sometimes we need to hurt other people so that we, through their pain, can cleanse ourselves of the compulsion of hurting people, namely those who are close to us. If we see that we are going through the same things again and again, with the same sorts of people, it is wise for us to also look at the picture as wide and deep as we can and look there and see what it was that we needed from these things that hurt our Soul. We need to see there that sometimes, even in the hurt, even in the things that are represented by those we thought the world of but found ourselves to be somehow crushed by them, there is merit. There is something there that we need, even though the teacher who brought us the lesson might not realize that they taught us anything at all, because the truth of that is just like they hurt you, you brought to them the lesson that is hurting someone that they care about and no longer being trusted by them. It is all a circle. We reciprocate that which we are with that which we are not. While we might want to think that who we were we still somehow are, the truth is that who and what we were no longer fits our lives and has no room for the old us in this new part of life.

It is said that people come and go, but what is rarely said is that the reason they do so is because we have reciprocated the energies and the lessons that they would bring to us and now, even though their actions and words might have hurt us, we are stronger for having dealt with it and we are better and cleaner than we were prior to their bringing with them to our lives the fire which burns white hot and which sears us to the very core of us. This is what hurt does – it brings us the pain which is like salt in an already wounded Soul.

My first thought about this is that we just need to allow the pain, allow it so that it can cleanse us and show us our more polished, better able in the Soul, Self.

I Love You All
ROX

Beautiful Camera Artistry by my friend and Spirit Brother, Mr. Randy Jay Braun

Please visit his website at RandyJayBraun.com

Souls…they just Know Each Other

It is a simple recognition of the Soul…

“I feel like I have known you forever.”  “I am so glad I met you because I feel like I know you already!”  “Somehow, we just click…”

No, these are not pick up lines. These are things that are said when we know someone without even knowing their name. This is not something that does not happen to us all, and it is not something that is as strange as you think it is. It is simply proof that the Soul is forever, that the reason that you seem to get along with some people better than others is because you have never NOT gotten along in Astral terms, and it is just time that you all knew that when you click with someone, no matter why or for the reason that you might believe it to be, it is not only those things but also because you were meant to meet up again in this lifetime.

I experience this phenomena ALWAYS, and always I am treated to the perfection that is the Soul on the level of the Soul with other Souls. Always, I am guided to those who are much like me. Always I am shown who I am through these people and sometimes, as Luck and Spirit would have it, I get to be with them permanently, and that is what this is about today. When we meet up with new people, it isn’t that it is really new but that the meeting is. Sometimes, the newness does not go away and that is when it is the most energetically awesome thing that anyone goes through and experiences. That is when you know for sure that you have met up with your Soul Family. That is when you know where you belong and that is when the fun starts. I say that is when the fun starts because it is a time when you finally know what it is like to belong. It is a time when you know that you are home, in a sense, because the things that you talk about with these other Souls makes sense to you, makes sense to who you are, and just plain old makes sense.

This is not to say that you will not be at odds with them from time to time, but when that time and those times come, you will recall that you met up in this consciousness for a purpose and that it is that purpose in the Now that you met up, because you are not done with the mission that you and these other Souls are meant for. You have a specific mission, and Spirit has challenged us all to find out what that mission is, and when the time comes that we are to meet up with these other same Souls is when the mission begins.

We don’t get to know the mission, either, because that is what we are meant to build together – this … thing…that we are all meant to be a huge part of. We all have a mission, and in some cases that mission is a big one that we cannot undertake all on our own. My mission…my Tribal Mission…is to simply Be with these people in the capacity that I have been and will remain to stay as. When we meet up with our Soul Tribes, we know them because there is no weirdness, no feelings of “I need to get to know these people” and always there is that sense of “I don’t know why I know you, but it is way cool because there is just something there that I cannot place my finger on, but it is there, and I am glad to know you…again…” and no, there needs to be NO kind of thought to the idea that what it was on the top of things and at first glance that THAT is the way that it will stay because like all other things, the reunification of Souls is a big deal, and it is a big deal because these are the people who we each are meant to be with. This…these similar Souls…is the Family which we all yearn for and want to go home to, and these are the people for whom we pine and even as things have changed, the sameness and the newness and that crispy white sheet feeling when you are with these people is incredible. It is like you get to meet up with them all for the first time, again and again, every time you meet.

The weirdness that is not really weird

I say a whole lot about my own weirdness. It is who I am and has always been a big part of me and until recently was not one of the biggest things in my life. While it is not the biggest thing, it is a pretty big thing because for a long while I felt stuck between having that feeling of being stuck and alone with no one to hang with to being inundated with similar Souls, all of the rock and roll sort and all who are just like I am….not perfect, but perfectly imperfect and totally okay with our imperfections. Sure, like in every family, there are misunderstandings and of course there will be differences, and sometimes those differences will cause us to have to be apart, so that we can reconvene on a level that is new, even as the Soul recognition is not new at all. The weirdness is a welcomed one, and one that lets us all know that we are so not alone, even when we feel like we might be.

The weirdness guides us so that we know who our Tribe is, and our weirdness makes it so that there is no mistaking that these people…these people who you know even though before you knew their names you knew who they were…these are your Tribe and they are yours, forever, because they have been your Tribe forever. Those with whom you hold the most counsel with, and those with whom you have the most in common, but not always who you share DNA or a marriage certificate with – these are your people, this is your Soul Tribe.

Cherish them like nothing else, because they are here and in your awareness because they are meant to be here. Love them as though you might not ever have known who you really are without them, even though you do know who you are, and because they are the mirror to who you are and what you see there is the Truth of you all. What you see in the faces of these people who are familiar strangers is you, is your Truth, is who and what you are and these are the people with whom you will spend much time with, and these are the people who will do the most for you and these are the people who will always, always be by your side, even if it is from far away. You will always know them, will always be them and you will always be a part of them, and they, a part of you. From the moment that you see them, meet them in this lifetime, you are not alone.

You were never alone, ever. You were merely and only waiting for the rest of your Tribe to be visible to you, and my best guess is that they showed up at the same time mine did…

And that time is called the right time….they all just showed up, right on time…

I Love You All !
ROX

RandyJayBraun.com

Strange Days are Change Days

If you can’t quite wrap your head around something right now, don’t worry, you are perfectly fine, I Promise…

I have been asked a whole lot lately to do a whole lot of different things, and one of those things is evacuating an area of negative energies, which I did not once, not twice, but three times today alone. The last one that I did today was for family, and it goes without saying that if there were anyone at all in this lifetime who totally deserves a whole lot of rest and relaxation right at this very moment in time, it would be my Soul Family.

You see, there is a lot of change happening to us all right now, and right now, and you all…ALL of you know who you are – yeah, I am talkin’ to you guys, my fellow strange people and the very people who have captured not only my attention but my very Soul. I want you all to read what this says and take it to heart and absorb it (where?) all the way down to the Bones of The Soul. I say this to you all right now because right now that which seems like it is normal also seems like it is the most abnormal thing in the world, and the thoughts we are all thinking right at this time and all at the same time – those are the normal things that you think about anyway, and that those thoughts seem way more pronounced than they normally would are not different but are the very things that we each and all need to pay more attention to. Seriously, I would not be sitting here writing this if my own Soul did not say so, that it is time to put down the flag that is advocacy, and grab up the Maoli drum again and let everyone know that now is not the time to freak out, not at all.

In fact, the reason that you want to freak out is because you are not understanding your own thoughts. You are not understanding your own thoughts because basically, and this goes for me as well, you are not able to grasp on to what it is that you are thinking because it simply is not the way that you are used to thinking about those thoughts that you are thinking in the manner that you are now thinking about them. That which used to tell you one thing, well, it still tells you that but now there seems to be a back-story to it, a prelude to it all, if you will, and the scary part is NOT that we have been there before, but that we have been there before and when we saw it before we feared it because we recognized it with our actual eyes but NOT with the eyes of the Soul. If you want an example, I will give you mine.

So, here I was earlier, trying dearly to come up with some words that would make sense to me when I get a text from an old friend asking me how to cleanse her home. I tell her. She doesn’t get it. I go over there. Still cannot seem to grasp the idea that what I was doing was simply symbolic, and told me that she didn’t feel different than she had before I got there. I told her “oh honey…you need to wait and more, you need to let go of the thing that I showed up here to help you get rid of…stop thinking about it and be happy, dammit…” and away I went. All the while I am waiting for another friend who came to my house earlier and who was telling me about the crap that goes on in her life that is like my life and we talked about it and we helped each other and bang! It hits me that I have to do this same thing for her just not in her presence, so I do it. Then I have to leave to go to my cousin’s house, and I told him this morning that I would be there today at some point and that when I show up I will be there, sage and abalone shell in hand, ready to cleanse his house. So I go, I cleanse, and he is good now, because he told me so.

ANYhow…

My thought about all this craziness is that we are in the middle of a very BIG transition at this time, and it is one that is pulling NO punches with ANY of us. We are being called to cleanse a whole LOT out of our lives, and for the very life of us, there are many, many of us who still cannot let go of things. We cannot let go of these things because we are so comfortable in the idea that we are finally adjusted to the last set of adjustments we had to go through and the hell if we are going to go through another set of them just because that is what Spirit tells us is going on whether we like it or not.

And yeah…hell yeah…it IS whether we like it or not, and it is that time of our lives in this, the New Age of Aquarius, that we are expected NOT to hang on to the things that make us mad or hurt us, and we are supposed to look at all these old situations for what they used to be and compare them to what they have become so that we can see how far we have come and how much we have changed and even that much isn’t enough for us to be able to take a breather for a moment because every time we stop, we realize that, again, we are at the start of a new change, a new phase, and while we know we asked for all of this, we were not ready for it to happen so fast that we feel like we have hardly had a chance to catch up to ourselves.

We are at that critical point, guys…the one that tells us to move forward and grow and never mind the things that are going on in the past because there is nothing going on in the past. The things that were there are no longer there but in our memories, and now we see that we have come this far and we have done so much and it seems not to be like we have come as far as we have, but I am telling you that we have. I am telling you all that we have come a long, long way, and in that time we have seen ourselves as what we were and now what we are and we are Loving who we are because who we are is in FULL ON evolution. The ones who are not liking it at all are the ones who we can no longer pull along with us. It is not that we have to leave them behind, but more that they are choosing to stay there, and that is none of any of our business. We do not have the right nor the power to choose for others. This was a dear lesson that I learned these last three weeks, and that is that when someone has decided that there is nothing left for them that they will just give up.

And I don’t know if anyone told you this about me specifically, but the phrase “give up” are not in use in my everyday vocabulary. I am sure that if I thought about it for a while, I would find out that that phrase was never really something that I have used, ever, because if that were the truth, well, I wouldn’t be sitting here telling you all this stuff, because this is the stuff that I am meant to tell you about.

Yes, my friends, these are VERY strange days, but get used to liking them, because the strangeness that is Now is the foundation for what is to come.

Wish I could tell you all what that was, but I can’t…how will you learn if I just tell you what you need and are meant to learn, right?

Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight

I Love You All !
ROX

The Graduating Class of Aquarius…2013

It dawns on me that my son was meant to wait to Graduate…

I can’t lie and say that when I realized that my son, Jeremy, was graduating late, not really, but just not with his friends,that I was not upset. Yet it was not his fault that he was just…I don’t know – not ready yet. Somehow, because of everything that had gone on during his early years in high school, his emotional life, inner life, would not allow him.

There is truth to the idea that things like these which came into our lives, collectively, do so for a reason, and ALWAYS it is a VERY good reason. I know that the reason that my son was held back, not by his school life, but his life that seemed to go haywire at any given time, was so that he would graduate with a generation which I can sit here, almost tearfully, and give proper acknowledgement to this, the class which I have named and crowned the Graduating Class of Aquarius.

The Graduating Class of Aquarius

It was evidenced by the way these young people expressed themselves in their speeches that told me, for real even, that the Graduating Class of year 2013 is the very essence of the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius.

These are children with Souls. Parents whose children have graduated this year, I join you with my late Graduate, my oldest child, Jeremy, not for an adulthood that is sneaking up on him, but because these children…OUR children, are the very essence of the seed of Love, of Soul, of Community, and we are who planted it in them. We are the ones who taught them that it is far better to work toward something together than it will ever be all and totally on our own. Unlike our graduation, this was very soulful. This was the most beautiful night of Lokahi that I am glad to have been witness to.

The energy was impossibly Divine, abuzz with laughter and joy in abundance. We did not fail them, guys. We taught them what they needed to know, and collectively our generation’s children have pulled through some of the most very difficult times in all of both of our generations have been witness to. I saw it in them, the spark of Love that was familiar but was also different. This was not what it was like way back when we were kids, when Bon Jovi was not classic rock, and when it was that the internet was a fantastical notion that we might be able to connect with other humans and reach out and share our lives with people who just this time last year, we did not know. This is the proof. Our kids are the proof.

We have managed to raise kids who are loving and supporting, and we have given them the keys to the proverbial kingdom in that, for the most part, almost all of us in our generation – we had to learn this from each other, because all of us hurt so very badly. We did it our way, and we did it our way the most loving way that we could have, and these children are who serve as our proof. These kids – they Love one another, and it is a family type love. It is the most Unconditional Aloha that I got to be part of, just like you guys did!!

They did it ! They did it in a time when doing lots of stuff is difficult. But, they did it.

They are excited, and they should be, because they are the epitome of the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius

Congratulations to the Global Graduating Class of 2013…The Class of Aquarius

I Love You All!!
(I Love You Jeremy !! Right on, kiddo! You did it!!)

ROX

Im-Possibilities

That which seems impossible to believe is actually the Truth of Us

It is impossible in the collective and unenlightened energy of the populace of humanity that that which seems like it does not fit will eventually fit, will eventually make sense, and that which we resist will continue to persist, and we are all being asked, without being actually asked, not if we like what we see or if we accept what we know to be the very truth of us, but instead, we are now being prompted to at least bother with the idea that right now, we need to do something with the things that we have learned.

There is nothing quite more beautiful than knowing for sure that the things that we see, the things that we want, the situations as they are are also building up to the things that we want and the things that we need. We might think we want something, but Spirit always and only gives us what we need, and always what we need is much, much better than what we want! And this is where the impossibility in our limited human type thinking makes us crazy for the things that bring us clarity. And clarity is something that we need, always because of the way that we humans are- basically clueless to our own symbols and signs. We like to resist, to judge, to question everything, namely when it is awesome, and namely when it is safe, and namely when we think we cannot have it.

We might resist something, but again, that which we need, and, believe it or not, AND want, those things are being shown to us right now, and right now we are doing our best to resist them, all of them, even though we know what is best for us. What is best for us is that we follow the lead of Spirit and not bother with the ego and not intend to be so stuck to an idea or an outcome that what we want and what we see in our minds that represents what we want may only be the conscious example of what it is that we are desirous of. While it is that people and things are the representation of our power to manifest, what we see there rarely is the thing that we actually need. I need a whole lot, and what my mind’s eyes see – the impressions that come to mind, that is – are only symbolic and not absolute. Absoluteness only comes when we have the absolute manifestation of the thing that we want but always, the thing that represents it is totally different and usually way, way better than what it is or was that we thought about all along.

I get the question a lot, and more than that, I get a LOT of people who come to me for Soul fixin’ services who all have that very same energy of “but that is not the one that I want…I want that one and only that one!” to which I must first take a deep breath, think quickly of what it is that I need to tell them, when really, the only thing that I know they are going to hear is that I told them “no.” Yet that is not the issue here either. The issue is that no matter what, Spirit always knows better than we do, and the more that we insist on our knowing what we think we want, our believing that we know what is best for us (we do, but we need help with it) and the more that we resist the energies of that which we also know is better for us and more inclined to be the better idea all the way around – well, we resist it because very simply, change is scary, and especially change that is going to make us look a WHOLE lot better to everyone else. I know this monster, the one who does not like change, the one who likes to be comfy in the idea that where I am right now is good for me and while it is that I may not like where I live, the person who I am and the people who I choose to spend the most time with in general…it is all good, it is all meant and they are also all good and all meant.

The reason that we are afraid to look better to everyone else is because then we, at least at this time, are scared that we cannot live up to it. The thought at that point should only be that if Spirit it brought it, we got it, that it is ours, and that if it is ours, then obviously we must have the tools at this time in our learning to live up to it, no matter what it is. For a long time I feared being this person, this empowered woman, because I knew that I would have to live up to it. I knew that I would have to adjust me, period, from the top, down, and I knew that it would be a lot of work, but more than that, all along and yes, even and especially now, I realize that I was being made ready for it. I was being made ready for the thing that I wanted, and the thing that I wanted had always been part of me but I feared it, because really, I thought I was not good enough. I thought it was an option for me to be able to choose, but it isn’t. It is not my choice anymore, because I chose a long time ago to do and be and feel better than I was only but a short six years ago, and dammit if I wasn’t right and more than that, if it doesn’t fit. And really…I like it.

I like that I was right in that what I grew into is so much more than what I asked for, and it is more because of the work that is involved with it and the work that is involved is on myself so that I could become what I aspired to and more, manifested into my own reality. Things fit now. People in my life fit better than they used to because I, eventually, accepted the idea that it was not they who were wrong, neither I who was wrong, but that I just did not do the work yet, at least enough of it, that is, so that I would fit into the role that I alone decided was the one that I wanted to live and to be and to have. I alone wanted to be empowered, but because of the abuses I’d suffered, I could only see the end result. The end result is not what mattered because I know now that it is not the end result but the work in getting to that point.

I know that I was correct in choosing the life that I now have, because very simply, it fits. It fits that I am a misfit, and it fits that I am strange. Yet, it also fits that I am this Loving person who is not scared of herself, not scared of the Love that she has for the rest of the world at large and more than anything else, I fit into the family which I chose to call “ohana,” and which I know is mine. I know it is mine because I called them into being, and I called them into being into my life because I needed them as much as they needed me. I know I am right because if I were not, they would no longer be there, would no longer wonder about me when I have not contacted them in a few days. I know I am right because everything just plain old fits.

The way to know if you were right on the money is to ask yourself “Does it fit?” and more times than not, it will fit, regardless of who thinks what, who does what, who resists what…it will fit. Period. This is what I mean by “it’s all good,” and it is, almost that is, all good…there are still some leftovers, but for the most part, it’s all good…all pono…

Most of it is all good, but the rest ???

The rest of that which is other than all good is what we are fixing now. The rest of the crap that we are going through right now is a clearing of the crap that we either do not want to let go of or accept (there’s that comfort thing again) or is stuff that is new and scary to us and the crazy part is that the new and scary part of this all is TOTALLY what we asked for to come to our lives. We wanted to be challenged and we wanted to have new experiences and dammit if we also didn’t want to hang on to all that was familiar to us. We hang onto the old like it is a comfortable old hat, and in keeping with the hat analogy I can only say that sometimes we would rather wear the old and tired and ratty hat when what we really need to do is learn to not wear the hat and allow our crowning glory of beauty be what is seen by all.

We would rather not have to endure the growth that comes with newness, even though we want dearly to be with the new things and just not have to look at the old. The old is easy to deal with , because that is all we have ever known. We want the new, but are scared of it. I know this one well, because it is new to be out and about in the world as a Woman of Spirit and NOT the retired pastor’s oldest daughter. It is new to me to even think about the word “Shaman,” but that, too, is yet another thing that at the moment, Spirit is gearing me up for. I am scared of my own creativity, afraid of the thing that tells me I can create a new life and fearful of that one thing that I have chased forever…success…not only in my ventures, but more, in the creating a new thought with people who are wanting a new thought, a new clue, but who, themselves are scared to death of it. We want the newness and the rebirth of things that we call into our midst, but for the life of us we are not aware of that which is ours in manifest, and that which is ours in manifest is the seed of the future, the thought of creation which lives within us all, and that one thing that brings about change to our lives.

We are more willing to live in the comfortable old when the new is beckoning us like flies to the purple light in a bugcatcher. We are more willing to not look at the things that scare us because the things that scare us are ours and ready and willing to be ours in the manner that we want them to, and it bespeaks our own power, our own miracle of manifesting that we can claim to, and we fear it dearly. In fact, we fear it so dearly that we do not realize that the thing we want so much is masked in the things that can go wrong, is cloaked in the darkness of “what if?” and is there and ours for the taking, and our issue is NOT that we do not know this, but that in our heads it is the Im-possibility that is ours. Remember – people in our awareness are the very mirrors to who we really are, either exactly we are the match or we are the match in opposition bringing the same velocity of energy in equal opposite to ours.

So basically, what I am saying here, in long form, that everything, no matter how impossible it may seem to be in your own thoughts, in your own energy and in your own mind, is EXACTLY as it needs to be at this moment in time, because at this moment in time we are all very much squarely in the throes of a Shift that has beat the crapola out of us all collectively and while it might seem like things are a little on the messy side, know now that no matter what, it is totally how it should be.

And yes, this madness will ensue and as it does, you will know more and more everyday that what you thought was the truth was really only a symbol of it and not what it is in manifest.

I Love You All !
ROX

Like the Devil In The House of The Lord

Some people use Biblical reference as an excuse for violence

It is not a secret that I was “raised in the church.” There are a lot of good things that can come from such an upbringing, and in no way am I saying that I was robbed in any way of at least knowing that we are not alone in the Universe. Yet, there are people who know that I am telling you the truth that there are a whole lot of ways that the Bible has been wrongly accused, so to speak, of leading men into the idea, and now, sometimes, even women, that somehow and in order to “keep it Biblical,” one of the two partners in a marriage has to be assigned as the bully.

While I will not say that there are not people within a religious belief who do not look to those Holy Texts and take them totally and fundamentally as the literal truth, because there are, I will sit here and say that indeed, the dirtiest secret that too many believers have within them is that since it is that the man is the God-Willed person to be called “The Head of the Household,” and since it is that the woman was reduced in said such a man’s eyes to being nothing more than a rib-bone, that somehow, God…Spirit…Whomever it is Who they or anyone else bows to…somehow that entity condones the beating into submission of other human beings.

I will not sit here and tell anyone that what they believe in is wrong, but I will sit here and tell anyone who has eyes to read and ears to hear that this is not right. To place the perceived wrongness of being female on a woman to begin with is wrong – it is not like we chose to be the gender we were born as. To make it seem as though we are not okay to be equal humans is just as wrong, because that entails that somehow, God screwed up. To think for one minute that anyone else on the planet is somehow not as great as we ourselves are is as wrong – if not more wrong – than it is to believe the lie that God condones the absoluteness of abuse as discipline upon people who are old enough for their abuser to have sex with, to bear children with, to fight like screaming and yelling adults do but who, according an unenlightened person, are not mentally or Spiritually capable of making up their own minds about anything. When that happens – the making up of their own minds, that is – is when the abuse begins, and it is an abuse that is many-fold, because it already started with the idea that anyone else has complete control over the life and the abilities and more than anything else, the choices and also the idea of who we are as people. It starts simply – and with Bible in hand, they go on with the idea that since it is in the Word of God, and since that book is thousands of years older than the victim, that it must be true. From there, the abuse happens in the manner that we are told that if we do not submit to our husbands, that God will surely send us straight to hell.

The fun part about that is that once it is that we are told that much, suddenly this book of many truths disappears from our awareness, and it is so that we cannot go and find out that there is more to that verse that tells the story of so many abuse survivors…that even as God expects the wives to submit to their husbands, it is also stated that the husband must respect their wives, and that is the sin in all of this. That is the devil that sits in the house of the Lord, and that is the thing that no one in a whole lot of churches are willing to admit to – that their congregants might have taken the prose in that book just a little too literally and that now there is an entire population of women who are being abused in the name of the Lord.

The Devil that Lives in The House of The Lord

I am not sure if it is correct or even okay to call it this way, to see it as being the thing that is silently there, the thing that can be called the one cardinal sin that a woman commits, sometimes a man, that is simply being a person who does not want to be controlled by someone else. This is what abuse is really all about – control. The control of another person’s life. The control of another person’s thoughts, and in this case, at least as the excuse that the abuser uses, the abuse is not abuse and the abuse is sanctioned by God.

I have a problem with this because my father never put a violent hand on my mother. In fact, to this day my father, and for as far back as I can recall, never has and still does not. This is a person who is now retired as a minister, whose passion back in the day was NOT saving lost souls but teaching the ones in his congregation about the things that God wanted us to know. It was up to the congregants to interpret for themselves what it was that God was particularly saying to them through my father. When the abuse began in my life, I was told that I needed to try again, no, not by my parents, but by a Christian therapist whose name escapes me. To bolster the idea that it was ME who had to make things right, my caretaker was part of my father’s congregation, and it was she who told me that I needed to heed the advice of what I am sure, at this time in my life, was what she, the therapist, thought was right.

This is the problem with a lot of religions – there is too much that can be taken literally and there are too many abusers sitting in the pews at church and there are too many things that these people think about in the manner that is thinking that their “ignorant” spouse needs to have the Lord tell them what is right and wrong, that they are not privy to the luxury of thinking original thoughts because those original thoughts lead to the victim knowing for sure, even as they already know for sure, that somehow, God does not want us to be hurt. If we are created in His image, it makes no sense to anyone that we would be subjected to sanctioned abusive behavior and acts put upon us because “the lord said so.”

The Lord said and says no such thing. The Lord Loves us all – yes, even weirdos like me, and the Lord does not want for us to suffer. The suffering mentioned a whole lot in the Bible is NOT actual suffering but the “suffering” we go through when we are learning the most important lessons in life – lessons in Spiritual growth, and lessons in Sacrifice that is needed, and lessons, most of all, in Aloha, in Love, in Unity and in the knowing that we are all meant for a particular purpose in this lifetime, and that we are here to carry out a mission.

I am sure that the mission is not to be the pariah of another person’s life, and I am positive that the Lord does not want any  one of us to cry over the maddening idea that we were sent to be cleaved to a person who would be bad to us to the point where we need to be institutionalized. The Lord did not want for us to be in pain that was forever, and it is the pain which can be referred as being the Fires of Life. We are meant to go through things but only to learn – NOT to become the sacrificial lamb to an controlling person. We are meant to have experiences that will teach us both what we like and what we do not want in our lives, and I know that ALL of us wants to be Loved, and all of us wants to know that we are special to one other person, and that all of us each is safe in the knowledge that we were chosen by God to be here in this consciousness so that we could reach that point in our learning that we will finally know all of this.

Yet this truth…these truths…are lost on anyone who is an abuser. These thoughts never ever cross the minds of abusers, and they never will cross them, because that is not what they are about. They are about absolute control, and they are about the idea that they have to compete with everything and everyone and it is for nothing other than to feel superior to another person. Other people are not who make us and are not who have control over us, no matter what we want to think or believe. No matter what, no one is allowed to have that control, and no one can have it without the systematic putting down of the Spirit of the person they do this to. This is how this all happens – the abuser already takes the initiative to do what he or she will, and thus ensues the madness that is the never-ending cycle of abuse that begins, usually, as verbal put downs, “constructive criticism,” judgment of the abuse victim’s personal self, loved ones – including family and especially their friends, then comes the problems at work caused by the abuser (which ultimately leads, most of the time, to the victim losing his or her job), and the moment comes when, if they are not able to control their own feelings of self worthlessness and insecurity, the abuse victim becomes another statistic for violence, and it is a violence that begins at home, where we are meant to and are promised that we will be safe.

The thing is, when it is “sanctioned” by God, all bets are off, and it becomes even uglier, because the abuser takes it upon themselves, after they have already used everything else in the life of their victim, they now will choose to take said victim’s Higher Power and use it against them. This is the worst kind of abuse, and I know this one personally, because this non-believer, while he never attended services with me on a regular basis, he knew how much I believed in God, and he knew what it was that was in my heart in regards to my beliefs. While it might not be that my beliefs are what they used to be, they are there, and it took me a whole lot of time to get to a place where I could trust in a Higher Power again. Once I did, I started to know that it was never me who was wrong, that I was not the Devil in the House of the Lord, but that there were indeed those who could be akin to just that.

The Devil in the House of the Lord is the stain of abuse that too many clergy members still refuse to take as anything other than a phase which all married couples go through. This is wrong. This is a lie.

Clergy…my call is out to you…my fellow purveyors of all things “Spirit.” We need to do more to protect the people who hang on not only our every word, but every word presented to them through the texts which your people deem as “The Word of God.” It is an aberration that we have to think of things in this manner, and it is a sad day when someone who is also clergy, who has seen the ugliness of abuse within the church, and when it is that that same someone is not also someone whose beliefs can be called “mainstream,” feels like she has to sit here and tell you all that you are not telling your people the whole story, and the whole story is that you need to step up and start saying things to your congregants about the reality that is Domestic Abuse that happens within what is no longer only able to be thought of as the confines of a marriage, but more like the confines of abuse and the prison that is without the bars but is the energy that is control of a person by another human being.

We are not in a third world country anymore, and we are not tilling the fields with slaves, and we are not here and all subject at the same time to what could be deemed as our own personal trials of Job. We were meant for this life and it is with purpose – the purpose of Spirit, and in your language, The Purpose of The Lord God Almighty.

I am sure that God’s purpose for anyone who suffers from abuse was never to be controlled by someone else to the point where the victim can no longer think straight, can no longer not cry, can no longer feel like they want to take their own lives, and yes, of course, I know ALL of these, yes even the one which says “want to take their own lives,” and yes, I know how difficult it is to come back and to redeem one’s own self, not in the eyes of the Lord that sanctioned the abuse, but our very selves. It is time, Reverend, to please, Auhea wale ana ‘oe – pay attention – and do right by your congregants and address that this happens, yes, in your church and right underneath your nose.

You don’t have to believe me about this, Reverend, but I will tell you that it happens, and that it happens a whole lot. You don’t have to believe me, husbands of the church, that your church buddies…some of them hit their wives and belittle their kids, but it is the truth. You don’t have to believe me, abused wives, that you are not now and neither were you ever meant as the target of one small person’s ideals and one small person’s own thoughts of self-worhtlessness and insecurity belong to you. You were never meant to take on that energy and it was never your Kuleana, never your Soul’s responsibility to shoulder the burden that was not ever yours at all.

We were not ever meant to fear the one who we give our trust to willingly, and we were never meant to have to feel like we must choose between their waning ego and our waning ability to have the motivation to wake up in the morning, period.

We were not meant to be kept like unruly pets who cannot be tamed. We were never meant to be beaten like animals, and we were never ever meant to be less than anyone else.

Ever.

I Love You All
ROX

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We are almost there

Hang on, guys…we are almost there

So much has happened to us in so many ways just in the last few months and weeks that it is almost impossible for a whole lot of us to really think and more, to believe that indeed, we are almost there. We are almost “pau hana” with this weirdness and this craziness where things that make sense also do not make any sense at all. In the time that has passed, and it has been a lot longer than any one of us realizes it has been, we have changed a whole lot. Where it was that we had massive misunderstanding, while we still have a little confusion, and where it is that we seem to believe that what we have in front of us will not budge, it is budging and is doing so at a terrific speed. While our intentions are what they are, were what they were, became what they would, we did not see one thing, and that one thing is that we have made it as far as we have, and in that time we have found out a few things about who we each are in a Spiritually personal way.

A Spiritually Personal Way

There are things that happen in our lives that, when they happen, we are at a loss for words because what has happened is either too much and too painful for us to think about, or, conversely, it is so great that we cannot begin to think of it not being the reality that we have brought to ourselves. We are either worried that what we did is bringing the “other than good” to our awareness and that we did something wrong and so now God is punishing us, or, we are not wanting the beauty that has come to our lives to not be real and not be ours and not be all we want to believe it is and know that it is that we cannot look at it to believe that it is ours. I promise you – whatever it is that you are seeing and experiencing right now is the truth of you, is a lesson and a reward all at one time, and that it is your Kuleana, no, not only to learn from it, but more, to embrace it and to know it and love it and feel it and most of all, to trust it.

The way that we have all been taught is right and good is to not let our guard down, to be vigilant in sniffing out those who cannot be trusted and to avoid the things that hurt. This has robbed us all of the ability that we all have to being able to just Know who it is that we can trust, to know who is just like us in ways that we never thought about, to know, for sure, that we are whole, that we are the essence of our own Perfect Love.
We have been called upon by the Cosmos to give to the world, but in that giving we were not privy to much else than that giving, and in that giving we learned, or at least most of us did, that when we were doing this, we were learning. We were learning what it means to be the ultimate sacrifice, and we were learning our own limitations, and we were living in the energy that was ours alone and we were finding out that who we are is limitless.

We have always known that what we are meant to do is somewhere in between where we left off about five or six years ago, and where it is that we are headed is right there in front of us, but like the carrot on the stick and the horse which chases it we thought that it would be just that easy – we thought and believed that Spirit was finally going to just give us our way. When it was that we had to accept that no, this time will not be any different than was any other, we behaved like petulant children. We had tantrums, and we cried, and we lashed out and we whined about what we do not have. We looked at what we do have and eventually realized that it was us who brought to our lives, and that it was the moment in which we felt most vulnerable that we were at our very strongest. And this was not something that we wanted, at least not in the form that it came to us, but that more than anything else, was something that was well needed and well deserved by us.

Good or Other Than Good, Me, You – WE created it and brought it into reality

I am fond of saying it – and I am about to say it again…I said it, so deal with it. We brought everything to our lives that we see in them. Where we know that we have changes to make, we learned what they were through the trials and tests that came our way. When we looked to the sky, hands up like we were being held at gunpoint by our very own energy, and asked “Why me, God?” we got our answers, and our answers didn’t look like our egos wanted them to. Our answers came to us in the manner that is one more thing to deal with, and our answers came in the form of a person who we loved and who did us wrong, and our answers became the lesson that we needed to get to the answer that we wanted. Our answers were never cut and dry and no way were they anything that we did not have to work toward getting to.

We create all that is in our lives. I have said it, written it, intuited it…it is the truth, and I like the truth, because the truth is that what we see is only our version of it. Where it is that we might think that someone else has it better, there is yet one other person on this planet who sees what you have, even though you refuse to see it yourself, and thinks that you have the world and more. We have been taught our whole lives to love the tangible things, even though those things cannot love us right back. We have been taught that if something has a price tag, that it has value, but no one ever said that with time things lose value, but that people and Love and Spirit never do. The thing that the entirety of us is up against is NOT who we are now, but what was, and those who are still living in what was are the ones who continue to permeate the world with the bigness that was when instead the bigness that we need right now from EVERYONE is NOT how many more toys any one person has more than another person, but really and only, how much of a material loss will we endure when it comes to the idea of having to choose – Spirit, or Material things?

Spirit – or Material Things?

Now is the time when the question of what it was that you really were asking for comes full force into play, because right now we are all able to see the wounds and right now we are able to feel the pain from the past and the present and we are worried for the future without a good enough reason to be OTHER than where we have been and what we have experienced and what we know is our truth.

If you thought that the material things in your life would make things better and make them stay that way, by now I am sure that you know otherwise. I am sure that you know that it is not now nor has it ever been anything in the material realm but that what you see and sense and know in this awareness is the absolute show of what is going on inside. Where it is that many have felt like they had accomplished something because they had….HAD…a lot of nice things and had…HAD a lot of great people in their lives the truth is that while those things were nice and while those things were the things that you thought would be the Soul’s response to a request, the truth is that no, the things that came to you were the beginning of the learning, of the learning to live without them and the learning to be with only you and your soul.

We are made up of the tangible, but we live in the intangible nature of the things that we most dwell on and think about. We can feel the hurts that are given to us by anyone, and it is ours to fish through in the most tangible sort of way, but the reality is that our feelings, our thoughts, our moods, our everything, is in the intangible world. The intangible world scares people who have never had to deal with their own thoughts by means and measure of that which is tangible. This is where most addiction comes from, the idea that there is a tangible way to deal with the intangible world, and we would only be partially correct because we are the tangible nature of our own intangible world. We are the ones who bring the tangible to the intangible. We are who is responsible for the way that we think, feel and do things, and we are, that is, a lot of us are not, capable of dealing with the intangible things that affected others by what we needed and expected from and by them in the tangible world.

The tangible world has many people still believing that the things that we can see, feel and touch are what matter the most, but that is not the truth. The truth is that without what we are thinking, there is no tangible world and there is no judgment to be made on said tangibility because without our manifesting those things into the present we would not know what it is like to feel the way that we do about a thing that has materialized for us. Whether we want to believe it or not, we are who makes or breaks our lives, our hurts, our fears, our awareness, and it is not okay that we take it upon ourselves to tell other people how it is that THEY are the ones who brought this, that and the other to our lives. No, no, no…you see, when we see what we don’t want, don’t like, don’t understand in our lives, we are more inclined to place responsibility of that weight of that knowing on the person who is representing that part of us and our thoughts, and it is SO not theirs that we see them as the thing to be blamed when in reality, we brought them to us.

We brought them to us in the form of asking Spirit to please teach us who we are. We brought our learning to ourselves, and well…what have we learned?

Seriously…ask yourself that question….what is it that you so dearly wanted to experience in your life and from that experience, what was it that you learned and what is it that stays with you now that you cannot stray from because you know, too, that it was the Soul’s wish that you learn those things?

What is it, dearest darling Lovely Ones, that you called into being from your own intangible Greatness?

I Love You All
ROX