Make Room in Your Life for your own Greatness

Greatness scares people who cannot see it in themselves

You have to be able to see your own Greatness, hands down. You have to know at this very moment that what it is that you think you do that makes people leave your life is not something that has been orchestrated by you, at least not in a direct sense, and the reality is that it may not be that they are leaving your life but that they are vacating a space that is too big for their own greatness.

By this I mean that we are more inclined to see what we are not by seeing what others are.By this I mean that there are people on this planet who, for the very life and soul of them, cannot and even are not willing to believe that they have their own measure of Greatness. It doesn’t matter what it is that any one of us is Great at. The only thing that does matter is that we all understand that no matter who thinks or says what about us, no matter who thinks they know who we are, and more than that, no matter who wants to compare through the Ego’s idea of Greatness who is “better” than who, we all have our very own thing – and some of us a few things – that we are great at that not one other person on this planet can do quite in the manner which we can. This is not a mistake. This is not some sort of sick joke that the Universe or God or the Goddess have played on any one of us. This is nothing more than our being able to see, for real, through the fog that is the lie of someone else’s sense of what is NOT great about them, that indeed we are all meant to carry out a specific and Divine Purpose, and one that, like everything else in this consciousness, is also Divinely Timed and Planned.

I am often called, by people who do not know any better, that I am the Queen of Excuses, but only because I tend to see things in a different manner. Of course, the “making excuses” thing is not really what it is and in fact is nothing more than my ability to see things as they are, my gift for helping people how to learn to elevate their own awareness, not only of things that happen in their lives but more, to see the reality that is the beauty that they are. Once it is that anyone sees who they are for real and in a different and more positive light is when the people who like to hate on other people come out of the woodwork, and they do so because of one thing – they cannot handle being out-shined by anyone else, and if we are in their line of sight, I promise you that if they are more inclined to leave your life because they are having a hard time with keeping up with you that it is not you who has to think about why it is that they left, but they who have to figure out how to strengthen the light who they are.

Greatness Is Meant to Be Ours – embrace it

The level of shininess that you have is there because you made it that way. No one else on the planet has the very same level of shiny that you have, and unless those people who call you on your Greatness and tell you that it is anything other than Greatness have the courage to no longer look at what is not theirs and choose instead to ponder their own Greatness, they will never know what it is that you know that is the truth of them, much as it is your truth – Greatness belongs to us all.

Greatness belongs to those of us who are willing to not look at what we are not and only to look at what we really are, and what we really each and all are is a testament to the fact that we are here and in each others’ presence because in each others’ presence we get to know who we are that is not according to ourselves. If who you are for real bothers someone else enough that they feel threatened by you or perhaps the thing that will make their ego tell the other ego-idiots in THEIR tribe that somehow, you are not good enough because something on the outside of you tells them so, that is THEIR problem and never was yours. You have no business trying to dumb yourself down so that someone who is not willing to prop themselves up so that they can see their own greatness as it really is, pits, dings and divots included, so that they can do like you have done and turn that empty hole in their lives into a container which will hold their greatness.

It is not your issue that someone else has recognized in you the thing that lives there in your Soul that they are having too many arguments with themselves as well as with other people who also have no idea of you or who you really and truly are. It is not your issue that you have done what you must in order to be where you are at this point, and if they are telling you about things that you know are not your own but that they think they see and that they feel matters more for them than for you about who you are and what you are possessed and comprised of, that is on them, not on you. It is highly creepy that there are people who will choose to make an issue about something that is awesome about anyone, turn it into a detriment just so that they can feel better about their very sorry selves, and it is not okay that people think that it is their right to opine about who they think you are in relation to them and make it anything that is “wrong” about you because it does not apply to them. My thought about that is that they need to see what they think is wrong with them because we know there is nothing wrong with you, at least not the way that anyone wants to think or to believe is essentially “wrong.” You simply and only were being magnificently you and the sad fact is that there are people on this planet who feel that in order for their vibration to be elevated, they have to knock someone else’s vibration down like so many dominoes.

No one has the right, and it is no one’s life purpose to knock anyone else down. This creates so many negative realities for people that it is shocking that it seems that no one realizes it yet. There is no reason for anyone to feel intimidated, to feel like they are threatened, to feel anything negative when we are talking about peoples’ greatness.

Our greatness does not stem from what other people tell us is the truth of us.

It never will. It will never be that way because very simply and truly, you are too grand and shiny for people to NOT notice you or who you really are, and when that happens and people knock you because of it …well, only thing that matters at that point is if whether you ought to drop them like a hot rock or try dearly to not believe their truth as it applies to you.

Which, it doesn’t. You are not beholden to anyone and you are not obligated to believe what other people say about you. You are not obligated to believe the things that make you hurt or cry, make you feel like someone took your snow-white evening gown and painted a big red “X” on it that everyone can see, point at and make you aware of. When we are dealing with people who are in our lives but are not like us and all they have to say about you or anyone else for that matter are things that they are not sure are the truth of you and according to you, it speaks a lot about what they are not rather than what you are in their eyes. In their eyes you are not good enough, and in their eyes you have to live up to their standard, but in the eyes of Spirit you are perfect and whole and lovely to see, because Spirit does not look at what we are on the outside, only the inside, and on the inside we all look exactly alike, no matter what. On the inside, physically, we are alike, and on the inside, Spiritual, we are also alike but the way that we perceive that likeness to one another will be, without a doubt, markedly different. If we were all exactly alike in terms of how we feel and how we think, there would be no reason for the world to have healers, Shaman, Kahu or Clergy, and there would be no need for a degree in Psychology. There would be no need for these things because they would not apply. We are comprised like one another, and that alone should be enough to make anyone with a huge ego realize that there are a lot more people than only themselves on this planet and a lot more chances that we will run into and have to deal with people who will try to tell us that we are not as Great as we are meant to be.

What they are really telling us is that because they do not know their own Greatness, that there can be no possible way that anyone else will know theirs and it is simply because when we are unaware of what is the truth of others we are also not able to be aware of anyone else’s awareness. Let that sink in for a bit and wear it for a little while and you will see what I am saying. When we are more inclined to only see things from our own limited point of view and we are not willing to allow others to see things without our involving ourselves and imposing onto them who we are as opposed to who they are, and we impose ours onto them without allowing them to be who they are, we are wrong. Period.

Anyone choosing to see only what they think is there that will cause you to feel like you have to defend, that will cause you to think that somehow you are not the best version of you at this moment that you know you have been and have striven to be, anything that makes another person feel badly or angry…while those things might be the truth for some, they do not have to be the truth for you unless you want to believe that it is, and yes, Loves, it really is that easy to believe otherwise. No one has the right to make someone else pay for the Greatness within them that they want to see there but are not willing to work to make it shine.

To which I must say that it takes so little to clean up our own messes than it is to see that we have a mess but that we believe someone else’s messes are more important for us to judge and compare ours with, when in reality what we are doing is just excusing ourselves from seeing what is there that is ours. What is there that is ours is meant to keep us from being a pain in the okole to others. What is there is meant for us to create from a mess the beauty that is there and is ours.

Most of the time though, most people are inclined to see that someone else’s mess is not like ours, because if we live from the ego only, everyone else’s messes are the only ones we will see because we believe ours is not a mess and that nothing needs to be cleared out.

If this is what you believe to be the truth of you, then perhaps it is not that the person who you are judging needs to clean their mess, but that you need to stop throwing more and more blankets on top of the pile of your own crud and that you really need, maybe, to call in a professional crud cleaner because while it is that you are pointing at the tightly coiled pile in your neighbor’s front yard you have ignored the big stinky pile in the litterbox you hide from the view of others just long enough to make sure that the rest of the world sees the mess on the lawn and not the quiet stink which emanates from the closet which you insist there is nothing in other than things which have no use.

Okay, so you are right on one end…that those things have no use, but you are wrong in pointing out the pile your neighbor is now cleaning up while you ignore that putrid smell akin to cat litter that is not cat litter but is your Soul.

Life is indeed messy….so clean yours up because eventually while you point at the pile that is no longer in your neighbor’s life, people will begin not only to smell your quiet stinkiness, but soon they will be able to see it, too. Think about it in terms of a cat litter box versus a grassy yard…one is hidden…

The other is out in view.

The other will get cleaned up.

The litterbox will continue to fill up, you will continue to ignore it, and well, yes, pretty soon….

Yup...no hiding your own stink.

I would imagine that Greatness smells a lot better than the remnants of too many cats tellin’ other cats what their business is…right?

Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight

I Love You All!
ROX

Reverend Roxanne Cottell is the Kumu Hula and Creator of the Healing with Hula Program for Women and the Co-Founder of Na Hula O Ka Wahine ‘Ui – The Sisterhood of The Soul. She is a blogger, book author, choreographer , Public Speaker, Domestic Violence and Emotional Abuse Survivors Advocate and Spiritual Coach. If you would like to contact her for speaking engagements, Spiritual Consultations, or for anything else, please send an email to reverendroxie22@gmail.com 
(c)  Roxanne K. Cottell. All Rights Reserved

That thing called the Life You are Creating….

All those strange things happening are not really strange at all

Call them whatever it is that you want to call them. Maybe you want to refer to them all as being coincidence, or maybe you might want to call them “miraculous” but no matter what you want to call all these things taking place in our lives at this time that seem too strange to be believable, I am telling you now that you have no choice BUT to believe that you were powerful enough to see to it that at least this part of the manifestation of the life that you have envisioned for a lot longer than you believe you have that you are now starting to actually live.

Congratulations, and welcome to the first day of the second half of your life. You have been building it to this point…and you really do not realize that you have been doing this part for a lot longer than you believe you have been.

A lot longer than you believe you have been

All those people who have come to your life this past year are there because on some level you called them into being for a particular purpose. All those things that you saw that you thought you needed but really only wanted have been replaced, at least in your mind, with something way WAY cooler than what you wanted not even a year ago. All the things that you asked for and wished for and dearly totally wanted are about to pop out of your thoughts and into your reality and the hardest part of this all is knowing that this is the truth and having to wait for those last precious few moments in Universal time….well, that, and believing that you alone were powerful enough to see it all begin to begin…like, right now even.

One of the hardest parts is that we have to wait a little bit longer (though not as hard as the believing you did this all with your creative power), even as we know the thing that we want is right around the corner, right there and waiting for us to grab hold of and take as the sign that somehow, we did things the right way, that somehow who we are matters on an entirely different level than it did for us just a few short months ago.  I know, I know…I said this all a few months ago, and I am saying it all again now, but now is different than it was 6 months ago.

Now is Different

Now is different in that you are different than you were 6 months ago. This illustrates for a whole lot of people who are reading this who do not understand the reason that, when I am coaching someone, I tell them to please go back a year from right now and think month by month about what stands out the most during those times, and then to go back 9 months, then 6 and then 3 because who you are now is a far different person than you 6 months ago. In fact, there are some of you reading this now who can go right back to April of this year, 2013, and how much has changed for all of us in that short amount of time, and see, too, that the things that we thought we wanted are no longer the same as they were.

Where the most of us thought and believed that we wanted a certain job, thought we believed that we wanted to be with a certain person, have a certain type of lifestyle, we find now that there are things within those things about ourselves that we no longer can even think are the truth of us because we have grown so far out of what it was that was comfortable that anymore now we are more inclined to think that maybe what we thought we wanted we felt that way about those things because the bottom line was that we really had little faith in ourselves as far was being able to have the reality of the dream we held near and dear to ourselves and held captive within the very soul of us. When we finally chose to wake up and accept the thing that was in front of us, took the time to think about how these new people happened upon us and why it is that they are so very important to our lives and our living, we begin to see that the truth is totally that the way we want our lives to be, we create it that way. 

The way we want our lives to be, at the moment that we know and believe that we want them to be a certain with, with certain types of people in them sharing our lives with us on whatever level it is that they share it with us, scares us, and it scares us because we see what we want, but we are not sure that we are able to fulfill what it is that we see ourselves doing with anyone or in anything, and we run. We run and we hide and we keep running and we keep hiding until one day we realize that no matter how fast we run, no matter where it is that we choose to hide ourselves from the changes we know we will have to make, change and the things we intentionally manifested into our lives catch up with us and we realize, finally and without a thought to turn away from our own dreams, we come to accept what it is that we have called into being.

Accepting what we call into our lives is easier said than just automatically done

It is hard to believe that sentence, that thought that we have to accept what it is that we call into being as ours. Yet, this is the truth and it is a very scary truth to say the very least. It is scary because when we create our own truths we are essentially and at that point the very one who is responsible for the way that things turn out and at this point there are too many of us who know that we are the ones who create our lives to this point, and in that same manner, even as we have created what we know to be the life we have lived at this point, we still have this big scary thing called “the future” and the truth is that not one of us should be or needs to be too concerned about the future because if we are savvy enough with all of these things that we do all the time we also know too that what we have done thus far and to this point is all by our own hand.

Since we know that all of these things have been done by our own hands, and since we can now believe and accept it all as being that way, we can also and now ease ourselves into these new truths. Where it was that once we thought we knew what love was to us, we now know it to be something quite a bit different, and we also know that there is real Love from people who really Love us, and there is the sort of Love that only lasts until the next better thing rolls around, and if that is the way that you see things and do things, then that is also the only way that you will ever see things – from the ego, not the soul, and it is from the soul that we all want to live from but at this time there are a whole lot of us who are still ego driven and trying to make decisions based on the ego’s thoughts about what the Soul needs and wishes to grow into becoming.

The things that we each wanted, the people who we thought we would want to be with are not the same anymore. Sure, there are still the ones who were there, who will always be there, but even they are changed, and those changes, even as we might not like them for ourselves are exactly what those other people truly needed. Just like we could not change them back when this last year beginning in August of last year began, we still cannot change them now, but now we are needing more to worry about what we need else to look forward to, and I promise you – it is quite a lot.

So, just so that you realize now that it might seem like things are crawling at a snail’s pace, what is actually happening is that our changes are no longer happening at a gradual pace but they are immediate, and we just don’t realize it because all of these changes are happening fast, and we are a soul with less of an ego now, more than we were just a year ago, and it is the whims of our souls which are no longer guided by the physical, for the very most part, that is mattering anymore.

The things that mattered to us just one year ago now are no longer of major importance, because within the year that has passed we have come to accept that we matter, and that we matter more than we thought we did, that we matter more now than we ever have in the past, and we matter more to those who we love, but most of all, we matter the most to ourselves because in the year that has passed we realized one very important thing…

…nothing matters without us….

I Love You All !
ROX

Reverend Roxanne Cottell is the Kumu Hula and Creator of the Healing with Hula Program for Women and the Co-Founder of Na Hula O Ka Wahine ‘Ui – The Sisterhood of The Soul. She is a blogger, book author, choreographer , Public Speaker, Domestic Violence and Emotional Abuse Survivors Advocate and Spiritual Coach. If you would like to contact her for speaking engagements, Spiritual Consultations, or for anything else, please send an email to reverendroxie22@gmail.com 
(c)  Roxanne K. Cottell. All Rights Reserved

DON’T BE SO DAMNED RUDE !! Words about Courtesy

There is nothing quite more distressing to another person than when we are being rude or dismissive to them about anything

Listen up, folks – there is a big fat thing in the world called “people wanting to be cool but who have no idea that it has nothing to do with being rude to others for a laugh or a high-5” and frankly it’s old already.

We have become very much a populace which enjoys one-upping others, no matter who they are and no matter if we are related to them or not. The problem in the world is not only that we hate on each other for no apparent reason, but that we do so with such blatant and real fervor every time we disrespect anyone else that we believe that this is somehow the norm.

What I would like to know from anyone right now is why is it that anyone would believe that being rude to other people is okay and acceptable? Why is it that we are more primed to believe that we need to be rude to one another to get our point across to them? Why is it normal that this is okay? I will tell you why. When we think to ourselves how it is that wars are started, how it is that corporate takeovers happen, how it is that we hear about mega-divorces in the media, we know already that (1) it is possible that those two factions should not even have known each other, let alone partnered up, that (2) we are about to see people being nasty to one another and the entire world is going to see it, and (3) what we are seeing is ‘normal’ because it is normal in our society these days for people to feel like they have to hurt one another somehow and on some level so that any one of us can get ahead. This is the wrongest thing to think because it is the most untrue thing that anyone has ever believed about anyone else, including our very selves.

We are how these things happen. We are who makes the phone call not returned, the text ignored, the voicemail not listened to, the email not replied to, and most of all, the sense that in our care is the other person’s trust and we have totally and absolutely, with that one thing that we did not do, fractured it somehow.

It is a common courtesy for people to stop with the dispensing of their own opinions of people who they do not know personally. It is a common courtesy for us to excuse ourselves when we have done something rude without meaning to. It is a common courtesy to tip our hat or apologize to others for behaving like morons. It is a common courtesy for us to know when we are being rude and a common courtesy to make it right when we know this is the truth. It is a common and tragic thing, though, that we know all of this but do nothing to remedy it because for the most part, we have, as a whole and on the whole, failed ourselves.

And it is time that it STOPPED.

Rudeness abounds…

People who know me for real know one thing about me and it is one thing that my photos do not announce to the world and that one thing is that I am a huge stickler for good manners, for behaving in a proper way, for not assuming that any one of us knows the truth of a thing without our first also finding out that we are or are not correct in our assumptions. We see this sort of behavior EVERYWHERE we go anymore, the assuming that we know better because we think we are that damned much better than everyone else and everywhere we go and everyone we meet seems to have this energy about them that tells them that their opinion is fact, that they had a good reason for being such a rude person, that they had a good enough reason for someone to do or not do what they knew was the most courteous thing to do. Sometimes it is unavoidable, the things that irritate us, like when our phones are in need of being replaced or when we are so busy with what we are doing that we cannot send a message back to anyone – and it happens to us all.

Yet, more often than not, human beings are inclined to go with whatever it is that allows us each to have to have the thought in our heads that a good decision must be made, one made from the brain and not from our emotions, and one that is tied to our being able to handle the thing that is at the end of it all, and the thing in this case that is at the end of it all is called courtesy. Courtesy is something that is a rare find these days. In my own line of work I am called upon to do the “mom thing” and teach grown people how to have manners. Yup, you read that correctly – among us are those who are our age (you know..ADULTS) who obviously and apparently did not pay attention to whoever it was who was the one in their lives who taught them, or maybe did not teach them how to behave properly in the company of other people. This is a sad fact that as a whole we have cultivated and have as the very truth of us all.

We have taken our own arrogance and our own egotistical ways and have enforced them onto the rest of the planet. We have taken it upon ourselves that we know better than everyone else, and in that inclination we have also made it so that who we are in the lives and eyes of others is this person who, if you are not in agreement with them, they will take offense and think you are against them somehow. Let it be well known now that no one is really “for” or “against” anyone else at all, and that this is yet another mechanism of the Ego self telling us each that somehow, while other people are important to us and to our lives, they are not as important as we are in the grander scheme of the All that is. While this is the truth that we have to be the priority in our own lives as far as happiness and peace and Love is concerned, where it is that we need to be these things stops when we feel like making others feel like they are not important at all is where we are wrong. And when we need to compare us to anyone at all is when this load of crap hits the fan.

I am likened to telling people that they have to think about how it was that they came to the idea that somehow they are more important than other people are. I am often times audibly heard telling someone that they “need to check yourself before you wreck yourself,” and it is something that does not register to a whole lot of egotistical people and it does not register because by the time they are in my awareness, whether or not they showed up there by someone else’s referral or they were sent to me by their manager or they were simply just meant to be part of my own consciousness….it does not matter…by the time they end up with me is about the time that the entirety of the world which they call their own has finally had just about enough of their crap. This crap that they like to place into other peoples’ lives is the thing that anyone wants these people to get rid of. People actually love the people in their lives, even the crappy and arrogant ones, and it is because to a whole lot of us it is not the attitude but the reason behind it that is telling us more than any arrogant fool will believe we are told.

The truth is that there are people on the planet like me who have had about enough of people showing up at work or in the lives of other people period and believing that the only truth there is is their own. This is correct, because we all have our own truth and we should all live by that truth, but that is a truth that sometimes, when we are not as highly evolved as we want to believe ourselves to be, is lost on a whole lot of people. It is a beautiful thing to see a grown man who behaved like he was still a 19 year old kid come to the point that he knows he must change, that he knows he has to be the one to exact that change, and lo and behold – one day, this formerly boorish idiot evolved into the most attractive person on the planet to a whole lot more than only one person. This is called the evolution of man, literally. 

The truth is that more times than not, it takes someone whose job it is literally to make it known to a person that they are behaving like a fool, that who they are has been so overblown by the person they think they want to be and who they try being before the work they need to do takes place that no matter what they do outside of someone teaching them and showing them not only where they are wrong but how to make it right, that they literally give off an energy that is like poison to the newly evolved but evolved and do not know they are evolved. They give off an energy that is like fleas on a dog in August, an energy that is like having eaten way too much and releasing gas into a crowded room and then having the audacity to blame it on the food and still not correct themselves with a simple little phrase that is “Pardon me…”

That is too difficult for some folks. It is too difficult for some folks to think about themselves in human being type terms, enough so that they would make an ass out of themselves than to have manners, believing that having manners is somehow a sign of weakness.

Having good manners is anything but a sign of weakness. It is a sign of personal, professional and social strength. It means that there is not a situation that you cannot deal with, even if you cannot deal with it, and that no matter what, it will be with grace and ease that you will get yourself out of a situation that might suck for everyone involved without certain social skills. This is the commonality between us all that is like lice in a kindergarten classroom. Either way, common courtesy is something that is most assuredly learned and is something that we all need to have a sense of, because having a sense of those things also opens the doors for us in other areas of life. It doesn’t mean that you are not cool if you don’t say “excuse me” when it is appropriate, and is, in fact, quite the opposite, and if you don’t believe me try pushing past a very beautiful woman or a strikingly handsome man and be a boorish fool with them and then think about their reaction.

It will be one of disdain and they will be repelled by your energy. This is not my rule but that of the Universe.

This is not my rule but is one rule which I have not only stood by but am teaching other people to learn to live by – the idea that having manners is somehow uncool escapes my thinking. To believe that we are here but that only some of us are privileged enough to have the very nerve to think that there are some of us who are allowed to be rude to others and expect that they will not be rude right back just annoys me to no end.While it is within certain rights of freedom of expression in some countries, it is also our right and more – our human being type duty – to treat other people decently. 

The very idea that we are allowed to be rude to whoever we want to be is one thing, but to go out into the world and actually live this way is the reason why so many of us believe that we are somehow above everyone else, and well, that is just another sort of thing that I teach that really, I never thought people would need to be taught. And I make no bones about it when I am schooling someone in a properly mannered sort of way. It makes for great writing.

Don’t be so damned rude ! Yeesh !

I LOVE YOU ALL
ROX

Reverend Roxanne Cottell is the Kumu Hula and Creator of the Healing with Hula Program for Women and the Co-Founder of Na Hula O Ka Wahine ‘Ui – The Sisterhood of The Soul. She is a blogger, book author, choreographer , Public Speaker, Domestic Violence and Emotional Abuse Survivors Advocate and Spiritual Coach. If you would like to contact her for speaking engagements, Spiritual Consultations, or for anything else, please send an email to reverendroxie22@gmail.com 
(c)  Roxanne K. Cottell. All Rights Reserved

No time for all this darkness…

We cannot hope for change if we are too busy with what happened in the past

If there is anything that I have learned very well over these last twelve months it is that there is no room for hanging on to old darkness, no hanging on to things such as self-hatreds, no room or time for anyone with a clue and a heart and soul to NOT try to get past all the things that break our hearts. This morning I will be using the idea that within an ethnicity there are many self-hatreds, and there are people within those ethnic groups who use the dark energies produced by those cellular thoughts about who we are collectively and who will profit in some manner from those hatreds, and the sickest part is not only that they will be paid huge sums for the opinions that they hold, opinions which are similar in nature to the collective and ancestral hatreds from the past, but the hatreds offered by these dark souls will be believed and held as the absoluteness of Truth and it will be so for no other reason than that the ignorance which have been adopted as the Truth of a people will have more power set by the collective than will the power of United Love.

Hate that is generations old.

These are hatreds that are not only generations old, but historically old, meaning that these hatreds are a part of our own ethnic history and they are the thing that separate nations of peoples from within. This is the beast which has beget the hatreds. This is the snarling animal that is the thing which has invaded us all, the every one of us, and it is not helping matters of coming together, not only as an ethnic group but also as a group of delusional humans who, for the life of them, cannot see past the big okole that is their hatred, and it is an inborn hatred of self. It would have to be, because only someone who hates their own self would be able to remain as hateful as is the day long. Only people who feel weakened and controlled by the actions of the past, actions which hurt us as a whole feel like they have an ax to grind. The rest of us just want fairness, just want to be seen and known as what truly we are. It is unfortunate that there are more people who would rather fight and run in circles and get nowhere than there are people who can see things as they are and who are willing to fight from a place which is Light, Love and Aloha.

We, as a people, have found that self-hatred is better than fighting from the brain, with a fight that started in the soul, made its way to the heart, called us all Warriors and then, somehow, became the ugliness, the beast that is both culminated of self-misunderstanding, that is born of the notion that we are too weak as a whole to not get emotional, to not get mad, but when the beast turns upon itself, we have what we have, and what we have is an energy of Self-Hatred, and it is the beast which will eat us from the inside out. And it will not eat us up in one bite but rather will do like the vileness that is any kind of cancer and will eat, little by little, til the entirety of the whole has been stricken with the foolishness that is older than anyone fighting for what is deemed as fair and as equal. What is fair and equal and believable in the eyes of the unenlightened many is the emotion of hatred, is the anger that is deep seated and is borne of the energy that is weakness, that is being victimized, that is anything than what truly the human race is.

We have allowed the things that broke our collective heart and soul to be the thing that is the reality of us and for us all, even if some of us fight daily to make it otherwise than this. This is something that together, we can fix, but this is also something that, together, we find ourselves at odds, and we are at odds because of something that someone else said, in another lifetime – their lifetime – that made this fight, at this time, seem as though the hatred is what will win whatever it is that we think we need to win. It is the hatred that we are presumed to have – the very all of us – for other races and other ethnic groups, that has seeped into the minds and the hearts of the many and is now bleeding out into those who are like us. We have become so marginalized in what it is that we want to believe is the truth that we have allowed those things that show many of us to be ignorant, and now that ignorance has bred something new and entirely wrong on the whole. We have come to the point in our own collective self-hatreds that finally, there is a smaller minority of us who are begging, pleading even, for the hate to please stop.

Yet, we know that it won’t. It won’t because hatred sells more television spots and gets your books purchased in all the formats that you can come up with, and it won’t because there are people whose livelihoods will always depend on the seductive nature that is our own smallness. It won’t because without the self-hatred, “activists” who are not more than televangelists without the cameras will have no means with which to pay for the continuance of hate placed upon the whole of us by the few. It will not because too many of those who believe themselves to be the very powers that be will never allow a true healing to be the reality, because once there is a true healing, the things that propel them, the things that allow them to have the place in society that they and their egos have will no longer have a place in society if these hatreds are eliminated. 

This is the Beast which we have all, at one time in our lives, in a singular manner as well as a collective one, allowed to give birth, again and again, to the things that wreck our souls.

We cannot hope for change if all we are willing to do in order to push forward through to a better future is to grant people access to the hurts of the past that we were not there to be witness nor victim to. We have all, at one point in each of our lives, have chosen to believe that being a victim is far easier than is fighting to become a survivor, even as being a survivor proves something to us all, on a personal level, and it is proof that is permanent – proof of our own personal power. Sadly, too many of us will never be able to see that if we combine our personal power into the collective whole of things that we will exact the changes that are needed rather than the ego driven changes which are fueled by a collective of ignorance and hate.

We, as a race of human carbon based life forms, have a duty to one another, and when it comes with ethnic hatreds which are not only old, but generations and historically old, this is when we are allowing ourselves to travel back in time, back to when things seemed to be the way that a whole lot of people thought was right at one time, and that a whole lot of people now know is NOT right but who still use those ego-driven ways to promote equality and fairness but with unfair means and a means which really, no one had a choice to have – the color of skin, the place of birth, and the history shared with people who, even as they may not be ethnically the same as anyone else is, they are same in the manner that is human. 

In the manner that is human

In the manner that is human, not one of us is different than the other, but in the manner that is Ego, there are those who prefer for us to see the division between us that is not real, that is not there, that is pointed out because it has to be pointed out to be seen. No one thinks about race, no one thinks about being an ethnicity until someone else brings to our awareness the things which are different between us, which normally are place of birth (not place of origin) and zip code. There is an entire population of people on this planet with whom I share both air and history – ancient history, that is – with, who would rather see to it that people who were not born where they were born not be seen as what we really are, which is the same thing that they are only with a different zip code. If I can see this, and lots of other enlightened people can also see this, and if all one group is doing is saying and assuming what they will in order to feel better or more superior to the rest who are like them in more ways than one, then that tells me that the reason that anyone will point anything out to someone else that makes anyone appear to be ‘different’ that these people doing the pointing are weaker than the whole, and if they are weaker than the whole in its entirety it means that they are trying to weaken the whole, period. 

If what any person who claims to be a “National Leader” deems as being the thing that is the common thing about a people, that that thing uses division, that thing uses what is the shadow part of a people, then that person is perpetuating a darkness of a collective whole and it boils down to that person and their goals and their feelings and their ugliness and does not speak for the whole. 

What does not speak for the whole is the idea that since I am a person born “on the mainland,” that this means that somehow, as an ethnicity to a place of historical origin, since it is that I was not born wherever “there” is, that I am not right, that I am damaged, that somehow, I am not at all like those whose fight for equality would be one that would include the all of us. This is hurtful. This hurts a whole lot of people, all over the world, because the simple fact of the matter is that children of all cultural backgrounds are born all over this big beautiful rock, but that this does not mean that these children of certain origin are somehow not ethnic enough.

What my point is…

My point in using these things that I have been met with, that a whole lot of people like me have been met with, is to show the whole of you that when we are more inclined to see only what is not the same within a group, even as the group as a whole is essentially the same, it is a hurt within a hurt. It is a place that no one wants to be but is also a place that too many people who share culture want to believe is a “for us or against us” mentality. And hell yes I am against the kind of thinking that divides a people, no matter where that nation’s origins are, no matter how that collective thought came to be, no matter what – I am against the belief that a whole lot of culturally-adept-but-human-being-moronic have, and that belief is that it does not matter how you were taught as a child who is part of a culture and that only your birth zip code matters. I am against the idea that to get us where we need to be as a race we have to divide us so that the purity of the hatreds that are generations and historically old can be the ONLY thing that gets seen. I am against anything at all that pits brother against brother, sister against sister, tribe against tribe, nation against nation, namely and specifically a nation within a nation.

I am not at all impressed with the idea that there are people who behave as though if you were not where they were at the time of your birth, that this makes you not the real thing. And I promise you all right now that there is no one realer about anything “equality” than this person writing this right now, and since it is that we draw to ourselves who and what we are, and since it is that our souls mirror one another’s, and since it is that beauty attracts beauty and ugly attracts ugly, then this means that I am blessed in that I do not draw to my life people who will willingly divide a people, will divide themselves from their own kind, all because of a hatred planted in them by their ancestors, by their ancestor’s ancestors, and by the people with whom they share a likeness in darkness.

The time is now, guys. I am making the call out to the collective Soul of all that is “race,” yes, including the all of us in that group called “Human.”

NOW IS THE TIME, EVERYONE !

Now is the time that we all, no matter our ethnic origins, no matter where we were born, no matter who we are, need to knock off the ignorance. At this time in history too many of us are blinded by hatreds that are old, that are only reborn when people….so called “activists”….get involved in something with the wrong and selfish intentions. There are many of them, in fact, too many to be able to list them all, and I would not waste my time with highlighting them here in MY blog because the truth and the fact of the matter is that these purveyors of ancient hatreds and ancient methods of being controlled by other people is just not something that I want to be part and party to.

I do not want to be one who gives the energy of hatred, but of healing, not only of the one, but of the all. I want to see that nations of indigenous peoples can come together with nations of people who are not of indigenous ancestry and be together in mind and in spirit because we are already here together in the physical. I do not want to be here, in the present, seeing all of the ugliness that is the hurt of the past, the anger of the past, and the cellular knowledge of what is not okay, what was hurtful and caused generational and ethnic anger and hatred to be the thing that is passed on to the people in  my life, namely my children, namely the collective of the future which is nestled and safely protected within the Na Mamo who are our kids, collectively.

To this point, those who would raise their brood in the energy that is anger and mistrust will continue to share only that energy with the world, and it is in that sordidness that tells a people that they have the right to place hatred on to others and it is their duty that they share not the culture, not the beauty of a people, but the hatred for others who are not like them. This is the same thing that is seen in religion, and people die over it. This is the same thing that is in racism on the mainland, and people die over it. This is the same thing that religious people confront the LGBT community of the world with, and yes, there, too, people die over it.

People die over the hatreds that they have been given because all they have been taught is to hate and not to use the energy that is that same hatred to turn it into something useful and to do something right, good and positive with it. I could take these generalized pieces of hatred that a whole lot of ethnic Hawaiians like myself have, and give to my children, their friends, my cousin’s kids, my brother’s son, all my hanai (adopted) keiki (kids) and show them, too, that they can also hate as well as any adult can, or I can use it to do for them, as well as the rest of the planet, the right thing and show them that nothing is more lovely than being able to share with the world who you are, for real, and nothing is more lovely than being able to remain true to who you are while allowing others to just be who they are, too.

Yes, even within the very same ethnically divided group such as both sides of the coin called the Nation of the Peoples of Hawai’i. This is what I call us, us Kanaka Maoli, and I really do not care to hear if I have spelled it wrong, or that I cannot be part of it because I was born in Los Angeles County, California, where it is also know, and lovingly so, as being “The 9th Island.” We here on the 9th  love you guys there in the ‘Aina with a fierceness, and we are met often with the idea that we are not as real as you are there because we are here. It does not occur to you that when you do this stuff, when you think of us as people who you have to prove are not the same as you are, you hurt us. And the hurt is real, deep, and stays with us for a long, long time.

You hurt us because we are you and you are us, and you hurt us because when we bleed, it is the blood of the ancients which also spill from our veins. When we cry, it is the wailing of the ‘Aumakua which is heard. When we rejoice, it is all of the heavens which open wide and smile down on the whole of us and show us that we here are also Na Mamo, are also the cherished and the chosen. Yet you there seem to think that it is a zip code that matters, that who you are is more important to this …whatever it is that you have turned it into….thing that really, ALL Hawaiians are a part of. Not just you, or me, or your silly drunken Auntie named “Sweetheart” or “Honey Girl” who is the reality of the whole of us all – but it is us all that is the whole of us all.

This is the same thing that MUST BE applied to the whole of us all who inhabit this planet, who expect that we should be able to venture on into the future with eyes opened wide to the things that we know are truth, are ours, are made and here specifically to show the world that we seek peace, not hatred, and that we are Love, not lost, and that the All of Us includes ALL OF US and not one preferred bunch of same humans over another. The color of our skin does not matter unless you are trying to profit from it through measures of hatred and generations old anger. The zip code on our mail does not matter as much as the idea that the zip code on our mail is all on the same planet at the same time. The middle names that are comprised of all 12 letters of the Hawaiian alphabet mean nothing if the only words being formed and used are those which divide us all.

The All of Us need very dearly to take a look at the things happening in Hawai’i right now, the things happening in Florida right now, and we all need to think for a moment about how it came to be that we would hate each other over something that not one of us had a choice in – what race we are, and how that is the greatest way to show to people how ignorance and how old hatred of people who NONE OF US KNEW WHEN IT HAPPENED BECAUSE NONE OF US WERE THERE OR BREATHING BACK IN THE 1800s, but a whole lot of us are willing to hate people because someone a long time ago messed with our ancient ancestors and now we feel like it is our right to take up a bone with strangers and pick it!

Really? You mean you have nothing better to do than mess with other people over something that you really have no control over? You really wanna keep on the hatred?

Wouldn’t you much rather be the person who, just by your birth right, are meant as the purveyor of the Aloha that you have no issues with when it is said to a stranger of certain paler origin as they get off the plane, wallet open, ignorances to who you are and what you are up to, completely open for you to take advantage of?

Is someone like that mo’ bettah fo’ you when they have some Kala for you? Is that all they really are to you?

No wonder why you think they say bad things about you…you have given them no other choice but to, and really, you are showing us your guilty conscience from the inside, out, and yes, that guilty conscience is something that you have over people like me…people who are ethnically like you, but whose zip codes run along the neighborhoods dotting the 5, 10, 210 and 15 freeways rather than the highway called “Kam.”

When it is that we, as humans, want to use who we think we are because we think that other people are just going to give in to our whims, it is at this time, no matter your origins, that you need to check yourselves before you wreck yourselves.

Nothing gets done when you are running around in circles. The only thing that happens is that you end up dizzy.

By my own count, I am thinking that we have a lot of people who are dizzy from running around in the same hateful circles. You have gotta be tired. Perhaps you ought to stop fighting so much for the thing that you think still applies and learn now that what it is that you are doing is the opposite of that thing that you call
“pono,” because to be “pono” you have to sorta be right…

And the way you behave is not right…it is left and right, just like the two cheeks of the okole called ignorance.

I Love You All !
ROX

Reverend Roxanne Cottell is the Kumu Hula and Creator of the Healing with Hula Program for Women and the Co-Founder of Na Hula O Ka Wahine ‘Ui – The Sisterhood of The Soul. She is a blogger, book author, choreographer , Public Speaker, Domestic Violence and Emotional Abuse Survivors Advocate and Spiritual Coach. If you would like to contact her for speaking engagements, Spiritual Consultations, or for anything else, please send an email to reverendroxie22@gmail.com 
(c)  Roxanne K. Cottell. All Rights Reserved

Let me break it down for you like this, fellas…

A beautiful woman is not a hair style or the tag in her clothes…

My heart just breaks when I hear that someone has decided to be way, way creepy and has told a woman – any woman, namely one who is just looking for someone to be nice to her, that how she looks is who she is, is what is the most important thing to any man.

Don’t listen to anyone who tells you that you are not beautiful just as you are

The line in the song says that we are beautiful, no matter what they say, and this is the damned truth. I think the most upsetting thing to any woman is not that she is not anyone’s preferred type, but that someone has the very audacity to tell her that there is something wrong with them because said woman is not the ideal of one man. I say to hell with that person, and to hell with anyone else who cannot get themselves past the idea that who we are and what we are made of and what we are each all about is only important if we look a certain way with a certain hairstyle and a certain number in the tag in our jeans.

This is hurtful is what it is. It is hurtful for anyone to tell anyone else that what they look like is the thing that matters the most, and I am here to tell you that the only person to whom that matters is someone who cares what other people think of THEM, not you. They are worried that the woman on their arm is not someone who their stupid friends would think was beautiful, and the last time I checked, there is no real woman alive who would not be hurt by the words breathed by an unenlightened guy who only goes by what is seen of a woman. It is hurtful for us to hear that someone thinks that there is something wrong with us because we do not match up to their ideal of what is a beautiful woman.

What is a beautiful woman

…or rather who, is more like it.

A beautiful woman can be seen and known, not by what her hair looks like, and not by who designs her hair, not by the tag on the ass pocket of her jeans, and damned sure not by the tag on the inside either, but only and truly by who she is on the inside. A beautiful woman is a woman who is human and capable, is one who can accept her flaws without making an issue of them, and this is also the woman who, with a little time, will be the one who the man who hurt her feelings with his insensitivity and his boorish remarks watches walking away from him, and when that day comes, it will have been after she has told him that he is just not ready for her and quite possibly will never be.

He will never be ready for her because he is the man who needs to collect certain types of women, like we are prizes or notches on his belt. He will never be ready for her because he is too busy with being the guy who everyone is judging by the things and the people he is with, and he is the guy who might be easy on the eyes but in the heart and the soul he is like sandpaper on a fresh wound. He is the guy who will, eventually, be the one who thinks that he has all the answers, will be the one who expects a good woman to kneel to his own perceived greatness and he will be the one who will tell this woman, the one who he hand picked and the one who he also used his hands to pick on, that she is good but that she is not as good as he is, and he will be the one to tell her that she needs to act a certain way, and be a certain way, and he will also be the one who, if she marries him, will make her life a private living hell, just from the things that he tells her that she is not.

What she is not

What she is not is his property, and what she is not is not the one who will make him look good because guarantees are that if one person thinks he is a douche bag, there is likely a whole lot of other people who think he is, too.

What she is not is the representation of all the things that he thinks he deserves, and what she is not is his show pony. What she is meant to be is the culmination of the love within him and not the culmination or the prize at the end of the game called “I have goals and a hot chick to my specs is one of them…”

She is not a goal. She is not a score. She is not something that is not tangible at the same time that she is an intangible being because she is not a thing and she cannot be owned.

A woman is not a thing, but a human being. When the world realizes that we are powerful in our own right it will also know that this has been the truth all along.

I Love You All !

ROX

This WAS about affordable weddings, BUT…

I was asked why don’t I do this blog like I do the other two blogs…

And it was not hard for me to answer that question with another question, one which sounded like “Yeah…why DON’T I turn it into one of THOSE blogs already?”

There are a lot of websites around that give people advice as to how to save money, and those kinds of things are and should be reserved for those who have nothing but time and patience to shop all day. I am not that person anymore. I have given myself all the time that I need in order to become all the advice-giving-clue-having-no-crap-taking-feminist-mom-healer-wedding-minister-person type human being that I need to be, and it was without hesitation that I would take this time to do exactly what it is that I do anyway but in this case it is specifically for those who are getting married very soon, or maybe even not that soon.

I get a whole LOT of questions, mostly about the human nature part of relationships, particularly about those between men and women, and most of those ones about marriage and how things fall apart. This is not the way that I like to do things, the falling apart part, but my thought is that if I can reach just one couple and plant the seed in their heads that you get to do your life your combined way, then I have done my job, not only as a person ordained to perform marriages, but more, as the healer that I am in my daily practice. 

I was asked to write it, not because people need to get a clue, but marrying people need to have one walking into it…hence, this is FOR THOSE ABOUT TO WALK…down the aisle, that is.

And yes, of course, these things which I will write about also could and most of the time will apply to the rest of the humans on the planet as well.

The wedding is only a tiny part of the marriage

Weddings are, by and large and as long as someone’s drunken auntie does not make an ass of herself, a whole lot of fun! Come on! You know they are! You get to dress up (ok, sometimes you don’t have to dress up, at least when I am who is performing the ceremony, but that is neither here nor there right now.). You get to eat free. You get to drink free. You get to do a whole lot with lots of people, some who you know, and many who you don’t, and at the end of it all, the thing that is changed is not only the bride’s last name.

What once applied to two separate people now applies to one couple, and what used to be your last name is now your “maiden name,” and what used to be your life is now still your life but is now shared with someone who might not realize just how irritating it is for someone else to replace the toilet paper roll the wrong way. (There is no wrong way, by the way…just sayin’…) He who used to be a bachelor is now a husband. She who used to be a nice young lady is now some dude’s ‘old lady.’ Clearly, just from what has been shown to you here is a lot more than a whole lot of words which apply to two people, and these whole lot of words carry a whole lot of meaning and bring with them a change in the energies within a person simply and only from thinking about this paragraph on its own, let alone all of the other things that go on within a marriage that is brand new. 

The wedding, kids, is only one part of the entirety of the whole. The wedding is that one last party, the last hurrah, even as it is the first party that you and your beloved will throw for what is now your combined bunch of people who, at one time was “his” and “hers” but is now “ours.” 

When you think about that thought for a minute, and you wrap your head around it enough to where it won’t make your brain freeze up like a Facebook site update, it hits us each like a two ton load of bricks to know that this coming Friday evening, there will be an entire population of women who are known as “The Bride to Be,” who will, on that very next day, no longer be the bride-to-be, but will, at one point in the day, BE the bride and a very short time after that will be Mrs. Newlywed.

Kind of a big fat thought, right? 

Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiight!

Is it respect, or honor, or Love which we each crave?

“Well, DUH!” exclaimed the snarky minister, dressed in her best Metallica T-shirt and very faded skinny jeans, hair, arms thrown up into the air as though it would make the statement any clearer that “indeed, Love, it is not Respect OR anything, but Respect, period, along with honor and Love…duh!”

I have found that within the minds of the marrying there are questions, questions, questions about whether or not they will get along, whether or not they will get along with each others’ families after the pageantry, and after all the loveliness of that one very special day has become something committed to the memories not only of the couple, but also of all their guests. This is the part that not a lot of people take for granted. Too many people believe that these are just nice words that all ministers say, but this is not the truth. These vows, these nice words are ages…GENERATIONS old and while they are still part of the ceremony, many, many ministers, including this one, have changed the way that the vows are read because the way that they are usually set up makes me think of a pirate who has literally “taken” a bride, tied her to some part of his boat, and forced her to say these things and mean them in front of the ship’s clergy so that he can, very truly, take her as his wife. This denotes that she is his property. I ask anyone reading this who really wants to think of their partner as property?

Who really wants to have that kind of responsibility – the responsibility of ownership when in reality there is no one being owned and no dowry being traded. 

To Love, Honor and Respect means a whole lot to a whole lot of different people, but the bottom line in all of this is that these things apply to both the bride and the groom and these are things that a whole lot of people have never really thought about. No one getting married really thinks about the vows that they take until they happen upon their very first argument and the woman in the typical marriage is the one who ends up in tears, reminding her once-upon-a-time guy that he vowed to Love, Honor and Cherish her, but that he also told her in those vows that he would respect her.

When he doesn’t it proves to her what her parents told her, what her mother showed her, which, if you thought about it on the whole, there is a whole population of women who are divorced who now are that way because they did not realize that they get to make the rules now. That’s right – the rules by which you both shall love, live, and be like are yours to make and yours to keep, forever and ever, amen.

Seriously. For real – it’s your show, and no one else’s. This is the part that not a lot of people want to accept, namely the parents of the bride. I know this. I was this bride-turned-abuse-survivor. That is what this particular blog really is about – staying sane when the wedded bliss is more like a wedded bleh! And those days will happen. You will fight – and do I mean a LOT, and it is because there is a constant power struggle, at least in most unions, even in these times when it seems like it should not be this way. Too many people still listen to advice that might have applied to a lot of other unions between men and their wives, and too many people see other peoples’ marriages through and with their own marriage dearly in mind and while what we are told is the absolute truth of things, the bottom line is that the things that used to apply a lot of years ago cannot apply now. Things are very different now.

Things are very different now

Marriages these days are no longer “for the farm,” like they were generations ago, when people married young, raised families – large families – very young, and it is because back in the day before cars and before women had the right to speak up without garnering the chance at also being beaten for speaking out of turn, people married younger because the life expectancy was not as great as it is now. People had great big families then because there were family farms to tend to and it made sense to bring your own farm hands into the world.

Today, though, things are markedly different. Today there are things called equality, and today there are men who get married to men, women who get married to women, men who are thirty years older than their brides, and women who are twenty years older than their grooms. Today, there are women CEOs and today there are men who stay home with the kids to raise said such woman’s children while said woman goes out into the world to collect the sustenance to provide for the family who she made with the man who stays home and does what was primarily women’s work back in the day. Today women are respected as equal partners, and today, men are not thought of as being creepy and macho because today we just seem not to want to deal with what was because what was no longer applies.

Am I saying that we women need to assert ourselves more in our marriages? Not if you don’t have to, and if you feel like you have to then it is time to ask yourself a couple of questions with the first one being thought of as “why did he not behave this way before I married him?” and he might ask “What happened to that gentle creature who I fell in love with and why is she not letting me be the way that I was to her when we first started dating?”

Well, you, oh bride to be, were so blinded by what you wanted that you told yourself and lied to you about what the reality was of him, and without bothering then to question yourself then about it, you somehow, and on some level, decided that you would be able to settle for it this one time, all in the name of Love. And you, Mr. IamthemanIamtheman (gotta love Anthrax, right?) …you were SO busy trying to not let all the guys in your life think that somehow you have become pansy-fied in your ways that you allowed someone else’s thoughts and someone else’s beliefs about you become the thing that has caused you to behave like a moron.

It is very simple. 

When we think about things in the manner that is the question “How would I want to be treated?” and we are willing to NOT see our beloved as the only person on the planet whose opinion of us matters, and when we are willing to not settle for being treated as though the other person who we have placed atop a pedestal can finally come back to earth from the Land of Ego, and when everyone can remember and make it a habit to not ever slip into the idea that we are more important than anyone else is and that we have to be the most important person in the person who we married’s life is, and when we can accept that we cannot have our way all the time, and when we can accept that this other person is someone who, just like us, has their own thought about everything and we can bother to have some respect for them and who they truly are….

…this is when we have the key to a happy, long marriage.

I Promise…

ROX

Reverend Roxanne Cottell is the Kumu Hula and Creator of the Healing with Hula Program for Women and the Co-Founder of Na Hula O Ka Wahine ‘Ui – The Sisterhood of The Soul. She is a blogger, book author, choreographer , Public Speaker, Domestic Violence and Emotional Abuse Survivors Advocate and Spiritual Coach. If you would like to contact her for speaking engagements, Spiritual Consultations, Book a Wedding or for anything else, please send an email to reverendroxie22@gmail.com 
(c)  Roxanne K. Cottell. All Rights Reserved

…from the inside

To fix what is outside of us, we have to go from the inside…

We are all asking ourselves where we are supposed to go from here?

That is easy.

We go within.

We have all lived outside of ourselves for so long, worried about who would see what it was that we were trying to hide from the world and not realizing that we were not hiding a thing. It is our fears which have again reared their ugly heads, and it is the collective fear, not of anything other than ourselves, that causes us to see what we do not want to see, and we see it in the people who we don’t think the Shadow exists in, and really, the Shadow is nothing to fear because just like the light, so, too, is the Shadow a big part of who we each are.

We have to go within, but a lot of us are afraid of what is there that we cannot see

There is always something that lurks beneath the surface of our personal safety net. We like the darkness, a lot of us do, because we can hide our sins there, or at least we think we can. The reality is that, if we looked at things in the manner that is a dark closet or an attic or a basement that we keep on throwing things into without the light to show us what is there, eventually, as if we didn’t know this, it gets pretty cramped and cluttered in those places. Yet, we keep on amassing these piles of stuff that we refuse to look at, stuff  that means something to us in a sentimental manner that really, what all those things are doing is taking up space.

Think about all the shows that feature people who are hoarders, who are addicted somehow, and you will have in your midst the reality that is the cluttered mind, the reality that is the pain buried beneath all that stuff that a person just continues to pile on top of an already big pile of things that may be sentimentally ours but they are sentimentally ours in ways that might be to our own detriment. Hanging on to things that no longer serves a purpose for us, things and people who cannot teach us anything more than they already have, only hurt us in the long run.

Our limited thinking does not allow us to want to think in a manner that allows us to want to look at all these things as clutter. Our limited thinking always tells us that when we want to do better that we are up to no good, and always, someone makes this the truth for us one way or another, and that is when the over-stuffed nature of the closet we hold all these experiences in becomes a detriment. It is one thing to recall with a fondness the way that our dearly departed loved ones used to talk with us, but is quite another thing to remain in the part of the recollection that keeps us there in that hurt and in that heartache where we are ready more to stay there because we think it is comforting us. While it might be comforting to us that we can recall these times with fondness, it should be disconcerting to us that we want to hang on to those times and those things and those people so that we do not have to feel the burden of the loss.

It is in the burden of the loss where we are confused. We want to believe that we will never be able to be the person we were when what was so cool happened both for us and to us. We have not yet gathered the strength to deal with the loss, so we only recall when things were good, and we do not bother with the thing that is the reality of it all. The reality of it all is that we cannot change things outside of us to match the inside, and when we do not allow ourselves to feel our own pain we become someone who we were rather than getting to that point of being who we are on a daily basis.

Who we are on a daily basis is not who we were when we lost what we lost, and instead of thinking only of the loss, we should be looking at the lesson that we learned through that loss.

We have to change things from the inside if we want things to be different. We have to deal with who we were so that who we have become and who we are right now makes sense…

If we want to see change, we have to do it from the inside.

I Love You All
ROX

Stand Your Ground (18+)

When it comes to the Sanctity of Life and perpetuation of Love through every means possible, there is no other way….
You must stand your ground.

We are all feeling the effects of the Stand Your Ground laws which played a huge role in the most notorious case since the 1990’s. I will not make mention of what happened, because there is no reason to remind the world of parents that a mother and a father lost their son.

We must, people, learn to value Life, period. This is the tragedy born out of the fear that has been pounded into our heads since we were all children – that it is better to be safe than it is to be sorry, even if safety is through lethal means. Sometimes, as has been proved just by judging how poorly people are dealing with this, lethal means is not the best way, because it makes people think they are allowed to take the life of another person  This is a sorry state that we have come to. The only thing that anyone needs to be sorry about at this point in time is the sadness that a young man’s memory will be tainted by what a jury panel decided was important – and you do not need to be told that it was life and that it really is not freedom to carry or use a weapon, and not “justice,” because when there is a loss of a young life, there is no justice. It is life. This young man did not have to die this way. Yet, he did, and now the whole world ….the ENTIRE world…is being told that it is about race.

I am sorry folks, but it is not about race. It is about hatred and having an excuse to act like jack-offs and use that hatred as the fuel that excuses people from thinking, period.

I reiterate – this is not now nor has it really ever been about anything more than fear and hatred, and both of those things, when chosen as the prevailing energy, suck ass.

It is not about racism

This is not about racism. This is about the idea that we devalue the life of another human being so much that we have, again, become divided, and over what? A law that said that guy could shoot someone else if he was afraid? Really? And now we have these big giant shows of hatred, and people protesting…(whatever)….on the damned freeways…in Los Angeles- wake up, folks – this has NOTHING to do with race, at least not the way that we are thinking it does.

That the shooter made this about race is one thing. That the populace should know better than to buy into mainstream media’s idea that we have to fight over skin color, and then they go further to bait the populace is another story all together. Really, what time it is is NOT time to make this about race, because it is not about race, but rather and only about the sanctity of life.

We do not value life anymore. It is evident in the way that people vote for women’s health rights and thinking that the only way to value life is to control ours. It is evident in the way that we look at each other – through eyes that have been seeing through lenses that are scratched and that make everything seem like it is something that it is not. No one said that we have to continue to fight with each other, over the most insidious things – people believe that they should have things handed to them, including the right to take up arms, gather up the hateful masses, and make this tragedy their reason to hate.

Guys, this is NOT A CALL TO FIGHT but a call to think about who we are for real. We are not meant to hate on each other, but that is what we are doing, using this young man’s memory as the reason why. There is not enough talking me into the idea that I should be on one side or the other, but I chose and will remain to choose the side that says we are not thinking about that young man’s family, and we are speaking for them, so to speak, at least a lot of us, when what they really need is to shut the hell up, sit the fuck down,  and be able to let this young man rest peacefully.

It is not enough that his parents already lost him, but to have his memory and who he was to them tainted by all this hate, by all this ignorance, by all these things I am sure that his parents do not want happening is the thing that we need dearly to stand our ground on and against. Yes, the shooter legally had the right to shoot this kid, but that is why this is so terrible – because adults who think they are thinking with their hearts are thinking with a heart that is filled with hatred and believing that because they are a “color” that they have the right and the duty to speak for someone else. I am sorry, but I, too, can be thought of as being a “color,” and I promise I do not agree with ANY of the violence that is happening in the name of the boy, who was black, and the shooter, who was not, and neither do I believe that any one person who is making all this noise and causing all this bullshit has ANYTHING to say about anything other than that they believe that this is about race.

It is NOT about race, but about equality, and if you feel like you should be handed anything, including the right to behave like a jack-off and make more violence become our collective reality, the right to shoot your mouth off, the right to threaten people because of their race, then you are a big giant jack off. A big giant jack off  who does not think with the entirety of the whole of us in mind… A big giant jack-off  who believes that they must be the karmic debt repayment for the sins that they feel were committed on them. It was the shooter who used poor judgment, but it was the jury who people should be considering and NOT the jack-off who pulled the trigger. That the shooter is a panty-waist is one thing, but that we are making his foolishness the reason that everyone else has to behave like jack-offs is an entire other story all together.

This is so not about race, was never about race.

It was not about race until someone said that it was. That the shooter is what he is is one thing, and that the boy was what he was is another, but this is not about race. This is about fear. This is about hatred. This is about anything other than preserving the memory of that young man and more about reviving memories that a lot of us don’t have.

This is fear at its finest, because there is a large majority of us in the United States who have taken this up as their own fight for equality, and the only equality that they are claiming is that they, at one time in their lives, because someone else said so, believed what they were told about themselves, about the color of their skin- they believed it. I know this is the truth because I am a recovering closeted racist. My excuse a lot of years ago that I had made up was not one about my hating on white folks, but my hating my own self because I was not white. Yep….you read it right…I used to think that I was not right, because I was not white. I am not that person anymore, and I am very proudly Keiki O Ka’aina…I am fiercely, proudly Kanaka…fiercely proudly Hawaiian, and I am not scared to let people know that no, I am not white, and that yes, I am proud of my roots, but no, you have nothing to do with the past that spoke of the slavery of my people on our own islands. If you do not believe me, ask a real historian with Hawaiian roots and not one that is not of that origin. Not because of anything other than that you will get the entirety of the truth about the Hawaiian islands. That is neither here nor there, because I love me and I love where I came from.

I found out a lot of years later that I do not need to be anything else but a human being, because that eliminates anything “race.” I am not a race. I am a human, and the majority of us on this planet are also human. If you feel like you have been made less human by anyone it is because you believed what you were told, believed what someone else said that hurt you, and you carried that with you, all this time. I could get ass hurt, be a whiny bitch about how I feel that the justice system failed this young man, but that is not the truth. It is a tragedy, period. No matter how anyone wants to look at this is irrelevant, because it is all based on an opinion that really is not the fact.

The fact is that people who think that they need to spend their time behaving as though the outcome of this whole entire travesty has more to do with 5 white jurors hating on people of ethnicity, let me remind you that the more hatred that anyone puts into this mess, the more we mock the life of that young man, of his family, of ourselves, and the more that we choose to believe that we are inadequate because we have skin color, the more that we make people who really do feel like they are better than “colors” will ever be, and the truth about those people is that they are not worried about things as much as the rest of the world of colors is, because theirs is a quiet hatred, one that is as old as would be ANY generation and ethnic hatred would be and is.

…yes…I have a place to talk…because when that verdict was handed down, suddenly I had skin color…again. I am not a color, and neither is anyone else. Period.

I have skin color. Period. I like it. It goes well with my black hair and my brown eyes. I could sit here, angry at the whole white race for things that their ancestors did to the Hawaiian Monarchy and our last sitting Monarch, Queen Lydia Liliu’okalani Paki of the Nation of Hawai’i, but why? Why should I bother with the idea that a long, long time ago, business interests from the United States went over to the islands and took them. They jailed our queen in her stateroom in her home – ‘Iolani Palace – and to this day Hawaiians are not only up in arms but in a somewhat quiet manner we are divided, and this should just not be. Where some of us fight to keep the Hawaiian Spirit alive by passing on our treasured traditions and ways, there are a lot of us who are tying hard to take the islands back. I wish them luck. .

My thought is that we should not be showing our babies and the younger generations of Kanaka Maoli how to hate, but that is exactly what is happening. We, not me, not really any mainland Hawaiians, and a few on the islands who are more worried that our beautiful culture of Aloha and of Lokahi and Ohana are going to be lost in the fight for our sovereignty as a nation, when instead we would be better able to preserve our culture’s ways. We should be passing on our spiritual traditions, and while I get it with the idea that we need to be recognized as a nation of people, what I do not get is that we have to fight with each other over things that will take generations to make right.

To perpetuate the fight within our children is one thing, but to encourage them to hate strangers for something that said stranger’s ancestors did a long time ago is preposterous to me and a monstrously huge amount of time and energy wasted on people who just do not care what we think. We would sooner fight for a label than the truth. We are supposed to be teaching our kids to love, but instead we are instructing them on who is to be hated, because of the color of their skin, and this just breeds an entirely new sense of self-hatred and makes a kid question why it is that if they are so special, why is it that they cannot claim as theirs what is rightly theirs?

Hatred is not theirs, but it somehow belongs to the whole of us when we decide that one tiny group of people have made a choice and that that choice makes it okay for us to go out into the streets and behave like stupid assholes.

We need to stand our ground, be proud of who we are as humans, not quietly angry that this is a setback for racial rights. It is not a setback. You are an asshole if you think that this is yet another person trying to make peace by kissing ass. I do not kiss ass. I am not an asshole. I know how to be angry without hating people for something as stupid as our own beliefs about what someone else told us was the truth. It is not the truth that the boy died because he was black – he died because the shooter is a chicken shit, and I really don’t care what the fuck anyone thinks about this, do not give two shits if I lose readers, could not care one little bit less if anyone goes off on a rant with me about how I have no clue about the reality of racism in this country.

Really, asshole? I think I might have a tiny little bit of a clue…now run along before I cuss your sorry ass out!

Get on out into the world and create peace, not lies. Create Love, not hurt.

Get on out there and create a new life with us, and stop hating on yourselves because a long time ago someone named “Al” told you that it is the white man who holds us back. I promise you that it is not the white man, but that it is men like that fucker Al who like stirring shit up and making minorities feel like motherfucken minorities.

And to THAT fucker…I say that if he wants to debate someone, do it without cameras, or at least without all of his “people”…dude, you have no people…you ain’t god damned Moses.

If what you want to see is the creation of a new world, it has to start with a new thought, and we are the ones who have to come up with that thought…

I Love You All!
(Even though at this time many of you are pissing me off)

ROX

The Magnificence of NOT knowing what is to be revealed

We learn a lot of lessons in life. Sometimes, the sweetest thing is waiting to be revealed. It is not up to us to guess, but only, to wait for the revelation of it all.

In my personal private life, the one which I share with a few people who I connect with on a completely different level than the physical one only, much is revealed to me, at least, as far as what anyone will learn in their lessons, through the actual physical manifestation of things. Some of the things that were revealed to me while talking to a woman who I will refer to only as “Rose” were things that no one, not even my cousin Kai who knows me well enough to know the truth in this, could possibly know without also knowing me as well as Kai does.

Her name is Rose

I took it in the manner that is the Rose of Sharon, this meeting of this lovely person whose name I only know as being Rose. She wore a Harley-Davidson bandana on her head to cover the evidence of her physical frailty. In her Spirit, in her heart, this person is anything but frail. This person revealed to me so very much about who I am and more, the things that she read for me and while I was in her presence astonished me, because in those words, in some of those things that, at the moment, I am just beside myself about, I found out that there are things that I did not know why they needed to be done, why I have to do them still, and why it is that those things keep cropping up. “You don’t need me to tell you why, lady. I just have to tell you that whatever it is that you are afraid of will not go away unless they are done…”

Of course, I sat there as she explained to me what she saw, who she saw, and told me her reasons as to the reason that I have no idea about and more, the reasons that I simply am just baffled over, and it has everything to do with the person who I am becoming. Rose told me things that not a lot of people who do not know me all and only know, and she told me that the moment that these things happen for me, and not TO me, that there will be a bigger truth that I have been waiting to know, that I have been racking my brain for months about, and it all has to do, not with the people that these things have to come to pass with and because of, but more, with the things that I teach and I Spiritually give to people on a daily basis.

A Drive on that Place Called “The Wild Side” 

We didn’t drive anywhere, me and Rose. But it was way wild the things that she told me, and much needed to be heard by me, even though a whole lot of it made me squirm uneasily. The reason that it made me uncomfortable is not because this Wisdom Keeper knew me so well, but that she knew, that she knows that I, too, am part, a big part, bigger than I know or realize, of the grand Universal thing about things.

Without leaving La Verne until about 10 P.M., I took a ride on the Wild Side of things for a minute, and saw through the eyes of this woman named Rose those things that I just do not want to deal with at this time, things that I am not ready to go through, things that have to be done. She told me that when the time comes, and I am ready to see them for what they are and even as I already know what a lot of those things marked as “they” are already, I was challenged in the Soul by her words, and eagerly, I listened to what this person had to tell me. She struck me as a Wise One, as a piece of belief called “The Rose of Sharon,” because her words, for me, were not marked with anything more than the Love borne of Wisdom, the Wisdom from someone who, even in her frailty, is her strength.

It was an outer strength so marked by an inner peace, a reserve of things unknown and a Soul which refuses to take itself to the depths of its physically assumed frailty. Rose, by any means, is anything but frail. She saw this about me and told me that no matter what, I know what to do, that I am exactly where I need to be at the moment, and that while sometimes, things hurt, sometimes, things make no sense, and sometimes, the things that we cut ourselves from are not meant to be severed but embraced. Even though I know that the shadow side of me keeps on prodding me to do things, think things, make light of things, there are things that, without my needing to really, truly know why, have to be done, and they have to be done so that I can finally be done with the level of things as they are. In order for things to climb to the places that they need to climb to, I have to, you have to, we all have to give in to the things that we work so hard to not deal with.

It ain’t that we are not willing to face Truth and stare it in the eyes, but that we want to pick and choose when we will face them…

Now is the best time to make sense of things rather than to make light of them. I know this is the thing that this woman was telling me, because in her machinations of the way that energy works, I found out that I fear a whole lot of things, but that I am well on my way to finding out why I fear the things that I do. I fear what I fear because of the past. If we can let go of the things that are scaring us, asking ourselves questions about why we are so afraid, and asking ourselves what we can do to make us not afraid of them anymore, we can then bother to also know what is the lesson therein contained for us.

My fears are quite ridiculous, as Rose confirmed for me, and again, I was told that the thing that I am doing now is the thing that I am supposed to be doing anyway, and that the things…there is more than only one thing that is scaring the crap outta me at the moment…that make me want to crawl into that zone called “safety” is the thing that I have to deal with. I am not afraid of things in the literal sense. I do not bodily fear these things. My soul…the shadow portion of it, that is…fears being revealed in the sense that is the sensual and provocative and all of those things that can be marked as being the regeneration of things, the renewal of the energies that were prevalent and only for me a little over a year ago last month, and those things which were as they were last year at this time…well, they are the same, but not, and they are “not” because of the things that I have given to them.

The things that I have given to them

We all give a whole lot to the things that we think about. I think about a whole lot, all the time. I think about how many times I have changed my mind, only to come right back to this place called “home,” even if it is only in my mind. I have gone over, in my head, at least a dozen times a day, the things that I want to do and the things that I have already done and always I know that we are all learning, all the time.

It is in the things that we are willing to give to a situation, to a person, to ourselves that will always reveal what they are meant to when they are meant to. I see a whole lot of change, and I sense the same fear that I have about certain areas of life, and all of it boils down to the idea that the only thing left that makes these fearful things go away is me. I am the end component in the fear, in the mistrust, not in other people, but in my own self and in my abilities to see things happen as they are meant to and not fret over what I am not seeing that I would love to see. I would love to see that every single one of my friends would be able to be happy and comfortable in their lives at present moment, and I would love to know that my kids are always going to know that patience is the most important thing when we want to see changes. I would love to know that everything that I do and have done and will do are all somehow going to end up with my getting exactly what I want.

Wouldn’t we all?

Wouldn’t we all just love to know all the answers to the questions that we have that have been haunting us for as long as it all has been, and wouldn’t we all just want to know that what we see in our minds is the absoluteness of what is to happen rather than only a representation of what is to be?

Of course we would. We would all love to know what is going to happen next, and for the most part the majority of us are savvy enough to pay attention to the patterns which visit our lives at a constant, but then no one would be around for me to show these patterns to if we all bothered to really think about our lives to this moment.

If we always knew what was going to happen, life would be boring, we would not be able to taste the thrill of not knowing, the thrill of everyday being “6 year old on Christmas day” excited. This is what we should be like, everyday – a 6 year old, anticipating his parents waking up so that he can rush to the side of the tree and gleefully and unmercifully and with total glee and excitement, rip to shreds the paper which hides the truth of the gift beneath.

If we could approach each day with that sort of energy, just imagine the things that we would see in our lives. If we chose to wake up daily and see what is ours as the challenges of the day, we would see, too, the path that we are not only following, but more, the path that we chose and it is the path, we find out, too, that we alone are building.

And alone, what we are building is nothing short of this thing called being magnificent!

This is called Being MAGNIFICENT

This is called being magnificent. This is called being able to deal with waiting for the best things in life to come to us and this is called trusting who we are is good enough in the eyes of Spirit as well as ourselves, to just simply wait until the best comes to us. Period. We cannot force things to happen for us. When they are meant to happen for us, they will just happen for us.

What else we cannot do is force other people to get it in terms of our happiness, to understand where it is that we are each coming from and more, to know for sure that who we are matters, that what we think is all going to make sense for us each one day.

Being magnificent, by the way, is something that just comes naturally to us all….we just need to stop believing the lies we have been told. Being magnificent means that no matter who thinks that there is better out there, at least for them, that who you are is the best version of you that there can be. Being magnificent means that we have accepted who we are for us and not for anyone else. To be the most perfect rendition of who we each really are is the most precious gift which anyone could ever have. The very moment that we can each and all give ourselves that one little chance at grabbing on to our own light and hanging on to it for dear life and realizing that we alone are the only ones who can change our story line from “bleh” to “YEAH!”

We are who makes all the difference in our own world. This means that we alone will be who figures out first just exactly how magnificent we are.

No one will know it until you know how magnificent that you really and truly are!

For anything like that to happen, though, it is important that you just learn to chill and wait because the best is yet to come!

I Love You All !
ROX

Reverend Roxanne Cottell is the Kumu Hula and Creator of the Healing with Hula Program for Women and the Founder of Na Hula O Ka Wahine ‘Ui – The Sisterhood of The Soul. She is a blogger, book author, choreographer , Public Speaker, Domestic Violence and Emotional Abuse Survivors Advocate and Spiritual Coach,  and also a group trainer for business in the area of etiquette, person-to-person communication, office group trainings in proper etiquette and clear communication. To reach Rev. Cottell for any reason at all  please send an email to reverendroxie22@gmail.com 
(c) 2013 Roxanne K. Cottell. All Rights Reserved