By Lynn Scheurell

Everyone has a turning point. And mine came as a result of virtually everything associated with a job that I had in 1997. Now it almost seems like a dream… but then, I was searching for something to fill me up. I had just taken a job with a consulting firm in Chicago two months earlier and my supervisor was taking me under his wing. And then I got recruited to move to a start-up .com in Salt Lake City, Utah. I wasn’t even unpacked yet, and yet somehow found myself packing up and moving again. I’d never been to Utah, so I had no idea where I was going. I’d rented an apartment sight unseen over the internet. I didn’t know anyone there to help me unload my truck, but I firmly looked past the details and drove for three days myself to get there (hauling my car behind me).

On the way, I called my new colleagues to ask for help and, not surprisingly, no one was available. After all, they didn’t know me yet and it wasn’t their issue. I drove straight to my new apartment, saw some young guys moving in themselves and paid them to help me. With one day to get myself oriented, feeling completely alone, cut off from support systems nearly 2000 miles away, reeling from a second huge life change in as many months , not knowing anything about the city, my job or how things were going to turn out, I walked into the chaos of start-up internet company.

Over the next fifteen months or so, I lived on shifting sand. In retrospect, I don’t know how I did it. Not only was I adjusting to a new life, had my car broken into (my purse, company laptop, and cash all taken), and feeling the shock of swimming in a social culture of which I wasn’t ever going to be a part, the leader of the company was a visionary trying to make a buck so our jobs changed on a daily basis. We went wherever his head did… I did everything from customer service to sales presentations to administrative support and more. I didn’t know my place, because it was changing and because I’m a generalist – I see the bigger picture. I know what needs to get done, and, as a life-long entrepreneur, I know what it takes to make things happen. As a professional catalyst now, that comes in very handy. Back then, it made me someone to rely on when they needed and a maverick when they didn’t as someone who didn’t fit in any box within a company that had changing, dotted-line bordered boxes.

At any rate, as people jockeyed for security, internal competition became the name of the game. And since that’s not a game that I knew the rules for (either then or now), I lost. I was the first of an eventually long line of lay-offs. Mine happened on December 15, 1998. I now consider it the greatest day of my life.

For the next three months, I laid on my couch in depression. I didn’t know what to do. By then, I was renting a house from a married (now former) colleague to whom I had a dysfunctional attraction. I had no financial reserves or support. I felt betrayed and couldn’t bear to think about getting a new job (since that would just set me up for more pain). I knew then that I was outside the ‘old’ way of doing things. But I didn’t know what my new way would be… all I knew is that this was my moment. This is when I HAD to do something different because I didn’t want to return to this place ever again, where my life situation had been dictated by someone else. Where my life force energy had gone into building someone else’s dream and had been ultimately devalued. And where I lost myself.

That’s when I did the only thing that felt right – I followed the energy. Over and over, I’d been seeing references to Feng Shui – a newspaper ad, a billboard, a story on tv. I approached the teacher of a practitioner training course, told her that I was supposed to take her class but couldn’t pay for it, and she let me work the course tuition off in her store. It was the gift that started giving me back my life. And that’s where I re-connected to the one thing that now guides and supports me living every day since – my conscious connection to Source energy.

Now, more than a decade later, I see that what felt like my most disastrous day after a string of disastrous days in that moment, overflowing with fear of not knowing what was next, replete with feeling that I had hit bottom in my career, and had used up all my resources and wouldn’t make it… THAT was my great gift from the Universe. It was my turning point to get on the right track with living and being and expressing my true purpose. And I’m happy to report that my life has been just that since my turning point.

Here’s my one piece of advice for anyone feeling the fear of a particular situation. Feel it and then use it to find your turning point. Your life will never be the same.

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Lynn Scheurell, Creative Catalyst, works with soul-driven entrepreneurs to gain clarity and strengthen their inner systems for dramatic business results. She teaches simple strategies to increase perception, align the ‘doing’ with the ‘being’ of true life purpose and how to express that through entrepreneurial business. Download a free report to learn “The Seven Deadly Mistakes That Keep Soul-Driven Business Owners from Making Money” at www.mycreativecatalyst.com.

The first day of school our professor introduced himself and challenged us to get to know someone we didn’t already know. I stood up to look around when a gentle hand touched my shoulder.

I turned around to find a wrinkled, little old lady beaming up at me with a smile that lit up her entire being.

She said, ‘Hi handsome.. My name is Rose. I’m eighty-seven years old.
Can I give you a hug?’

I laughed and enthusiastically responded, ‘Of course you may!’ and she gave me a giant squeeze.

‘Why are you in college at such a young, innocent age?’ I asked.

She jokingly replied, ‘I’m here to meet a rich husband, get married, and have a couple of kids….’

‘No seriously,’ I asked. I was curious what may have motivated her to be taking on this challenge at her age.

‘I always dreamed of having a college education and now I’m getting one!’ she told me.

After class we walked to the student union building and shared a chocolate milkshake.

We became instant friends. Every day for the next three months we would leave class together and talk nonstop. I was always mesmerized listening to this ‘time machine’ as she shared her wisdom and experience with me.

Over the course of the year, Rose became a campus icon and she easily made friends wherever she went. She loved to dress up and she reveled in the attention bestowed upon her from the other students. She was living it up..

At the end of the semester we invited Rose to speak at our football banquet. I’ll never forget what she taught us. She was introduced and stepped up to the podium. As she began to deliver her prepared speech, she dropped her three by five cards on the floor.

Frustrated and a little embarrassed she leaned into the microphone and simply said, ‘I’m sorry I’m so jittery. I gave up beer for Lent and this whiskey is killing me! I’ll never get my speech back in order so let me just tell you what I know.’

As we laughed she cleared her throat and began, ‘We do not stop playing because we are old; we grow old because we stop playing.

There are only four secrets to staying young, being happy, and achieving success. You have to laugh and find humor every day. You’ve got to have a dream. When you lose your dreams, you die..

We have so many people walking around who are dead and don’t even know it!

There is a huge difference between growing older and growing up.

If you are nineteen years old and lie in bed for one full year and don’t do one productive thing, you will turn twenty years old. If I am eighty-seven years old and stay in bed for a year and never do anything I will turn eighty-eight.

Anybody can grow older. That doesn’t take any talent or ability. The idea is to grow up by always finding opportunity in change. Have no regrets.

The elderly usually don’t have regrets for what we did, but rather for things we did not do. The only people who fear death are those with regrets.’

She concluded her speech by courageously singing ‘The Rose.’

She challenged each of us to study the lyrics and live them out in our daily lives. At the year’s end Rose finished the college degree she had begun all those years ago.

One week after graduation Rose died peacefully in her sleep.

Over two thousand college students attended her funeral in tribute to the wonderful woman who taught by example that it’s never too late to be all you can possibly be.

These words have been passed along in loving memory of ROSE.

REMEMBER, GROWING OLDER IS MANDATORY. GROWING UP IS OPTIONAL. We make a Living by what we get, We make a Life by what we give.

University of Portland, May 3rd, 2009

When I was invited to give this speech, I was asked if I could give a simple short talk that was “direct, naked, taut, honest, passionate, lean, shivering, startling, and graceful.” No pressure there.

Let’s begin with the startling part. Class of 2009: you are going to have to figure out what it means to be a human being on earth at a time when every living system is declining, and the rate of decline is accelerating. Kind of a mind-boggling situation… but not one peer-reviewed paper published in the last thirty years can refute that statement. Basically, civilization needs a new operating system, you are the programmers, and we need it within a few decades.

This planet came with a set of instructions, but we seem to have misplaced them. Important rules like don’t poison the water, soil, or air, don’t let the earth get overcrowded, and don’t touch the thermostat have been broken. Buckminster Fuller said that spaceship earth was so ingeniously designed that no one has a clue that we are on one, flying through the universe at a million miles per hour, with no need for seatbelts, lots of room in coach, and really good food—but all that is changing.

There is invisible writing on the back of the diploma you will receive, and in case you didn’t bring lemon juice to decode it, I can tell you what it says: You are Brilliant, and the Earth is Hiring. The earth couldn’t afford to send recruiters or limos to your school. It sent you rain, sunsets, ripe cherries, night blooming jasmine, and that unbelievably cute person you are dating. Take the hint. And here’s the deal: Forget that this task of planet-saving is not possible in the time required. Don’t be put off by people who know what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are done.

When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand the data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse. What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world. The poet Adrienne Rich wrote, “So much has been destroyed I have cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.” There could be no better description. Humanity is coalescing. It is reconstituting the world, and the action is taking place in schoolrooms, farms, jungles, villages, campuses, companies, refugee camps, deserts, fisheries, and slums.

You join a multitude of caring people. No one knows how many groups and organizations are working on the most salient issues of our day: climate change, poverty, deforestation, peace, water, hunger, conservation, human rights, and more. This is the largest movement the world has ever seen. Rather than control, it seeks connection. Rather than dominance, it strives to disperse concentrations of power. Like Mercy Corps, it works behind the scenes and gets the job done. Large as it is, no one knows the true size of this movement. It provides hope, support, and meaning to billions of people in the world. Its clout resides in idea, not in force. It is made up of teachers, children, peasants, businesspeople, rappers, organic farmers, nuns, artists, government workers, fisher folk, engineers, students, incorrigible writers, weeping Muslims, concerned mothers, poets, doctors without borders, grieving Christians, street musicians, the President of the United States of America, and as the writer David James Duncan would say, the Creator, the One who loves us all in such a huge way.

There is a rabbinical teaching that says if the world is ending and the Messiah arrives, first plant a tree, and then see if the story is true. Inspiration is not garnered from the litanies of what may befall us; it resides in humanity’s willingness to restore, redress, reform, rebuild, recover, re-imagine, and reconsider. “One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice,” is Mary Oliver’s description of moving away from the profane toward a deep sense of connectedness to the living world.

Millions of people are working on behalf of strangers, even if the evening news is usually about the death of strangers. This kindness of strangers has religious, even mythic origins, and very specific eighteenth-century roots. Abolitionists were the first people to create a national and global movement to defend the rights of those they did not know. Until that time, no group had filed a grievance except on behalf of itself. The founders of this movement were largely unknown — Granville Clark, Thomas Clarkson, Josiah Wedgwood — and their goal was ridiculous on the face of it: at that time three out of four people in the world were enslaved. Enslaving each other was what human beings had done for ages. And the abolitionist movement was greeted with incredulity. Conservative spokesmen ridiculed the abolitionists as liberals, progressives, do-gooders, meddlers, and activists. They were told they would ruin the economy and drive England into poverty. But for the first time in history a group of people organized themselves to help people they would never know, from whom they would never receive direct or indirect benefit. And today tens of millions of people do this every day. It is called the world of non-profits, civil society, schools, social entrepreneurship, non-governmental organizations, and companies who place social and environmental justice at the top of their strategic goals. The scope and scale of this effort is unparalleled in history.

The living world is not “out there” somewhere, but in your heart. What do we know about life? In the words of biologist Janine Benyus, life creates the conditions that are conducive to life. I can think of no better motto for a future economy. We have tens of thousands of abandoned homes without people and tens of thousands of abandoned people without homes. We have failed bankers advising failed regulators on how to save failed assets. We are the only species on the planet without full employment. Brilliant. We have an economy that tells us that it is cheaper to destroy earth in real time rather than renew, restore, and sustain it. You can print money to bail out a bank but you can’t print life to bail out a planet. At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product. We can just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it. We can either create assets for the future or take the assets of the future. One is called restoration and the other exploitation. And whenever we exploit the earth we exploit people and cause untold suffering. Working for the earth is not a way to get rich, it is a way to be rich.

The first living cell came into being nearly 40 million centuries ago, and its direct descendants are in all of our bloodstreams. Literally you are breathing molecules this very second that were inhaled by Moses, Mother Teresa, and Bono. We are vastly interconnected. Our fates are inseparable. We are here because the dream of every cell is to become two cells. And dreams come true. In each of you are one quadrillion cells, 90 percent of which are not human cells. Your body is a community, and without those other microorganisms you would perish in hours. Each human cell has 400 billion molecules conducting millions of processes between trillions of atoms. The total cellular activity in one human body is staggering: one septillion actions at any one moment, a one with twenty-four zeros after it. In a millisecond, our body has undergone ten times more processes than there are stars in the universe, which is exactly what Charles Darwin foretold when he said science would discover that each living creature was a “little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars of heaven.”

So I have two questions for you all: First, can you feel your body? Stop for a moment. Feel your body. One septillion activities going on simultaneously, and your body does this so well you are free to ignore it, and wonder instead when this speech will end. You can feel it. It is called life. This is who you are. Second question: who is in charge of your body? Who is managing those molecules? Hopefully not a political party. Life is creating the conditions that are conducive to life inside you, just as in all of nature. Our innate nature is to create the conditions that are conducive to life. What I want you to imagine is that collectively humanity is evincing a deep innate wisdom in coming together to heal the wounds and insults of the past.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would create new religions overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead, the stars come out every night and we watch television.

This extraordinary time when we are globally aware of each other and the multiple dangers that threaten civilization has never happened, not in a thousand years, not in ten thousand years. Each of us is as complex and beautiful as all the stars in the universe. We have done great things and we have gone way off course in terms of honoring creation. You are graduating to the most amazing, stupefying challenge ever bequested to any generation. The generations before you failed. They didn’t stay up all night. They got distracted and lost sight of the fact that life is a miracle every moment of your existence. Nature beckons you to be on her side. You couldn’t ask for a better boss. The most unrealistic person in the world is the cynic, not the dreamer. Hope only makes sense when it doesn’t make sense to be hopeful. This is your century. Take it and run as if your life depends on it.

Paul Hawken is a renowned entrepreneur, visionary environmental activist, founder of Wiser Earth and author of many books — most recently Blessed Unrest.

By Lynn M. Scheurell

Courage is something that people talk about but they don’t necessarily know when they’re doing it. And the reason for that is because in that moment, the one requiring courage, they aren’t aware that they need to exhibit it; rather, they’re busy being courageous.

Every day living requires great courage; after all, we chose to be here in the first place – the first act of unsung heroism. We’re the lucky ones, as we work out the lessons of Earth School. Our corporeal form that is the physical expression of divine cosmic energy helps us to take quantum leaps in our spiritual evolution. Here is where we are most tested for our ability to have resilience and take action in the face of sometimes daunting odds to experience and have more of what we want in our lives. And that means taking a deep breath and going beyond our comfort zone if we’re doing it right.

So what are some of the greatest acts of bravery that occur regularly that we overlook in their commonality? Maybe you’ll recognize yourself (and the people around you) in the following five heroic, audacious and maybe even flagrant acts of everyday courage.

Saying What Needs To Be Said

By voicing the truth, even when you don’t know what the response will be OR if you know it will be challenging, you are being the hero of the other person to help them learn and grow and, at the very least, you are honoring your spirit by giving it voice. Sometimes it seems easier to hold back, to not say something this time, to wish that they would just “get” it. But, in actuality, this kind of thinking is full-on sabotage. You’re not showing up authentically, which doesn’t allow them to be authentic with you. If you’re waiting to say something that needs to be said, you’re actually hurting your relationship and your own self-worth in that relationship.

This, by the by, goes hand-in-hand with authentic listening, where you are allowing the fullness of communication to pass without mental comment as the other person is still talking. If you’ve formulated a response before they’ve finished, you’re creating projections and assumptions and you’re the one who is missing out on something. Give yourself, and the other person, the honor of sharing the robust truth as you know it in the moment by attending to their communication and saying what needs to be said.

Taking Action When You’re Not Ready

When you don’t feel ready to follow through on something, don’t know how to do it, don’t feel like you have the resources or support to get it done, it’s not perfectly ready yet or you don’t know that it will turn out the way you want with any degree of certainty and you do it anyway, you’re operating from a different level of awareness. This happens for any number of reasons, like you feel you have no other option (the moving truck arrives tomorrow so you better be ready!), people are counting on you (to make a powerful presentation), or your bank account says it’s time to generate some cash (and you magically find a way to make that happen). Whatever the motivator, whenever it is stronger than the resistance to change, you find yourself taking action and transcending obstacles, barriers and things that could keep you stuck somehow. There are times when this means trying something again when you have to scrape yourself up to do it, knowing that the first time didn’t go so well. Doing what you can in each moment with whatever you have to work with is an act of courage worthy of big merit (although that may not come from others, since you are the judge of how much courage is needed proportionate to the circumstances!).

Living From Your Passion

There are a lot of people talking about their passion, their purpose and their power in creating an amazing life someday, but how many people actually do it? Letting go of the familiar status quo to pursue a life based on what feels good to your heart and spirit is still not the ‘norm’… taking risks is encouraged but not if they’re too risky (people who love you will want to protect you and be risk-averse for you). By being a non-conformist, striking out on your own into the unknown (scary enough by itself) and doing it your way (which tends to be unpopular with groups), you are jeopardizing your status in your ‘tribe’. If you risk it and don’t make it, you could be abandoned or exiled, and if you do make it, you aren’t likely to go back to where you were because you’ve outgrown it. Either way, living from your passion is one of the fastest paths to extreme personal development. You are certain to attract new relationships that are in vibrational accord with your new way of being, which, in turn, can kick off adventures that you can’t even imagine that require courage on multiple levels.

Confronting Yourself

The inner journey is one that, to be done well, insists that you go deep, give up what feels routine and might upset the people in your known systems of support. By confronting the darkest parts of yourself, coming to grips with your gremlins and dancing with your shadow side, you are potentially seeking adversity with the goal of being whole in the end. People talk about as one door closes another opens, but nobody really talks about the long hallways in the middle… those corridors can test the mettle of even the most seemingly together person. By feeling the fear of what you might find within and staying in action, you are taking the most significant ‘hero’s’ journey you could possibly undertake. But it’s also one of the sources of greatest life achievement and contentment. To thine own self be true… and that includes all your parts.

Owning Your Life

You are the creator of your life experience, through and through. It would be nice to pick and choose what parts you created, wouldn’t it? You could just pick the birthday parties, job promotions and fabulous weather days in that case… but, unfortunately, to really empower yourself to create what you want in your life, you’ve got to ‘own’ the adversity too. Not only do you have to have the nerve to get through tough situations in the first place, you’ve also got to claim that you created that in some way to help you get to your next best level. So you get to claim that colleague that pushes your buttons, or the neighbor who is extra loud, or your loved one who just doesn’t give “it” (whatever that may be) a rest. They are showing up for you, based on some energetic frequency that you are sending out asking them to be that for you, so you can get address and release whatever energy doesn’t feel good in your world. By owning your power in creating even the things that don’t seem so wonderful, by seeing the magic in all your creations, by demonstrating the courage to lay claim to creating all those parts which may not feel so good on the surface, you are empowering yourself to be all of who you are and to create what you want going forward.

Courage is made in the moments of life large and small… but here’s the big secret to owning your life. Nobody has more power in your world than you do. And owning that could be the most courageous thing you could ever do for yourself.

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Lynn Scheurell, Creative Catalyst, works with soul-driven entrepreneurs to create a living by manifesting their true purpose through their business. She guides them to extreme personal clarity as well as supports their innovation and active implementation of proven business practices. Download a free report to learn “The Seven Deadly Mistakes That Keep Soul-Driven Business Owners from Making Money” at www.mycreativecatalyst.com.

Knowing is probably one of the most elusive concepts I teach in working with my clients (and myself!). ;+) It’s kind of ironic, don’t you think? (That ‘knowing’ is so uncertain…)

My theory is that we are socialized out of trusting our own knowingness, and taught to depend on external credibility for alot of things – validation, approval, permission, proof, measurement, and more. It’s natural that something as intangible and, well, ‘woo’ is so difficult to pin down and say it’s a certainty. Even more interesting is that there are still societies living in remote parts of the world that only rely on knowingness to live their lives. Intuition, instinct, trust, faith and perception are the keys to their world. What would it be like if we could do that too, surrounded by all the other gifts of the Western world but not dominated by them?

There are a few things that I have discovered that really help anchor how to know what you know. In random order, here goes:

1) Trust that you are always getting your messages, in right timing, to the degree that you can interpret, take them in and do something with them. (If they’re too far ahead of where you are in the moment, you won’t have a frame of reference for them – but they’ll come back again when you’re ready…)

2) Have faith that you retain the power of free will in acting on what you know. And you can always choose different if your results aren’t what you want / expected.

3) Be responsible and accountable for what you ‘know’ – just as you can’t unring a bell, you now have access to information you didn’t before and that becomes part of the fabric of your life. Denial isn’t really an option.

4) Let your body help by feeling your knowing; give yourself the experience of understanding your physical language of knowing. (Hint: play with that by holding something in your hand and asking if it’s optimal for you – if your body leans in, that’s a yes.)

5) Nobody else can ‘know’ for you better than you can… this is all about internal authority over your domain, regardless of what you see with your eyes (circumstances, relationships, opportunities, resources, environment).

6) Knowing can be contrary to what you expect / want.

7) Your ‘knowing’ will always add to your life experience in the long run, and generally doesn’t hurt someone else. (However, if your ‘knowing’ says it’s time for a relationship to end, that may hurt as this situation gets resolved, but it’s necessary for growth – and usually, for both of you.)

I ‘know’ this has some good information for you – I’d love to hear your thoughts about it! ;+)

Is it possible for only you to be happy?
Is it possible for only your family to be happy?
Is it possible for only your country to be happy?

No, No, it is not.

Because I like to believe that “happiness” which in Japanese is said “Shiawase” 幸せ means the same as the phrase “Shi-a-wa-se” (四安和瀬）

This four character phrase describes water that is calm and at peace in all four directions.

If they are surrounded by happy, water, trees, and flowers will be full of life, clothe themselves in green and give forth fresh clean air for us to breathe. And there are withered trees, leaves, and petals are the creators in turn of rich loams.

A world is created that allows all living things to exist in harmony.

So only when all are “happy” surrounded by calm and peaceful water, can we know real happiness, I believe. But then how can this happiness be achieved?

How about asking that number which is said to be a composer of this universe?

Indeed, the cosmos begins with “1″…

And “1″ is yourself and myself.

Let us each be happy first to do that. ”

Love Thyself”

Masaru Emoto
http://www.hado.net/watercrystals/index.php

It’s not the big issues that make up the balance of your vibrational offering. It’s the little issues. It’s how you feel when you are driving in traffic. It’s how you feel every time you open that drawer and it’s a mess and you can’t find anything in it. It’s how you feel about the day to day experiences that you are having. It’s how you feel about the people you are working with and the personality conflicts or alignments that you have. In other words, the things that are rolling across your mind on a pretty steady basis they set the tone of your vibrational frequency and so you just gotta ask yourself, “Is my frequency anywhere near the frequency of who I really am?” “Is my chronic frequency anywhere near the vibrational reality that’s in the process of becoming?”

We want you to know this vibrational reality that we are talking about it’s not something to just discard as non-reality. It is the preface to all that you call really reality. Real reality. Real life reality is always prefaced by a vibrational reality. There is nothing that you see or know, none of this knock on wood stuff, none of this stuff that you are translating vibrationally through your eyes and ears and nose and mouth and fingertips. Nothing that is the reality that you call reality is anything more than extended vibrational reality. This is where it all starts and this is where 99.99% of it becomes before you see it. This reality is valid, it’s vivid, it’s real and it’s worth turning your undivided attention toward.

Abraham-Hicks San Diego 8/23/08

Here is my most recent column in Exceptional Life magazine… let me know what you think about life balance! ;+)

http://issuu.com/thoughtoctave/docs/exceptionalife_may_2009

“For Teresa of Avila, Divine chaos was God’s way of creating an upheaval in order to break through patterns of denial that held a person emotionally or mentally captive. Or Divine chaos brought about necessary endings to ways of living that ceased to serve the well being of humanity. Whether the task you are attending to is personal or professional, it is essential that you put conscious thought into it, that you do it with as much awareness as you can, given the reality that none of us can be that aware each day. But realistically, the point being driven home by Teresa as well as other great mystics is that when you become too accustomed at what you are doing – too bored or too familiar – you retreat into unconsciousness. You no longer have to push yourself toward consciousness. You reach a place where you let habit and familiarity do all the work for you – and that is a danger zone, a serious danger zone and a prime set up for an encounter with chaos. Why would that be?

After all these years of teaching, some things still baffle and challenge me again and again, among them is, “What exactly is this business of consciousness about that we are in if not to become conscious?” When anything becomes habit, in particular your life, what becomes of the challenge of becoming conscious? How is that task supposed to be accomplished? Of what are you supposed to become conscious? (Please don’t tell me your wounded history). Ideally, our task is to become conscious of how we direct the power of our spirit into acts of creation during the course of our life. More or less, that sums it up. An illuminated soul is one who is on to the game, who really understands what Buddha meant by seeing clearly through the world of physical illusion and not being controlled by that world. Jesus would say, “Be in the world but not of the world.” Same truth, different words. What we are meant to become conscious of is how well we live in accordance to these high cosmic truths while in physical form.

When are you melting too much into the world of illusion, for example? Do you know? Can you recognize when that sensation of melting is happening to you? Are you able to say to yourself, “Careful, I am now losing my power in this conversation because I am becoming frightened?” And then, equally if not more important, are you able to detach from that conversation and potential fear once you spot it? If not, you become captured by the illusion, by a fear that you should have been conscious enough to protect yourself from as this is what your inner work is all about: learning to discern what is truth from illusion – at all times, in all places. That test never stops, it never goes away. The moment you think you have conquered a part of yourself is the moment you are tested, like the addict who announces he has won his war with alcohol, only to discover that his hubris is his downfall. Consciousness is hard work and when we slip, which we all do, the net that catches us when we fall is chaos itself.

The common thread in every experience of Divine chaos is one of truth; specifically, a person has fallen out of alignment with his or her core truths. Divine chaos is a course corrector, a way of bringing down the systems that distraction built in order that they can be replaced with systems or structures designed with conscious thought. That’s the ideal, of course, and ideals are rarely achieved – thus, we are visited by Divine chaos again and again. It is not easy, this business of becoming a conscious human being, but what’s your other option?”

~ Caroline Myss, In Times Like These Newsletter, 092408

Mark Johnson, Grammy Award Winning Producer / Engineer and Award Winning Film Director, was walking through the New York subway in 1999 during the morning rush commute, and stopped in his tracks when he saw two monks, painted white from head to toe, playing a guitar and singing a foreign language… and 200 commuters from different ethnic and economic groups who were pausing in time to watch. It was a tipping point for him… the moment of his inspiration to create his Playing for Change movement. His calling was to find as many inspiring musical moments as he could in order to unite people as a race through music.

He shared his vision with a number of people, which birthed a multi-media movement to inspire, connect and bring peace to the world through music called Playing for Change (a play on words that references both street performers and the musical ability to effect change). Since music knows no bounds, neither did their travel… they went to countries all around the world and videotaped musicians who never met each other personally but who became united by the music and, in so doing, united the people who got to experience their music.

There are musicians from African villages, New Orleans sidewalks, Himalayan mountains, and California streets… and the result is a documentary, Playing for Change: Peace Through Music, and several songs, and the Playing for Change Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to connecting the world by building music and art schools equipped with recording studios and cameras around the world.

The first “Song Around The World”, the John Lennon version of Stand By Me, has received 9 1/2 million views on YouTube alone (with other sites as well), and has grown by people sharing the joy through their email. If you haven’t seen it yet, turn up your speakers and watch it here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Us-TVg40ExM

And it all happened because Mark listened to his soul-driven calling… ;+)