The sphere of the spirit

The sphere of the Spirit is the soul's true home,
And Man will surely reach it
By walking in the path of honest Thought;
By choosing as his guide the fount of Love
Implanted in his heart;
By opening the eye of his soul
To Nature's script
Spread out before him through all the Universe,
Telling the story of the Spirit
In all the silent spaciousness of lifeless things,
And in the stream of Time--the process of becoming.

-Rudolf Steiner

for love for love for love this is what i live for

Woke up today with a little more will to get out of bed. How easily it is to sink into habits. I need a lot of sleep lately and taking care of this new K9 friend is both a blessing and a curse. He gets me up early to take him out running and I am greatful for the excuse to move my body. Again I have been engaging in poor body image and judgments on my physical appearance. Does everyone have this? It feels like such an epidemic.

I started voice and music lessons yesterday and it felt so wonderful to be studying and practicing music. It is slowly revealing itself to me and I am getting a little more confident on my instrument and with my voice. Having a music teacher once a week is really going to make all the difference.

I am avoiding what I really want to write about...

Depression. All I want to do is go lay in my bed. I don't feel the energy to even reach out to God. Little waves I sense His presence and I am greatful that he hasn't left me. I will sit in quiet relations with Him to hear what He has to say today...

Dear God,
Please show me what it is I must see.

To be allowing whatever arises? To not try to push away or change anything other than exactly how it is and shows up. To watch and observe without judgments. With neutrality. This is what I am working on, not to even judge my emotions or depressions, but to just respond with kindness and curiosity. Judging and changing emtions and states of being or doing is actaully taking me mroe away from the present - and identifies me with the drama of the story or feeling.

How do I reside in neutrality?

Oh thank you for that lesson Dear One! I can see now and appreciate what it is in my life that is given to me so perfectly to learn and grow.

My intention today is just to return to neutral whenever I face guilt, depression, tiredness, stress - these are my emotional states these days. All will pass, all is changing.

for love for love for love
this is what i live for

Growing Up is Not always Easy

Taking a deep breath in - why does it seem so difficult to see the beauty all around. As a child wakes up, everything is magic, and i crave that sensation once again. Taking care a of a new k-9 friend has reminded me of the joy of the outdoors and play and to stop being so serious. This change in pace is truly the perfect shake up which i needed. It seems so easy to step back into old mind habits and I am reminded to stay neutral. Just getting up and exercising every day and then writing is such a joy. Work too seems still to have this looming effect, but i know that i can transform that internally. I have such a wonderful opportunity to grow this program i run and to watch it blossom, and yet there is all this doubt and anxiety i carry inside. This is exactly what i am learning to transform. When I feel doubt and anxiety, or a sense of guilt or whatever, I need to stop, ring the bell and see it. I can choose to transition out of it. I am not powerless to it, only then will my creative potential arise - not out of guilt - that is just an old habit. And I am so thankful to have the teachers I do to help see this. I am so used to functioning in the old, overly thinking the past - and craving and visualizing/fantasizing about others lives. This sucks my creative potential - this consumes me. I can't jump to the other side until I look at and transform each emotion as it arises. To take it slowly and really visualize myself in the future as a teacher - always learning about herself! What joy! What a wonderful opportunity to be with children and enjoy, every day, the challenges of learning. I have forgotten what a struggle it is to learn things for the first time. Growing up is not always easy. I remember school often times being the worst possible place to go to, doing homework the last thing i wanted to focus on. My father would help me in the evenings with my homework and I needed to scribble and draw every 5 minutes. So he set a timer for me - five minutes of homework and five minutes of scribbling and drawing. It is funny how freshly this memory sits with me because I can understand, even at that age, how important this change was for me - my father was working with me to help the discomfort of learning something new. And in fact - i have no idea what i was learning at that time, but i do remember that scribbling!

Being in a new home is really really really helping me get out of the old. I think I am still going through this seasonal shift, this out of summer and into winter. thank goodness for Fall, thank goodness we have this transition season. It is so helpful to go through this dying process, letting go and again sinking in for the winter to visualize what next I will create in my life. There seems like so much ice everywhere energetically. Like I have to warm myself with enough love and understanding to melt this ice. My creative potential is just now flowering again with all the work I am doing in school to refire my music, voice, art, writing, acting. These things really are so important to the developing mind and I am so thankful to have Waldorf education and Anthroposophy to develop my waking mind.

I really feel it is necessary for myself to recognize when i am not in a space of neutrality. When I am constantly judging myself, I can't get anything done and everything I do is wrong. I am so grateful to have all this free time to study, learn, write, reflect, enjoy my time. As a teacher my time will be limited. And so to have this life right now, which seems full at times, but others, just the right amount of work - I feel so grateful.

There are things in the school which are complicated. My work school I mean, and it is hard not to constantly think i have to figure them out. I blow everything out of proportion and I forget that parents and teachers are really quite thankful and grateful for my work. I think I am always looking for something "to do" and not just being present in my heart, which is what children need. The doing is just a distraction to not feel emotional, or guilty - and these feeling are only coming up because they want to show me something. I am not sure just what it is I feel so guilty about all the time, like I am not capable at my job. I have such a deep desire to serve, and it is very new for me to be in a place of creative leadership that often times i just get overwhelmed. I really need to start giving myself more credit, and it is ok to just let the kids be and enjoy the time with them. The few ideas which are arising are taking a slow time to take effect, but that is ok too. Being in my power at work means being in myself, enjoying my presence as a force of love, attention and respect to the children. Conflict resolution and care giving. These two things are enough and as long as the kids are still being registered, there is nothing to stress about all the time. thank goodness for clarity. amen.

A new commitment to writing

Guidance from Eileen Caddy
Make Room for the New

Life is full and overflowing with the new, but it is necessary to empty out the old and make room for the new to enter. The emptying out process can be very painful, but it is necessary. You have to be willing to unlearn so much to make room for all those new and wonderful truths to enter and to become part of you. It is more difficult to unlearn than it is to learn. You may experience that feeling of barrenness, of having nothing to hold onto, of being alone and bereft of everything, a life dead and empty and with no meaning to it. Realize that it is a process of being emptied of the old so you can be filled with the new. Never give up faith. Then you can begin again in newness of spirit and of truth.

With that said, here I am in my new house sit situation. The breathing is still coming very shallow and slow and my thoughts and mind are still seeming to attack me at every turn. I wonder about when i was a teenager and feel that whatever i am going through now is very similar. Everything feels new and strange, everything feels like a huge struggle to overcome. I harvest so much guilt and shame for the littlest things. Every time I step outside of a rythem and eat a treat or go to bed late or even speak forcefully to a child at work, I am struck with this overwhelming experience of shame and guilt. Like I can't just let go. My Conscious Freedom Counselor speaks of being in my power. When I am feeling pain in my stomach it means I am not in my power and dislodging thoughts and feelings can come in and hook me and nock me over. That is just what it feels like. With everything changing in my old house I never felt safe, I didn't know how to be in my power when I wasn't happy with my surroundings or the people who were in my intimate surroundings. The house I just moved from was full of strangers coming and going and I felt uncertain as to how to "be" around them. My false small self was triggered and I was lost in wondering how I was supposed to act or talk to them. When I don't feel "seen" from others I react with putting up walls and avoiding interaction. This is funny, because how can anyone see me if I am hiding behind walls?

I would like to release that. When I am percieving others as a threat, instead of running away, how else could I respond? Perhaps remind myself that they are not in fact a threat, but just in their own heads, in their own reactions to their life and day. I was threatened by so many people as a child, (or that is what it felt like). I couldn't trust my extended family, my babysitter, even my friends were cruel to me at times. I ended up retreating into clouds of my own making and shutting the world out. Many days after school were spent alone and watching TV. I was alone sometimes for five hours before my mom came home from work. I created a comfortable reality to hide in.

Now when i try to escape to that comfortable reality I am hit with Karma and a big wake up call. There is no comofortable other reality, where we reside is this moment right here. When I didn't have the tools as a young girl to cope with that reality, to honor that the moment is actually very safe and peaceful (though it wasn't always) I did the next best thing and retreated into my mind. No wonder my mind is so active and full of stories and images to take me from feeling and sensing in this present moment. My feelings that arise are so intense that I just shut them down.

My breahting has been tight and controlled now for almost four months. My breath is shallow and gets caught in my diaphram. Each thing that happens that is not to plan is another reason to shut down and freak out.

I am working on creating a connection to source when I am in these moments. To find a heart space that is open and trusting, no matter what is happeing. This i feel is being in my power. this i feel is the only thing that actually works in these situations. I feel asleep most of the time these days. that other day when i went to 'escape' my life and go see a film (which was horrible and caused more stress than escapism) my car was towed and I ended up paying $400 total with all the costs of tickets, registration, and tow costs. That was sure a wake up call!

You can't just escape from life. You have to meet life with whatever it throws at you with focussed clear energy, there is always a truthful peaceful thread no matter what is happening. It is hard for me to "feel" my emotions durring this. To just allow them wash over me. Of cours I want to identify with them and cling to them for some sense of reality. And then my mind jumps in and takes me to that invisible world of illusion. While all of this occurs my breath is tight in my body.

I can't save other people. I can do the best I can with what is given me and I am learning immense things at this time. I know that I am actually a very good person. I spend a lot of my time proving to myself that I am a bad person, deserve nothing and reside in shame and guilt. Where did this all come from? The hardest thing is to continue to be alone and praise and love myself no matter what. This is what my heart and mind and the girl inside me truly wants. She also craves support in her power, in her leadership, in her good ideas. I can find everything else about what is not right about me - and get distracted at the 'big bad' world. Like the big bad wolf trickign little red riding hood - pretending she is safe as the grandmother, the little girl is beginning to wake up and see the big bad teeth, and the deep dark eyes, and the big furry ears - she is not stooped for long before the wolf is killed by the man with the axe. I do have an axe in my psyche. I need to take it out more and use it to cut the chords with the parts of myself that do not serve, the parts of myself that i know are truly not me. I want to cultivate what is me, who i am and what I believe in. I want to cultivate the me that loves life, takes it all in stride, and enjoys the highs and lows, because life is an ocean. Of course I am not perfect and no matter what is happening or how I am reacting - it is ok too. But truly, enough of this nonsense. i love my body, my mind, my soul, my looks, my life - and i am always working towards what works and i want to cultivate. I am in a learning curve right now. I am one by one stepping up to the plate to hit the home run which will truly take my life by surprise. I need to start giving myself more credit.