Global Shift and Follow Your Bliss

Friday, December 21, 2012



We survived the apocalypse.

That means another Follow Your Bliss Friday.

That also means I have to step up my game, speak more from the heart.

I want to talk about the global shift in consciousness that has been happening for years and that some say is hitting a pinnacle no-turning-back marker today.

I want to talk about how I took fifteen months of work on a now-defunct magazine and followed my intuition to re-purposing it into an eBook that I'm excited to publish. And how this was the direct result of a year of working to get closer to my intuition, sense of joy and ease, and to work through love instead of fear.

We can't separate making smarter, more powerful choices from our subsequent efforts to develop into more conscious versions of ourselves. The self-work WILL reflect in the outer work. If you aren't seeing the results yet, give it time.

I see this happening in my family and friends too, even those who are resistant to concepts that seem New Agey (but really aren't). They're getting on board and acting with increased awareness, self-care, and openness to the concept that we are here for a purpose: the basic motivating message behind "follow your bliss."

But growing pains are ... well ... pains. The last couple months I've had a heck of a time getting to sleep before 5 a.m. I've also felt a lot of symptoms below. Have you?

• Have your emotions been more intense lately? 

• Does it seem like there are more thoughts racing through your mind? 

• Have you noticed your body tensing up for no apparent reason? 

• Have you been feeling a vague - or not so vague - sense of anxiety? 

• Are you finding it difficult to get a good night’s sleep? 

• Do you seem to be compelled to keep busy? 

• Are you feeling a mysterious sense of urgency? 

• Do you have less patience? 

• Do you find yourself obsessing more over things? 

• Have your moods been shifting quickly from optimistic to discouraged - from delighted to downhearted? Does it seem harder than it use to be to enjoy life?

If you are experiencing some - or all - of these things, take heart. Believe it or not, it is a sign that something very positive is happening to you, and to the planet. These symptoms are (in most cases) a “by-product” of an extraordinary spiritual awakening - or “consciousness shift” - that Planet Earth and humanity are currently undergoing. (read more on How the 2012 Shift in Consciousness Might Be Affecting You)

Following your bliss will put you in touch with the mystery that's the ground of your own being. It's not just about enjoying your work, it's about trusting that the universe WANTS you to enjoy your work. That you are here to ENJOY your work so that it may build a better energetic universe as well as material one.

I invite you to join me on January 3, 2013 at 2 pm on the online radio show The Life's Dash with Michele Mattia as I talk with Michele about The Best of Follow Your Bliss, full of articles and personal narratives of ordinary people propelled to extraordinary versions of themselves through the transformative process of following one's bliss.

Today Our Hearts Are Broken, But Tomorrow They Will Heal

I wrote yesterday about the negativity that can plague even us light-chasers who work diligently to self-heal, heal others, and create a better world.

Today, in the wake of the shooting in Connecticut, I am sitting in my little office, listening to President Obama address the country, saying "Our hearts are broken" and I feel it when I look at my Facebook feed. Every single post is an outpouring of anger or sadness.

When I mourn the loss of those children and teachers, I feel catapulted out of my own world of issues, my little dragons, and into an outer space of our connectedness and with it, our shared pain.

And I don't think this pain only surfaces during a tragedy. I think a lot of us are carrying the collective pains of many. The unspoken, unprocessed, unconscious ones.

Many of us adults live rather steady, love-filled lives. We have everything we need. But then we can be overcome by negativity with no specific trigger. We think it might be something from our past, and sometimes it is. Sometimes it is our own stuff.

But sometimes I think that much of the negativity we process day to day isn't just our own. And maybe as we learn to "shake out" our own traumas, we help shake out the traumas of our collective psyche.

Guy Raz, in a special coverage from NPR News, was just speaking with an expert whose name I didn't catch, who said that there are teams on the way to help the students work through the PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) but that there is still a lot scientists don't know about how trauma works.

However, he says, we do know this: allow the children to express their feelings, to revisit the event and try and find meaning. Try and make sense of the the tragedy, put it into a framework. Part of what terror is is that it's incomprehensible. Putting it into a narrative gives us some control over the events.

As for the rest of us, he advises us to, "Step back and ask what really affects us most of the time. School shootings aren't one of those things." He also said that the thing about trauma is a lot of people come out the other end whole. There is lots of resilience in the human character.

My thoughts go to the parents and families of the people who died today. May their hearts, and our hearts, not be broken forever.

You Have to Follow the Breadcrumbs

The November 2010 issue of O Magazine ran a multi-part article by life coach Martha Beck about finding your calling. I want to tell you a little bit about it. If you've read Monday and Thursday's posts, you'll see I like Martha Beck.

I am completely mesmerized by this idea that we each have a calling. Still, I struggle with it sometimes. I’ve made many inroads to living a purposeful life, but working from home has its own set of difficulties.

Freedom does not equal happiness, and the greater the freedom, the greater the responsibility to make skillful life decisions. At least that's how I feel. The things I learned two years ago when I first read Beck's article, I still seem to be learning, just on subtler and more nuanced levels.

Beck explains the process of finding your calling through this analogy:

You are tracking a wild animal. You take a step, scan for it, pick up on its scent, take a step in that direction and keep going. And if you lose the scent, you go back to the last place you had it and try a different direction.

The article reminded me of something I knew but had forgotten while consumed with the day-to-day focuses of my job: following your bliss is a process.

You take one step at a time. Do you feel that inner warmth – that ‘ding’ – that YES? If you don’t, go back to the last place you did and then step from there.

Or, as my friend, the sage and eminent smart-ass Kalonda says: "You have to follow the breadcrumbs."

As I watch my friends uncover there bliss month by month, year by year, I see the same thing: that it is not usually about making a dramatic shift, but about finding the right mode in which to express their already recognized talents. Often he or she will love a certain mode of activity but just haven’t found the right setting or vehicle for it.

Oprah Winfrey, for example, writes that she always wanted to be a teacher. And she is. She just happens not to be in a traditional classroom.

Sans crystal ball, I’m just taking it a day at a time, doing the work that comes to me to my best ability and trying to separate out who I really am from who I think I should be.

How about you? Any inner dings lately?

This article was originally published in Follow Your Bliss magazine. For articles on how to do what you love and love what you do, look for The Best of Follow Your Bliss eBook, to be published in January 2013. What to be notified when the book comes out?

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Julia Watkins, Art that Brings Your Spirit Home

The Creation Tree - Create Your Reality

I don't know what it is, but I feel something when I look at paintings by Julia Watkins. I don't just mean an abstract sense of the sublime that certain art objects carry; I actually FEEL something in my gut. This isn't an intellectual, conceptual thing; it's visceral. And many others feel the same. Take a look at The Creation Tree,one of my favorites, above and see if you agree.

Julia Watkins is considered to be the founder of the Energism Art Movement. Energist artists seek to imbue their work with spiritual energy and thereby assist the viewer in connecting to its healing powers.

Of her process, Julia says:

The very first step is being able to feel the energy. I find that meditation, reiki and tai chi are good practices that help with channeling energy. However, strong prayer, trying to feel god's energy flowing through you and in all things around you works very well too. 

Transferring that feeling to an art object is the hardest part of the creation process. At first, you will probably find yourself analyzing every part of the composition and will come up with something highly illustrative or a literal interpretation. The trick is to let yourself go to the energy without thought. You need to let it guide your hand. When you do this you will find that a lot of time passes without you knowing it, and at times the experience will be so intense that it stands out in your mind as a feeling rather than a memory.

Are you a blocked writer or artist? Do you think you could let yourself go to the energy without thought? Could you let it guide your hand?

Here are some more paintings and poetry by Julia Watkins, set to lovely music. A nice twelve minute meditation on her art.

And here is Julia in an Art-ONTV interview (although the interviewer seems a little out of her depth). One of my pet peeves are interviewers who are out of their depth with the person they are interviewing, like this video interview with my favorite musician Leonard Cohen.

But first, watch Julia. She's pretty awesome. See how her eyes light up when she tells the story of how she started painting in this new way.

 

How Do You Find Your Creative Genius? Elizabeth Gilbert Weighs In

"Everyone is a genius but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree it will spend its whole life believing it is stupid." Einstein

Is genius something that only a few people have? Or is it, as Einstein's quote would suggest, something that has more to do with a personal mode of expression than a permanent state?

Watch Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love muse on the impossible things we expect from artists and geniuses -- and share the radical idea that, instead of the rare person "being" a genius, all of us "have" a genius.