Jeremy has an interesting story. Unbeknownest to me, when we met he was awaiting trial, which he never mentioned. He told me he might be going to Haiti on a mission with his church. In reality, he was awaiting trial in Florence, SC for stalking a woman and was convicted of indecent exposure and placed in the sex offender registry. But I didn’t know any of that at the time. He is the son of my neighbor of 20 years, who never mentioned him. His story to me was that the Christian community he was involved with ignored him during his troubled times and he came to me for meditation. We began metaphysical discussion and reading Rumi, Hafez nightly and his mind blew open. While he was incarcerated in SC for 6 months,I introduced him to Bo Lzoff’s book We’re All Doing Time, which instructs inmates to use their prison time s self imposed monks doing sadhana, spiritual practice. He began meditating and having revelations and writing them to me. He was gaining insight from time spent contemplating and I witnessed the evolution of thought via his daily writings. I could see his beliefs evolving and morphing. I watched the light bulbs as they went off. Below I share from what I sent him. It’s way long.
I wrote: “You sounded much more relaxed and calmer when we spoke the hour before, when you said you’ve been rethinking everything you’ve ever done. You sounded resigned to it, which is good since that lowers your level of resistance, which means you’re vibrating in a more allowing and accepting place. When that happens, a better result can come about and things can fall into place quicker. Hang in there. The good news is if jail time is ordered, you’re already doing it and this counts as time served. Plus you can practice being a yogi meditating on God all day every day you’re in there.”
I began sending him the monthly articles of Abraham-Hicks, continuing our discussions about law of attraction: how things come to us and how we attracted the past we attracted, and the steps to take to attract a future we want.
I sent him the mystical poetry of Rumi and Kabir, which we’d taken to reading together during our daily sessions. I love how Rumi refers to God as the Beloved and the Friend. I believe when we serve and please our beloved, we serve and please God as well. An entire new world opens to you when you have that perspective. I wanted him to have that perspective. I sent him the writings of Wayne Wirs, who speaks of mystical oneness, and the articles by Ma Yoga Shakti, Alan Cohen, Mike Dooley, Karen Williams and other articles from Horizons Magazine each month. I reminded him: “When your vibe, your vibrational resonance, changes on any particular topic, what you attract relative to that topic changes as well. And it can happen in an instant.”
One reason all this is coming to a head is a result of all the insights and awakenings you’ve been having. It’s like an acceleration of karma, and everything from the past comes up to be healed. That’s why all this is happening at once. That’s also why we’re connecting in this holy instant as well. It’s all part of the plan, part of the process, and part of the remedy and solution. It feels horrid to you, but we’ll be on the other side of it soon enough. This time next year so much of all of this will be behind you. Just keep facing that way, just keep that in mind.
Don’t look around, look up. Trouble doesn’t come to stay, it comes to pass. Patience does not mean to passively endure. It means to be farsighted enough to trust the end result of a process. What does patience mean? It means to look at the thorn and see the rose, to look at the night and see the dawn. Impatience means to be shortsighted as to not able to see the outcome. “The lovers of God never runs out of patience, for they know that time is needed for the crescent moon to become full.” Rumi
My experience is to get a general plan in mind and then wait until you see what the situation is – driving, probation, classes, fines and court obligations – then decide what you can do as far as what kind of job to get, where do you need a ride to for how long, how can you clear up the insurance so you can drive, what else needs to be addressed. But first things first. See what the court wants and do it and everything else flows from there.
The Lord’s Prayer says give us this day our DAILY bread, not: tell me six months ahead of time what my job is going to be, right? We don’t need to know the whole road, we just need to be led to the next right step.
We get from life what we give out. Not what we think we’re entitled to or deserve. But what we give out. I expect if I keep myself in motion looking for people to help and work that needs to be done, then I’ll be led to my next step to make that happen. If I think I have to scheme and lie and cheat and criticize and bad mouth and wish harm on someone else, no matter what harm they’ve done to me, then that is what I can expect to receive back. I wasn’t always an angel, I cleaned up my act and it wasn’t easy and it took time, but it’s done now which is why I have an easy and happy life today.
You’re good with words for a reason. You’re a songwriter for a reason. It doesn’t matter whether you are a singer songwriter of Christian music or the blues or any one genre. You write about your life and your journey and however it plays out, it plays out.
You write what you live. Everyone expects the black artists to dominate that field but the pretty white boy may have every right to sing the blues as well. Case in point, last night talking about being always accused of being a con artist, that why can’t you just be charming and helpful without everyone stereotyping you, thinking you have an agenda, that you want something from them, that you’re setting them up, that you’re playing them. Sometimes it’s just our karma to overcome. Our life is our message. How we act with people is what tells them who we are.
Sometimes first impressions are our karma to overcome. The bodies of andrea and jeremy in this lifetime just need to do whatever it takes to stay in motion producing words that uplift and inspire people and make them think and let them know there are alternatives to what they are now living. That there is another way to be, a way with hope and expectation of the world and everyone in it wanting you to succeed, wanting to do the right thing, wanting to focus on priorities and not worry about things they can do nothing about. Wanting to find meaning in their lives and to want something with animated passion and to feel full with purpose. So let’s not lose sight of what’s really going on and why we’ve really been brought together.”
The public defender never once in six months spoke to him nor returned my calls or emails, so I wrote: “Don’t be worried about when you’ll go to court. You want to go to court when you’re a vibrational match to the result you want, and not before. That’s why you want to keep your thoughts in a calm place. You’ll go to court when God wants you to go to court, make no mistake. Also the reason your public defender seems to be ignoring you (and me) is that God wants this behind you and knows that more jail time being served now will work in your favor when you get before the judge.”
God turns you from one feeling to another and teaches by means of opposites, so that you will have two wings to fly, not one. –Rumi
Hang in there, you’re stronger than you know.
THE WORM’S WAKING by Rumi
This is how a human being
can change: there’s a worm
addicted to eating grape leaves.
Suddenly he wakes up,
call it grace, whatever, something
wakes him, and he’s no longer a worm.
He’s the entire vineyard, and the orchard too,
the fruit, the trunks, a growing wisdom and joy
that doesn’t need to devour.
When I get surprised when you have a smart ass reaction to something that happens in there, that’s no reflection on you. It shows me how much I was judging you for lack of judgment, failure to take responsibility and failing in practicing showing what you know, judging for perceived weakness instead of recognizing it’s the pendulum swing from practicing having faith under duress.
But that’s why we have to practice faith when we’re not under duress, right? So we have it working by the time we need to call upon it? Then for me it’s a no brainer what to do and how to act and when to disappear into the woodwork and when to not react. What I initially fail to remember is that, at 39, I was still learning that lesson, too. I’m glad for these opportunities to see what I’m judging and work on it. Don’t take it personally, I know this petty human stuff is the stuff of soul work. I know what we are together is so much more than whatever people who look at us see. You know that, too. We know that.
I understand what you mean about the insights you’re having during your contemplation times, and about how the thoughts of God being in you goes against what so many of your people believe, so you can’t talk about it to them. That’s one of the struggles we go thru during the 39th-42nd year (astrologically the Uranus opposition.) It’s when we question our beliefs up to now and take a good hard look at them. The guidance that bubbles up is how God talks to us. You’re so right that if you keep studying the old manual (the Bible,) you never learn anything new. But if you continue to listen to the voice inside, you’ll begin to be able to discern His voice from your own.
I think God has enforced this apart time, to let the acorn incubate in the soil and grow a tiny sprout. This is the time you need to be writing songs because you don’t know but that God is going to place you in a 40 hour a week job the minute you get back and you’ll be too tired to remember and write them all down, then finally won’t care about it. Unless you know this is the place on the Path where you are right now, and you start putting pen to paper writing songs in there.
Write down everything you feel. The way it works is seldom that you get time off to write your songs because you win the lottery and you don’t need to work. The way it works is it happens all at once and you have to maintain presence of mind to do what must be done at each step. So you’re not stuck trying to gather your thoughts the moment you get home and then you have a job offer you can’t refuse and have zero time for your music or anything else for the next 6 months.
This is why you do it now, now that God has given you this time with your thoughts. This is what he’s created this space for. What you do with it is up to you. And don’t worry, He laughed when you let your wife take the truck with all your stuff in it. He knows you didn’t really know you were on this path and everything would be a test of how conscious you can remain to do His work no matter what obstacles are thrown before you. You didn’t fail any test that the rest of us haven’t failed for lifetimes as well. Welcome to the club. We’re all on this Path together and most of us never meet in person.
A friend had written she had a hard time making money. I replied, “That’s because you think the money comes from outside yourself. That’s what we’re taught. It helped me to see money as coming out of me, just as an oak tree comes out of an acorn. That yes I should endeavor to keep jobs in place and buy lotto tickets to give dollars more avenues to come in, but to also expect that dollars can come to me from a source I have no way of expecting it to. Just leave room for the miracle, so to speak. “
Leave a part of your consciousness on the idea that, I would love to see how much money from an unexpected source that the Universe can provide me with. Then look around you every day and see what other people do to make money that you could also do.
That doesn’t mean go apply at McDonald’s, but it means look at the McDonald’s dude and say “I could do that. If I HAD to, I could do that.“ It’s a mental exercise you want to begin doing many, many times during the day.
I look at the gardening shows and think, I could do landscaping and mowing. Do I want to do it for a living? No, but the practice helps me be aware of what all I can do if the chips were down. I could type for someone else. I could design flyers for local businesses. I could sell stuff. I could stand on a corner and spin a sign for $15 an hour. The Universe could also drop a big inheritance in your lap even if you think you have no relatives to give you anything. You just never know.
And if your fortune suddenly loses value; or your entire industry vanishes? No biggie, something else will replace it soon after. Where one door closes another will open, but you won’t see the door if you’re stuck in the grieving process of what you feel you lost, and especially if you feel you lost your purpose in life.
Your purpose in life is just morphing into new forms of expression is all, and you’re in the stage of “oh, the caterpillar is dying”. That’s all. After the caterpillar dies, the butterfly emerges. All it is doing is morphing. What a caterpiller calls death, we call a butterfly.
As to being unable to envision where you’d like to go next, that does seem like a daunting task. Maybe start by thinking of what you’d like to be doing now instead of sitting here reading this, and how you’d like to feel, and remembering the last time you felt that way. That will help your next step unfold for you.
Remember, we don’t need to see the whole map, all we need is to ask for and be shown the next right step, and take it when we see it.
You’ve said it’s important to you to be connected personally with people and receive feedback in order to feel that what you do has value. That’s a stage on the Path also. The more I cut off outside contact (while I work) the deeper inside myself I go and the more my inner guidance comes forth. For ME, feeling connected to inner guidance is more important than contact with people.
How do you chose your next destiny when the previous manifestation vanished through no fault of your own? It’s actually optimum because it gives you a clean slate. Zero = infinite potential. You get motivated really quickly to discover the next step.
Some things are just out of our individual control, right? In one sense, you can say yes. As in, I worked for The Daily Planet and it folded so no, you can’t make it go back and re-open and give you your job back. But in the greater sense, we are absolutely responsible for our vibrational stance, our dominant field of resonance, overall, and it is that which will draw my experience to me.
It is upon that basis that I will attract to me what I am in vibrational harmony with. That may show up as me being kicked out of a job or life I love. The Universe has no qualms about plucking you out of Point A so that when Point B comes along, you won’t miss it. Make no mistake.
Just as you now were plucked out of home and placed where you are, out of the frying pan and into the fire so you can burn up the impurities and, oh yes, put all your words on paper in the process. The songs can be refined later. Get the grit and heartfelt emotion onto paper now while you feel that river flowing through you. That’s the reason He’s placed you there. The sooner you get that done, the sooner you’ll be out.
And if you’re not out right away? He knows you know you’ve got a little more writing to do.
I know I’m a horse of a different color, but the apocalypse I bring is an inner awakening of the deepest sort, with everlasting benefits, destructive of nothing but the personal ego that thinks it’s separate from God. You can dig it.
We all need someone to see our light and someone who shines wants to add to the light of the world, it is only natural. I see your light.
Do you know how you can go your whole life and have people treat you one way and you think that is how life is and that is who you are and then suddenly you wake up to how life can really be and who you really are, with people who see that in you, and it’s so much better than you ever dreamed of? It makes all the difference in the world to be around people who believe in you and support your dreams and visions and encourage you. It makes all the difference to know you are seen as who you want to see yourself as, not just who your family saw you as when you were a kid.
I’m glad you’re doing so much writing in there. My heaviest writing years were 39-44. I did a lot of writing then and a lot of growing then. I have notebooks full of it, it surprises me to go back and read much of it. The magazine was born then, I came out of the closet with readings then. I married Lee then. Lee and Mom died then. I met Doug then and spent 8 months in California.. Lotsa stuff going on and a lot to write about. Very formative years. So write. While it’s pouring through you, let it pour onto paper. Plus it will turn into dollars for you quicker when your thoughts are on paper. In your head they are just floating around, landing nowhere. When you empty them out onto paper, you make room for new thoughts, then new thoughts, then new thoughts. New thoughts = a new life.
——- You wrote of an insight you got that really talked to your heart, that God needed to isolate you as a warning to guard your soul before he blessed you, that you were there to do emotional work, which you already knew, but that this was a glimpse of the calamity that could come if left unchecked. It’s so cool that you realize that. Not everyone gets it, that it’s a series of lessons unfolding on the path, the journey, to help rid yourself of any impurities you might discover you have to your character. Ridding yourself of them kinda burns up past karma, which causes the big giant flood of momentum to catch up with you, tearing your life (as you know it) apart and then rebuildng it in stronger fashion.
It’s the Lightening Struck Tower in the tarot: A breakdown of the current situation to make way for what is better. We’re on the same page, I wrote something similar that came to mind, you have the letter by now. I love that we are so in tune with each other on the inside, spidey sense wise, our inner cinemas seem to play us similar shows. We are such a reflection of each other, we can help keep each other in check, too.
Remember, your personal success, and your prosperity are not in the hands of some “fickle finger of fate”—nor are they determined by sudden changes in the economy. The answer is in your conditioned ability to form and shape the ever-present substance of the Universe. There is just no way around it: your fortune (good or bad) begins with you. Financial crises, even recessions or depressions, so far as they affect your pocketbook or bank account or job stability, begin with your reactions of faith or fear. You do not cause economic conditions, though we all share in the cumulative consciousness that is the cause; but if you give them reality by your negative thoughts or conversations about them, you become synchronized with an energy flow which has as swift an influence on your life as the light that bathes the room when you throw the switch. From Eric Butterworth, in Spiritual Economics.
That has been my experience, not just with money, but with everything. If I get a fear or anxiety about something, I start a chain reaction of a downward spiral which affects the other areas of my life. The domino effect, plain and simple. It happens every hurricane season, too. Like yesterday. Are you watching the weather guys trying to freak us out about the storms brewing in the Atlantic? Remember, getting riled up over that is a waste of time. We know by this year’s weather pattern that like 90% of the tropical depressions will dissipate before hitting Florida. Get off the Watch And Worry Bandwagon and don’t talk about the storms. Don’t make folks think about them because they will then only attract something else they don’t want. So it’s in your hands.
These daily storms we’ve been having let the pressure off, so celebrate them. I do. The years we’ve gotten the strongest hurricane hits, we’ve had unseasonable weather and no summer storms to mitigate it. Not so this year. Lotsa daily storms = no big buildup for surprise hurricanes during the season. It is really as simple as that. Our personal storms are like that also. We can either feed them with hasty actions and reactions based on the vibrational stance of those who are freaking out around us, or we can keep conflict at bay by being mindful and following our own guidance system, no matter what is happening, no matter what anyone else is saying.
It’s true that our perceptions create our personal reality, that how we choose to look at the world determines what kind of world we will live in. And two people living under the same roof can live in very different worlds. One of them can believe we are all at the mercy of Fate, and the other can believe we each create our own reality.
Even for those of us who believe we create our own reality, there is one concept that most just can’t seem to get. They think if they ponder and dream on what they want, that what they want should just come of its own accord. They don’t realize that what they do and how they think and what they say in all other areas of their lives impacts the creation process as well.
You can’t hate your boss and criticize your co-workers and expect to find your dream job – it’s all related. You can’t ignore your mother and be fighting with your sister and expect to draw in your perfect mate – it’s all related. If you watch the news and get aggravated by it, that’s impacting your creation process. If you listen to politicians and think anyone is unethical, that impacts your creation process. If your boss is unreasonable and rude, and you have any emotional reaction of discontent or dislike toward him on a regular basis, that definitely impacts your creation process. And not just in the area of career and income. It impacts it in all other areas. Even areas you don’t think you have resistance in.
That’s where I find most people get hung up. They don’t get that it’s all related. They don’t get that they’ve already done all the daydreaming and pre-paving of their creation, the Universe is just waiting for them to release their resistance and allow their creation to come to them.
It’s way more important to release resistance than it is to visualize what you want your outcome to be. It took me years to learn that. It took me years after hearing it so well said by Abraham-Hicks in the late 80’s to release resistance I didn’t know I had, or to even understand there was a process I could do to discover where I had resistance and a process to release it.
For me, the key was when Abraham-Hicks said – no one else was talking about this back in the 80’s – that every subject is 2 subjects: that which we want and the lack of it, and we’re either focused on one or the other. I’d never heard that concept before and it changed the way I saw everything after that.
We can always tell what we’ve been focusing on, because it shows up in our lives. It shows up in our relationships with others, it shows up in what kind of job we have and how much money we make and the state of our health and happiness.
If you and your husband are in business together, how you feel about him affects your business and affects your income. How he feels about you affects your business and affects your income. You can’t think about and treat your partner one way and expect the Universe to deliver to you anything other than what you’re sending out. And only one of you has to change how you think and feel about the other in order to effect a change in the outcome. And a change in the income.
This is where we can fully realize the power of the Now: by choosing in this moment right now to quiet our personal storms and release any old baggage we have with whoever is the closest to us; whoever we have to see every day and who has been in our life for the most years. Forget everything that has ever happened between you in the past. Stop bringing to mind all past transgressions.
When he pushes your buttons and a past memory comes up, make a choice to turn your thoughts around right then. Bring to mind the things he does that you love. Bring to mind all the good reasons you are together and how much fun you have when things are going well. That’s how best to use the power of the Now: to dissipate old baggage and transform the Now moment into an enjoyable, delicious time for you and everyone around you. No matter what storms might appear to be raging around you.
And, in the Now, don’t be worrying about what the news tells you about the economy or the storms brewing in the Atlantic. This too shall pass. Be prepared, but be in the moment with it all. Look around you right now, in this moment, and take inventory of everything that is going right in your life. Storms will come and go, but we can get through them, it’s just a cycle. So breathe a sign of relief and get onto your next good thing.
### end of long a** 2009 post
This is one thing that becomes more clear through the years is that the less I know about someone’s personal life, the more likely we are to get along. If they’re politically active, that doesn’t interest me. If they are into conspiracy theories, that doesn’t interest me. If they think I need to drink filtered water and buy a water filtration system through them or be at risk for a bunch of disease, that doesn’t interest me.
Tell me what the sunset makes you feel like and why you think the acorns fell so late this year. Tell me what makes you happy and what you’d like to be doing a year or 10 or 20 from now. Tell me about the people you enjoy and the activities that make your heart sing. Those are the important things to me.
I have a lot of people I know that I like and enjoy but I just don’t want them in my personal space. That’s why I’m more likely to go visit someone than ask someone over. It’s always easier to say “I have to go,” than to say “You have to go.” LOL not really, I have no problem telling people when they must go, I set a time limit ahead of time and stand up when that time comes.
Having a space that stays in sacred silence is my big energy battery, it’s where I fill myself up again before heading back out to work in the world.
——— You talked about being wound up, notice that wound also spells wound. When we’re wound up tight as a drum, we’re all wrapped up in our wound (which is asking for healing.)
The is something I read very early on and it helped me understand the emotional body: “The body and the man are two, and the man’s will is not always what the body wishes. When your body wishes something, stop and think whether you really wish it. For you are God, and you will only what God wills; but you must dig deep down into yourself to find the God within you, and listen to His voice, which is your voice.
Do not mistake your bodies for yourself-neither the physical body, nor the astral, nor the mental. Each one of them will pretend to be the Self, in order to gain what it wants. But you must know them all, and know yourself as their master.
When there is work that must be done, the physical body wants to rest, to go out walking, to eat and drink; and the man who does not know says to himself: “ I want to do these things, and I must do them.” But the man who knows says: “This that wants is not I, and it must wait awhile.”
Often when there is an opportunity to help some one, the body feels: “How much trouble it will be for me; let some one else do it.” But the man replies to his body: “You shall not hinder me in doing good work.”
The body is your animal – the horse upon which you ride. Therefore you must treat it well, and take good care of it; you must not overwork it, you must feed it properly on pure food and drink only, and keep it strictly clean always, even from the minutest speck of dirt. For without a perfectly clean and healthy body you cannot do the arduous work of preparation, you cannot bear its ceaseless strain.
But it must always be you who controls that body, not it that controls you. The astral (emotional) body has its desires – dozens of them; it wants you to be angry, to say sharp words, to feel jealous, to be greedy for money, to envy other people their possessions, to yield yourself to depression. All these things it wants, and many more, not because it wishes to harm you, but because it likes violent vibrations, and likes to change them constantly. But you want none of these things, and therefore you must discriminate between your wants and your body’s.
Your mental body wishes to think itself proudly separate, to think much of itself and little of others. Even when you have turned it away from worldly things, it still tries to calculate for self, to make you think of your own progress, instead of thinking of the Master’s work and of helping others. When you meditate, it will try to make you think of the many different things which it wants instead of the one thing which you want. You are not this mind, but it is yours to use.”
###end of excerpt of At The Feet Of The Master by Krishnamurti