Diane’s Blog

Today I checked in with my guidance to see if there was anything special that you could benefit from in this week’s blog.  The following is what I received: 

 ”We are all on a journey, one of tolerance, greed, poverty, wealth — in short, experiences of all kinds.  As we travel down our own personal road we each will experience a moment or a number of moments during which everything changes.  What does this mean?  Simply that all that we thought was true, all we assumed was important, and all we hoped was real is suddenly seen to be illusion. 

 It now becomes necessary, for the first time, to jettison the old, outdated thinking that allowed us to continue living with this illusion as if it were truth.  In this moment the world as we know it slides away and behind it we catch a glimpse of real life.  How does this manifest?  For some, this will mean a loss of a relationship and glimmerings of their true ability to lead a solitary life.  For others, illness will strip away the illusion of control, showing another way to live — that of acceptance; trusting life to take us to places that are frightening without fighting against it every step of the way, and in so doing finding faith. 

 No matter how it comes to us, each of us is due to wake up to our true nature as a lovable, worthy, creative child of God whom no physical circumstance can break.  We can allow this to be our greatest moment or continue to try to keep change at bay.  No one can force us to evolve; those who choose not to, won’t.  It’s really that simple.  It’s a personal choice. 

 We still think we are living in a predictable world governed by human logic.  That is the reality that must give way to the greater perspective behind it: We are governed by divine logic and have little “control” over anything.  The universe works in a way that is foreign to our logically oriented thinking, but mystery is an acceptable mode for living.  This means that although very little that we set our sights on turns out according to our plans, there is a loving hand behind every situation, guiding us toward greater congruence. 

 Our job is simply to notice that this is so as we walk through our experience of life; to allow ourselves to open to the possibility that human logic is not meant to be our only guide.  Then, as we continue to open to the opportunities that come into our lives, sometimes disguised as events that feel negative to our judging mind, we begin to suffer less.  We begin to attract into our lives those people and situations which more closely match our evolving Self.  We begin to see and feel a greater potential for personal achievement; and we begin to notice certain areas of our life in which things seem to be falling into place without any effort on our part.” 

 And so, perhaps each time you hear another horror story on the news this week, instead of your usual response, try using this as a cue to remind yourself that, seen from a higher perspective, all is well.  That we are right on schedule on the planet, that there is a guiding hand behind every event, and these events can be seen as opportunities to move beyond our perception of control and into a space where we no longer feel the need to judge and to be “right.” 

 We can each experience great shifts in our own lives by initiating such an attitudinal change.  The new energy we carry then touches everyone with whom we interact.  At some point, a critical mass will be achieved, and Earth as a whole will awaken to the greater perspective of cosmic, or unity, consciousness.  Even if you feel skeptical of all this, acting as if it were true will bring you great rewards.  What do you have to lose?

Last week I talked about my concern that we tend to not get worked up enough about the state of the world.  Funny how you can step around a corner and Bang!– you’re looking at the other side.  My father sent me a newspaper article this week from the Cleveland Plain Dealer.  Although at first glance it seems to provide useful information — graphs, statistics on medical care for retirees — a closer look had me jumping back like I’d stuck my nose into a funky garbage can.  After checking out my response with that of my husband Jim, I tossed the thing into a file drawer.

 Why, you ask, did I flip out?  Well, I’d be pleased as punch to answer: I no longer conspire with worry-mongers.  My dad, on the other hand, is a full-out black-belt, proselytizing worrier.  I can remember hearing his voice back in my teen years, responding on many occasions to my innocent statement that I wasn’t worried about whatever it was.  “Well,” his deep voice would boom, “You SHOULD worry!”  And so I did.  I learned to be a champion worrier.  Hell, I’d worry if I even suspected that I might run out of toilet paper before my next scheduled trip to the grocery store.  Did you notice the word “scheduled?”  Yep — I was also a world-class control freak.  More on that another time.

 But as I began to look at my life in a new light in my 40s I realized there is a hidden hand guiding everything we do (not necessarily “God” — but a greater intelligence.)  And then I understood that a soul that is lovingly, purposefully guided and supported every step of the way is wasting absurd amounts of energy by worrying.  As James Redfield, author of The Celestine Prophecy stated in an interview, “Worry is negative prayer.”  Oops!  That really hit home for me.  The last thing I want to do is send more negative energy out into an already gasping world.

The aforementioned article on the growing cost of medical care for baby boomers meant well, but its whole point of view was to scare the shit out of us about how “unsafe” retiring at any age now is, unless you’re Bill Gates.  Worry because of scarce resources is big in the media these days. While I agree that there will be people going under financially, and who knows, I could be among them, I know that worrying is a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Especially harmful is dwelling on “statistics” and anything quoted from “experts.”  Please.  Who can be more expert than me about how I choose to create my life? 

 Interestingly, large numbers of people (also sheep) are quite easily directed if someone yells “Fire!”  and then points to the door they want said sheeple to pass through. So I hope you’re not in “worrier” mode.  Here’s an interesting fact: You can’t worry and be fully present at the same time.  It’s not possible — our conscious mind can’t achieve that particular multi-tasking challenge.  Try it out if you haven’t already. 

 Whenever I’m tempted to worry, I ask myself — “Is everything okay in THIS moment?”  The answer can only be “yes” unless you just expired. (Now THERE’S a whole other topic)  Then I remind myself that the future is just a string of “this-moments.”  So the chances are really good that they’ll be fine, too.

My parents expected to age as their parents did — retire, find a hobby to help you kill whatever time you have left until your health takes a nose dive; then you croak.  The main difference being that their generation had the new, improved version of aging — it lasts longer — so now you find yourself raising puttering and dawdling to an art form, while stoically avoiding any mention of the “D” word.

For a while there, my parents played out their expectations with a certain flair, if not gusto.  My father, true to his own hermit-like inclination, spent the first 20 years of his early retirement hanging around the house.  He did manage to go outdoors long enough to take my mom on a few vacations, which turned out to be a plus, since it gave her a chance to visit non–Ohio parts of the country before she died in 1994.

My dad entered a difficult period of grieving, but then a strange thing happened: He noticed that he was single.  He decided to take advantage of this unexpected turn of events.  He was only 70, and still youthful.  Waitresses everywhere flirted with him.  And so he stepped off the path that had been laid out for him so long ago by HIS parents.  He started to reclaim some of the adolescent verve that had been left on a closet shelf to fade and die. 

He placed an ad in the “personals” of his local newspaper (shaving a few years from his age.)  He jumped into the dating ritual that he had largely missed in his youth and found a couple of agreeable companions along the way.

That was 12 years ago.  At 83, my father has now re-evaluated the beliefs and attitudes of a lifetime and thrown out much of what he now sees wasn’t healthy for him or anyone around him.  In this he has joined me in breaking away from the “Hausler heritage” of holding on to all your grudges for, well — forever.  At any given moment, fully half of the Hausler clan (not my mom’s side — they were all Finnish immigrants whose days were filled with heroic attempts to utter at least every other word of their “English” recognizably) would have banished the offending “others,” and sides tended to shift and morph in ways that confounded logic and left me scrambling for the nearest exit.

Frankly, I am still amazed and downright giddy at the thought of what he accomplished.  My father was a verbal abuser, controller,  and rage-aholic throughout my formative years.  Our relationship had always been strained — a few times even broken.  In the last few years, that rift has healed.  Now we talk and laugh and even forgive each other for the pain we inflicted over the last half-century.

How could he have the beat such odds?  My theory is that sometimes it takes a disaster of gigantic proportions to shake a person free from the private hell they constructed long ago to keep them “safe.”  My mother’s death was that freeing disaster.  Suddenly everything was up for grabs.  And if that wasn’t enough, the Universe threw in a little prostate cancer and an angioplasty for good measure in recent years.

We will all experience losses as we age.  I am so grateful to have a living role model for not only surviving those losses, but transcending them.  Thanks, Dad.  I love you.  You have been my greatest teacher.

This is a subject I intend to return to again and again, in many different guises: We have to begin to trust our own inner knowing/gut feeling/guidance/inner voice/intuition — whatever words feel most comfortable to you — above all else.  We tend to allow much of our personal power to be sucked up by others.

Yesterday I started thinking about an article I read recently by a doctor of naturopathy.  At first her advice seemed reasonable, since it was about homeopathic medicine.  Then she apparently was nudged by her ego voice which told her to go for it — and she did.  She commenced to wax pedantic on all manner of topics, from healthful foods to sleep habits.  Specifically, how many ounces of broccoli to eat how many times a week, all the way to what time we should go to bed every night, and for how many hours.  There seemed to be no exceptions allowed.

I know this is the information age, but some of us seem to get carried away.  Do adults really need to be lectured on when to go to bed and how often we should experience “evacuation of the colon?”  And who is doing the lecturing?  Isn’t every fourth person you meet an “expert” on something these days?  Personally, as soon as I hear someone being introduced as an “expert” I head for the hills.

How do we discern where the expertise ends and personal opinion begins?  I had an intuitive reading by phone a number of years ago from someone whose work I admired.  About the fourth time I listened to the audiotape of this session, however, I got a funny feeling.  Although 75% of the information was obviously received from Spirit, the rest seemed to be his personal opinion.  Ordinarily I have no quarrel with people stating their opinions.  But it is incumbent upon a healer to differentiate for the public between information or conclusions arrived at from a higher source and that which rests solely on the say-so of the ego mind.  This healer — and a few others I’ve run across — didn’t do so.

As with any other position where people seek you out — politician, doctor, Minister – one has to guard vigilantly against loving the platform more than the truth.  Isn’t this happening everywhere today?  Everyone’s a pundit.  I hear increasingly nutty opinions every day by all sorts of folks who take themselves way too seriously.  And there’s always an audience.

I got pulled into this power matrix briefly myself when I began teaching adult classes about our inner wisdom, and here’s why — Reason #1: A lot of people treated me like a guru.  I was shocked.  They couldn’t divest themselves of their own common sense and wisdom fast enough, so eager were they to hear a “definitive” truth.  Reason #2: I was insecure about Diane’s worthiness.  It feels safer to hand out information as though it is 100% guaranteed certainty than to couch your knowledge in terms of degrees.  “This is fact” rolls off the tongue with a satisfying smoothness that “At least in my experience, here’s what works” never could.

I believe that the human race will not continue to evolve unless they get this issue straightened out.  It’s that basic to the fulfillment of our potential.

I still accept too much information as “fact”, but I’ve trained myself to notice more of my behaviors.  More and more I catch myself in my old habit of throwing away what really feels right to me in favor of someone else’s “right.”  I ask myself, “Does what they are saying really apply to my life, or do I need to check that out by getting quiet and sitting with it for awhile?”  Or alternately just acknowledging the cognitive dissonance I feel.  That’s guidance too.

 We don’t have to throw the baby out with the bath water.  If we pick and choose what really seems right for us from the constant onslaught of wall-to-wall opinion, we can only become our truest self.

If any of this doesn’t fit who you are in this moment, please set it aside.  You’ll be that much closer to your own truth.