Another season passes into another. This Winter has been keeping a solid toehold for sure. The official day of Spring this year was March 20th. Hard pressed to tell by what has been happening out the back door in the Pacific Northwest as well as in my travels across the U.S. the past 2 months. A few weeks ago we had a surprise snowfall that managed to cover the ground in a thin blanket of white. It did not last long but how unusual for us! The nights have had us dipping down in temp to the low to mid 30’s. A couple days ago there was an offering of a warm enough sunny day that prompted me to go out and do some beginning prep on my gardening.

I also surveyed the demise of a few treasured plants that did not make it thru the tough Winter we had this year. I took a moment to extend my expression of loss! My prized Rosemary bush that had seemed to of happily proliferated away in growth for the last 3 years was clearly devoid of any possible life and I sadly dug it up to prepare for its replacement. Then I left my backyard retreat from reality to plug myself back into it.

The headlines have clearly been a-changing. Our concerns and curiosity about who would be heading our country, through an extremely taxing economical time for all, have been abated by the election of history making President Obama. I do not envy the man for the vast challenges that await him to find a way out of the mess that has been made of our country by the administration before him. The integrity of himself he offered during the election process will certainly be put to task. There are no easy answers or options and will require the understanding and patience of the American people. No doubt and becoming true, we are being asked to back it in the form of our bank accounts. I think things are beginning to level out at least from the dramatic downward economic death spiral we have all witnessed.

Hopefully the lessons we should have learned as free spending Americans, understanding that needs and wants are two different things and have been backed by the idea of how fast our foundations can be destroyed with situations totally out of our control. Whatever belts were tightened need to be remembered and carried on to protect ourselves for our personal futures. Just because things appear to be better is no excuse to stick our heads back into the sand and set into a false sense of security that everything is alright again.

The latest headlines are informing us of a possible “pandemic” in the form of swine flu. As if we don’t have enough to worry about! I have bought into the hype and spent time on CNN online, listening to facts, opinions and projected outcomes of all this as well as thought about what can I do to avoid contracting this nasty virus. In the end, I have decided to ditch the paranoia which I can be prone to! It comes down to simple conscious hygiene. Be aware of surfaces my hands touch and when in public keeping my hands away from my eyes, nose and mouth. Washing said hands when available or using bacterial wipes and gels in between. As soon as I come home from being out, I head straight for the sink and cleanse my hands. Maintaining a healthy immune system is also important. That should be an ongoing thing anyway.

On my spiritual front , I have spent the last Winter consciously focused on feeding my soul with books, podcasts and meditation. Although it is good to nourish oneself with new ideas and suggestions for self-help, I have come to the conclusion that too much can actually hold back someone seeking “spiritual enlightenment.” I have come to call this the “Oprah syndrome.” She televises her show on a daily basis during the week. I think she is a beautiful well meaning soul making her way with her own trials and tribulations along her own path, as all of us are, and blessed with loads of money to engage herself in any area she chooses to explore and share with her adoring public. She has worked hard for it. More power to her. On the other side, she is a business. She has not come to be one of the most successful woman on the financial list of well to do’s without understanding that herself.

Every day of the week she comes up with issues to bombard her public with. They are certainly valid and she backs them up with facts and ways to deal with the issue of the hour.

I have a close friend that follows her diligently. Her admiration for the woman is expressed to the point that she feels a kindred soul with the woman. O.K., good for her I say.

My problem with it is, Oprah presents so many issues and ways of dealing with each one that I question how someone can isolate out of a long list what is truly a valid issue to focus on and give it their all. For example, on a Tuesday, the issue is marital communication.

Suggestions have been presented on how to prop up a failing marriage and become strong enough on a personal level to proceed to include the spouse to work together for a worthwhile outcome for them both. It takes focus on personal growth as well as working together in order to remain together. It is definitely not an overnight accomplishment. It also includes layers of identification of learned behavior as well as understanding of enlightenment on a spiritual level to be able to interact with another soul with the same goal in mind.

So, one walks away from the program with a renewed sense of purpose and dedication. It is really the tip of the ice berg as far as the solutions that have been presented to them in that hour. Sources have been introduced to them at some point for further information to allow them to learn more about it. However, it’s their responsibility in order to proceed on that introduced subject, to gain more information beyond what they were able to supply within their broadcasted hour.

On Wednesday, next day, there is a broadcast on weight gain and how to deal with it. That is an ongoing subject to Oprah, to anyone that knows about her at all, that is near and dear to her heart. Most of us at one point or another in our lives can understand that.

Oprah then spends the hour expounding on the subject with her experts and what we can do to deal with it. Serious weight problems are a deep rooted problem for anyone that experiences it. In the course of 2 days, we are presented with 2 potentially valid issues that need to be addressed. Don’t even get me started on what she talked about on Friday!

I come to my point on this particular rant. For myself, with so many genres of input available to me on the “information buffet” via books, in their varied modern incarnations, television and podcasts that I was taking full advantage of, I discovered for all my effort to absorb “enlightened” words of wisdom that I was stagnating and going nowhere. The reason was, I had become overloaded and was not applying any one thing with enough effort to feel progress.
My solution has been to take myself off the “buffet” and focus on some of the basics I learned years ago.

During a particularly enlightening meditation, I heard the words inside me, “Live in the moment.” I heard it loud and clear and spent time in thought on it. By being aware of diverting attention to the past, or worry about the future, and focusing on “the now,” this has allowed me to gain more control of myself. Knowing, that is all that exists right now. Also, being aware of emotions appearing that can whisk me away backwards or forward, acknowledging them and let them go. If an emotion is evoking a situation in front of me, I assess whether or not I can do something about it at that moment.

Questions like, is there a letter to be written, a phone call to be made, a question to be asked or something I have avoided following thru on? If the answer is no, then I give permission to myself to let the emotion attached to that issue to go away.

I am spending more time in the silence that lives inside me. It has become a soothing comfortable place to be. Meditation is an intentional activity that I can indulge myself in. It requires finding the time and a comfortable soothing place that I can sit in and follow a routine that I have set for myself to enter my quiet place inside me. When I do, I feel welcomed and a loving positive recharging energy from the Universe.

As a result of my belief and practiced meditation routines, I have learned how to enter into this place in my everyday world without having the need for physically having to sit in my quiet place alone. When emotions threaten to carry me away, I can quickly ascertain what needs to be done with whatever is threatening me and discharge it, leaving a peaceful silence to calm me. I have experienced this in the face of someone that was trying to engage me in their anger. My first instinct was to go with my initial emotion of defense and the threat of being dragged away into their drama. I suddenly had the thought that I did not have to do that. It was a choice! I realized that the issue and emotion they were exuding was theirs, not mine. It was real to them. That allowed me to feel compassion for where they were without the feeling of responsibility that I needed to fix it for them. It was out of my hands.

Once I came to this conclusion inside myself and responded to it, I was able to comfort this person with credit to their feelings with compassion instead of muddying our interaction up with my own sense of misplaced defensive behavior.

To be able to gain this level of enlightenment takes conscious practice. I am not professing myself to be exalted in this discovery by any means. It’s more like a feeling of being rewarded for my efforts. It was decades ago I remembered reading about Living In The Moment. I thought I had applied it to my life as I moved forward but the truth was I had placed it in a file somewhere inside me as I devoured the miles of text over the years looking for the true solution for my spiritual growth. Maybe it was the hope of easy answers. There are none.

I have also realized that once I come to terms in the practice of unconsciously living this approach to my life, I will be able to tackle the really tough issues that are stacked up for my attention. I am able to at least see the correlation between desiring something to change in my life and having the ability to tackle the challenge to make it so.
To me it has come down to, what effort I am truly willing to give to any one tool that the Universe has offered up to me. I discovered that the one base tool I needed to be able to apply the new ones presented to me was there all along.

If we do this stint on this earth plain right, we are never done learning. Most times it seems one step forward and a few steps back. At least there is some forward movement with efforts on my part. I assuage my soul with the knowledge that I am truly a student in the light of life. There is no destination but only the journey.

As clichéd as that might sound, it gives me comfort in believing that as a student, I have a certain amount of allowances in that I don’t know it all and there is plenty of room for mistakes on my part as I do learn.
This is my interpretation of my own journey at this point. Bright blessings for you on yours.



As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.
--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

To think is easy. To act is hard. But the hardest thing
in the world is to act in accordance with your thinking.
--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe