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Moving Around Flexible and Free

I think there is a big and significant difference between being a leader and being a manager. Leaders lead from the heart. You have to be analytical and flexible. Flexibility is one of the key ingredients to being successful. If you feel like it’s difficult to change, you will probably have a harder time succeeding. Andrea Jung

Flexibility is an attitude and state of mind. It is required as we continually are confronted with faster and faster changes in our world. We can truly appreciate diversity if we are flexible enough to hear other people’s perspectives or try out new ideas. There are many ways to keep ourselves in the habit of being flexible rather than rigid. A significant way is through the body.

Sitting all day in front of your computer, driving everywhere, and then sitting at home in front of the TV, all cause your body to become rigid and inflexible, which can also create inflexibility in your psyche. It’s important to find lots of different ways to move your body. Have fun with it! Take dance lessons, learn to golf, swim, or do yoga. More flexibility in your body creates more openness in your life.

Spiritual Contemplation: Where am I rigid in my thinking or attitude? Where in my body is this rigidity reflected?

Affirmation: I move easily. I bend gracefully. I am flexible and open, in mind and in body.

Children of Light – Summer Solstice

The summer solstice, which is the longest day of the year and the shortest night, has been celebrated across all cultures and locations. Symbolic of fire and the source of all creation, the sun has been a central theme in the cosmic stories of spirituality from the time of the Great Pyramids of Egypt and the monoliths of Stonehenge.

There is an earthly sun, which is the cause of all heat, and all who are able to see may see the sun; and those who are blind and cannot see him may feel his heat. There is an Eternal Sun, which is the source of all wisdom, and those whose spiritual senses have awakened to life will see that sun and be conscious of His existence. Paracelsus

It is written, “As within, so without”—what out-pictures in the world of physical form is a reflection of what comes from within. This is why so many ancient cultures such as those of the Essenes, Hindus, Sumerians, Egyptians, the First People of North and Central America, the Inca, and the Maya, all referred to themselves as the “Children of the Sun” or “Children of Light.”

As a child of the light, take some time today to allow yourself to be sourced from within and recharge, for the night will return to bring the balance of the yin and yang, light and dark. This Summer Solstice celebrate the sun so you may remember it in those times when it is not as high and strong and know there is something All Powerful within you that can be called to shine at any time.

Spiritual Contemplation: It’s the Summer Solstice! Find a place to sit outside in the sun today. Allow its life force to penetrate your body and allow your mind to connect you in consciousness with your ancestors who came before and felt this same sunlight on their bodies. As the cells of your body respond to the light, how does your spirit respond in this moment of recharge?

Affirmation: I am a child of the light!

Are You in Integrity?

Anything that has integrity holds its shape. Buckminster Fuller

My favorite definition of integrity is “the state of being whole or undivided” in the same way the hull of a ship has absolute integrity. Each sheet of metal, each rivet, each plank is so completely integrated that they have become one, whole, unified structure. Integrity isn’t about living by someone else’s moral code or behaving perfectly. It’s about being wholly in alignment with yourself or with your purpose. This is just as true for a team or business.

We often speak about being “perfect” from our spiritual perspective, but this perfection is not a flawless or static state. It’s not something you achieve or attain. To be “perfect” is to be whole and complete, just as you are . . . right now! You are wholly and completely yourself—you cannot be anyone else. When you bring your whole self into everything you do, operating in alignment with your purpose and values or those of your work, then you are in integrity!

Spiritual Contemplation: Am I in integrity or am I trying to be perfect? What activities do I still need to bring my whole self to?

Affirmation: I am wholly myself. I bring all of me—my values, my spirituality, my strength and my skills—to everything I do. This is the unique way Spirit is showing up as me. I live in integrity with myself!

Multitasking keeps us out of the Flow

Forget multitasking; find the beauty in doing one thing at a time. Unknown

It has been proven that we don’t actually multitask—rather we shift quickly back and forth between various things. But unfortunately, we usually don’t pay attention to any one of them really well, and over time this becomes frustrating, and our efficiency and effectiveness go way down. Rather than trying to do too many things at once, do each thing well while it’s there in front of you. Once you focus, you will find yourself moving into the zone of perfectly balanced concentration and attention where things seem much more effortless.

This is going with the flow —living in Grace—being in the zone. Allowing each activity, person, or decision to fully engage you until you move on to something else creates a more balanced experience of work and life. Then things are all working and unfolding easily and effortlessly. This is the way Spirit operates as you in the world: by being present in the moment, fully present.

Spiritual Contemplation: How much multitasking do you try to do during a day? How does it feel when you focus on just one thing? How can you be more present with what’s in front of you?

Affirmation: I am present with what is right in front of me. I do not try to do two or more things at once. This way I allow myself to BE as Spirit in every aspect of my life.

Reawaken Connection

The indigenous peoples have lived for thousands of years in harmony with nature and a deep, divine connection. They have listened to their intuitive hearts more than the logic of their heads. Their philosophy has been about living in touch with the rhythms of life. But as importance shifts from the intuitive to the measurable realm of form, the very fabric of the love and reverence that held it all together appears to now be one of pure materiality. Corporations are now endowed with the rights of a person, yet there is no heart or soul to connect them with the Infinite or a deeper connection with humanity and the earth. The link with the rhythm of life that our indigenous ancestors developed for guidance has been severed for certain facts that support power positions.

We will be known forever by the tracks we leave. Dakota

When a man moves away from nature his heart becomes hard. Lakota proverb

It’s time to return from our sense of separateness to the revelation of wholeness and the divine connection, remembering that Spirit is the reality of our heart and soul. The Divine at the center of our being is at the center of all being. When we are in connection with that which is all things, we naturally live in balance with all that is. We remember in our heart and soul that we are part of one global family.

Spiritual Contemplation: Have you lost touch with the internal connection by doing something that is out of alignment with your heart and soul? How can you return to the divine touch?

Affirmation: I live in touch with divine connection.

Choose to Respond not React to Change

There was once a blind girl who didn’t like herself because she was blind. She was bitter and despised all people except her boyfriend who was always there for her. One day she told him, “If I could just see the world I’d marry you.” Then it happened, someone donated a pair of eyes to her, the transplant was a success, and she could see everything, including her boyfriend. “Would you now marry me?” he asked her. But when the girl looked at him and saw that he was blind, the sight of his closed eyelids was just too much for her. She hadn’t expected that. The thought of looking at them the rest of her life was just too much for her to bear, so she said no, and he left in tears. Days later he wrote her a note: “Take good care of your eyes, my love, for before they were yours, they were mine.”

Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved. Helen Keller

When your status changes, do you change? Do you use life situations as an excuse for your poor behavior? Life’s dynamics reveal your true character. People and circumstances don’t make you act in a way you are not; they uncover the content of your character. Do you like the manner with which you conduct yourself when your world swirls?

Spiritual Contemplation: Take a look at a time when your response to a circumstance elicited a behavior you are less than proud of. Choose a manner of behavior you would prefer to respond with next time that button gets pushed and impress it on your subjective.

Affirmation: I respond to life’s dynamics from a high place.

Smiles & Laughter Create Joy

How can you be grumpy with a smile on your face and joy in your step? Change the way your body moves and you will change your feelings. When you’re upset, try clapping your hands and jumping up and down a bit. Shake it out of your body, breathe deeply, and see how change can come over you in an instant. If you’ve just hit a grand-slam home run to win the seventh game of a world series, you wouldn’t mope around with your head hanging low and looking at your feet, would you? No way. Your hands would be in the air and with a swagger in your step you’d show how hot your stuff is. Joy would pore from your eyes and light up your face.

Don’t take yourself too seriously. Know when to laugh at yourself and find a way to laugh at obstacles that inevitably present themselves. Halle Berry

We hear so much about “change your thinking, change your life,” but sometimes the body and mind just feel heavy and it’s tough to get them to behave. To get out of that state when you’re feeling down and tense, consciously change what’s gotten into your body. Go outside in the fresh air and get your blood pumping by doing an impersonation of Rocky’s victory dance at the top of the stairs.

How would you feel if you’d just won the lotto? What would make you jump for joy and hoot and holler? Movement impacts your body’s chemistry. Sometimes you just have to let your motion help shape your emotion.

Spiritual Contemplation: What would be a joyous, abundant scenario for you? Play it out in your mind, let it get into your body, move around with it, and feel how your mind’s state has changed.

Affirmation: My body is now filled with joy and happiness!

Compassion opens our eyes and ears

Compassion opens our eyes and makes it possible to see what’s really going on. It sometimes seems easier to keep your head buried in the sand than to look at what’s going on around you. When you pretend not to see it, it’s not a reality, right? Wrong. It may not be your reality or yours to deal with in this life, but compassion will keep you from needing to make others who are hurting wrong in their experience. When pain is proliferating in a certain sector, it’s good to know Spirit is in the midst, because It’s omnipresent and if you want, leave it at that. But denying and making another person wrong by jumping on a bandwagon of attack for something you haven’t experienced is a questionable approach to living in love and understanding.

I think the core criterion is the social awkwardness, but the sensory issues are a serious problem in many, many cases of autism, and they make it impossible to operate in the environment where you’re supposed to be social. Temple Grandin

When something that is wrong in the world reaches epidemic proportions, only then does it finally catch our collective attention—whether it’s the housing bubble, autism, media control, or our disregard for the environment. The energy that moves upon the collective of humanity will have its expression until we stop denying what’s going on and start coming together, with compassion, around a new idea. There is no large or small in the mind of Spirit, or as Hermes put it, “As above, so below; as within so without.” Compassionate hearing and conversations are in order for those who may be harbingers of a new insight to a way of being.

Spiritual Contemplation: Where can you be compassionate with your understanding in an area where your beliefs want to make another wrong? Where can you see and hear with more compassion?

Affirmation: I hear more deeply. I see more clearly. My compassion opens my eyers & ears.

Getting Through the Hard Conversations with Fierce Love

People describe me as someone who is willing to have the hard conversations. I have learned that this is the only way to resolve things or actively move them forward. Yes, someone may get mad. Yes, my hands sweat and my heart beats fast. Yes, it can be very uncomfortable and nerve-racking. Yes, I may not know how it will turn out.

The best way out is always through. Robert Frost

However, avoiding pain and not dealing with difficult situations or people do not make them go away. It only makes things worse. Avoidance just keeps you stuck and allows things to fester. Facing the challenge, dealing with what is, and having the hard conversation, may be painful in the moment, but it will get you to the other side. Trust this Truth: put on your big girl panties (or big boy boxers) and discover the healing and growth available to you, and the beauty and peace on the other side.

Spiritual Contemplation: Is there something in your life you need to face head-on that you are avoiding? What will you do to move through it? Are you ready for the hard conversation?

Affirmation: I am willing to walk through the fire of engagement to get to the other side of communion and resolution. I know that I don’t walk through this hard conversation alone.

What? Do You Think I’m a Mind Reader? Clear Communication Shines a Bright Light

Did you ever stop to think, and forget to start again? Winnie the Pooh

Have you ever driven at dusk and have someone almost plow into you? They honk at you, you honk at them, a few less-than-kind words are mumbled, and you drive away with your heart pounding. Then while you are stopped at the next intersection, the car cross the way flashes its lights at you, and you realize that although you’ve been able to see where you were going, others could not see you because your headlights weren’t on.

Trouble brews when you are absorbed in your self-conscious awareness with the subjective assumption that others know what you are thinking and expecting. You must communicate where you are, whether you’re driving, cocreating or cohabiting. Not everyone is a mind reader so be clear in communicating what’s going on because even if it’s perfectly clear to you, it’s not to the rest of us.

Spiritual Contemplation: What are some of the results you created by assuming others understood you when they didn’t? What have you learned about clearer communication?

Affirmation: My light shines bright for all the world to see!

There’s Another Way – The Middle Way

Rather than either/or try to find the middle way. This allows the infinity of the Divine to come to the table. This makes all the difference!

Sometimes in the process of decision-making, you see your point of view as the only option. But being fixated on only one way doesn’t feel right—it will stir your insides and obscure your inner vision for a new kind of seeing. If instead you were to step back, you might easily notice there is an opposite perspective to yours. And observing from an even higher perspective, you’ll come to see a third option that is often overlooked: the middle way between the two conflicting opposites. Having a higher perspective is how you’ll find the way through your inner obstacles in situations like negotiating with your teenager without either giving in or making him wrong.

It takes two sides to fight, but a third to stop. William Ury

As you adopt a higher perspective, affirm guidance that you will find another way, the middle way. Then remember to separate the person from the issue at hand. Don’t defend your position but invite the other’s criticism and counsel. Allow them to share their story, emotions, and concerns as you listen and acknowledge them. Then focus on your common interests rather than the problem. If you are willing to stay in the conversation without making the other person wrong, this approach will bring a shift and another way than was not previously known.

Spiritual Contemplation: Find an area of your life that could use some fresh observation and find the middle way.

Affirmation: I now see another way through!

Understanding Tomatoes – Release Blame and Judgement

Anger will never disappear so long as thoughts of resentment are cherished in mind. Buddha

When you plant some tomatoes and they don’t seem to be growing well, it would be odd to blame the tomatoes. Most gardeners would instead explore the reason the plants don’t seem to be doing well. Maybe it’s not enough water, or the soil doesn’t have enough nutrients, or possibly the plants are not receiving enough sun. Master gardeners don’t sit there and berate the tomatoes. So when there are issues with people in our lives, why is it so easy for us to blame them? Accusations don’t bring about blessings, nor does manipulating or arguing with someone create joy.

What is the alchemic process? It’s the same as working with tomatoes: we must analyze the situation. What is prompting a person to behave like that? What is causing a nation to act in the manner that is painful? Care enough to take extra time to explore with a loved one what’s going on. This kind of love and show of understanding will be felt, and the circumstances just might change. You might find that people can communicate a bit more clearly than a tomato.

Spiritual Contemplation: What area of your life could use some clearer understanding? Bring love and caring to your understanding and see what might be revealed.

Affirmation: I care enough to understand what’s going on in a tough situation.

Unable to See the Truth – Release Resistance, Embrace Change

Resistance to change plagues all evolutionary processes. It’s easy to get locked into seeing things a certain way and become unable to see something differently even when the evidence is there. Galileo challenged Aristotle’s gravitational theory that things will fall to earth at a rate depending on their size by simultaneously dropping two objects of different weights off the Leaning Tower of Pisa. They landed at the same time, but the observers couldn’t see that because of their fundamental beliefs. Despite the physical proof, they continued to hold on to the old thinking. Giordano Bruno correctly substantiated the Copernican model of heliocentrism by showing the sun was just another star moving in space and Earth was just a planet in its orbit. He was tried for heresy by the Roman Inquisition and burned at the stake in 1600.

It’s not what you look at that matters. It’s what you see. Henry David Thoreau

Resistance to change will always attempt to halt progressive development. Even the most educated can have a tough time with shifting to the next gear. It’s important to validate what has brought you to your present point and be willing to let go in order to improve and move forward into the abundance of what’s next. You won’t become what you are intended to be while remaining what you are.

Spiritual Contemplation: Are you so happily attached to a position and habit that you are blind to the current information pointing to your next step? What is your concern about making a shift?

Affirmation: I see and embrace the emerging Truth! I release my resistance to change!

Opportunity for Spiritual Growth – Everything Grist for the Mill

Every challenge is an opportunity for spiritual growth if we will let it be grist for our spiritual mill. Grist is any grain that was brought to be ground at the mill. Because millers always received a portion of it in payment, they would grind any grain, no matter what it was. Thus they always benefited from whatever was ground. Likewise, every activity, mistake, challenge, or opportunity is grist for our spiritual mill.

With bare attention consume your impurities. – Take whatever comes down the pike. – Everything is grist for the mill. – Not “this” or “that” but “whatever.” – Keep giving up your story line. – All of life is a meditation cushion. It’s all meditation. – You are the fire and fire doesn’t burn itself. Ram Dass

Every moment of our lives, spiritual opportunities abound! Every activity is an opportunity to learn, grow, or practice. Every conversation, every action, every choice is an opportunity to come from our center and bring the Divine into the moment. Ask yourself, “What do my spiritual values, principles, or practices tell me to do right now? How does this further my spiritual growth” This will allow you to grind the grains of your uncertainty and unbelief into the fine flour of faith and understanding.

Spiritual Contemplation: What am I resisting right now that is actually grist for my spiritual mill? How can I bring this idea to my workplace or business? How does this further my spiritual growth?

Affirmation: Everything is grist for my spiritual mill!

What About the Committee? Go with the Flow

Your body has something in the neighborhood of 40 trillion cells—quite a consulting committee. Call on it when you’re confused or undecided. Relax quietly and ask your body what it has to say. Victoria Moran

Working with others can be challenging—whether on a volunteer team, a work group, or managing employees. Yet working with others allows us to multiply the effectiveness of our work in ways beyond what any one person can accomplish. Years ago I hated working with committees; it was simply easier to do it myself. And I knew that it would get done right! But oh boy, was it exhausting. Now, there isn’t much that I wouldn’t tackle with a group of minds and hearts, rather than just working by myself.

I’ve learned to go with the flow by relaxing into the Divine Presence and Power of Life as it moves through each person in the group. I now love to trust the unfolding process of life toward greater life—because I always know a better outcome and more abundant result are assured. Pushing harder or doing more isn’t the answer. It’s so much healthier, and much more fun, to allow Spirit to work through you and through others for the greater benefit of all.

Spiritual Contemplation: Where are you holding on to doing it yourself? What do you believe would happen if you trusted others to get involved? Could you find a new belief?

Affirmation: I allow myself to go with the flow, knowing that as I listen to others, and others listen to me, we are making the larger Reality of Spirit present in the conversation.

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