Amara Rose | Ascension Lifestyle

05 Aug 2021
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Over the Speed Limit: How to Drive, Ecstatically Alive, Past 55

The day before I turned 55 I received a notice from my bank. The auxiliary checking account I’d opened for online transactions would shortly be assessed an $8 monthly fee unless I a) maintained a $1000 minimum balance, b) deposited $250/month, or c) used my ATM card at least ten times per month, none of which was feasible for me.

A bit put out by this parsimonious behavior from a bank I’d found very customer-centric until then, I approached the assistant manager. She skimmed the letter and said confidently, “We’ll find a solution.” After a couple of basic usage questions, she asked, “Are you 55?” I exclaimed, “My birthday’s tomorrow!” She said, “Then the account is free,” and scrawled, “55+ FREE” across the notice in red marker.

This was my first encounter with the unexpected perks of my seniority.

Sea Change in Consciousness

Coming of age as a member of the silver tsunami is a sea change from growing older in yesteryear. As the Boomer wave grays the globe, some members of this tribe have concocted playful descriptions: “chronologically gifted” and “over the speed limit” are two of my favorites.

Language matters, because, like the mirror, it reflects how we see ourselves. Cross-cultural anthropologist and author Angeles Arrien once shared how a child stroked her grandmother’s cheek, crooning, “Grandma, you have such pretty designs on your face.” Too young to “know better,” the little girl viewed her grandmother’s facial lines as fine art. Wrinkles can signify ripeness, wisdom, and a life lived by design, indeed.

Yet even as robustly alive as many of today’s elders are, I’m nowhere near ready for “Gran Central Station,” as I refer to the exuberant participants at a nearby senior center. And therein lies the conundrum.

“Forty is the old age of youth. Fifty is the youth of old age,” wrote French novelist Victor Hugo 150 years ago. Hugo lived to be 83, pretty “ripe old” for the 19^thcentury. His observation is daunting to me, because I don’t feel remotely on the cusp of old age.

Marc Freedman agrees. Of the description “young old”, the author of The Big Shift: Navigating the New Stage Beyond Midlife asks, “Are most people in their 50s and 60s in anything resembling ‘old age’? Are they elderly? Senior citizens? (Why not child old for those in their 40s, infant old for the late-thirties set, and prenatal old for latter twentysomethings?)” Prenatal old. Love it!

This can be a juicy time. Visionary OB/GYN Christiane Northrup, MD, author of The Wisdom of Menopause, says midlife brings potential for regeneration. She cites research showing women in their 60s and 70s enjoy the best sex of their lives. Clean out emotional debris, claim your power — and it’s an erotic feast.

A Place of Passionate Possibility

Just as old age was reimagined as “the Golden Years” and retirement as a destination, Boomers are rapidly reinventing this time as a place of passionate possibility.

In The Big Shift, Freedman chronicles how Granville Stanley Hall publishedSenescence: The Last Half of Lifein 1922,when he was 76. Hall characterized this period as “a precious bud of vast potentialities” and urged older people to step up:

“We rarely come to anything like a masterly grip till the shadows begin to slant eastward, and for a season, which varies greatly with individuals, our powers increase as the shadows lengthen.” True to his teaching, Hall’s greatest creativity and achievement came after age 50.

One of my defining moments arrived while reading Deathing by Anya Foos-Graber, an uncommon guide to creating a spiritually informed dying process. The composite protagonist, Selma, in preparing for a grace-filled departure from this life, shares an inner vision of seeing people on a half-built bridge, “spilling into the sea, drowning in their own ignorance because they had no bridge, no reality construct to cross from this shore to the Other Side, from one reality to another.”

As a voice instructs Selma to “Build them a bridge,” I realized with chills of recognition that my recurring childhood dream of a train on an unfinished track jutting out into space was Spirit dispatching my mission statement: Become a world-bridger, build the bridge between mainstream and metaphysical. I was initially shown my life purpose in a dream at age eight, and only completely understood this early message at 55! I reveled in awe and gratitude for this belated awareness — even though I’ve been living “on purpose” for years.

How can we awaken to the clarion call of who we are, whatever our chronological age? Freedman says that by midlife, life has become a run-on sentence in dire need of punctuation, and he proposes a metaphorical semicolon to capture the sense of renewal and redirection.

Becoming An Elder of Excellence

Anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson, author of Composing a Lifeand Composing a Further Life, calls for establishing “a midlife atrium”: a sabbatical of sorts that functions as an opportunity to let in more light and air — which is precisely how Kathy Bates describes this shift in the film Fried Green Tomatoes. When her perplexed husband asks his quintessentially evolving wife, “What’s changed?” she muses, “Oh, the air and the light.”

Bateson writes, “The doorway to this new stage of life is not filing for Social Security but thinking differently and continuing to learn.”

We all have the choice to become “Elders of Excellence,” a Louise Hay euphonic. (Hay’s classic, You Can Heal Your Life served as a template during my awakening journey.) Even the word “elder” confers an essence of wisdom and respect that seems lacking when we append “ly”, transforming the vibrant, vintage noun into a frail, forgotten adjective.

Rabbi Zalman Schacter-Shalomi, author of the wise guide, From Age-ing to Sage-ing, says we become elders not by accruing years, but by harvesting our wisdom in service to others — future generations, yes, but also our peers who may be aging fearfully.

Elders, he writes, “have an ongoing responsibility for maintaining society’s well-being…They are pioneers in consciousness who transmit a legacy to future generations. Serving as mentors, they pass on the distilled essence of their life experience to others. The joy of passing on wisdom to younger people not only seeds the future, but crowns an elder’s life with worth and nobility.”

Wonder and Wisdom

Perspective shifts as we do. I learned this profoundly from my lifelong friend Ellie, who lived alone after her husband’s transition until she was nearly 96. At 72 she began writing letters to the editor of her local newspaper, expressing strong opinions about the salient issues of the day. Most of her letters were published, and in 2009 the paper ran a front-page profile lauding Ellie’s 22 years of chirographic activism.

When I interviewed her at age 92, Ellie shared how she was a surrogate mom to “lots of young people.” I was 48 at the time and wondered what she meant, since to me “young people” were in their teens and early twenties. I was amused by her reply: “In their fifties.” By the time you’re 92, fifty is young.

Ellie’s enduring gift has been the joy with which she greeted each morning, her gratitude for “being accepted” by Source for one more day, keen to give it her best and create a little more beauty in the world. The last time I saw her, she scampered down three flights of stairs (yes, at 95) and pressed her nose against the glass prior to opening the door to her apartment building, causing me to giggle.

“I hope you never lose your sense of wonder,” sang Lee Ann Womack, and she might have been channeling Ellie. Although my friend never learned to drive a car, she lived over the speed limit in every sense of the phrase. As elders-in-training, we can all embrace this teaching: when you get the choice to sit it out or dance, DANCE!

About the Author:

Ascension Lifestyle Managing Editor Amara Rose is a “midwife” for our global rebirth. She offers life crafting, e-courses, business alchemy and content creation to accelerate your evolutionary journey. Learn more at LiveYourLight.com, where you can subscribe to her resource-rich enewsletter, What Shines.

04 Jul 2021
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Stealth Spirituality

I was talking with a new copywriting client whose principal markets — entertainment and politics — aren’t often predisposed to metaphysics. Since I’ve long advocated “speaking in the language your audience can hear,” we discussed how to slip transformative messaging under the radar, through intent and light (which is in-form-ation, bringing the unknown into form).

This is especially vital now, as momentous cycles conclude and we face the end of life as we know it — not as cataclysm, but as an ascent into greater self-actualization.

The Alien Perspective

A French film from 1996, The Green Beautiful, is amusingly on point in its perspicacity, depicting how humanity appears to a highly evolved extraterrestrial visitor. The storyline:

No one from Mila’s harmonious planet wants to volunteer for the Earth assignment; we’re considered an incorrigible orb. But it’s been 200 years since they’ve sent an emissary, so Mila steps forward.

To prepare, her brain is encoded with telepathic programs that, when activated, will restructure human thinking. This is where the fun begins.

As the film gently chides us by illuminating standard behavior (“Yes, they’re still using the money!”) the wake-up calls become entertainingly engaging: this IS how we are — and how bizarre we might appear through an “alien” lens.

Yet, who is the real “alien” here? I’ve often felt like Mila since my awakening: reactive to the poisons we consume and expel, unsettling people by verbalizing what they barely think about. In The Green Beautiful, as each person is “disconnected” from their mental programming, they begin hugging trees, hugging each other, speaking their truth, and unwittingly creating pandemonium through paradigm-evanescing conduct.

A Confluence of Clues

When we’re paying attention, the synchronicities in our own everyday lives are strong, and point the way to greater awareness. Consider:

As children, my brother and I loved chasing milkweeds carried on the breeze. “Look, a friend!” we’d exclaim. Years later, through a reference in a novel, I experienced a profound ah-ha. The botanical term for milkweed is Asclepias. This chimed in me. I wondered, could my childhood ally be related to Asclepius, the mythological Greek god of medicine who was trained by Chiron (the archetypal “wounded healer”) — which was conjunct my Sun at birth? Yes. What we know, before we know that we know.

Further intrigue: Asclepius was born mortal but given immortality as the constellation Ophiuchus (“serpent bearer”) after his death. Yet Ophiuchus is not recognized as the 13th sign of the zodiac, even though both the celestial equator and the ecliptic pass through it. The number thirteen, like snakes, is a sacred symbol of transformation that has been debased in order to control the collective through fear.

By unmasking deception, we discover a deeper connection.

Melting the Mind

One more example:

In Mindwalk, a visionary 1991 film that I watched prior to my descent, a scientist, politician and poet discuss how Nature is perceived as mechanistic, modeled on the clock — and then I left on the Journey and reconnected with natural time cycles via Mayan cosmology, living in accord with Nature in the middle of a forest — much like the people in The Green Beautiful, who also enjoy “silence concerts”.

Did you know “listen” and “silent” are anagrams? Living the both/and rather than the either/or expands our perception of possibility.

Mindwalk’s passionate discourse invokes our global focus now: whole-systems thinking. Liv Ullman, as the film’s physicist, declares, “The essential nature of matter lies not in objects, but in interconnections. We are pure potentiality, probability patterns; relationships make matter.” Poet John Heard agrees, “Healing the universe is an inside job.”

Whether through stealth spirituality or out in Rumi’s joy-filled field, this is our moment. As the entire planet incubates in the Asclepeion (ancient healing temple), it’s time for an abundance of subtle shifts: from passivity to passion, from collusion to collaboration, from independence to interdependence.

For our relationships. For our countries. For our connection with All-That-Is. The new reality, morphing into being with every breath.

About the Author:

Amara Rose is Managing Editor of Ascension Lifestyle. Her work is widely published in health, business, lifestyle, and new thought magazines, both digital and print. Visit LiveYourLight.com, where you can also subscribe to her monthly e-newsletter, What Shines.

26 May 2021
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Context

There were only two check stands open, and lines of customers snaked down the aisles. I remarked, “They need to open another one.” The man in line behind me replied, “We can’t open it until it’s paid for.” I was perplexed: pay for a check stand?

A man across from me caught my confusion and said with a grin, “Amazing timing!” He explained that the first man wasn’t responding to me, but to his young son, who yearned to open a box of cookies. Minus this frame of reference, his words made no sense to me — yet their synchronous timing illustrates the crucial nature of context.

Caroline Casey introduces each broadcast of her weekly radio show with, “Welcome, allies, to the Visionary Activist Show, and I’m your weaver of context, Caroline Casey.”

What It Looks Like Is Not Necessarily What It Is

We’re all weavers, whether or not we’ve ever touched a loom. And context, from a metaphysical perspective, can look very different from what we perceive in 3D.

For example: I spent the first year of my 3-year “dark night of the soul” initiation in rural New York state, the latter two years in Santa Fe, New Mexico. For me, these locales were less residences than healing sanctuaries for my rebirth. When I was complete with each phase of my gestation, as though a bell had rung, I knew it was time to move on. Others simply dwell in New York or New Mexico as home; for me, they were crucibles.

When I lived in southern California, I knew a man who briefly owned a restaurant. He’d originally been a silent business partner of the fellow whose dream it was to open his own restaurant; when that venture dissolved, he placed his own name above the door, and customers continued to visit the establishment with no discernable difference. Except the eatery was mainly a storefront for Steve (name changed), a vehicle for his journey. It “looked like” a restaurant, but the place’s principal function was not to serve food.

Similarly: a woman harbored an intense desire to write a book about immature bosses. While her book and resulting online presence have no doubt helped many people, her quest to convey this material to the world sprang primarily from a need to heal her relationships with past superiors.

In each case, location, restaurant, and book created the context for valuable personal development, beyond the obvious outward purpose they served.

Information Alters Experience

We can gain new clarity or a profound ah-ha! from revisiting a catalyzing event, once we gain context that was initially absent. In 1993, I watched the film Resurrection, starring Ellen Burstyn and Sam Shepard. I’ve written before about what a visceral experience this was for me. When I discovered the movie uploaded to YouTube in 2010, I decided to watch it again.

What astonished me, from the vantage point of seventeen additional years and awakened perspective, was a reference to “the moon under her feet” (which comes, amusingly, from the Book of Revelations.) In 2003 I read The Moon Under Her Feet by Clysta Kinstler, a Mari Magdalene story that takes place 2,000 years ago. The book also affected me profoundly. When I watched the film in 1993, those words passed right by. In 2010, they pierced my soul. Context.

In these extraordinary times, the context of the known cannot provide the container for where we’re going. The new context arises from the liminal, luminous places we touch with our hearts, and can be both as ephemeral and as everlasting as breath. Each of us is the warp and the weft; we inter-are, as Vietnamese Buddhist monk, peace activist and author Thich Nhat Hanh says. What looms large is our future.

About the Author:

Amara Rose, Managing Editor of Ascension Lifestyle, is widely published in health, business, lifestyle, and new thought magazines, both digital and print. Visit LiveYourLight.com, where you can also subscribe to her monthly e-newsletter, What Shines.

15 May 2021
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Do You Create or Maintain?

As I watched a woman in a large corner home open the door to her housekeeper and child at 8 a.m. on a Friday morning, I mused, wouldn’t we all prefer to be the one living in that house rather than the one coming to clean it?

Perhaps. Yet Nature herself continually creates, maintains and destroys; that’s the essence of the life cycle.

While I think of myself primarily as a creator, the world needs daily maintenance — not least because of the mess we bipeds tend to leave behind. I wipe down sinks in public restrooms and often have to clean off outdoor tables before I can sit to eat at places like Whole Foods or our local Community Market; the staff can’t keep up with the detritus.

The Doors of Perception

Daily life is one of maintenance and renewal. Poet and novelist Marge Piercy writes,

“The work of the world is common as mud.

Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.

But the thing worth doing well done

has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.”

(excerpted from To Be of Use, © 1982)

Yet I’ve found myself disdaining some whose work entails tidying up the universe rather than contributing something fresh. In the pre-COVID era, the former maintenance manager at a local community center appeared almost comically addicted to keeping the exterior doors locked. When I sat inside to use their WiFi, I witnessed him checking and re-locking the doors at least a half dozen times within a few hours. It seemed a pointless exercise, as people streamed into the center for classes, meetings, and other events all day long.

Directly across the outdoor quad from the community center was a new senior wing. It was designed to be ADA compliant in every way — except the architects didn’t take into account many older adults’ diminished upper body strength. Over time, several women became trapped in the restrooms, whose heavy oak doors are almost impossible for someone using a walker or wheelchair to negotiate. So the community center’s maintenance counterpart now has the additional responsibility of constantly ensuring all eight restroom doors (two for each gender, at opposite sides of a long corridor in a 2-story building) remain stoppered open each weekday from 9 to 5.

There’s poetry to this, and a bit of Divine humor as well.

Years ago, metaphysical teacher and author Louise Hay made many audiotapes accompanied by the musical group Alliance. One I listened to repeatedly was, “Doors Closing, Doors Opening,” and while it focused on personal growth rather than physical structures, I find it amusingly applicable to the situations I’ve described. The main lyric went, “Doors closing, doors opening, doors closing, doors I’m opening. I am safe, it’s only change. I am safe, it’s only change…”

Are you opening doors or closing them? Do you create or maintain? Does your life weave between the two, and if so, are you growing in ways that feed your soul?

Mother Nature is always in motion. It’s important to clean up our messes and keep the doors to possibility open. And maybe, unlocking what seems a necessary barrier will let in some surprising gifts that may change your perception and release a fresh flow of creativity.

About the Author:

22 Mar 2021
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The Dandelion Principle

One spring I volunteered at a botanical garden, spending many days uprooting what to my untrained eye looked like lovely flowers and plants, because they were “non-native.” This particular garden cultivates only indigenous plants, so any errant seeds that have the misfortune to blow in and bloom are routinely removed

I found myself apologizing to the blossoms I pulled, innocent flowers who happened to settle in the “wrong” location. And I began to contemplate how much of our sense of borders and boundaries trickles down to everything we express as a species. While I’m not a horticulturist, my sense of deep ecology evolved out of my own healing journey.

Living Beyond the Lawn

Growing up in suburban America, I observed fairly rampant homeowner disgust with the dandelion, scourge of suburbia’s well-manicured lawns.

Much later, I discovered that dandelion is one of the most healing herbs available to humanity, offering itself in abundance wherever we may dwell. It’s a supreme liver tonic, known to help detoxify the body’s “processing plant.” In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), the liver equates to anger. If you want to release that pent-up rage in a healthy way, the remedy is probably available, free and easy, right in your own backyard.

Dandelion can act as de facto compost, gently surrounding and helping to decompose back into rich loam that which no longer serves. Yet we curse the weed and uproot it, spray poison to keep the green carpet unsullied. When we can stop “livin’ for the lawn,” focusing predominantly on the external, and make the subtle shift from ego mind to Universal Mind, we see with great clarity the incredible gifts all around us. Our teammates are everywhere, in the animal, plant and mineral kingdoms — if we have eyes to see.

Reimagining Inclusivity

As we move ever deeper into our collective rebirth process, we’ll be releasing people and places that no longer resonate with our lives now, and preparing to welcome in the new. Doing this with lovingkindness is our mandate. It’s a ripe moment to ask, who or what in my life seems like an outsider? Am I willing to look again, to enlarge the lens, to see beyond imaginary borders, to become inclusive rather than exclusive?

The Dandelion Principle says that where some see a weed, others see an herbal ally; a tonic not a toxic.

Where in your life is the medicine you need staring you in the face, masked as an undesirable…and all you need to do is shift your perception?

Below are seven practical steps to enlarge the lens this spring (fall, for our southern hemisphere allies): to slow down and look with the eyes of wonder, like a child. You’ll find many more on my mp3/CD, What You Need to Know Now: A Road Map for Personal Transformation:

Keep a journal. Buy a beautiful blank book and a pen that feels comfortable in your hand. Then allow yourself to write whatever and whenever you want. No one else need ever read it unless you choose to share, so send the censor packing! Journaling is like ingesting dandelion leaves with your pen — a great way to purge emotions and discover what really matters to you. And writing by hand is very different from writing on a digital device.
Dance your evolutionary process. Do you instinctively sway as you talk, or dance around the room when you get excited? Express your change process as flowing movement. Maybe it’s yoga, or tai chi, or free-form dance.
Make art. Are you a natural with a paintbrush or clay? Splash your emotions onto canvas, pour them into a mold, sketch them into being. Remember, this is art from the heart: done for the sole/soul purpose of enlarging your own vision.
Sing! Is your voice your most powerful expressive tool? If you love to sing but don’t know any songs, make up nonsense words to tunes you like, and sing them — in public. This is also a fabulous way to break free of the “What will people think?” trap.
Be in Nature. Sit by moving water. Sit inmoving water. Sing while sitting in a stream!
Prepare a meal that is as aesthetic as it is nutritious. As you combine ingredients, imagine that you are cooking up a grander vision for your life.
Hush. Spend a day, alone or with others, in total silence.

About the Author:

13 Mar 2021
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How to Save Time Forever

This month, approximately 75 countries worldwide will create an annual illusion: saving time. We move the hands of our clocks ahead, and think we’ve harnessed the sun. In the U.S., our participation begins at 2 am on Sunday, March 14^th.

How time flies when we perceive it as linear. By contrast, cultures that live in tune with natural rhythms do not alter their clocks, because clocks do not define their time. The seasons and the stars do.

I once heard thought leader Deepak Chopra share how he explained existence to his three-year-old granddaughter as they walked along the beach at sunset. Essentially, he told her she is made of starlight, and that the spirit of the stars is reflected in her eyes. Tara was silent while she digested this information. Then she said, “Nanna, look up!” When Chopra asked why, she replied, “The stars want to see themselves!”

Living in the zone

Time is elastic. Athletes know this. When athletes move into the space known as “the zone,” time slows down. They see every move or play with perfect clarity, and execute the correct maneuvers as if in a dream, sensing the favorable outcome. Something expands within them that translates into success.

How many people do you know who never seem to have “enough” time? We are each gifted with the same twenty-four hour cycle to use as we choose. People who are time-deprived are exhibiting one aspect of our pervasive scarcity consciousness.

Psychologist Maria Nemeth writes, in The Energy of Money, “Scarcity is a reality in the physical domain. As a minister friend of mine once told me, ‘It’s as though we got bored living without limits. We decided to incarnate — which means, literally, to turn into meat. We further chose to work with the limits of form, time and finite energy. This was to see how much of the divine we could bring into the mundane before it was time for us to leave.'”

As paradoxical as it may seem, says Nemeth, “We reach the infinite through living fully in the finite. The infinite is not reached by trying to ignore limits, as many of us try to do.”

Holding the both/and

And in Eastern Body, Western Mind, chakra expert Anodea Judith observes, “Manifestation requires an acceptance of limitation. A boundary allows us to contain, and thus collect and build.”

So holding the “both/and” is a prerequisite to freedom, whether from the constraints of the clock or the tyranny of the paycheck: “We must accept limitation in order to transcend it.” This is what zone athletes do.

My articles, Embracing Paradox Can Help You Beat the Clock and ‘Om’ Is Where the Heart Is suggest ways to shift your beliefs about time and creativity.

As we set our clocks ahead, in the wee hours of Saturday night or sometime soon, let’s look out at the stars and remember what we’re made of. Recognize the expansive possibilities that exist within the limits of form.

There is enough. It’s all a question of consciousness. Choose to embrace the both/and, and you’ll grow with the flow!

About the Author:

Amara Rose, Managing Editor of Ascension Lifestyle, is widely published in health, business, lifestyle, and new thought magazines, both digital and print. Visit LiveYourLight.com to learn more, and to subscribe to her monthly e-newsletter, What Shines.

21 Jul 2020
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The Magdalene Awakening: Reclaiming the Divine Feminine

For me, the Great Remembering began in illness. On a descent to the depths of my being, I found myself throwing my arms around trees and sobbing, feeling their loving embrace. I began talking to crows, paying tribute to their visceral wisdom in a poem that concluded, “A coded conversation/In guttural cries/Opens my eyes/And lifts me higher.” Stunned from exhaustion, I’d never lived in such clarity. With my brain on an extended vacation, I was forced to access a more primitive part of my being, to participate in the instinctual world, not merely watch.

I devoured books such as The Feminine Face of God by Sherry Ruth Anderson and Patricia Hopkins, and The Moon Under Her Feet by Clysta Kinstler. I became Inanna, the ancient Sumerian Goddess who symbolizes death and rebirth, with wisdom gained.

I attended a pivotal event, Returning to the Mother of Us All, birthed by singer/songwriter Jennifer Berezan. A multilayered, sensory-rich immersion, Returning featured musicians, dancers, poets, actors and activists from all over the world. I participated from an altered state of pure consciousness approaching ecstasy, and at the conclusion, as a 12-foot tall Black Madonna danced in the center of the main stage and the audience cavorted around her, I made my way through the throng to clasp Jennifer’s hands and affirm with heartfelt conviction, “You’ve changed my life”.

Synchronicity and Spiritual Service

These are just a few examples of the myriad ways the Divine Feminine began showing up in my life, as she is now showing up for women (and many men) everywhere. Shannon Andersen, author of The Magdalene Awakening, is a powerful voice in service to this remembering, sharing the essence of the journey she’s lived, decoding the sacred symbols and synchronicities that herald the re-emergence of the Divine Feminine on Earth, as reflected in the archetype of Mary Magdalene.

Trained in past life regression by Brian Weiss, M.D. (author of Many Lives, Many Masters) with an extensive background in religion, psychology, metaphysics and mental health, Shannon embarked on a global quest to discover the meaning of recurring synchronicities surrounding numbers such as 444, 222, and 153, and symbols such as the lily. She eventually found the link between Mary Magdalene, the Cathars, the Knights Templar, and gematria (numerically encoded messages embedded in both the Old and New Testaments). And true to the synchronous manner in which such awakenings unfold, her first past-life regression client remembered a lifetime as Mary Magdalene!

As I listened to Shannon singing my soul’s song during a gathering, I was enfolded in the Returning experience anew, at a deeper level of understanding. A sister in the Magdalene lineage, her words echoed in my cells. The beauty and sanctity of Mary Magdalene is that she is Everywoman. “So many people are having Magdalene experiences now because it is a call to come back to the heart,” says Shannon. “Mary Magdalene represents the strong spiritual aspects within ourselves.

“She is the voice of the Divine Feminine more easily heard by those brought up in a Christian/Jewish culture, as well as those who grew up in this time of awakening feminine power. In myth and legend she is known as the Apostle to the Apostles. She opened up southern France and Europe to Christianity; churches throughout the region are dedicated in her name. Mary Magdalene correlates cross-culturally with Isis, Mother Mary, Quan Yin, White Buffalo Woman and other archetypes of the Divine Feminine found around the world.”

I know from my own journey that synchronicity — a word coined by psychologist Carl Jung that means “meaningful coincidence” — is a key way Spirit commands our attention in the West, where we inhabit ninety-mile-an-hour lives and seldom take time to listen to our inner voice. Shannon had begun seeing the numbers 444 on digital clocks, waking every night at that exact time. She discovered a correspondence with Archangel Michael, and started using this synchronicity for guidance in making important decisions. When she pulled into the parking lot of a building where she was considering employment and the odometer rolled over to 444, she knew the job was hers.

She later learned that on a higher level of meaning, in the gematria of the Greek New Testament, the phrase, “In the beginning there was the word…” adds up to 444. After her book was published, she discovered, as with Magdalene dreams and visions, that people all over the world had begun seeing these master numbers as powerful messengers from their own subconscious mind. And she understood she was being called into service.

(Similarly, when my relationship with crows began in 1993, as legions of Lightbearers were being summoned worldwide, I did not yet recognize Crow as a powerful archetype of the Divine Feminine. I only knew that when they cawed to me, I felt kinship.)

When you step onto the path of awakening, synchronicity will find you. It is the manifestation of spiritual alchemy.

The Magdalene Frequency

This is the time when the Feminine frequency is returning to Earth, to heal and balance the masculine energies that have held sway on the planet for the past 5000 years. It’s the close of a Great Cycle, the Shift of the Ages, and spiritual leaders in all traditions are calling for this sacred reunion. Native American elder, Chief Sonne Reyna, says, “It is time for the women to lead.” The Dalai Lama reportedly said, “The world will be saved by the Western woman.” This is why Magdalene has returned now: to help bring us home to our hearts. The gematria of Magdalene in the Greek New Testament is 153.

Shannon recounts: “At my first book signing, I was curious to see men showing up. I asked one why he was there, and he told me he was a member of the Knights Templar, dedicated to Mary Magdalene. As similar experiences continued I became convinced it is the mission of strong spiritual women to initiate the men into their hearts.”

A secret order that arose during the Middle Ages, the Knights Templar are peace warriors who carry the sword of peace, like Archangel Michael. The historical Knights were thought to worship the Divine Feminine — and some say these Knights held the secret of the marriage between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. The sexual initiations of the sacred marriage represented the very alchemy of the creation of life.

The Cathars, a group of monks from the Middle Ages who also held the heretical belief that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were intimate,exalted them as a couple. The Cathars resonate to the number 222. When the Church launched a Crusade against the Cathars, 222 priests were slaughtered. A troubadour poet prophesied that the Cathars would return in 700 years to finish their work.

[Note: the Knights Templar were massacred on Friday, October 13, 1309 — which is why Friday the 13^this still considered unlucky! Of course, the Knights Templar vibrate to the number 13. It is the number that denotes transformation, enabling us to make a subtle yet quantum shift, from scared to sacred.]

Yet the Knights, known as the “snail men” because they left a trail for us to follow, knew that death was but a doorway into the next dimension. And today, those of us who are reawakening are both Cathars and Knights: rainbow warriors leading the way into a new dawn. It is 700 years since the 1309 execution: The Age of Aquarius.

“The Magdalene lineage is about service — being a strong, spiritual, heart-driven warrior-monk,” affirms Shannon.

One way to open the doorway to the Divine is to walk a labyrinth. A form of sacred geometry, the labyrinth serves as a connecting link between Heaven and Earth — just as the heart chakra joins the three lower, physical chakras with the three upper, spiritual ones.

When I was moving deeply into my own healing journey, I began visiting the labyrinth at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, which is patterned on the one at Chartes Cathedral in France. Each walk was a release and a blessing, as I remembered and reclaimed a lost aspect of myself.

Shannon shared that the six innermost petals of a labyrinth represent the initiation of the Lord’s Prayer. The rose image (Rose itself being one of the ancient secret names for Magdalene) models the Holy Spirit. The ceremony for walking the center petal, which can be found in The Book of Love by Kathleen McGowan, is:

1^stpetal = Faith

2^ndpetal = Surrender

3^rdpetal = Service

4^thpetal = Abundance

5^thpetal = Forgiveness

6^thpetal = Strength

You can find a labyrinth to walk via the Worldwide Labyrinth Locator.

Coming Home, Again

Shannon concluded our initiatory afternoon with a group past-life regression, asking us to watch for the lesson in that lifetime. I found myself as an 18^thcentury Dutch child named Magda, who turned away from the man I loved at age 17 and spent the rest of my life in regret. At my death I cried, “Oh, Ezekiel!”

Initially, I thought the lesson was to accept/allow love when and where I may find it. I felt Mary Magdalene’s presence; certainly I was named for her then, as now — and knew the message was to realize I AM love, and must receive it in order for my own wells to be full, to have something to pour back out to the collective (I’m an Aquarian, the zodiacal Water Bearer).

However, reading The Magdalene Awakening I discovered that 444 is also the number of the Biblical Ezekiel, denoting the angelic realm: “From the spinning orb of light there appeared four beings, with four wings and four faces.” (Ezekiel 1:4). And now I sense that I was looking into my own face, my Divine Masculine, who was asking me to claim my lineage as Magdalene and become one with him in sacred reunion. All true love must begin first within our own beings.

I was unable or unwilling to do so then. But I am here now, with a clear mission to connect the collective towards our eventual expression of unity. I am honored and humbled to be part of the Magdalene lineage, and to be in service at this magnificent moment on Earth.

If you are reading this, you are ready to reclaim your sacred power. Be not afraid. There are too many of us this time — and the Light will prevail.

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About the author:

Amara Rose is a spiritual artisan, author, and “midwife” for our global rebirth. She offers life crafting, e-courses, business alchemy and talks to accelerate your evolutionary journey. Learn more at LiveYourLight.com, where you can subscribe to her e-newsletter, What Shines.

20 Apr 2020
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The Great Unmasking

“Searchin’ the horizon

For what we can’t quite see

When all we’ve ever needed

Has been there all along

Inside of you and me…“

~ lyrics from A Little Soon to Say, by Jackson Browne

Here we sit, on the cusp of the Age of Aquarius: a true renaissance in spirit/mind/body for everyone on Earth.

Or is it the Age of the Virus, a plague that promises to be the end of the world as we know it? Theories abound:

Is the virus our body’s response to 5G technology?
Is it a bio-engineered plot to control the planet?
Has the magnitude of this event been “trumped up” for political gain?

Over the last few months, these and other questions about the origins of COVID-19 have been batted about ad nauseam. And while questioning authority is always a good idea, in this extraordinary time we need to question reality. So consider this:

Is the virus an out-picturing of endogenous fear — which is, itself, a virus?

Changing the World from Within

In the Gene Keys teachings, a powerful awakening tool that describes the shadow, gift and siddhi (enlightened mind) of 64 human consciousness codes, Richard Rudd writes, of Siddhi 49, Rebirth: “The first insight is that the world in its current form cannot be fixed, no matter how profound or far-reaching the revolution may be. The very bedrock of our modern society is founded upon a species that has always made decisions rooted in fear. The only way for a new future to be created is to begin from scratch — a rebirth.

“The rebirth is the organic flowering of the revolution. Just because we cannot fix the world as it is, does not mean we cannot make the world a better place. Our vision of the perfect future is precisely what creates the necessary frequency shift that will trigger the genetic forking of our species. It will happen because it must happen, but we must still create that happening. This is the paradox.”

If this coronavirus is the embodiment of our collective fear, is it causing the most severe symptoms in those whose DNA holds the greatest degree of ancestral terror? And if so, is this helping us accelerate towards what Rudd refers to as our “genetic escape velocity”?

Yet the genesis of the virus is still not our most powerful inquiry. The deeper conversation calling us is: what can we learn from what is transpiring?

This evolutionary moment heralds manifold gifts for humanity:

We’re healing ancient trauma. Mayan elder and cosmological historian Barbara Hand Clow has discussed paleoscientific research, which indicates “early humans showed no signs of being aware of the existence of the four seasons until 10,000 years ago.” The cataclysm that created Earth’s variable rotation, which gives rise to climatic changes, plunged us from unity consciousness into duality and survival mode, which is still encoded in our limbic brains. Our planet underwent a trauma and ever since, she “trembles,” bringing us the phenomenon of seasonal shifts. So our fear of the “end times” is actually a multi-traumatic memory, not a premonition. The virus is a memory trigger.
We’re giving the Earth a breather. In just 30 days, Himalayan peaks emerged from 30 years of pollution. In Venice, minus tourism, the canals run clear, prompting dolphins to frolic in the crystal waters. Perhaps most astonishing of all, the infamous Los Angeles smog is gone — a potent glimpse of what’s possible.
By staying home, we’re allowing wildlife to re-emerge in droves. Chimpanzee champion Jane Goodall says, “The world is only going to come right when every day is an Earth Day, because we’re part of the natural world; we depend on it.”
We’re connecting with “strangers”, having heartfelt conversations six feet apart, without artifice or agenda. While wearing facemasks, we’re becoming much more vulnerable, melting the masks of separation as never before.
We’re discovering what kindness means at a primal level. The ultimate key to coming home to ourselves as one people and one destiny may lie in what peaceable cultures have always known: from the pain that cracks our hearts wide open, compassion and kindness flower. Naomi Shihab-Nye’s poem, Kindness, eloquently expresses this “proper dose of poignancy”.

Clearly, this global time-out is a directive to be introspective. We’re being asked not just to isolate, but to innovate and co-create. As one ally put it, “It’s go time, Starseeds.” And we are.

Searching the Horizon

Viewing what’s taking place as a gift opens the quantum door to 5D, not 5G. It depends on how far we can allow our minds to s-t-r-e-t-c-h beyond the known. Everything is experimental, now. A Native American elder urges, “Let go of the known unreal, and throw yourself into the real unknown.”

As Thea Alexander writes in her wildly prescient 1976 novel, 2150 A.D.: “The measure of a mind’s evolution is its acceptance of the unacceptable.” Her Macro Society future is richly imagined, and I encourage you to read and share the book if you can get your hands on a copy.

A high frequency comedic French film, The Green Beautiful (La Belle Verte), explores similar themes: loving and respecting Nature, and loving ourselves as connected, whole beings at one with the natural world. The full movie is routinely removed from YouTube (hmmm…).

Love, not fear, is what needs to spread. Love is the key to our evolution. During my pneumonia gateway 27 years ago, I asked myself, if I died, what would I regret? The answer came quietly: “You haven’t loved.” This surprised me. Then I heard, “You haven’t served.” And I began to understand that loving, and serving, are one.

Now, we are all being asked to open our hearts to a greater degree than ever before. At the start of April, Venus, planet of Love, transited Alcyone, the central sun of the Pleiades, “activating a stream of powerful Divine Feminine energy that will be received on Earth to assist humanity to rise above the darkness and fear that is currently engulfing the planet.”

Growing to 20/20 and Beyond

We’re on a global vision quest in this year of perfect (in)sight.

Barbara Hand Clow writes, “Cosmic light reaches Earth in 2020. Miraculously, at the exact moment of the Winter Solstice, December 21, 2020, Jupiter conjoins Saturn in zero degrees Aquarius trine the Pleiades, the dawning of the Aquarian Age.”

Viewed from this Macro perspective, it is a true privilege to be alive at this nexus, ushering in the Shift of the Ages. We’re the sunrise of the kind of society 2150 A.D. and The Green Beautiful envision: peaceable, loving, healthy, and joyously co-existing with All That Is.

It’ll be a long road; we didn’t arrive where we are in an instant, and the changes won’t occur overnight. We can begin by adopting an eidetic suggestion from Kirstin Miller, executive director of Ecocity Builders: “Start thinking like a flower, not like a tailpipe.”

We are all cells in Mama Gaia, called to become perfusionists for the lifeblood of our planetary body. Out of the chrysalis, unmasking fear and denial to invite Love, respect and co-creation into our lives in a wholly new way.

All we’ve ever needed has been here all along, inside of you and me. Thank you for choosing to be embodied at this auspicious liminal threshold. Welcome Home.

About the Author:

30 Mar 2020
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COVID-19 Or CORVID-20? Giving Us Something to Crow About

Since the term COVID-19 became synonymous with our lives, I’ve been hearing “COVID” as “CORVID”. It’s one added letter, and the sound of change: “R”. Say it aloud: arrrggh. That’s the caw of Crow Wisdom.

Crows became my companions the summer I had pneumonia, a major spiritual gateway for me. During this period I faced the idea of death, and understood that I hadn’t yet served; that is, given my gift to the world. Pneumonia is about accepting life, breathing it in; the root, pneuma-, from the Greek, literally means, “that which is breathed or blown.” Philosophically, pneuma refers to the vital spirit, soul, or creative force of a person.

Like pneumonia, COVID-19 lodges in the lungs, which in traditional Chinese medicine correspond to the emotion of grief. We’re being called to grieve our disconnection/duality, both from one another and from our 3D reality, in order to fully release into the profound possibilities of connection and higher dimensional living.

Shallow breathing thus correlates to a fear of taking in life fully. Most of us live this way, motivated by self-protection and pain avoidance. It’s only when the pain of remaining where we are overwhelms our fear of the unknown that we’re catalyzed to change.

We need to stop looking outside ourselves for guidance and learn to trust our inner knowing. The lungs in Chinese medicine also signify boundaries and renewal. We’re in the midst of learning about both, in the form of a worldwide spiritual initiation.

Aliens Among Us

What if an alien life form descended to Earth; how would we respond?

Guess what? COVID-19 is this alien: a microscopic messenger on a mission to awaken the masses. Fear only magnifies it, because fear is a low vibration emotional state that floods our bodies with stress hormones, weakening us, lowering our immunity and leaving us open to illness of all types. In this sense, the fear of coronavirus has itself gone viral.

While we don’t need to love the virus, we do need to expand our love for one another, beyond age, race, cultural origin, religion, gender identity, and other artificial boundaries, and come together to unify and co-create ingenious new solutions to a global challenge.

This is the year of clear vision: 2020. How can we open our spiritual eyes to greater possibility? Corvid can assist. Birds are augurs, and never has there been a more important time to become a birdbrain.

Keeper of the Sacred Law

In Medicine Cards, Jamie Sams and David Carson write, “If you look deeply into Crow’s eye, you will have found the gateway to the supernatural. Crow knows the unknowable mysteries of creation and is the keeper of all sacred law.

“Human law is not the same as Sacred Law. Crow sees that the physical world and even the spiritual world, as humanity interprets them, are an illusion. There are billions of worlds. There is infinitude of creatures. Great Spirit is with all.

“Crow is an omen of change. Crow lives in the void and has no sense of time. The Ancient Chiefs tell us that Crow sees simultaneously the three fates — past, present, and future. Crow merges light and darkness, seeing both inner and outer reality.

“Crow medicine signifies a firsthand knowledge of a higher order of right and wrong than that indicated by the laws created in human culture. With Crow medicine, you speak in a powerful voice when addressing issues that for you seem out of harmony, out of balance, out of whack, or unjust.

“Remember that Crow looks at the world with first one eye, and then the other cross-eyed. In the Mayan culture, cross-eyed had the privilege and duty of looking into the future. You must put aside your fear of being a voice in the wilderness and ‘caw’ the shots as you see them.

“As you learn to allow your personal integrity to be your guide, your sense of feeling alone will vanish. Your personal will can then emerge so that you will stand in your truth. The prime path of true Crow people says to be mindful of your opinions and actions. Be willing to walk your talk, speak your truth, know your life’s mission, and balance past, present, and future in the now. Shape-shift that old reality and become your future self. Allow the bending of physical laws to aid in creating the shape-shifted world of peace.”

Isn’t this precisely where we are now?

Becoming Crow-Magnon Men and Women

In the summer of 1993, cawing to my crow messengers as I slowly regained my breath, I penned a poem/chant to these allies who enraptured my attention. Over the years we’ve sung it in rounds in drum circles, and the energy rises to a very high level. Choose your own audio accompaniment, and enjoy:

Black-winged wisdom on a wire

Cawing collect,

Caws and effect

A coded conversation

In guttural cries

Opens my eyes

And lifts me higher.

We are all becoming visionaries in this year of perfect (in)sight. The power and magic to heal are available to each of us. Step into the Great Mystery (and Mastery) and say a resounding “yes” to all you know and don’t yet know. Allow the unknown to be a gift rather than a fear. We must each traverse the corridor between the worlds of our own unfolding. You’ll come out the other side with wisdom gained, and compassion magnified a thousand-fold, in service to the collective.

CORVID-20. That’s something to crow about. Welcome Home!

Amara Rose is a metaphysical “midwife” for our global rebirth. She offers personal life crafting; business guidance; branding brilliance for your website, blog, or marketing campaign; signature storytelling, and a CD/mp3 to accelerate your evolutionary journey. Learn more at LiveYourLight.com, where you can subscribe to her inspirational e-newsletter, What Shines.

21 Mar 2020
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Sqrapple

“The more we allow ourselves to unfold,

the less likely we are to unravel.”

~ from Yearnings: Embracing the Sacred Messiness of Life by Irwin Kula

I’m a great fan of subtle shifts. Transposing a single letter, or altering where we choose to place our focus, can create quantum awareness: from scared to sacred, nowhere to now here. In this way, scrapple (a loaf-shaped meat stew) or scrabble (“to make great efforts to get somewhere or achieve something”) can morph into sqrapple: square apple.

We’ve created square watermelons in Japan, and square apples in South Korea. Why attempt to improve on Nature’s design? It’s part of our innate yearning to conquer space — shelf space. And while cubic fruit may be more dimensionally desirable, it lacks a certain poetic beauty that informs the original.

This seems to be our ongoing invitation and initiation: learning to hold the “both/and”, to express without excess, to midwife beauty and practicality in an 11^th-hour world.

Determining the Healing Dose

Beyond some of our more obvious paradoxes that comprise wholeness — laughing/crying, giving/receiving, birthing/dying — there is the greater stretch into “complex ambiguity”, which is akin to the homeopathic principle of poisonous allies: what’s deadly in a large dose can heal in a minute amount; the smaller the dosage, the greater the potency.

One of my favorite terms for the many ways we navigate the road Home is the cartographical “groundtruth”. I first heard it when I interviewed Planetwalker John Francis. A form of remote sensing, groundtruth refers to gathering information on location, then translating the data into meaningful results — much as we might combine our daily acts into outcomes that serve the collective. I can hear it as enlightened slang: “Dude, what’s your groundtruth?”

I also like the lyrics from an old Frank Sinatra tune, That’s Life: “I’ve been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn and a king/I’ve been up and down and over and out, and I know one thing…” We’re all All of it, and One with the All: fractals of the OneSong, Universe, harmonious chaos, Music of the Spheres.

We are each a force of Nature, a genetic/geometric/geomantic groundtruth, traveling at undreamed of speed through unimaginable vastness in a spherical vessel. It’s challenging to choose sides on a circle, especially as it describes delicious pi, which extends into infinity. Unite the circle and the square, however, and we approach transcendence.

This moment is ripe for new forms of collaboration, such as Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance,” another way of saying quantum entanglement: linked particles (or people?) that appear to communicate faster than the speed of light, no matter how far apart we may be. This is because we ARE light, shining inside one another, especially now.

Let’s be fruitful and welcome a confluence of allies into our expanded circle of influence. That’s a square deal, all the way around.

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