Amara Rose | Ascension Lifestyle

09 Apr 2017
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Becoming REAL

In recent times we may have felt like stand-ins in our own lives: understudies playing a role on short notice while waiting for our “real” selves to return. That’s not going to happen. We’ve been in dress rehearsal for the quickening, and it’s a flume ride of the highest order, a baptism from which no one emerges unchanged.

The good news? Density is transmuting into destiny faster than we can say “anagram”. The world stage is welcoming us as the human holons we are, stepping up to the plate and into our soul missions as never before.

From Resistance to Resonance

Holding the both/and has become paradoxically more challenging and much easier than in the past. We’ve had more than a taste of primordial chaos and pain. The flip side is primordial joy: what sociologist Emile Durkheim called collective effervescence (the idea that communally induced ecstasy cements social bonds) and anthropologist Victor Turner termed communitas: the spontaneous love and solidarity that can arise within a community of equals.

The unknown is both scary and powerful. Resistance cripples. Resonance emancipates.

As Heraclitus explained in his famous quote about not stepping twice into the same river, we can have constancy precisely because there is flux; it’s a primordial truth. Balance means loving all of who we have been, are, and will become. Or, as Shakespeare put it half a millennium ago, “This above all: to thine own self be true/And it must follow, as the night the day/Thou canst not then be false to any man.”

The REAL-izing Process

Of course, a proven way to make the imaginal real is through love. In one of my favorite children’s books, The Velveteen Rabbit, a little boy loves his stuffed bunny with all his heart. The Skin Horse, wise elder among the nursery animals, explains the “Real-izing” process: “It doesn’t happen all at once. You become. That’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily, or who have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

While we can’t yet see the outcome of the global shift well underway, we can’t miss the beauty flowering all around us as we live ever more fully into the Love that we are. We’re remembering and reclaiming our wholeness, integrating what was once “other” — and the understanding that grows as we do is beyond any happiness we’ve experienced thus far. Welcome home!

About the Author:

Amara Rose is a metaphysical “midwife” for our global rebirth. She offers spiritual mentoring, e-courses, a CD/mp3 of the journey to awakening, and an inspirational monthly newsletter.

Learn more at LiveYourLight.com. Connect with Amara on Twitter and Facebook

06 Mar 2017
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Imagine Nation

“If I could tell the world one thing

It would be that we’re all OK

And not to worry ’cause worry is wasteful

And useless in times like these

I won’t be made useless

I won’t be idle with despair…”

~ Jewel, Hands

Here in The Great Turning, the predominant emotion is often fear — the same energy as excitement. What we feel is a matter of interpretation.

It’s a time of incredible expansion, according to every cosmic weather report I’ve seen: an opportunity to compost our “harrumphitude” concerning Trumpelstiltskin (thanks to “mythic news” weaver of context Caroline Casey for these deLightfully winnovative words). If you have skin in the game vis-à-vis Trumpelstiltskin, this is the ripe moment to play your Trump card.

A Subtle Shift Makes the Diff

The key is our collective readiness and willingness to segue from living in Alien Nation to co-creating a global heart community, Imagine Nation. The shifts are subtle yet substantial: from thinking we’re alone to realizing we’re all one.

In Alien Nation, self-flagellation is popular. “I’m the only one I know who can blackball myself in my own community,” a woman despaired recently, explaining how, in angrily speaking her mind about an issue vital to her, she piqued the one person who might have proven most helpful, had she spoken with Spirit Tongue. I empathized, as I’ve often carried my own whips, too. Practicing self-love is the hardest task most of us will ever master.

Yet it’s so apparent that everything is vibration: while food shopping in a happy frame of mind at my local organic grocery, trading quips from old Monty Python routines with the customer in front of me at check-out, I was bowled over when the young cashier offered, “Would you like me to burn you a CD of their skits?”

True Happy Hour

A New Yorker cartoon shows a man standing in front of a sandwich board outside a bar. The board reads:

Happy Hour: 6-7 p.m.

Are you truly happy? Hour 7-8 p.m.

Have you ever been happy? Hour 8-9 p.m.

Wish you were home with your cat. Hour 9-10 p.m.

Would we need “Happy Hour” if we genuinely understood how to be happy?

When 9-1-1 happened in New York City, I penned, This IS A Test. A still-relevant excerpt:

“This event is a volcanic eruption, and in hindsight, the rumblings many of us have been experiencing the past few weeks presaged it. Several players on the path have been sharing stories of total strangers (as well as of acquaintances and friends) suddenly, savagely and inexplicably dumping truckloads of mental trash on them. Everyone has been feeling ‘the quickening’ of these end times, but, since we’re at different stages in our growth, those who have no context for what they’re experiencing also don’t know what to do with these volatile energies. The anger’s been leaking out, and finally, here’s the explosion.

“It is, in a very real sense, a planetary birth process. Something old has to die in order for the new to emerge. We are all learning how to transform the war within ourselves into spiritual warriorhood.”

Radical Evolution Redux

We don’t need tosh everything we disagree with; we can compost hubris into humus (another subtle shift). Rather than radical surgery, we can perform a Trumpectomy using radical evolution.

We’re all members of the surgical team now; all cells in the body of Gaia, our Mother. Malignant cells have lost the ability to cooperate with other cells for the greater good of the whole. Yet cancer does not arise in an instant; it grows over time. If we plunge ahead intent only on annihilating the cancer, we also destroy healthy cells, and possibly the entire body of humanity and all other species. By excising what no longer serves the collective, we can return to high health.

As the old evanesces and the new ripples into being, we build the Imagine Nation of the One Heart, where we are each re-spected (seen again), re-sponsible (able to respond), re-cognized (known again) and re-warded (honored) for our gifts.

After all, Earth is simply “heart” with “h” at the end: the ∞th letter of the alphabet, infinity, the secret of happy, the beginning of home.

About the Author:

Amara Rose is a metaphysical “midwife” for our global rebirth. She offers spiritual mentoring, e-courses, a CD/mp3 of the journey to awakening, and an inspirational monthly newsletter.

Learn more at LiveYourLight.com. Connect with Amara on Twitter and Facebook.

02 Feb 2017
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Pax Gaia: Putting All the Peaces Together

“Only now can we see with clarity that we live not so much in a cosmos (a place) as in a cosmogenesis (a process) — scientific in its data, mythic in its form.”

~ Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry, The Universe Story

Environmentalist James Lovelock proposed that the Earth is not only alive, but innately intelligent, regulating the conditions that allow life to exist. Now we’re learning how to co-exist — not only with our global siblings, but with our Mother. Our ancestors grasped this connection organically: they knew they were kin to Gaia, because they had a direct daily experience of how the land produced their food and materials for shelter.

Divorced from our origins, we’ve fallen into the sleep of self-forgetting. Lynton Caldwell, who helped write the U.S. Environmental Protection Act, said, “The environmental crisis is an outward manifestation of a crisis of mind and spirit.” Wrapped in our smart phones and iPods, living at 110 decibels, we’re anesthetized against an undefined yearning, what Teilhard de Chardin called “almost a sensual longing for communion with others who have a large vision.” Having lost touch with the wilderness within, we savage the Earth and each other in an effort to combat our loneliness.

Living intention, rather than in tension

Yet despite pacific cultures, past and present, peace is not intrinsic to the human experience. Cultural historian Thomas Berry writes, in The Dream of Earth: “The universe, earth, life and consciousness are all violent processes… The elements are born in supernovas. The sun is lit by gravitational pressures. The air we breathe and the water we drink come from the volcanic eruptions of gases within the earth. The mountains are formed by the clash of the great continental and oceanic segments of the earth’s crust.”

So if life itself is born from struggle, how can we hope to be peace? By embracing the hermetic dictum, “As above, so below”: knowing ourselves as the universe, and beholding the cosmos in each individual. Blake put it more poetically: “To see a world in a grain of sand/And a heaven in a wild flower/Hold infinity in the palm of your hand/And eternity in an hour.”

Human and planetary survival now depend on a resourceful resolution of our antipathies. In other words, neither violence nor peace is the answer, but rather, the highest state of creative tension that we can hold as a species.

To create Pax Gaia, the Peace of Earth, we need to truly view Earth as a global village — biologically, geologically, theologically. Berry says, “The Peace of Earth is indivisible. In this context the nations have a referent outside themselves for resolving their difficulties.”

Now we’re getting juicy. Evolutionary emissary Jean Houston speaks of her tendency to “mythologize rather than pathologize… What often appears to be chaos is really cosmos in its most literal sense — world making and remaking.” How might we adapt this philosophy on a planetary scale, so that instead of seeing problems needing solutions, we seek the grander story, the connective tissue that unites the issue?

Tom Atlee, author of The Tao of Democracy, tells a fascinating tale of being part of a mobile community that reached consensus without making a decision. Somehow, the group “knew” how it was going to function on the Great Peace March of 1986. Much later, Atlee learned that this is standard operating procedure among the Iroquois: in the tribal council tradition, participants simply talk until there is nothing left but “the obvious truth.” It’s a bit like boiling sugar down to syrup, or an oyster spinning a pearl from the irritating grain of sand in its shell.

Thinking like a flower, not a tailpipe

How do we midwife the obvious truth? Atlee admits the Great March breakthrough came only after all the feelings, stories, and information had cooked awhile in group consciousness. “[It’s like] the necessary cultivation of the earth in preparation for planting, like making compost… ‘setting the conditions’ needed to help the natural truth emerge, that takes into account all the different pieces of the puzzle. The struggly, juicy work early on provides the nutrient base for the ultimate discovery of that big truth” — which is then birthed in “an ad hocracy rather than a bureaucracy,” to borrow Houston’s evocative phrase.

The more we can perceive ourselves as cells in the body of Gaia, ever-evolving, willing to leap creatively across chasms of confusion and miscommunication to form elegant, improbable connections, the greater the possibility we seed for creating the Peace of Earth, rather than the pieces of Earth over which various factions routinely fight. As the cosmic comic Swami Beyondananda says, “If we put all the little pieces together, pretty soon we’ll have one big Peace.” One planet, indivisible. It’s a thrilling concept, and a refreshing response to the disruption and divisiveness playing out in the wake of the 2016 election.

As one strand in the system grows healthier, the others must follow, since we are all interdependent. Kirstin Miller, executive director of Ecocity Builders, suggests we “start thinking like a flower, not like a tailpipe.” Devise ways to pollinate instead of pollute.

We might also invoke the essence of the creative commons license, which allows people to share their work as long as proper credit is given, and no third party profits. Our air, water, and land resources are all ripe for “creative commons” protection and usage.

And this kind of cultivation, at once mythic and mundane, will accelerate our global guardianship into warp drive.

About the Author:

Amara Rose is a metaphysical “midwife” for our global rebirth. She offers spiritual mentoring, e-courses, a CD/mp3 of the journey to awakening, and an inspirational monthly newsletter.

Learn more at LiveYourLight.com. Connect with Amara on Twitter and Facebook.

06 Jan 2017
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Inner Space, the Final Frontier

“Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family.

Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one.”

~ Jane Howard

In the 3^rd millennium, we’re designing ways to travel that weave us more deeply into life’s web. People are opening their hearts and homes to intrepid travelers from around the world. Airbnb is in nearly 200 countries and expanding by the micro-minute. FriendsinRoute.com caters to travelers over forty, with the same basic concept: stay in a homey environment instead of a sterile hotel, and learn about your destination from the inside out.

This Earth Trek might be the ultimate social network. Because we’re searching for something beyond simple travel comfort.

We’re all driven by a fundamental need to be heard, acknowledged and loved. One of the greatest challenges is remaining present, open and loving when the other party — often a family member — can rapidly reduce us to a needy, sensitive child. When another’s reality clashes with ours, we must find a way to bridge the chasm. And sometimes the people who share our DNA are harder to reach than strangers.

Photo By Alessio Lin

Awakening guide Gillian Macbeth-Louthan writes, “You are asked to become the healer, you are asked to become the scholar. You are asked to become all that you shirk. You are asked to redesign yourself in a collage of life imitating art. You are asked to step up to the plate and sup upon what is needed to be done, let it fuel your life force. Instead of allowing life and her daily deeds to suck all of your energy, allow it to give you increased energy from all circumstances that surround you. Stop whining about what has befallen you and see it as a heavenly helping hand, a piece of the soul puzzle you seek to fit the picture in your heart.”

That’s the ultimate cosmic kick in the root chakra!

Getting here calls for a subtle shift in perception and behavior: from require to inquire, from escalate to elevate, from accumulate to appreciate. As we cease consuming planetary resources and each other at the speed of greed, let go of buying more in favor of being more, we reclaim our true heritage as Earth stewards, heart stewards (Earth and heart are the same word; only the “h”, for Home, relocates). Then barrenness transmutes into bounty. Separation into synergy. Fear into faith. Longing into Love.

During this season of transmutation, as we reach out to build connections with our brothers and sisters in diverse communities
and circumstances, let’s remember to fill our own wells first, so we have enough overflow to pour ourselves into another’s outstretched cup.

We become self-renewing by gathering knowledge from our experience, forging it into wisdom in the alchemical fire, and serving as vessels to share the gift. Conscious evolution favors the curious and kind mind. Truth nourishes us in ways we might never have imagined. Synchronicity takes us by the hand and we laugh in child-like wonder as we witness Spirit-in-action, again and again and again.

This is how we “win” the space race: by boldly going where no one has gone before, deep into one another’s hearts. May you journey well.

About the Author:

Amara Rose is a metaphysical “midwife” for our global rebirth. She offers spiritual mentoring, e-courses, a CD/mp3 of the journey to awakening, and an inspirational monthly newsletter.

Learn more at LiveYourLight.com. Connect with Amara on Twitter and Facebook.

03 Dec 2016
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Homecoming

Home. Except for love, perhaps no word in the English language conjures more evocative imagery. We crave the cozy, nurturing, roaring-fire scene depicted so effectively on film. Home houses our identity. It’s less about the four walls than what they represent: “the abode of one’s affections, peace or rest,” according to Merriam-Webster. At some point in our lives, many women (and men, too, if they will admit it) harbor a fearful fantasy of becoming a “bag lady/guy,” carting our belongings out on the street. We see the homeless and quake — “there but for the grace of God go I.”

What we’re seeking is a sense of security inside ourselves, a home within that can never be taken away. As national boundaries dissolve and corporations invite poets and spiritual mentors into their boardrooms, the hunger for this broader definition of home has never been greater.

From Me to We

Creating this inner sanctuary will entail a quantum shift for many of us: out of the competitive, “What’s in it for me” worldview into a more collaborative, compassionate perspective in which the operative question becomes, “How may I serve?”

For instance: as record numbers of us skate towards elderhood, home care has become a hot topic. What does this mean? On one level, “home care” is about providing caregiving in the home to enable our elders and homebound to remain in their comfort zones. But the larger view begs our attention. Before we can care for our home, we need to know it viscerally. We must embody the place of wholeness that wants to be born in us.

Our own bodies and the planetary body are inextricably linked. Anthropologist Gregory Bateson speaks of “the pattern that connects,” the common ground of our unity. We exist in relationship to everyone and everything else on Earth. What kind of home care is our aging Mother receiving? Maybe that’s the real key to conscious aging: caring for the personal and the planetary with equal reverence.

Living in Tune with Nature

In other societies, the old ones are the keepers of wisdom. So-called developing cultures that honor their tribal elders also honor the land in which they live. “Home care” is a unified practice for them, as indigenous as the planting and the reaping, as natural as celebrating life’s quotidian rhythms with ritual.

In this visionary view, we’re all caregivers — Earth stewards, some say. Home care for our elders is rooted in how we create home in our daily lives. What kind of home do we want to cultivate and care for, inside ourselves, interpersonally, and as part of the collective “home body” we inhabit?

Try this: for the next week, take a time-out from worrying about the economy, your teenager’s pierced body parts and the latest virus scare to live into the larger questions about the quality of life you’re choosing in every moment, by the way you live, by what you do and don’t honor. Does your definition of home serve you? Is it inclusive or exclusive? Will your practice of home care help create a sustainable future for us all?

Within a decade, for the first time in human history, the number of people in the world aged 65 and older will exceed that of children under five. If you’re not already among this exhalted majority, one day you will look in the mirror and see your grandmother’s or grandfather’s eyes. Will they reflect the wisdom of generativity, of the home that you carry with you always, as a turtle does, caring for it because it is an intrinsic part of you?

Native Americans call this planet Turtle Island. I imagine this is what they mean.

About the Author:

Amara Rose is a metaphysical “midwife” for our global rebirth. She offers spiritual mentoring, e-courses, a CD/mp3 of the journey to awakening, and an inspirational monthly newsletter.

Learn more at LiveYourLight.com. You can also connect with Amara on Twitter and Facebook.

01 Nov 2016
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Living In the Zone

Twice a year, approximately 70 countries worldwide create a collective illusion: saving time. We move the hands of our clocks, and think we’ve harnessed the sun.

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.

“The stars want to see themselves!”

Thought leader Deepak Chopra, MD, once shared 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 for fifteen minutes while she digested this information. Then she said, “Nanna, look up!” When Chopra asked why, she replied, “The stars want to see themselves!”

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 triumphant outcome. Something expands within them that translates into successful action.

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.

How limits expand possibility

In The Energy of Money, psychologist Maria Nemeth writes, “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.”

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.”

What “enough” really means

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.

As we set our clocks back an hour this Sunday (in the United States), 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 just a question of consciousness. Choose to embrace the both/and, and you’ll grow with the flow!

About the author:

Amara Rose is a spiritual artisan and “midwife” for our global rebirth. She offers one-to-one guidance, e-courses, a digital download CD, talks and playshops to accelerate your evolutionary journey, and is widely published in health, business and new thought magazines, both digital and print. Learn more at LiveYourLight.com, where you can also subscribe to her free e-newsletter, What Shines.

http://twitter.com/Amara_Rose

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https://www.linkedin.com/in/amararose

07 May 2016
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Spirituality? Is That Like Religion?

When I moved to California in 1981, spiritual exploration was still in my future. I had my first astrological reading that year, and the astrologer, who twelve years later would provide a reading that helped redirect my life during my awakening, referred several times to “spirituality.” She recorded the session, and on the recording you hear me asking in a perplexed tone, “What’s spirituality? Is that like religion?”

I needed to live my own spiritual journey before I understood. The terms can be synonymous, but often they are not.

The Difference Between Spirituality and Religion

The Dalai Lama, spiritual leader of the Tibetan Buddhist community, has said, “My religion is kindness.”

The word religion derives from the Latin religare, which means “to tie fast” or “to bind together.” One dictionary definition of religion is, “a set of beliefs, values and practices based on the teachings of a spiritual leader.” This would seem to suggest that religion is a subset of a larger rubric called spirituality.

Yet defining spirituality is a bit like describing color to one who has never known sight. Perception will vary according to your beliefs. Of the myriad online resources attempting to answer the inquiry, “What is Spirituality?” a Unitarian Universalist minister offers this view:

Spirituality is being concerned with things of the spirit — the big questions of meaning, metaphysics, existence. Being spiritual is thinking about, wondering about, and exploring the deepest aspects of reality, values, morals, and meanings.

Spirituality is mis-defined if it is equated with super-naturalism, which tends to be the mistake I find when I hear people object to the word. Nothing about a search for values, morals, and meanings implies faith instead of reason, or emotion instead of intelligence. Spirituality can be all those things, and it is to some people, but not exclusively so. After all, ‘spirit’ simply means ‘breath,’ as in ‘inspire’, ‘expire’ or ‘inspiration.’ Spirit is about being filled with life. It’s about all the ways that we try to make sense of our living, and our attempts to make good from our lives.

Thus, the Dalai Lama’s statement, like his work in the world, broadens the scope of religion to embrace its spiritual essence: both begin with how we think, feel and behave.

How What We Believe Affects Our Health

In recent years, scientists have demonstrated in the lab what mystics and spiritual teachers have been saying for centuries: consciousness creates reality. Renowned neuroscientist Candace Pert, featured in What the Bleep Do We Know!? and author of Molecules of Emotion: Why You Feel the Way You Feel, established that emotional communication begins at the cellular level, with tiny proteins called peptides.

Breakthrough cell biologist Bruce Lipton, author of The Biology of Belief, confirms that our attitudes and thoughts create our physical bodies. He writes, “Cells respond to perception by activating either growth or protection behavior programs. If our perceptions are accurate, the resulting behavior will be life enhancing. If we operate from ‘misperceptions,’ our behavior will be inappropriate and will jeopardize our vitality by compromising our health.”

In a nutshell: think negative, create warped DNA. Change your mind, change your body!

During the past few decades, medical science has also begun documenting the “faith factor” in healing. Physician Larry Dossey, a pioneer in exploring the role of prayer in healing, says, “I used to believe that we must choose between science and reason on one hand, and spirituality on the other, in how we lead our lives. Now I consider this a false choice. We can recover the sense of sacredness, not just in science, but in perhaps every area of life.”

Stepping Onto the Path

So, how does spirituality “happen”? Awakening is a journey, and just as with literal travel, this metaphorical passage is different for everyone. For many people, the call to embark on a spiritual path is preceded by a period of questioning or difficulty, when one or more aspects of your life no longer flow smoothly. This was what my summons looked like.

Being willing to surrender into the unknown is a huge, scary — and necessary — initial step, because you can’t “figure out” spirituality in a linear fashion. You might begin a spiritual exploration by reading about the world’s religions, or sampling various types of spiritual services. Some people seek out a teacher or guru. Some learn to meditate. Others go on retreat in the wilderness. There are as many ways to claim your spiritual truth as there are people. A formal practice isn’t required, although this can be a useful way to “get out of your head” in the early stages.

Ultimately, the journey to Spirit will be unique to you.

Spiritual vs. Material

Of course, it’s important to balance spirituality with the 3-D world. You don’t need to take a vow of poverty in order to live a spiritual life! This is a frequent misconception among both spiritual and religious aspirants: that a dedication to spiritual service requires one to renounce worldly possessions.

People often find that committing to a spiritual path dramatically changes their lives. Material resources may fall away, but this usually has little to do with religious or spiritual doctrine. It’s more likely a result of a desire to pare down possessions in an attempt to discover what’s necessary and valued, to release aspects of one’s life that no longer serve, or a deep-seated belief that it’s somehow “more spiritual” to be poor. Role models from Jesus to Gandhi to Mother Teresa have ingrained an unintentional link between spiritual service and self-sacrifice in our collective consciousness.

Those who possess spiritual wealth know that love and compassion are the true sources of sustenance. As the Dalai Lama so eloquently expressed, the most devout religious belief can be embodied as kindness. A person overflowing with goodwill towards others is incalculably richer than someone with a big bank account and a stingy spirit.

Full Circle

Fourteen years after wondering aloud what spirituality was, I was discussing my personal growth odyssey with my Dad. After I’d shared passionately for a while, he said, “You know, honey, when you say ‘spirituality’, I have no idea what you mean.”

My heart swelled with recognition. I took a thoughtful breath, and began to frame my reply.

About the author:

Amara Rose is a “midwife” for our global rebirth. Her services include transformational guidance, talks, e-courses, a digital download CD, and an inspirational monthly newsletter. She is widely published in health, business and new thought magazines, both digital and print. Learn more: http://www.liveyourlight.com

http://twitter.com/Amara_Rose

http://www.facebook.com/LiveYourLight

https://www.linkedin.com/in/amararose

19 Jan 2016
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Fire and Water: The Deeper Meaning Of What We Unleash

When I was deep into my spiritual awakening, I had startlingly prescient dreams; in one, the words, “violent emergency” reverberated through my mind. It was a violent emergence; birth is fierce. There is an ocean of difference, however, between Nature’s ferocity and that which is deliberately inflicted by human beings with their own agendas.

Theologian and author Thomas Moore writes, “Deep in the etymology of ‘violence’ is a strong Latin word, vis. It is the power in nature that we sense in the surging sea and the growth of grass. In our experiences of violence we witness the vain attempt of life to push itself into existence and visibility. This is a sexual power. Sex is not just about making bodies but making souls as well. The people of the world need every opportunity to be creative and visible. They need to enjoy life, not just survive. Without that opportunity, they will turn to violence, in spite of themselves.”

Life’s Novocaine

We tend to go through life anesthetized against our own yearning. The call to claim our power can be terrifying, because it means accepting our invitation to the Dance — and most of us have forgotten how to dance, if indeed we ever knew. We find it easier to lash out in anger: rage, the undiscovered country. If being “outrageous” means getting the rage out, Americans are black belts. Having lost touch with the wilderness within, we savage the Earth and each other in an effort to combat our loneliness.

War is the grand expression of this misdirected energy. It’s akin to our ability, or lack of it, to harness the power of the sun. Yoked to our solar egg, we could shine on in all our ecological radiance for millennia. Yoking means union, but we’re used to living the more limiting definition of bondage. Trussed to our desperation, we sigh, “That’s life!” Since interdependence — becoming what Kenny Ausubel christened “Bioneers,” or biological pioneers, co-creating with Nature — feels so foreign, we stay (un)comfortably in the familiar, pump up the volume, and wearily watch as the world turns.

There is a way out: it’s through. The trees are gods and goddesses who in their stillness keep the Earth’s counsel; the animals are our allies. We can commune with a snake or a sea lion as easily as with the people we call kin. The key lies in reclaiming our wildness — not as violence, but as an abiding, sensuous connection with Nature. Instead of experiencing everything at one remove, we can allow it to enter us.

My Inannic odyssey delivered me deeply into this truth. In illness and vulnerability, I threw my arms around trees and sobbed out my grief, 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 organically in the instinctual world, not merely watch.

How Peace Begins

This is how peace begins: by singing the wild symphony of Nature back into our cells, feeling the music of the spheres in our marrow, embodying the feminine creative principle. By raising our resonance, we become “the vessel which can contain all blessing,” as one ancient text describes peace. This is also how we heal our bodies, and the body of Gaia: “immune” means sacrosanct, inviolate, whole. In celebrating all life, we pulse a radiating joy that resurrects our daily dance. And you can’t wage war while dancing.

We’ve entered a new era. It is only in recent memory that strong antiwar sentiment (Iraq, Vietnam) has held sway. For much of human history, war has been an acceptable means of “protecting our interests,” “keeping the world safe for democracy,” or any number of other platitudes. If thousands, perhaps millions, of innocents had to die in the process, well, they were war heroes. And the villagers in other countries, slaughtered in the name of whatever deity one invoked, deserved death because they were “the enemy.”

Jeannette Rankin, the first woman elected to the US House of Representatives and the only member of Congress to vote against US entry into both World Wars, once declared, “You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.”

She makes an enduring point. Did anyone “win” the Indian or Chilean ‘quakes? Are we “winning” the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan?

What’s really going on here? What is the higher purpose of the impulse to violence we all harbor within, to a greater or lesser degree?

Fire and water are complements; harmonized, they elevate consciousness and catalyze healing. I sang these words often during my own dark night of the soul. Instead of the old, tired dominator matrix, using firepower in an “us” vs. “them” scenario, we can embrace the true fire within us, and discover the myriad ways to channel this potent energy for good.

Embracing the True Fire Within

Becoming a spiritual warrior is a profile in courage (which means heart.) Spirit asks, “Have you the conviction to stand by your heart? Are you willing to transmute war in the alchemical fire?” The fire within is the perfect peace of God/Goddess/Creator/Innate Intelligence, which expresses outwardly as enthusiasm (from the Greek, “possessed by God”), inwardly as a calm awareness.

We’ve mastered communicating from our wounds. Now we’re in a pivotal age, creating a context in which it’s safe to share who we are in love, in truth, in well-being. Our collective task is to marry scared and scarred with sacred, density with destiny, jaded with jubilant; to become inclusive not exclusive. Because none of us is truly free until all of us are.

This is one of the meta gifts of these disasters (which means, “against the stars”): they bring us face to face with The Other, in our psyches and out in the world, so we can see how they’re one and the same. All anyone can do is introduce you to yourself. So as you look in the mirror of your brother’s or sister’s face, be kind to your own confusion, criticism, sadness, or fear. Acknowledging your strand in the evolutionary web is, in itself, a giant step on the path to peace.

It’s time for each of us to create a personal crucible: a safe container for our energies. Envision your inner chalice. Then place this cup, brimming with fiery potential and the waters of life, into your heart, where it will become a perpetual font of inspiration and renewal — and, in time, of unconditional love.

As the Maya say, In Lakéch: I am another yourself.

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About the author:

Ascension Lifestyle author Amara Rose is a “midwife” for our global rebirth. Her services include transformational guidance, talks, e-courses, a digital download CD, and an inspirational monthly newsletter. She is widely published in health, business and new thought magazines, both digital and print. Learn more: http://www.liveyourlight.com

10 Nov 2015
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Scared to Sacred: Falling in Love with 13

In high school English I learned a 64-carat word for a common ailment: triskaidekaphobia, or “fear of the number thirteen.” The elevator in my grandparents’ apartment building omitted the thirteenth floor. Apparently the assumption was, nobody would have wanted to live on it. It was a fashionable New York City address; fear and loathing cross all perceived boundaries. I also recall a series of horror movies with “Friday the 13th” in the title.

A society steeped in superstition and a materialistic value system will find it easy to assign anxiety to anything that threatens the status quo. Thirteen is the number of movement, of change — a wild card — and that can be very scary. But it’s our lost connection with the Divine in everyday life that gives rise to such distress. Divorced from our origins, terrified of our own power, we profane the sacred: thirteen becomes unlucky, evil, a curse; symbolic scapegoat of all we’re afraid to embrace.

When we can take the thirteenth step, however, we’re on the first step of the Stairway to Heaven. With the courage to look, we find thirteen stitched into the very fabric of American culture. Thirteen colonies gave birth to a nation. The first American flag bore thirteen stars and stripes. We were on the right track back then, grounded into the roots of our heritage.

Think about it: thirteen has traditionally been cause for celebration. The thirteenth year signifies a coming-of-age, also across all perceived boundaries. In the Jewish religion, boys make their Bar Mitzvah at thirteen. This ceremony, which involves reading from the holy Torah, marks a boy’s entrance into manhood.

Girls generally begin to menstruate at thirteen. Cross-culturally, it’s common to commemorate the first blood with an initiation rite; here in the West, this significant threshold is at last beginning to be recognized as a powerful, sacred passage. (My e-course, Loving Our Lunacy, is an embodied initiation for women.)

In fact, there are even thirteen sun signs in the Real Solar Zodiac — which is not the one used in conventional astrology. Ophiuchus, the serpent bearer, has been omitted from the oversimplified Tropical Zodiac used in the West. Yet the serpent denotes transformation — and on the Winter Solstice of 2012, long prophesied by indigenous cultures worldwide as the Shift of the Ages, Earth directly aligned with both Ophiuchus and the center of the Milky Way galaxy.

Thirteen, then, is a fundamental Earth rhythm, biorhythm, manifested in our physical bodies as well as the heavenly ones. To reject thirteen is, perhaps, to reject or deny some core aspect of ourselves as human beings.

How can we reawaken to our true purpose and potential, beyond the fear and perception of separateness? By reclaiming our native knowing.

One way that resonates for me is following a 13 Moon Calendar. The 13 Moon Calendar shows us a path to walk to restore right relationship in our lives, to re-member (make membership again) our journey as one Earth family. Based on an annual solar cycle of 13 moons (months) of 28 days each (the female menstrual cycle), plus one “day out of time” in which to reflect and regenerate, the 13 Moon Calendar is synchronized with Earth rhythms and human biology. It’s expansive, intuitive, juicy, flowing: life, in all its harmonious chaos.

The beauty of this apparent paradox lies in learning to honor them both/and: life is orderly and messy, pragmatic and unpredictable, spiritual and material. Living in tune with these innate contradictions, we breathe in our own magnificence, and feel nourished and held in the body of the Great Mother.

Our Gregorian calendar, by contrast, models scarcity, so we always subtly feel like we’re starving: if you get what you need, there might not be enough for me. Living a compressed, alienating, sterile existence, our spiritual lungs squeezed for air, we evince these invisible shackles in the way we treat each other and Gaia. Time-is-money, me-first, bigger-better-best, I want it yesterday, are the credos of mechanistic time. Pursued by the clock, separated from our humanity, we’ve forgotten that time is creativity, that women carry time in their bodies, and have come to accept the clock as king.

Another Earth-based analogy may also help: I’ve observed a fairly rampant homeowner disgust with the “lowly dandelion”, scourge of suburbia’s well-manicured lawns — when in fact, dandelion is one of the most healing herbs available to humanity, offering itself in abundance wherever we dwell. It’s a supreme liver tonic, known to help detoxify the body’s “processing plant.” 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 is so plentiful that I find it also acts as de facto compost within me: 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 such great clarity the incredible gifts all around us.

In the 13 Moon Calendar, the number thirteen, like dandelion, grows everywhere; it’s the key thread on which the harmony of the calendar is woven. And on a 13 Moon Calendar, there’s always a Friday the 13th — in a 28-day month, every second Friday is Friday the thirteenth!

As our evolutionary readiness dissolves old superstition around the number thirteen — and all it represents — our collective mindfield makes a quantum leap from mindless fear to aware acceptance of thirteen as the sacred number of the spiral, the energy of kundalini awakening, the step to transformation and growth. Unified in time, living on purpose, a metamorphosis occurs as we attune to a higher frequency.

Metamorphosis means not only change, but going above, beyond what existed before. The Sufi mystic Rumi said, “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right doing there’s a field; I’ll meet you there.” In this quantum field, we midwife moth into butterfly. Scared into sacred. Each of us into our true purpose and potential.

What is this time of profound transmutation helping you bring to birth? Whatever it is, may it be in beauty, for the greatest good of all.

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15 Oct 2015
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Deep “E”-cology: Coming Home to Ourselves

There’s a war going on, and it’s not with Iraq. (Or Afghanistan. Or Syria.)

This war is on a scale so vast it’s difficult to see, so ancient we’ve taken it for granted.

It’s a war that has been gathering momentum since humanity first became conscious. It cuts to the very core of existence. It’s what drives the corporations and the deep ecologists, the religious right and the lovers. It’s woven so tightly into the fabric of our lives that we’ve accepted it blandly, without knowing there was ever a choice. It’s caused untold human misery for millennia, and still it burns on, more vividly in the digital age than ever before, as our collective awakening arches toward Armageddon — or quantum evolution.

It is the struggle between truth and heresy. Between subservience and sovereignty. Between opening our minds to wisdom, and clinging to what we’d prefer to believe. Between following a well-worn path, and cutting a swath through the wilderness of our souls.

This war marshals all of our natural resources. Passion and commitment. Love and communion. Faith and ecstasy. If we use them well, our stores will increase. If we use them foolishly, a barren landscape is certain. Because this war is taking place inside each one of us.

World Wide Web

$fractal-ying-yang-jaroslaw-grudzinski$

It is a clarion call to yinify: to wed our masculine and feminine energies for internal and external balance, harmony and peace at every level of co-creation.

Becoming whole — embracing our assertive/dynamic/solar/yang side and our receptive/magnetic/lunar/yin side, both within ourselves and as a planetary organism — is the creative quest of our time. It’s a homecoming, a re-membering (making membership again). As we are able to celebrate this marriage first in our own hearts, the joy and the love we then have available to share with our sisters and brothers increases exponentially.

Evolution through relationship defines the true “world wide web”: weaving our oneness through the meeting of minds and the holding of hands.

No lasting outer peace is possible without this inner reunion. The absolution of duality is the key to living Heaven on Earth, because it means the end of judgment. As the cosmic comic Swami Beyondananda says, “Nonjudgment Day is coming.”

With nothing to choose between, we are integrated, living in integrity, whole. In the seventh century, Zen master Sengstau expressed this potential eloquently in Verses On The Faith Mind:

The Great Way is not difficult
for those who have no preferences.

When love and hate are both absent
everything becomes clear and undisguised.

Make the smallest distinction however
and Heaven and Earth are set infinitely apart.

Understandably, this is not an easy task for most of us to master — or to choose to master.

Many have run, continue to run, for apparent refuge, either into religious doctrine, which tells us how to think and what to believe, or into other well-organized movements masquerading as paths to freedom. Some groups purport to focus solely on spiritual love, ignoring the truth that matter is Spirit in form. Others emphasize sexual union as the ideal path to oneness, omitting the sacred element, and once again it is a lie.

It can be comforting to be a foot soldier in someone else’s army. You don’t have to do any real thinking. You don’t have to take responsibility for the outcome you help create. You can externalize your role: it’s terrorists, it’s the government, it’s anybody who looks or acts or sounds different from me. This is the old, patriarchal view that’s held sway for five thousand years. This Weltanschauung has run its course and is completing its earthly cycle, now.

If you choose not to acknowledge the war at all, you can still go on raising a family behind a white picket façade, with Sunday suppers and comfortable routines that mark a life. But the time for hiding out in this delusion is deliquescing, like Dali’s famous clocks. The light of universal fire is bleaching falsehood from our souls, enlightening and enlivening us, one by one, cell by cell, bringing more joy to the journey.

What we can learn from the limbic brain

The truth is, we’re all equal backstage, when the make-up and the costumes and the constructs come off. We are all rays of the One Being, sharing the same life support system, Mother Earth. Our similarity is the great leveler, because it humbles our unique, snowflake selves into awareness of a greater whole.

This was brought home to me recently when I was having dinner in a Chinese restaurant where I’ve eaten many times. I like a certain dish on the menu, substituting a sweet and sour sauce for the standard garlic sauce. One waiter, who is Chinese, knows my order so well he even “recognizes” me over the phone when I place a to-go order.

The other evening, dining at the restaurant, I ordered that same dish. The place was bustling. When I went up to pay, the waiter, who happened to be standing by the cash register, did not know me as the woman who always orders the dish with the different sauce.

I had a flash of insight and asked him kindly, “Please don’t be offended, but Caucasians — do we all look alike?” With a relieved grin he said, “Yes.” The Caucasian cashier was amazed by my question, but I understood. I told her, “It’s like this for every race, every culture. Isn’t it more difficult to differentiate between Asian or African-American people whom you don’t know, than other Whites?” She admitted it might be.

We’re coded with an innate affinity for our own small portion of the whole. This is the ancient, limbic brain in action, defending our “territory” against invaders; limbic means, “forming a border.” To bridge this chasm is the beginning of world healing. Recognizing the Other through conscious understanding takes both patience and practice.

To see the big picture we have to widen our scope, extend our artificial boundaries. There are no actual map lines on Earth, delineating this country, this language, this religion, this culture from the next. We’ve created it all. It’s our collective game. As we become technologically proficient, the playing field shrinks to a more agreeable size, and the game starts to seem superfluous.

A meta-field is beckoning. We’ve called it outer space. Again, we put the cart before the horse, our eagerness ahead of our readiness. Inner space is the foreign territory we must master first. Yinification begins at home.

Deep “E”-cology

This is the potential of the Internet: to help us come home to ourselves, as a species, as a people, as one culture united through whatever we choose to call the animating energy that informs our existence. The ‘Net is a universal connector, a universal translator, the key to deep ecology in the most profound sense. “Eco”, from the Greek oikos, means home. “Logy” is a branch of learning or study. Ecology is, literally, learning about home!

Coming home to ourselves means owning the truth that there is no separation, except what we allow to exist, through fear. Fear contracts our hearts and minds; love expands them. Many of us learn to open our hearts through sacrifice, which means, “to make sacred.” Releasing our deepest attachments is a crucial part of the initiation on our journey to self-awareness. Our gift is as great as our grief. The poet David Whyte says, “The rest of creation is waiting, breathless, for you to take your place.”

We can start by detaching from what numbs us (like television), and focusing on what feeds us — like “tell-a-vision,” a subtle shift that transmutes suppression into inspiration. The price of freedom is your voice. Begin to share your vision of the world you want to co-create! As you do, you become a “rainbow warrior,” awakening and balancing your energy throughout your being in order to realize the full spectrum of your purpose and potential.

Heaven on Earth exists in being fully alive in the infinite Now. This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, as The Fifth Dimension sang ‘way back in 1969. They were early messengers, carrying our Divine blueprint via the medium of music.

Let’s revisit the lyrics: “When the Moon is in the seventh house”. In Western astrology, the Moon is symbolic of feminine, receptive energy, what we draw in; the seventh house is about intimate interaction with other people. I’ve dubbed this new way of relating a call to yinify: to unify in the Divine Feminine essence. “And Jupiter aligns with Mars”. Jupiter is the planet of expansion, of expressing our truth through storytelling; Mars is the planet of pure desire and, when dishonored, of war. To have them align means telling ourselves a new, expansive story: transmuting war in the alchemical fire into spiritual warriorhood.

Then, as the group sang, “Peace will guide the planets/And love will steer the stars.”

How clear the message becomes, once we are able to truly hear. The battle cries dim; the masks fall off. A layer of separation evaporates as we become transparent to the truth of who we are. People start to seem somehow familiar, even though we’ve never met them before. It’s the resonant déjà vu of realizing there are no strangers. “Service with a smile” suddenly takes on a whole new meaning.

Getting there calls for a subtle shift in perception and behavior: from acquire to inquire, from escalate to elevate, from scared to sacred. As we cease consuming planetary resources and each other at the speed of greed, let go of buying more in favor of being more, we reclaim our true heritage as Earth stewards. And then barrenness transmutes into bounty. Separation into synergy. Fear into faith. Longing into Love.

We use the expression, “Live and learn.” Implicit is the understanding that what we learn, we will also teach. We become self-renewing by gathering knowledge from our experience, forging it into wisdom in the alchemical fire, and serving as vessels to share the gift that is uniquely ours, but not meant to remain arcane.

Conscious evolution favors the curious and kind mind. Truth nourishes us in ways we might never have imagined. Synchronicity takes us by the hand and we laugh in child-like wonder as we witness Spirit-in-action, again and again and again. This is the Garden, and it is good.

Welcome Home.

By Ascension Lifestyle Contributor Amara Rose:

Amara Rose is a catalyst for quantum evolution. Her services include transformational coaching, talks, e-courses, and an inspirational monthly newsletter. She is widely published in health, business and new thought magazines, both digital and print. Learn more:

http://www.liveyourlight.com
http://twitter.com/Amara_Rose
https://www.linkedin.com/in/amararose