growth | Ascension Lifestyle

23 Nov 2019
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Why Losing Your Mind Is A Gift

“The human mind is kind of like… a pinata.

When it breaks open, there’s a lot of surprises inside.

Once you get the pinata perspective, you see that

losing your mind can be a peak experience.”

~ Jane Wagner, playwright, “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe”

Though it may sound strange, “losing your mind” — living for a time empty, without a constantly chattering brain — can help you find yourself. When the brain takes a break, it’s easier to hear your heart, and to follow its guaranteed guidance.

But few of us go willingly. For me, the shift from a left-brain, Type A personality took the form of illness. “Losing my mind” catapulted me into my body and into present time in a way I’d never experienced. I couldn’t think, reason, or talk my way out of what was happening. With my brain on an extended vacation, I began to live by — and trust — my intuition.

The truth is, our heart and brain are in continuous dialogue. Rollin McCraty, PhD, co-founder of the Institute of HeartMath, says the heart has a special intelligence, and sends “far more signals to the brain than the brain is sending to the heart.”

Yet we idolize the brain and give the heart short shrift, except when it demands attention — via a heart attack, for example.

Hm.

The Longest Journey You’ll Ever Take

Americans come from diverse backgrounds and speak different languages, yet we can all become fluent in a common tongue: the language of the heart. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, author of The Little Prince, wrote, “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye.”

Seeing with our hearts creates kindness. In Jewel’s song Hands, the bridge brings tears to my eyes: “In the end, only kindness matters…” It touches something primal in me. Similarly, TV talk show host Ellen DeGeneres closes each broadcast with the invocation, “Be kind to one another.”

The greatest gift we can give each other and ourselves is moving from the brain to the heart. Traveling these 14 to 18 inches is both the shortest and the longest journey most of us will ever take. This nine-minute breath-heart-brain coherence meditation can help you get started.

Leaving Normal

A brain-break catapults you out of your comfort zone, notes feminist icon Gloria Steinem. It can be a conscious choice in lieu of a crisis. Profiled in Oprah Winfrey’s latest book, The Path Made Clear, Gloria maintains that a constant “on the road” mentality keeps her open to new experiences, because travel “brings people out of their heads and into their hearts.”

Living in the moment is the very definition of “flow,” agrees Oprah. This is how we enter what athletes call the zone: the place where it all comes together because you’re being your truth.

You can’t think your way into the zone. It’s a heart-centered space in which, says Gloria, you feel “boundaryless, spontaneous, at one with everything.”

So pry those mental fingers loose. In free-fall, trust that there’ll be an invisible cosmic trampoline beneath you — or you’ll grow wings in mid-flight.

What Competition Really Means

Kindness grows from this expansive feeling: knowing there is enough to go around, enough of whatever you feel you need: love, attention, money, etc. Yet our cultural paradigm fosters competition, and competition fuels an “either/or” mentality: either you win or I do; either I get what I want or you do.

It’s hard to live from your heart when you need to win — and when somebody else has to lose. It’s also intriguing to realize that “compete” actually means, “to seek together.” The prefix “com” means “with.” So when we compete, we’re really striving together towards a common goal.

We’re more likely to cooperate when we feel there is enough for everyone. Cooperation is about holding a “both/and” perspective. Holding the both/and, choosing collaboration rather than competition, is a refreshing way to dance with life — and the key to honor and respect.

A Politics of Love

Some people use the word “spirituality” to mean religion. But spirituality is not about religion. It’s broader than our 3D compartmentalizing. And the moment for an integrated spiritual perspective (heart and mind) has arrived.

Recognizing this beckoning opportunity, spiritual teacher and author Marianne Williamson threw her hat into the 2020 Democratic presidential race, courageously re-crafting her message to reach voters for whom a politics of inclusivity is a new concept. She speaks about the power of Love, with a capital L.

In the early days of her campaign, people laughed at her platform, even as the number of Google hits on her name soared. Then the New York Times Magazine ran a feature. Fewer people are laughing now.

Does Marianne stand a chance of securing the Democratic nomination? That’s beside the point. Her work is not about winning the White House, or even about government. She’s stirring the conversational cauldron, whetting the appetite of those stirring to consciousness with an amuse-bouche of pure essence.

Who we are at core (the etymology of heart!) matters so much more than what we think, so much more than any political party or ideology. Spiritual teachers such as Marianne know the mind must be in service to the heart in order to elevate humanity to our next level of evolution. The body politic is not separate from our bodies: as above, so below. As within, so without.

This is something our Founding Fathers understood. As our youthful country has grown, we’ve become lazy, relying on the government to solve the very problems it creates. Einstein said, “You cannot solve a problem with the same level of thinking that created it.”

Realizing heart and brain must not just co-exist, but co-create, is a giant step, and bringing this awareness to the world stage is a major mission. Marianne answered her own heart call to take the leap, as a gift to humanity’s unfolding.

Show Me the Money

A heart-centered culture will also radically alter how we exchange life energy, better known as money. In her pivotal book, Beyond Prophecies and Predictions: Everyone’s Guide to the Coming Changes (which I finished reading the night before 9-1-1), Moira Timms speaks of a “New Order of the Ages,” which many indigenous cultures had prophesied to begin between 2001 and 2012.

She writes, “The mind analyzes — the heart synthesizes. The turning point is where the heart is awakening. Historically speaking, we are at this juncture. America’s motto, inscribed on the banner in the beak of the eagle of the Great Seal [of the United States], reminds us that America was founded on the principle of ‘E Pluribus Unum’ — ‘Out of the Many, One.'”

Further, the inscription beneath the Great Pyramid (the centerpiece of the Great Seal on the back of a one dollar bill) says, “Novus Ordo Seclorum” — which translates, appropriately, as “A New Order of the Ages”! Isn’t this amusing? The answer is in money, but it’s not about who can become the richest at others’ expense.

If we insist on remaining on the fast track, consuming planetary resources and each other at the speed of greed, the money will not follow. True wealth/prosperity/abundance flows from alignment with purpose. It’s about tuning in to a higher frequency. The clues are everywhere. In my computer’s thesaurus, one synonym for prosperity is well being.

Our Highest Expression

I’ve long maintained that the Internet is our precursor to global telepathy. In recent times we’ve become seduced by technology, tethered to our phones, barely breathing life, let alone our fullness. Yet in a crisis, we respond from the heart.

California just experienced some of the worst wildfires and mass evacuations in the state’s history. As people flowed into safe locations, many businesses opened their doors to share desks and WiFi with displaced workers, fitness centers offered free showers (even supplying towels, soap, and shampoo), and grassroots organizers provided the essentials people would need after leaving home in a hurry.

I always marvel at this kind of outpouring, which typically ceases along with the emergency (“emerge and see”). If people and systems were as open and loving all the time as they are during a disaster, there would be no homelessness or hunger.

Reverence for the Real

When heart and mind align, it’s whole-brain change: we marry the dreamer and pragmatist within, and move ahead without selling out.

It’s radical. It’s possible. It’s the new world order, a different form of self-government we’re beginning to embrace as the planet awakens en masse. Idols may make useful teen heartthrobs, but in adulthood our hearts seek a deeper, lasting Love.

The heart calls. The brain responds. It’s incumbent on each of us to make the journey.

This is how everyone wins.

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.

08 Sep 2019
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How to Live Forever

“You must go through the way in which you are not. 

And what you do not know is the only thing you know 

And what you own is what you do not own 

And where you are is where you are not.”

~ T.S. Eliot, excerpt from Four Quartets

When I began deleting my personal history, as Paulo Coehlo describes in The Zahir, it was the most joyous and bizarre experience of my life: I was simultaneously aware of who I was and who I was not, and 3D appeared both silly and sublime. It was expansive, akin to the seatbelt sign blinking off in flight as the Captain announces, “You’re now free to move about the cabin.”

Similarly: In college I listened to Woody Allen’s amusing audiobook Without Feathers. The title refers to the Emily Dickinson poem, “‘Hope’ Is the Thing With Feathers”.

Living Without “Hope”

The idea of “giving up hope” is as intriguing as stepping outside our conditioned responses. The day before the U.S. World Trade Center attacks in 2001, I’d finished reading Beyond Prophecies and Predictions: Everyone’s Guide to the Coming Changes by Moira Timms, and felt suffused with a calm knowing, a sense that something was about to happen. As 9-1-1 unfolded I sent out a global message contrary to popular reaction, and was castigated as well as thanked. (Email me if you’d like a copy of This IS A Test.)

In this era beyond prophecy, how do we transcend hope, transcend history, alter how we might once have responded, and simply observe our unfolding? How can we begin to live fully in the moment, as what one healer calls, “a constant stream of consciousness”?

We begin by enlarging the lens from microscope to kaleidoscope, as compassionate trickster Caroline Casey illustrates: “We are remembering our true selves, our destiny, our role in the Dynamic Mystery Play. You know how sometimes people ask that harumphitudinous question, ‘Who do you think you are?’ We reframe: ‘Hoo-Doo! You think! You Are!'”

This is how we morph into “forever beings” says thought leader Soleira Green. “Forever beings are not trapped by history, by past mistakes, learning, cultural influences, etc. Freedom isn’t a concept since there is nothing but complete and utter freedom on every level, available all the time… A forever being lives within limitless possibility, seeking change and creation constantly and always. This re-orients us to the ever streaming NEW and not to the static past.”

In her Quantum Awakening newsletter, Gillian Macbeth Louthan reminds, “It takes more molecules to create anger than it does a joy. It takes more molecules to hold disease than it does to hold love. All that is Holy is light and fluffy with no expiration date.”

Without “hope,” without history, we’re closer to our true nature than ever before. Think of it this way: if you “lose control,” you’re free. And you have everything.

###

About the author:

Amara Rose is a metaphysical “midwife” for our global rebirth. She offers personal and business guidance, content creation, e-courses, and a CD/mp3 to accelerate your evolutionary journey. Learn more at LiveYourLight.com, where you can also subscribe to her inspirational e-newsletter, What Shines.

24 Oct 2018
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Becoming Homeopathic: You Are Your Own Medicine

Just as our planet contains all of the resources we need to create and heal — awaiting only our discovery and ingenuity — we contain the ability to self-heal on an intrinsic level. This was brought home to me one day when, in the midst of a strong (and highly unusual for me) allergic reaction, I was looking for a homeopathic remedy.

To my great astonishment and amusement, one of the chief ingredients in the remedy I selected was ignatia amara. I picked another remedy off the shelf, and discovered ignatia amara listed there as well.

In fact, when I did an online search of the remedy, it seemed to describe my very nature to a “T”: “Women of sensitive nature, mild disposition, quick to perceive, rapid in execution. Rapid change of mental and physical condition, opposite to each other.” The website also stated a supreme aversion to coffee — and I can’t stand the smell of brewing coffee!

The Heart of Healing

I smiled in wonder at all this: I am my own antidote. The feeling was immensely empowering. We each, all, contain the answer to whatever toxin that’s currently affecting us, whether physical or mental, personal or global. We need not use a canon when a kiss will suffice: becoming homeopathic is about recognizing, and choosing to use, the smallest possible “dose” to activate healing.

This is how we begin crafting the new global community we’ve been inching towards for decades. It’s a spiritual emergence-y (emerge and see), as we emerge from the cocoon of complacency, the old paradigm, into a courageous new world. Courageous, from the French, means “heart”.

Now it’s about choice: how quickly and collectively we will segue from the old reptilian, limbic brain (the same impulse that drives materialism, separation, self-interest, and misuse of power) into the higher realms of consciousness, where love, wisdom and power are synthesized into service.

It’s a quantum yet infinitesimally subtle shift: from scared to sacred, density to destiny, toxic to tonic, reactive to creative. Homeopathy operates on the principle of “like cures like”, and the minusculedose: the more dilute the dosage, the more powerful the remedy. It’s the exact opposite of what you might expect to effect a healing. Not a canon, a kiss.

I invite you to become homeopathic. Discover and embrace your inner healing/wholeness that has always been there, and decide to make the subtle shift that brings you back to balance.

As for me, I’m going to live ever more deeply into my own name. Blessings!

About the author:

Amara Rose is a metaphysical “midwife” for our global rebirth. A former personal health columnist for Nation’s Business magazine, she’s written for numerous other publications, both digital and print. Subscribe to Amara’s resource-rich monthly newsletter. You can connect with her on social media at Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

27 Jun 2018
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Renewable Y-O-U

“Renewables” sounds like a fairly recent concept. However, we’ve been using renewable energy for millennia: wind, water, fire, and animal / human labor.

Today renewable energy is about saving the environment and diminishing our dependence on fossil fuels. Coupled with conserving finite resources, we’ve also gotten smart: smartphones, smart cars, smart homes, smart health care (wearables). Yet our smart solutions are dumbing us down in one crucial respect: we’re highly connected to them, and less connected to ourselves than ever before.

We are the ultimate renewable resource — when we become conscious of this truth. It’s a quantum shift in perception that changes everything.

What “Renewable” Really Means

Becoming a renewable resource doesn’t mean ditching your phone for the plow, but becoming more mindful in every moment. Think of it this way: work is applied energy. Sustaining your own energy means working with yourself as a renewable resource.

In their new book, The Healing Self, integrative medicine and personal growth pioneer Deepak Chopra, MD, and Harvard University brain health professor Rudolph E. Tanzi, PhD, discuss how well being is an inside job that starts with awareness.

They write: “Seeking self-renewal is a conscious decision, and it’s never once and for all. Renewal at the level of the cell is a constant and virtually automatic process, and so is self-renewal. The noted spiritual teacher Jiddhu Krishnamurti once made a provocative remark about meditation. People set aside a certain period of the day to meditate, he said, but they don’t realize that real meditation is twenty-four hours a day. The same is true for healing.”

In Western culture, we typically don’t slow down long enough to give our inner life a second thought — until life itself demands it. This often manifests as illness, because that’s what it takes to get us to press “pause”.

How to Become A Renewable Resource

You don’t have to become a monk or jet off to India to sit at the feet of a sage when a health crisis hits, although these are viable personal growth paths. You do have to begin paying attention to what’s happening, ideally before the volume amplifies. This is how healing begins.

I speak from experience. In my early thirties, with a thriving remote business, piano lessons, and a 90 mph lifestyle, I ignored the symptoms proliferating in my body. Finally I hit the proverbial wall and, like a cartoon character, slid two dimensionally to the ground. The message was clear: “Time out! Get in touch with yourself at a deeper level if you want to get well.”

And I did. For the next three years, healing/wholing was my primary focus. As I began to heal physically, I simultaneously opened up spiritually. Whole/holy/heal all come from the same root word, “hale”. What I was undergoing transfigured me on a cellular level.

It was an initiation, as true healing always is.

Suffering Is Optional

Chopra and Tanzi write about the paradox of pain: how someone can be in intense physical pain yet not be “suffering”. In remembering who I am on a soul level, I began to experience a joy beyond anything I’d ever known. It was the most profound ah-ha! of my life. And while my body was still in pain, my expanding consciousness superseded it.

Of course, this unfolding made absolutely no sense to family and friends who were observing my process externally, shaking their heads.

It is only ever about you, yet far beyond the small “you” with whom you previously identified. When you step into your vastness, you become a renewable resource: embodying the light of wisdom, serving as a beacon for others on the awakening path.

Espavo defines this awareness succinctly: “Thank you for taking your power.” That’s the smart, renewable solution we all need now.

About the author:

Amara Rose is a metaphysical “midwife” for our global rebirth. A former personal health columnist for Nation’s Business magazine, she’s written for Yoga Journal, E/The Environmental Magazine, MORE, Well.org, VentureBeat.com, and numerous other publications. Subscribe to Amara’s resource-rich monthly newsletter.

28 Feb 2018
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Life In the Middle Ages: Facing the Feisty Fifties

I see my folks are gettin’ on

And I watch their bodies change

I know they see the same in me

And it makes us both feel strange

No matter how you tell yourself

It’s what we all go through

Those lines are pretty hard to take

When they’re staring back at you.

~ Nick of Time by Bonnie Raitt

I got my period on Valentine’s Day. Talk about a literal red-letter day! Never have I been so unabashedly joy-filled at the sight of blood. For the first time, I truly appreciate a euphemism both girls and women have used for generations to refer to their Moontime: “my friend.”

Perhaps I should explain that I am not thirteen. I’m not 37. I’m 50, and this is my first cycle in five months. Menopause swooped in without warning last fall and I dried up like the Sahara. To suddenly bleed after a week in which I did, in fact, feel premenstrual is confirmation that my body’s still experimenting with this shift. It’s not a done deal. There’s yet time to adjust to the idea of being a Crone — and being eligible for membership in AARP (you’ve got to be kidding!)

Embracing the “F” Word

Now that the largest cohort in history is graying en masse, someone turns 50 approximately every eight seconds. Even this formidable fleet can’t stem the tide of aging jokes, however. At 50, the good-natured ribbing begins in earnest. My friend Faith, who celebrated her 50^th just weeks before me, recalled a card she received when she turned 40: “I’m going to have to say the ‘F’ word: forty! Forty! Forty!”

We lamented that the greeting card industry doesn’t seem to think we have a sense of humor a decade later. Why isn’t there a card for 50-year-olds that reads, “I’m at the age where I can freely use the ‘F’ word: fifty, fifty, fifty!!”

My parents, who do not perceive themselves as “old” in their eighties, sent me a hilarious Dr. Seuss parody of “Thing One” and “Thing Two” called, “It’s a Fifty Thing!” The birthday card included lines such as, “Thing Fifty can groove to the latest CD. (And with bifocal lenses, Thing Fifty can see!)”

Hm. It’s one “thing” to major in gerontology and enjoy working with elders in your twenties; quite a different matter when you’re on the cusp of joining a collective that’s marginalized in Western society and rendered virtually invisible.

I remember my mom telling me with pride about a man at the Department of Motor Vehicles flirting with her when she retook her driver’s test at age 65. I was 35 at the time, and even then, wondered aloud in my public speaking class “how much longer” men would continue to flirt with me.

From the vantage point of an additional fifteen years, I find my 30-something fear rather quaint.

Redefining Wrinkles and “Cool”

The fifties promise to be an intriguing balance of living in an aging body while possessing a certain ineffable wisdom and spirit we hadn’t accessed in our younger years. Although the twenty-somethings and teens I meet today often seem wise far beyond where my generation was at their age, due no doubt to the rapid evolution of humanity as a whole, there is much to be said for the joie de vivre that accrues with vintage.

Wrinkles signify ripeness. There’s a reason the honorific, “sage” is usually conferred on an elder.

I met an 83-year-old woman with close-cropped silver hair streaked fuchsia, wearing peace sign earrings. I commented that it was so cool to see “a woman of her maturity” thus attired, to which she replied, “Oh, I wasn’t cool when I was young!”

Reconciling body image with spiritual awareness is, paradoxically, only an issue if one chooses to focus on the physical. When the body becomes background — as it often is de facto in youth, with parts that are well oiled, shapely, firm, and thus, easier to “ignore” — our essence shines forth, and that’s what people see when they read the story in our eyes.

A Bountiful Harvest

Fifty is a time to harvest our joy — and acknowledge evidence of our mortality. While several of my contemporaries have already matched wits with serious illness, and a few have transitioned to the other side of life, I’ve also watched three dear friends meet and marry their life partners in their fifties. As I’ve been casting my soul mate net for a while now, this is heartening news.

Life in the Middle Ages can be bountiful, as Oprah Winfrey, our ultimate generational role model for accomplished aging, said of her 50^th birthday: “All these years I’ve been taking lessons from life experiences and feeling like I was growing into myself. Finally, I feel grown. More like myself than I’ve ever been. If it’s true what Maya Angelou says, that the fifties represent everything you were meant to be, all I can say is, watch out.”

Riley Mackenzie* embodies Angelou’s decree. In her fifties, she studied the subtleties of Argentine Tango, became a serious ceramics artist, and swung from a high trapeze. Now 68, she’s just back from a leisurely road trip around the periphery of the U.S. with her husband of almost, yes, 50 years. She’s also reinventing her marketing business with a partner, another vital woman in her late fifties. Mackenzie says emphatically, “It’s the most fun I could ever imagine having!”

Hot Flashes…of Inspiration

Age, like everything else in life, is a matter of perspective. Six months before my milestone birthday, I fell into conversation with a lively older gentleman as we waited to cross the street. He was searching his pockets for his eyeglasses, and, after I helped him find them, we walked together for a few minutes. He told me he was 100 years old, and regaled me with tales of his life. As we reached a parting of the ways, he turned to me and asked, quite seriously, “So tell me, young lady, have you graduated from college yet?”

Now, that’s the ultimate tonic for the “chronologically gifted”!

As I sit in a local teahouse, sipping rooibos and savoring my feminine cycle along with some exquisite chocolate mousse, I’m tickled by these words from The Reconnections website, on meeting the beloved: “I saw a license plate the other day, on a car belonging to a woman aged 50 plus: ‘Give me chocolate, and no one gets hurt.’ I thought that one was pretty neat until I saw a better one: ‘I’m over 50 and I’m still hot — except now, it comes in flashes.'”

How true. Flashes of insight. Flashes of inspiration. Flashes of unmitigated delight at just how extraordinary life on this beautiful blue-green planet can be. One author refers to the second half-century as “Jubilee Time.”

I’m ready to party. Considering how many playmates I’ll have in the galactic sandbox, it’s destined to be an unsurpassed blast. Bring it on: fifty! Fifty! Fifty!

* name changed to honor her privacy

About the Author:

Amara Rose can pluck a graying hair from her scalp at 25 mph; driving any faster, she waits for a red light. To see what she’s done with her first half-century, visit LiveYourLight.com. Offer her dark chocolate and you open the doorway to friendship.

04 Jan 2018
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How to Become Lighthearted (It’s Not What You Think)

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Czech author Milan Kundera posits that you only live once (social acronym YOLO), and this “lightness” signifies freedom — though it’s hard to hold.

But it wasn’t until I read Thomas Cowan, MD’s breakthrough book, Human Heart, Cosmic Heart, that I realized a conundrum: levity (lightness) means humor, and its counterpoint, gravity, equates to seriousness, tethering us to Earth. If gravity keeps us earthbound, it follows that humor would act as spiritual helium, helping us levitate: soar above our sorrow, at least figuratively.

Yet most people caught in a mirthful moment collapse with laughter, rather than rising into the atmosphere. And when the amusement subsides, the problems remain. What gives?

Cowan suggests far greater import to levity and gravity — one that impacts our very life force. And it’s a scathing indictment of how we live now.

Where Levity Is Lost

Referencing the work of naturalist Viktor Schauberger, Cowan writes,

“When one lives almost entirely in nature that is unspoiled by human contact, one often develops strong powers of observation. What Schauberger saw is the force of levity that lives in water. This force of levity flows upwards in vortices in the river. It is in these force ‘lines’ that healthy trout live effortless lives.

“Of course, these factors only exist when certain conditions are met. That is, the forest must be intact, there must be continuous tree covering shading the stream, there must be no dams anywhere on the stream, and the stream must be allowed to flow in its own path, not a path constructed by water ‘experts’. When all these conditions are met, once can observe the forces of levity balancing the forces of gravity, and, if in the river itself, one can experience the blissful life of the trout.

“When the forests are cut down and the streams straightened and dredged, the forces of levity are lost, and the trout has to swim for its life to maintain its position in the stream. Too exhausted to swim by muscle power upstream, it ends up with a life of continuous and useless toil. This is not unlike the plight of industrial man, swimming upstream for his entire life, getting depleted, weaker, sicker by the day.

“The important point here is that this force of levity, which allows for the effortless flow of water, is dependent on certain conditions such as temperature and flow dynamics (spiral- or vortex-based flow patterns). When these conditions are met, life is easy and health is the natural outcome. This state is the natural state of structured water. It is also the natural state of the structured water that is the basis for the flow of blood in our circulatory system.”

Out of Circulation

Cowan’s explanation unfolds layers of insight about the true cause of illness, on both a personal and planetary level. He describes my mother’s life and health to a T:

“This model allows us to see the real cause of varicose veins, congestive heart failure and poor circulation. These ailments occur when the structured layer fails to form properly. It is as if someone cut down our forest, kept us from the sun and Earth, and gave us poor quality nutrients and water.”

His analysis blew my circuits. No wonder mainstream medicine is inadequate in resolving chronic, systemic health issues: it doesn’t address the root cause.

As above, so below: roots and wings, water and sky. Life’s yin/yang is essential for our health and Gaia’s health. If our life is not flowing with natural rhythms, health deteriorates. Sequestered from the life force, we remove ourselves from circulation, like a worn-out book, and slowly decay.

A Heart of Gold

ORME is undetectable, nonreactive with other elements, non-conductive (i.e., doesn’t get hot) and lighter than its conventional counterparts.

Cowan makes the case that human beings are quantum coherent superconducting phenomena — more than the sum of our parts — and that the ORME, or cosmic form of gold, is the primary superconducting matrix [from the root word mater, or mother] without which nerve transmission and life itself would not be possible.

The Mother of All Levity

To paraphrase Abraham-Hicks, we can always choose to enter the vortex. In Dancing With Water, MJ Pangman and Melanie Evans write, “Vortices bring in raw energy for use in the creative process. They also cause individual elements to spin at velocities faster than the speed of light. These elements take on new traits referred to by some as super energy.” And ORME “borders on the etheric.” It’s a matter [= matrix = mother] of frequency.

Cowan says, “The heart of gold refers to its unique ability to carry out this transformation of an earthly element into cosmic gold, thereby providing the basis for life to exist.”

It’s what alchemists and sages down through the ages have been attempting to distill all along.

Celestial Call

At the close of 2017, Saturn moved into Capricorn, its home sign, where it will remain for the next three years. The arbiter of form invites us to take responsibility for the structure of our lives; to become their author, owning our authority.

If we wish to add more levity, joy — and possibly time — to our lives, we can infuse structured water into our body, and nature into our soul. When enough of us have done so, lightness will not only be bearable; we’ll wonder how we lived heavy-hearted for so long.

Sources:

Human Heart, Cosmic Heart, Thomas Cowan, MD https://www.amazon.com/Human-Heart-Cosmic-Understand-Cardiovascular/dp/1603586199/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1514497705&sr=1-1&keywords=human+heart+cosmic+heart+by+dr.+thomas+cowan
A New Sacred Geometry: The Art and Science of Frank Chester https://www.amazon.com/New-Sacred-Geometry-Science-Chester/dp/0988749203/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1514497857&sr=1-1&keywords=A+New+Sacred+Geometry
Dancing With Water MJ Pangman, MS & Melanie Evans https://www.amazon.com/Dancing-Water-New-Science-Second/dp/0975272632/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1514497746&sr=1-1&keywords=dancing+with+water+2nd+edition
The Chestahedron: The Wonder of Seven presentation by geometrician, artist, sculptor and teacher Frank Chester https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQMpEAsNHmY

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, and an inspirational monthly newsletter.

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

26 Sep 2017
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Of Two-Way Streets and Enriching Dichotomies

Our world of apparent duality offers a wealth of disguised enrichment opportunities. Consider:

A cyber buddy who currently lives creatively without residence wondered why a stranger would open her home and heart to her. She emailed, “I don’t understand why she’s being so amazingly generous. I keep telling her she just blows me away.”

I responded, “You never know what her own journey is…she may have needed to serve someone in exactly this way, and you are providing a golden opportunity, so it is a mutuality.”

This is the way energy works. When my lifelong friend Ellie fell and broke her hip at 96, requiring a lengthy convalescence in a rehabilitation center and later at home, I initially despaired about why Spirit didn’t simply call her Home.

Then I had a flash of insight: the enforced passivity enabled my fiercely independent friend to learn to receive, and blessed those who assisted her with the joy of service. I told her, “You would never have allowed it otherwise.” With wonder and her trademark humility, Ellie exclaimed, “Amara, you’re right!”

The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful

What appears adverse can be advantageous. I needed to park my car on a different street due to an upcoming festival, and planned to be out of town the following week. I gave the young man who acts as my “car surrogate” the spare key, and asked him to please move the car back once the festival was over.

Unbeknownst to me, a road crew was about to repave the street; tow-away signs went up the day after I left. If the festival hadn’t been scheduled (and, therefore, if I hadn’t given Danny my spare key) my car would have been parked in its normal spot — and towed during the week I was away!

More profoundly: A dear friend was in a near-fatal motorcycle crash earlier this year. After a month in the ICU, he learned he’d need a walker once out of bed, and would have only minimal use of his right hand for the rest of his life (he’s a southpaw, but still…). Eight months later, Rick says, “The accident was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

During his convalescence he lost seventy pounds and began exercising daily as part of his physical therapy program; the combination reversed his adult-onset diabetes. He’s grateful every day for the gift of life, and more open than he’s ever been. He says, “I cry if I’m happy, I cry if I’m sad.

“And you know what? It feels amazing. I have nothing to hide now; what others think of me is no longer my concern. I can be emotionally honest. I feel like this is another piece of the silver lining surrounding that terrible trauma.”

Sustained by his new outlook and the outpouring of love and support from friends and family, Rick’s regained almost full use of his right hand, and returned to work — as a practicing physician. Practice makes perfect.

Once you’ve been through the fire, you’re recast as pure essence; the superficial no longer holds sway in your life.

How Your Light Is Spent

Milton’s sonnet, When I Consider How My Light is Spent, exemplifies the nature of life’s dichotomies, and how we choose to interpret our time here. The full text reads:

When I consider how my light is spent

Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,

And that one talent which is death to hide

Lodg’d with me useless, though my soul more bent

To serve therewith my Maker, and present

My true account, lest he returning chide;

“Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?”

I fondly ask. But Patience to prevent

That murmur, soon replies: “God doth not need

Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best

Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state

Is kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed

And post o’er land and ocean without rest:

They also serve who only stand and wait.

“Apprehension” means both anxiety and understanding. If you apprehend the meaning behind Milton’s final line, you will understand that simply being is what matters most.

Whoever or whatever your messenger is, listen deeply. Once you apprehend the message, invite yourself to let go, so that you may embrace this wisdom farther along life’s spiral. Allow yourself to be amused by the alchemical nature of any apparent dichotomy that shows up in your life. And know there’s an invisible cosmic trampoline beneath you, so you can rebound from pain’s mirage, spread your wings, and fly.

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.

10 Aug 2017
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The Most Beautiful Question

“Hope and Memory have one daughter,

and her name is Art.”

~ William Butler Yeats

One day a cashier at my local organic foods co-op asked if I’d like to enter a contest to determine “The Most Beautiful Question.” The way he described it captured my attention, so I asked for the website.

He responded, “Oh, it’s not on the Internet. Just ask a question, and you may be a winner! Will you open that door?”

Intrigued, I asked, “You mean, what’s the most beautiful question I can ask someone else?” He agreed, “That could be a question!” The one he’d choose to ask is, “Why are you suffering?” Mine might be, “Who are you?”

This definition enlarges the scope of beauty by embracing awareness.

Holding the Both/And

All forms of beauty and art expand our perception, enabling us to more fully hold the “both/and”. Visionary activist astrologer Caroline Casey recounted a meeting she attended of scientists who also aspire to be mystics, observing, “If physics and metaphysics get married they can have a child: reverent science.”

This is where we are growing globally: towards a unity of former opposites, in every realm. We’re shedding our old skin, emerging from the chrysalis, morphing into wholly new beings. It’s arduous and joyful, scary and anticipatory all at once, as birth is.

And while our evolutionary symptoms can range from exhaustion to panic, the tools we can use to ground and comfort ourselves are surprisingly simple: Nature. Cuddling. Fasting from both “real” and “fake” news. Bonding with children and animals. Deep rest. And allowing art, beauty and creativity free reign.

Living as a Masterpiece

Creativity carries a high vibe. To begin to live as the masterpiece you already are, first consider how you learn best: are you predominantly visual, auditory, kinesthetic? Then choose an activity below and begin to integrate it into your life as “art school”:

Keep a journal — and try writing in it with your non-dominant hand.
Draw, paint, or sculpt your ideal work expression.
Sit by moving water. Sit in moving water. Sing while sitting in a stream!
Dance your dream. What does it feel like as flowing movement?
Walk the labyrinth, an ancient meditative art form. Visit the Worldwide Labyrinth Locator to find one near you
Enjoy on a device-free weekend. During this period, pay attention to your dream life; see if you have better dream recall and more vivid dreams.
Prepare a meal that is as aesthetic as it is nutritious. As you combine ingredients, imagine that you are cooking up your “work” of art.
Spend a day, alone or with others, in total silence.

In The Creative Connection: Expressive Arts as Healing, Natalie Rogers writes: “The creative process is a path to finding the divine self. Discovering the capacity to love is profound. Discovering the ability to receive love, whether it is from a particular individual or a universal source, can be so awesome as to be frightening to some people. However, tapping into that ability or consciousness is both healing and revolutionary in that it changes the lenses from which we view the world.”

Some questions for meditation and co-creation:

What would the world look like if we created it together to reflect our strength and vision as Spirit?
Who would we be if we looked within ourselves to find the answers?
Will you allow yourself to walk the beauty way?

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.

17 Jul 2017
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The Art of Awareness

As we move into the next phase of our global renaissance, copious creativity is the axis on which our elevation will turn. How deeply are we willing to tap our inner reservoirs? Can we expand our perception of what constitutes “art”?

José Argüelles, who adapted the evolutionary secrets of the Mayan Calendar for the Western mind, saw art as the unifying field, a path to help us move “from biospheric waste to artistic regeneration,” by attuning ourselves to a natural time frequency expressed as an equation: T(E) = Art. Energy (E) factored by time (T) equals Art. Energy is essence: a rock, a flower, a star, a human being. Time is a frequency. When we use our energy in concert with natural time cycles, we are living creativity. In other words, Time is Art…not the clock on the wall or the cash in your wallet.

Eye of the Beholder

What this means in terms of cross-cultural energy exchange opens unimagined doors. A woman traveled from Denmark to the tiny West African country The Gambia, toting numerous colorful plastic bags — prized by Gambian women as symbols of status and respect — to use as barter. (Women of The Gambia also recycle worn or ripped plastic bags into one-of-a-kind purses).

In the marketplace, she discovered a hand-carved figure of an African goddess and, through gestures, opened negotiations to purchase the stunning piece.

But the indigenous artist had no interest in money. She wanted plastic bags. The Danish visitor tried to give her all the bags she’d brought, explaining that there was a surplus of these in her country. The Gambian sculptor accepted three, and each woman felt she’d enjoyed the better bargain. Plastic bags or a unique woodcarving: equally sacred art in the eye of the beholder.

Then there is the children’s book that became a collaboration between two Jewish translators, a Protestant editor, a Muslim painter and a non-profit publisher in the deep South. It was a collective endeavor all the way, explained one rabbinical writer: “An Arabic Sufi tale (originally penned in what is now Iraq) translated by a rabbi into Hebrew in the Middle Ages and translated by us (into 21^st century language and sensibility), with a Sufi publisher and a Pakistani artist.” The subject matter — animals protesting their treatment by humans — transcended all ethnic, cultural, and religious boundaries.

The Art in our DNA

The universal urge toward the aesthetic is coded in our cells. Theologian and author Thomas Moore writes, in Care of the Soul, “Children paint every day and love to show their works on walls and refrigerator doors. But as we become adults, we abandon this important soul task of childhood.” When we relinquish this soul expression to professional artists, “we are left with mere rational reasons for our lives, feelings of emptiness and confusion, and a compulsive attachment to pseudo images, such as shallow television programs. When our own images no longer have a home, a personal museum, we drown our sense of loss in pale substitutes, trashy novels or formulaic movies.”

Because art arrests our attention, living “artfully” might require of us something as simple as pausing: taking the time to shift from acquire to inquire, to let go of buying more in favor of being more. This is what honoring our collective creative impulse can do for humanity: restore us to wholeness, holiness, health. “Whole”, “holy” and “heal” all spring from the same root. To be whole is to be balanced and harmonious in body, mind, soul and spirit.

It’s this level of awareness that will characterize the coming Psychozoic (“spirit life”) era, says Argüelles, when, having rediscovered who we are, we can create a culture based on the three virtues of true time: autonomy, equality, and loyalty to the truth in every moment. These are strikingly similar to the Three Commitments delineated by The Reconnections: stay free, stay present, follow the energy.

We already have fusion food: a culinary blending of cultures to delight the palate. Now we’re primed to feed our deeper hunger, to fuse mind and heart into healing art, and reawaken the sacred dimension in daily life.

And if we make a subtle shift — move the “h” in heart from the start of the word to the end — we create “Earth”. We live in a heart circle. Earth heart. The beat goes on.

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.

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