Tag: zen

Faith Hill, Elephants and Prophetic Dreams

~ soulunfold ~ Leave a comment

 

Last night, I dreamed I was Faith Hill, famed country music star. I had a cap of blonde curls on my head and I just thought I was amazing.

I was asked to speak at a kids’ event in a school. Being the lovely Faith Hill I was, I said yes!

I was in the gymnasium with the teacher and all of these kids. All of a sudden, some IDIOT releases an elephant into the gymnasium. This GD thing is trying to trample me AND THE KIDS.

I went running out of the gymnasium to get help. I’m walking around, trying to convince people to help us, but A) nobody believes me and B) nobody knows who the hell Faith Hill is. I spend most of the time yelling song titles and then referencing my husband, Tim McGraw, who I then also realize I don’t actually know personally.

One of the funniest parts about this dream is I was having some successful prophetic dreams every night this week, right up until this one. I’ve been doing a new brain wave sound meditation exercise with an alpha/theta wave track that I think is affecting my dreams.  This week, I had dreams that warned me of encounters I would have, heightening the emotions and stakes, so that I would know in my waking day how to tread when I encountered these situations.  Both times, I kept a tight rein on myself and played the situation calmly and rationally, when I might have made a mistake if I hadn’t been warned.

In all seriousness, the dreams resulting from this new meditation have been sharper, clearer, more memorable.  Our dreams are the first spiritual experience most of us have.  Your body lets go and your soul is free to commune with its higher self and the guardians from beyond.  If you can begin to harness your dreams, this is the first ticket to opening yourself up spiritually.

Meditation itself is something like a waking dream.  When I do a psychic reading and I really need to dig deep to communicate with someone on the Other Side, I have to go to a place inside where it feels like I am on the cusp of falling asleep.  I think this is what some mediums call a trance, but it doesn’t look crazy.  It just looks like my eyes are closed and I’m being still. I learned how to find that stillness through regular meditation, and sometimes, to be honest, IRREGULAR meditation.  All that matters is that you put your heart and soul into it and do it as much and as well as you can.

THIS dream better not be prophetic, though.  I love elephants, I’d be both literally and figuratively crushed if that happened. The truth is, it probably is prophetic, in a different way than the others.

For me, the elephant typically represents the idea of being a gentle giant, and the spirit of the Hindu deity Ganesh. Ganesh is the remover of obstacles and the bringer of success. He will create a path for you where previously none was possible. Is it any coincidence then that, as I build my business and my blog, I have this dream about being a famous woman who nobody recognizes, being chased by the God of success, scattering children in his wake?  It’s almost laughable how dead on this seemingly ridiculous dream is. I am running away from my own success, assuming I already know what I’m doing. I apparently also have some fears that success at what I want to do will crush me, so I better learn how to harness it. And apparently my subconscious is also pissed that i am not famous yet. What can I tell you, it’s not my rational mind watching this movie, it’s my lizard brain!

In my heart, I am already doing what many well-known mediums and spiritual figures claim to do (some are authentic, from what I can ascertain, many are not). I am living a genuine spiritual life, warts and all, and reaching out to connect with others on my path. I want to bring the messages I have learned from the Other Side to other humans here who want to know them. More importantly, I want to give others this gift of knowing their spiritual selves, knowing their guardians, coming into contact with life beyond organic life.

Once upon a time in the past, I was afraid I wasn’t going to make it any further in life. I was depressed to a point of exhaustion and didn’t want to keep trying. All of that shifted and changed, an inch at a time. I started by saying SCREW THIS SHIT and reading everything I could get my hands on about spirituality (reading has always been my savior, my happy place, my comfort zone). Ultimately, a friend posted an article from the New Yorker (to this day, she doesn’t know what impact she had, I’ve never told her) titled Jumpers about people who had leaped from the Golden Gate Bridge.  One man, named Ken Baldwin, survived, and his tale changed my life.

From Jumpers:

“I wanted to disappear,” he said. “So the Golden Gate was the spot. I’d heard that the water just sweeps you under.” On the bridge, Baldwin counted to ten and stayed frozen. He counted to ten again, then vaulted over. “I still see my hands coming off the railing,” he said. As he crossed the chord in flight, Baldwin recalls, “I instantly realized that everything in my life that I’d thought was unfixable was totally fixable—except for having just jumped.”

As I write this, a song by the Avett Brothers titled “Swept Away” plays, and tears run down my cheeks:

Well you send my life a whirling
Darling when you’re twirling
On the floor
Who cares about tomorrow?
What more is tomorrow?
Than another day.

When you swept me away

I see the end of the rainbow
But what more is a rainbow
Than colors out of reach
If you come down to my window
And I climb out my window
Then we’ll get out of reach

Then you swept me away
Yeah you swept me away

You said with such honest feeling
But what’d you really mean
When you said that I’m your man
Well how my darling can it be
When you have never seen me
And you never will again

That you swept me away
Yeah you swept me away

Life is ever changing but I will always
find a constant and comfort in your love
With your heart my soul is bound
And as we dance I know that heaven can be found

Well you send my life a whirling
Darling when you’re twirling
On the floor
Who cares about tomorrow?
What more is tomorrow?
Than another day.

When you swept me away
Yeah you swept me away
Yeah you swept me away

The energy of Ganesh is the sweeping energy of change. He will move through a path and change it utterly for you. He is a natural force to be reckoned with, and the one thing he promises is utter transformation.

Ken Baldwin may have been swept away for a bit, but he survived the jump. As he danced over that chord and spun through the air, he suddenly knew in an instant how heaven could be found. Heaven is peace. Heaven is certainty. Heaven is hope. Heaven is faith in the face of change.

In essence, the old Ken Baldwin was swept away that day and a new one took his place. I don’t know where he is today or what happened to him since 2003, but in my heart, he took that plunge for me and for so many others, by telling that story of his to that reporter (Tad Friend, I don’t know you, but thank you). I hope some day I can talk to a room full of people looking for hope and infuse them with this same feeling. How powerful is that: to know that on his way out, he saw the solutions for all of his problems in a flash, and they were all fixable.

My old self was swept away, too, and she’s slowly being replaced by someone more resilient and, I think, wiser. I’d like to grow more gentle and joyful, but I am grateful to accept this new woman as my identity.  She knows more than she says, and she’s wild and tougher than she used to be.  I may have a new self-esteem burgeoning of my own design, but I also am working to stay humble. Lord knows I’ve humbled myself enough to stay real.

“Swept Away” was followed by “Make You Feel My Love.”  I hear you, Spirit.  I think many people, my former self included, don’t realize that the guardians from beyond are right there waiting for us to notice. They want to drive us forward in our quests. They want to make us happy and help us. Yes, we have a contract with our higher selves to DO IT OURSELVES, this is true, but not without help. Trust me, they can make you happy, make your dreams come true, and they would go to the ends of the Earth for you. It just takes some work.

I hear the winds of change coming back around for me, and for once, I think I’m actually prepared to ride them and not just be swept away. As Spirit tells me here, the storms raging down the highway of regret are bringing the winds of change. I ain’t seen nothing like this yet, and I’m ready to further embrace Heavenly love.

The storms are raging on the rolling sea
And on the highway of regret.
The winds of change are blowing wild and free,
You ain’t seen nothing like me yet.

I could make you happy, make your dreams come true.
Nothing that I wouldn’t do.
Go to the ends of the Earth for you,
To make you feel my love.

Thank you for the dream, Ganesh, and for the laughs. Thank you for the change and for the love. I will go to the ends of the Earth for you and the rest of Heaven, too.

In love and light,

Erica

BE the Grasshopper: How to Create Your Ideal Life One Leap at a Time

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A co-worker and friend once told me, “E, you always make so much meaning out of your life.  I like how you put things together into a story.”  She has always been a keen observer of human nature, and she had a point.  I make meaning out of the seemingly random observations of my everyday life, both my physical and my spiritual lives (arguably they are two sides of the same coin, but you will have to read my book to see what I mean there).

You can do this too, and I’ll tell you why it’s a great practice.  Narrative is one of the most powerful survival tools given to humans.  Narrative weaves cultures together, starting all the way back to when stories were passed down by word of mouth and painted and carved by firelight.

Narrative brings meaning to life.  And meaning is what drives us forward.  Without meaning, we are pinwheeling through a sea of chaos, which is exhilarating and hopeless and horrifying, but still, we build a narrative to explain that, too, the narrative that nothing matters because there is no end game and no reason for existence and you either follow rules for comfort’s sake or live in anarchy, but nothing really matters.

It is true.  We live in a world of disorder, a two-sided Janus of a Universe built on opposing poles of chaos and yet infinite, magical wonder, right down to seeing the Golden Ratio in a leaf’s design and the beauty of the tides and their magical, yet dependable movements. We are disorder and order infinitely and miraculously woven into complex designs that only beings beyond our reach could have engineered.

We are a narrative built of the energy created when polar opposites revolve around one another, and we cannot escape this story.  Even the endings of our stories are just another part of the narrative structure.  Think about it like this—your life structure follows a narrative that you have created through your actions.  Most of this narrative you wrote yourself, with some of the structure gifted to you by forces out of your control.

Each one of us is a narrative within a greater narrative, and each of our physical lives is part of a soul’s greater, overarching narrative.  Starting to see the structure now?  Each thread of the tapestry is composed of millions of other threads, all weaving together to create one big book.

In keeping wzth my own narrative, at the end of every day, I love to spend a few minutes with my journal, piecing the events of the day together and making sense out of the signs and symbols sent my way.  I aid it along with mini readings for myself, as well, and I string each day together to see the overarching trends of my soul’s direction and what my spirit guides are urging me toward.  It is an incredibly easy and fulfilling practice that anyone can do—and you will find yourselves more spiritually attuned and feel your soul growing and reaching when doing this practice. You will feel more connected to the Divine in a personal, comforting way than you have ever been before.  There are even mediums among you, some of you who have not yet fully discovered your own abilities.  This is the practice that will bring those abilities to shine.

So last night, I worked in my journal, then in the minutes before sleep, I sought some inspiration in fitness boards on Pinterest, then looked at the savvy workout program I have created for myself.  I thought “I’ll wake up in the morning and do my workout.  Nothing’s going to stop me.”

Well, the Sandman stopped me, but not for long.  After I had readied myself for the day, I was on my way out the door but heard a loud noise coming from the direction of the window air conditioner.  I went over to check it out and realized I had to add a shim to the window to stop the rattling.  As I looked for the perfect spot for the shim, I encountered a horrifying object.

A 4” grasshopper crouched at eye level, daring me to do something about his presence.  I am terrified of insects—just a visceral, lizard-brain reaction takes over and I can hardly focus when one is nearby.  However, I finished shimming the window, finished my locking up, and went to work.  I probably should have identified the grasshopper being so high up, so large and so insistently in my face as a sign from Spirit, but I did not realize that until I was in the car and my fight or flight response had finished hurling insults at the little green monster.

I thought throughout the day about the significance of the grasshopper, and my intuition told me it was important. I researched the symbolism and there it was.  In some Native American traditions, the grasshopper is a symbol of making dreams come true, of grounding your dreams to the Earth, yet also making them fly.  The message suddenly unfolded before me, and I pulled an angel card to see if I was definitely on the right track.

The angel card that came up stated “Healthy Lifestyle.”  The grasshopper was there to remind me of my dreams, telling me to bring them to life, nudging me with a note about how I prayed for help with my fitness and how I need to make consistent steps to making it happen.  Because I like nothing more than to see good messages come in threes, I also queued up my music player for a random song, and it played a song titled “Vrkshasana,” which translates to “being grounded without being inflexible.”  It is notably also a song with a picture of a woman doing yoga on the front of it, and yoga is one of my favorite fitness practices.

The cherry on top, though, was last night, in pure, effortless synchronicity, I heard two quotes stand out from a show I was watching on Netflix with my boyfriend.

Pennsatucky: Man, do you know what it means when there ain’t nobody up there punishing the evildoers? It means there ain’t nobody giving out prizes for the good ones neither; ‘Cuz there ain’t no judge. There ain’t no justice. We just crawl around this earth like ants…
[pause]
Pennsatucky: And then we die.
Then, perhaps somewhat unbelievably, later on in the show, long before I came face-to-face with the jumping green monster on my window:
So-So:  BE the grasshopper.

BE the grasshopper, Erica.  Dare to jump, therefore to fly.  Exercise.  Become both supple and strong.  These are important elements to living my best life.  Important elements to bringing forth the narrative I want to create with every breath I take in this incarnation.

Later in the day today, someone close to me also reminded me to take the vitamins I have been neglecting to take for weeks.  Guess what?  Those amazing vitamins made me feel great, allowing me to power through my day’s work until 9:30 p.m., then create this blog post. They also help me stay motivated for morning workouts.

One of the elements of this world for which I am most grateful is cause and effect. Throw a rock, hear a splash.  Put effort into something, it will respond.  That is the beauty of this world, that we can make an impact, we can effect change, because with change comes transformation, and transformation is the whole reason we move around this Earth.

Cause and effect.

Call and response.

Some people would call this naiveté on my part, but I don’t believe we are destined to just crawl aimlessly around this Earth until we die.  We are the meaning makers, we are the storytellers.  The truth is, the world IS chaos.  It IS meaningless.  It IS designed to make us question meaning, to make us think there is nothing beyond it.  We are given the tools to MAKE meaning.  We are the narrative, we are the myth makers, the legend creators, the heroes and the villains.

Like Joan Didion said, we tell ourselves stories to survive.  We shout into the wilderness and we are the voices that record on the ages.  We are also swallowed up by the vastness of the Universe and snuffed out like candles at a moment’s notice.

Today, my story is about bringing my dreams to light, and yours.  My spirit guardians are guiding me toward fitness, telling me to take that first leap, and even right now as I write this, I see one of my guides making a grasshopper leap in my third eye to show me that if I just try, if I just give it some effort, they will take that effort and expand it, turn it into a miraculous leap forward, like the huge (yes I was horrified when I saw it, anybody who knows me knows I was horrified) 4″ grasshopper exploding effortlessly almost 6′ up to my window to remind me of my role in bringing my dreams to light.  Tomorrow, I will finally wake up as early as I need to and start my new regimen.  And my guardians will make sure that my results are faster and more powerful than I could have dreamed.

In making that pact, I turn back to you, because you are my true focus here.  I already know my path, and I am following it as my guardians light the way, 6′ in the headlights at a time.  My question for you this post is simple and it’s also a challenge.

What story will YOU write today?

Freedom in Darkness: Letting Go of the Need to Know

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It’s OK not to know.

I mean it. In fact, not knowing is the basis of the human condition. It is part of the contract we agree to before we take physical form—we pledge to embark on this journey in which we will not experience Divine love in the same way as we do in Spirit, where it infuses our beings and is ever present. When we take our human bodies, Spirit is still present, and God’s love is still everywhere, but there is a separation, often referred to as “the veil,” to prevent us from fleeing back home.

That veil is the basis of our constant need to control our environments and know the future. Human survival is about evolution and response, and nothing can prepare you for a situation like knowing exactly how it will play out. As a medium, I have experienced the constant need to know what comes next and temptation to pin that information down. I struggle with this temptation every day, but thankfully, the tools that I use are designed to gently remind me when my questions are overstepping boundaries that are in place for a reason. My divination tools offer me insight about the future without telling me too much. They tell me just enough to make better decisions.

When we sit up at night and we worry about the future, we waste time. Everyone knows that worrying is sometimes useful and sometimes a waste. Worry is a barometer—it is your intuitive self indicating that something is wrong. Your subconscious runs numbers and schemes all day, and that is where your worries surface from—your intuitive self can know more than your “aware” self. You do need to pay attention to those nagging concerns, but only if they are problems you can work on. Identify what you are worrying about, write it down, follow it with a multi-step plan to correct the imbalance, and thank your subconscious for the alert. Then: release. Release the worry. Surrender your fate to the Divine. The most relaxing feeling in the world is knowing you have done all that you can and the rest is in the hands of the Divine. You have incarnated on this Earth into a form that is not all-powerful like you are in Heaven. This is Heaven’s greatest gift to us. We have the opportunity to grow but almost none of the responsibility, because we have a limited range of power in our physical forms.

If you are worrying about something that is out of your hands, then you are toxic, septic, even, with energy that drains your batteries and does not give back, and you can cleanse yourself of that physically and spiritually. My Moonshine Meditation with Archangel Haniel from this blog is ideal for cleansing yourself of needless worry and feeling Divine comfort.

Worries are akin to messages from your computer that indicate something is off. One message from your antivirus that there is a Trojan horse in your system is great, because you can navigate to your antivirus program’s dashboard and tell the program to fix the problem. Done deal, no more alerts. However, sometimes worries become messages that in themselves are like viruses. A message from your PC that continually indicates something is wrong, but there is no source of the problem, is in itself often caused by a virus. This is what happens with worry in our spiritual systems. Worries tell us what is important to us and what we need to fix, but when they become viral and fear-based, they become our very human attempts to tell the future and dispel the terror of the unknown. It is easy to tell whether your worry is a helpful message or a virus. If you can do something about it and the worry disappears after you set in motion the fix for it, then it is a helpful message.

If your worry is something you can do nothing about and it plagues you mercilessly, then you are dealing with a virus and a spiritual and physical cleanse can help you.
Purging viral worry from your system is best achieved by meditation or what some people call “finding your center.” At my spiritual center is a place where I am eternally sitting in lotus position, enfolded in gentle green light and peace. Wherever I may be in the physical world, this aspect of my spirit is always present and available for me to take a time out. I developed this secret “room” at the center of my spirit by meditating for a few minutes every day. During my meditations, I was eventually able to achieve a place of such peace that I am now able to replicate it in visualization at a moment’s notice.
Finding your center is about learning to listen to Spirit, accessing Heavenly love, and then remembering what that feeling is like whenever and wherever you need it. The secrets to finding your center are as follows:

1. Regular meditation
2. Patience
3. Faith in yourself and in a power higher than yourself

In Corinthians, the Bible speaks of the nature and importance of love, famously stating in 1:13 “So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” Not to be forgotten are the underpinnings of love—faith and hope. Faith is nothing more than patience—patience with others, patience with self, patience with the human condition. Hope is love extended into the future. Hope is allowing space for love in your heart and putting a down payment on your dreams.

It’s not love, faith and hope alone that move the mountains in your way in life. It is what you do while you foster faith, hope and love. Faith is accepting the laws of physics on this Earth. Faith is the presence of action filling the void of defeat. Faith is reminding yourself that small changes make big results. You throw a rock, you get a splash. For every action on this Earth, there is an equal, but opposite reaction. Holding onto that thought will bring you more faith than you will ever need. And hope? Hope is the 5-year plan you wrote down in the first place to guide those rocks you are throwing into the waves. Hope is doing something about it gladly and allowing for your future to be what you want it to be.

Release and surrender are the keys to walking a spiritually tuned path. You have to release your expectations, surrender your path to God, and pledge to just try. That’s it. Then put one foot in front of the other–sometimes literally. I follow a blog titled Zen Daily Habits (at http://zenhabits.net/) and written by a man named Leo Babauta. In one of his first entries, Leo writes about how he changed his life, what the early days of those changes were like. He writes about making small changes—basically, taking baby steps. He speaks of lacing up your shoes and going running for 5 minutes every day until that 5 minutes becomes easier, then slowly increasing the amount of time you run and, as a result, improving your health. Leo writes brilliantly about change and how to make it happen in a method he calls “taking the long view.” Taking the long view means making small changes bit by bit in preparation for a future you would like to help shape. Taking the long view is love, faith and hope in action. Taking the long view is getting back in the game and playing for win or for defeat, for love of the game. Taking the long view is how you break out of ruts and taking the long view is how you halt worry in its tracks.

When mystic Eckhart Tolle writes about the power of living in the now, he harnesses a great force—the force of accepting that we do not know what the future brings, and that is OK, because the future does not exist yet, and every moment in the future is a moment that will come to pass in the now, therefore the now is all there is, so there is no point to living in the future. There are, however, like myself, some very literal-minded people out there who cannot live in the now. Planning is essential to human survival, and planning is a form of hope and faith. Where literal-minded people can access the power of now is at the point where your plan ends—be willing to take action, to try to shape your future, but then to sit back and enjoy the present moment as it unfolds. Enjoy the 5-minute run and the mini victory it brings you every day. Enjoy the idea if you are on a weight loss journey that every day you diet and exercise is a day you will look and feel better than the day before. The power of now combines efficiently with the idea of the long view when you juxtapose them with release, surrender, hope, faith and, most of all, love.

Out of the 3 concepts of faith, hope and love, it is hope that is most marketable for mystics. Hope is what everyone is selling, from famous mediums to modern mystics to Zen masters. Hope. I can give you hope, too. It is free. One foot in front of the other—that is the starter kit to hope. Anything can and does happen every day. That is hope.
Test your hope muscle. Try asking your higher power to take the wheel in the ultimate act of spiritual surrender. Try giving the angels, if they are your jam, as they are mine, or a specific angel permission to help you with some aspect of your life. Or just tell the Universe you give her permission to help you with a certain situation. Then, stand back and watch the opportunities roll in. It could be that a friend gives you a pair of running shoes you needed because they don’t fit her. It could be as well a blog post that advertises how to run a 5K in 5 weeks. It could be a friend asking you to go to Zumba.

Whatever it is, it’s coming if you ask for it. Watch for it. Do it. Keep doing it. God waits for you to arrive. You are a singular crystallization of God’s love, and the Universe is singing to you through me, through your dreams, through your joy and most of all, through your hope.

All you have to do is try.

In love and light, playing my heart out for you—Erica.