LOVING WITHOUT EXPECTATIONS. What would it be like to love purely, fully, unconditionally, without needing to receive anything back?
Imagine loving another person, or perhaps a group of people, or maybe even the whole world of us without any personal attachments to the nature of that love. Imagine love fully unleashed – love without judgements or fear or agenda, only the pure awareness of love. So much of our loving is transactional – we give and we get – or we try to keep those scales balanced. The next level is to let go, to be able to open our hearts and love simply for the sake of love. At the Tuesday Spirit Lab someone mentioned the situation in Afghanistan, but instead of anger towards the Taliban or grief and shame that could make her look away, she only felt love for the Afghani people. She is reading their stories and feeling a connection that is more powerful than the noise machine being generated by our own helplessness and guilt. It is the love she is feeling that truly supports, that will motivate whatever actions are aligned with her truth and her spiritual connection.
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WALKING ON A SPIRITUAL PATH. A conversation about walking the path of spirit with Marina Qutab. There has been a massive shift in our relationship to spirituality, as the tectonic plates of our religious belief systems have been moving and sometimes disappearing.
Many of us have abandoned religions and spirituality altogether, only to feel at some point our hearts pulling us back towards God. “I’m not religious but I am spiritual” has become a mantra of sorts as we explore a more personal relationship with the Divine. What we come to is that true spirituality is not a belief system at all, it is more a path that we walk. Sometimes the way ahead is not visible, and we are asked to walk into the unknown with our hearts open and trusting that our feet will land on solid ground. Other times we get to a fork in the road and we know we need to make some choices in life and also to deepen our spiritual engagement. This new spirituality asks us to keep clearing and healing old emotional and psychic wounds so that our path is one of evolvement and opening to life and experiencing true love here. When pain visits – whether it’s emotional or physical, we tend to cope with it by either rising above it or finding ways to get rid of it. Products and services that help us deal with pain and the fear of pain are huge industries. And we are conditioned to believe that pain is part of something evil.
But, like everything else right now, the idea of pain as an enemy that we must fight needs to be reevaluated. What wisdom can we add to the thousands of books already written and the words of so many teachers and all the drugs and methods of dealing with pain? When something hurts, we want to make it go away. But what if there was a different kind of relationship with pain? What if we learned how to expand our consciousness to not create an enemy out of pain in ourselves or others? Join me today to open this up in our hearts and minds and see where the future is trying to lead us. HEALING THE OTHER PANDEMIC...Many of us experienced life as we knew it unravel and disappear over the last year and a half. We witnessed up close, or from a distance, the ravages of a virus dealing death blows to hundreds of thousands of Americans and countless millions around the world. It’s far from over yet, but we are beginning to emerge from our quarantines and see each other’s smiles on unmasked faces for the first time.
The battlefield littered with the detritus of this war is still there and is home to the other pandemic of lostness. It’s equally as debilitating and distressing as the COVID virus and unlike the first one, it shows no signs of letting up. It is affecting all ages and all people. The emotional toll it has taken on us is growing like a cancer. It’s fueled by political polarization, fear, and mistrust in all existing institutions. Many of the structures set in place by the industrial revolution of the 20th century are breaking down quickly. People don’t want to go back to soul sucking jobs and children are questioning whether they can return to classrooms where they feel stifled and unseen. Emotional issues are flowering into full-on psychotic breaks and other mental illnesses. And many of us are on the edge. There is no vaccine for this epidemic, but there is medicine. We have to find ways to support each other to heal and to move on from old ways of being. Join me today to open this up in our hearts and minds and find a path ahead. We are asked in so many ways, from the time we are very small, to believe in things we cannot see, like God or faeries. Our religions ask us to believe in the paths they set out for us, the way to define right and wrong, good and bad. Our countries ask us to believe in our governments and our founding documents. We say we believe in freedom, in equality, but do we even understand what that means in relation to our own unique lives?
The demand to accept and follow a set of beliefs dooms us to a life of limitation and imitation. This is especially true with our spirituality. And if you think you are not part of this, because maybe you don’t follow any organized religion, look around at most of the newly emerging spiritual groups and you’ll see the same structures building up with a new set of words, rules, beliefs and leaders to follow. Beyond belief is true knowing. When you tell a child he must believe in God, you are taking away something he is already deeply connected to, something his heart already knows. Please join me today for a dip into the clear cool waters of knowing, where the true story of your divine connection awaits you. YOUR WORDS ARE SACRED. We do a lot of talking all the time. If we’re not talking to someone else, we’re talking to ourselves. Sometimes we talk back to the TV or to our pets. Often we try to talk to God. Sometimes we try to listen. We are communicators, and we tend to throw our words out like lassos, trying to connect or to defend or to explain.
What we don’t realize is the power of all these words. Words can go all the way from the profane to the sacred. Mostly, we use them towards the bottom of that ladder. The words themselves may sound sweet, but the energy that comes with them can be aggressive and cutting. Even in spiritual work, words can be thrown out like memes, and phrases become trendy. The casualness of the way we use the words actually blocks our growth and connection to what is real and true. It’s time to bring a much greater consciousness to language. Words are sacred emanations of our hearts and minds. Slowing down and connecting with our words means connecting with what is motivating these words from deep within us. We are surrounded by mystery and we are not alone. The great paradox is that while we are beings programmed by some inner radar to reach out and connect to all that exists, including what we can see and touch and what we can only sense, we have created so much perceived distance between ourselves and what we call Spirit or God that most of us don’t really make a true and ongoing connection.
We may feel like actors on a stage, as Shakespeare said, being moved around by a force we can’t know and often fear. And we seek guidance from a distant shimmering force. A greater truth is emerging as spiritual energies and beings are moving closer. We realize that what we have thought of as Spirit includes many others - beings from other planets, galaxies, universes who touch in here to observe and to see if we are ready to communicate in some way. The energy fields around us are full of spirit beings of all kinds, and our challenge is to learn and intimately know how viscerally present they really are to us and how eager they are to know us. The convergence of our spirituality and our science depends on our willingness to be part of a great matrix of intelligence and to enter a conscious state of communication through our thoughts and hearts that reaches out with grace and love. Please join me for an experience in contact. Being on a spiritual path can mean a lot of different things to different people. There are an infinite number of ways to engage with Spirit, and indeed, each person’s experience of that relationship is different. Even if you practice a religion with specific guidelines and restrictions, your personal interface with God is your own. Even your understanding of God is unique to you. And in that infinite variety, there is still the choice of just how deep you are called to go on your spiritual journey. What your path looks like and how much you surrender to it are the ultimate choices that lead to true transformation.
Today I will share Wisdom Wednesday with a spiritual teacher who felt called to do very deep spiritual work many years ago. We shared a teacher, or perhaps I should say an Earth Angel, Charles McCall. In that work, we were taken to the depths of our emotional and spiritual pain and resistance. And we were lifted gradually by the beauty of surrender to a true spiritual path that is fully integrated into life, and not separated from it. Please join me for this very special one-on-one with Marilyn Munro, a spiritual teacher from Austin, Texas. TIME FOR REAL SERVICE? We come here to be challenged and in that challenge we find a way to open, not close. We come here to feel the parts of us that are closed, that are afraid, that are in judgement of others, to then surrender to our innate generous and open hearts.
Some of us seem preprogrammed to be in service. From the time we are small, we take pleasure in helping others. It just seems natural, and we will feel a burst of heart energy in the giving. But so often that desire to be of service gets twisted into something transactional, and instead of doing things for the pure fulfillment and joy of sharing our gifts, we begin to expect something in return. A lot of this is cultural, but often our sense of self-worth can hinge on whether our expectations to be recognized or to receive something back for a “good deed.” Often, the bar gets higher and ego demands more and more of an exchange. ENERGY | WE ARE THE TRUE VESSELS OF THE NEW AGE. Energy. Swirling, flowing, emanating, within and without. Energy connects us to all that exists, as everything is made of energy. When it becomes trapped in the body, held by contractions of emotions and mind, stress holds, fear pulls in.
Breath releases the blocked energy to find its way out. Have you noticed how difficult it is to take a breath sometimes? How much resistance there is to move the body? We end up in a holding pattern, sometimes for years, for a lifetime. It can feel extremely dangerous to breathe, to move and release the energy. Feelings and thoughts of stuckness are usually things we try to shift by behavior changes, but without releasing the energy that is attached to the thought forms, the fixes are temporary. Take a breath and see thoughts and feelings become uncoupled and start to move. Things can change in an instant. It’s beautiful. The stuck energy transforms as it’s released, bursting into colors and swirls as it’s freed. And we, in growing consciousness and awareness, become able to perceive energy emanations all around us. The joy and adventure of the Spirit Human! |
AuthorA spiritual teacher, healer and minister, Racquel helps people clear the emotional and energetic blocks that keep them from discovering their true and unique spiritual connections. Archives
October 2022
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