Listen To Your Body

What doesn't feel right is an opportunity for investigation. All too often, we don't listen to our feelings, our gut instincts, the sensations in our body. Sometimes those physical sensations are subtle - a slight pressure on the chest, a warmth in the belly, a tingle in the hands. Sometimes those physical sensations are a spiritual approximation of a mallet to the head. Sometimes it actually is a mallet to the head. (Try to avoid those.) But our feelings and sensations are information. Not information that tells you, "If it feels bad, don't do it." For that is not always the truth. Sometimes it feels bad because you have emotion or circumstances to process to move forward. Sometimes it feels bad because there is resistance that you must conquer before you can continue. Everything you feel is an opportunity to know yourself better, know yourself on a deeper level, to develop a new relationship with yourself.

For example, if you feel something pressing against your chest, give that feeling permission to leave. If it doesn't leave, ask it for its message. Allow yourself to hear the answer, whether it appears immediately or takes a bit of time.

Feelings and physical sensations are a way to glean information that can't quite penetrate the walls of our brain. Our brains can only repeat what they already know, so if new knowledge needs to find you, it won't always choose your brain as its best point of entry. Your brain may ignore something, but your body never can. 

Because Money Freak Outs Happen

What is money? How does it come to you? Money is just like everything else - a flow. We've assigned it great importance because in this world we've made money mean security. Money to most of us means a roof over our head, food in the fridge, and a sure future. But money is no different than anything else. Money begins in your mind. Money shows you the truth about yourself, about what you've made the flow of your life mean, where you are and aren't allowing yourself to receive.

Love flows to you when you let yourself feel love for what's around you. Peace flows to you when you decide it's okay to feel peace. Money flows to you when you've decided that you can allow yourself to have what you need, what you want, what you truly desire. Money heightens these lessons because we've attached so much importance and so much of our wellbeing on the amount of money we have. We choose the amount that makes us feel safe. Some feel safe with ten dollars, some feel safe with ten thousand or ten million dollars. It is arbitrary. Money is arbitrary.

Money is not our security or our savior. Money is only a means, a means to know ourselves better, a means to get what we want. But money is not the gatekeeper to love or security or freedom. We can have these things with or without money.

Money works best when we share something we value - our art, our time, our knowledge - and receive in return. Money is simply an idea, an idea that works best when it feels fun, when it feels like simply another way to accept in the flow. You send out, you accept back, in an infinitely looping figure eight.

Care for it, love it, share it, send it back into the world for things you love and value - that's when money can truly do its job. Money doesn't need to be a receptacle for our shame and our fear and our disappointment. It can be, if that's what you require to learn what you've decided to learn. But money can simply be another tool that allows you to play in the world.

No moral value or judgment is attached to money. Receiving what feels like a large amount of money for value you put into the world does not carry the weight of "good" or "bad" - it's simply the product of a decision you've made. But the decision can't simply be made on the surface. The decision of what you're worth must be made within your deepest, darkest depths. By accepting and loving those deep, dark depths you can integrate them into the wholeness of your life, your soul, and your experience. When you do not judge yourself or others, you will not judge money. When you do not judge money, you have removed enormous blocks to allowing yourself to have it.

Money is like love - it comes to you when you allow it, when you welcome it, when you prepare yourself for it. Preparing yourself for it does not need to take time, it does not need to be another barrier. Preparation is simply something you have previously assigned yourself.

If you don't have the money you think you need or want, rejoice. You have just been accepted into the PhD program of your choice and you are about to learn how to conquer the world. As you go through the process of learning how to accept and have the money you would like, trust that you won't be abandoned, you won't be left, you won't be assigned to suffer. Allow yourself to have what you need without money and trust that as you step forward, one step after another, you will learn all you need about money - that it was never about money and it was always about yourself. 

There's No Need To Hide

Hi. Hello. I see you in there. Whether you're fully in the world or a moss-lined hermit, there may be some aspect of yourself that you're hiding. Because you're afraid, because you feel it should be different, because you're ashamed of it. Maybe it's your financial situation, maybe it's your relationship, maybe it's that you aren't doing what you truly feel called to be doing with your life. Maybe you haven't found a calling, maybe you have more money than you need but you spend it in ways that don't feel peaceful.

Come out of hiding. When you do you will see that there are so many others who are hiding that precise thing that you've tucked away and guarded so closely. Maybe you can help each other. Maybe you can begin to see yourself as whole, even though you aren't perfect, even though you aren't who you thought you should be, even though your life isn't where you thought it would be by this moment in time.

Emerge from the bushes, shine a flashlight into the shadow, talk about the thing that you're most afraid of. When you open your vulnerability up to the world, you will be surprised by the love and support and acceptance that flood back to you. For we are all afraid, we are all hiding some part of ourselves. We all have something that we wish would just die off already and leave us in peace. But peace is found in fully accepting that piece of ourselves. Building a relationship with it. Allowing it to provide us with more connection, rather than less.

If each of us pull out the monster hiding in our rib cage or our solar plexus or the back of our skull, we will lift each other up and the world will shift in indefinable but measurably great ways.

Show us your monster. We will love it, and we will love you. For you are one of the greats, monsters and all. 

How To Get Bigger

Expansion is simple. It begins with thinking about what you love most about your life, what you most appreciate. As you notice what's good right now, feel what arises - in your chest, in your stomach, in your hands. Let the thoughts slip away and allow the feelings to expand. Let the sensation fill your body. Now send it beyond the boundaries your body to fill the room, to fill the house. Let those sensations expand to encompass the city, the state, the country. Imagine those sensations wrapping around the world and filling it up.

Feel how big you are?

For You Are Bigger Than You Know

Don't fear the unknown. Walking through the unknown will show you to yourself. It will show you where you are strong and where you need help. It will show you how to ask for help. It will show you where you must have faith in yourself, faith in others, and faith in the road you've chosen. But all you fear is that lack of knowledge, and the only way to know the road is to walk the road. Don't fear the untrod path, whether it's one you missed or one you hope to take one day. All paths are leading you precisely where you need to go. Yes, you can choose the rocky side path rather than the scenic high road. Yes, that path might trip you with unseen branches and fling you into the mud. Another path might take you the long way, through the fields and past a desolate lake. But you will always get where you've chosen to go. It may take so long that you forgot where you were aiming. It might take far less time than you dreamed was possible. But you will get there. Just keep walking.

Don't fear change. Change signifies growth. Change signifies a tearing down for a more stable rebuild. Change is at the very heart of the human experience and it pumps the blood that keeps it healthy. Don't fear the things you can't see, don't fear the untapped future or the pained past.

Expand yourself to hold all of it - the fear, the unknown, the future, the past, the trust, the long winding road, and those who will help you along the way. You are greater than you can know, and you can hold everything that has or will come. Embrace what's coming now. And know that you can hold it, for you can hold the world.