Peace Pilgrim said that if we smile at the world, it smiles back at us. When we connect with the grace and innocence of our pure love, for both the animate and the inanimate world around us, then our connection with Nature's voice is awakened.
In modern times it has become progressively easy for us to connect with other humans, but what we have forgotten is how to connect with the Natural world around us. However, we don't have to re-invent the wheel here, we humans have been listening to the subtle communications coming to us from Nature since time began. We've gone on vision quests and written in pictographs. We've seen the forest as our brother and the river as our sister. Reclaiming this part of ourselves is as easy as stepping outside.
Of course our dutiful beloved subconscious minds are always going to protect us from something we have been taught to fear. And make no mistake about it, all of our fears have been taught to us. We learn them from our families, our religious groups, our friends and even our government. Unless our subconscious programming along these lines is intentionally changed, it can sabotage our attempts to open our hearts to hear Nature's voice. Beliefs like "People will think I'm crazy," or "I may loose my grip on reality," or "This is against my family belief system," are all scary enough to stop you in your tracks.
This is where self love steps in. We need to love ourselves enough to give ourselves what we need and really want in the world. Many of us yearn for this connection with Nature and when we get whispers and glimpses of it, it brings us so much joy.
I feel that joy is the basis of our spirituality an that it is our job as humans to nourish the Universe with our joy. So, if we'd really love to have that beautiful connection with our mother, Nature, we need to free ourselves from the tyranny of our own minds.
Identifying our fears, so we can move through and past them, is how we do so. Once we have become aware of them, we can use our intention plus our attention to change those old thought habit patterns and manifest new thoughts instead.
Our spiritual practices can also help us to listen to the voice of Nature. Self love, meditation, dream interpretation and prayer all help us to calm our minds, activate our inner vision centers and connect with the Divinity in everything, including Ourselves. When we do this, we open our hearts and let the love flow. We free ourselves to smile at the Natural word. And then it smiles back at us. We step into our joy with open hearts and Hear From Our Source How We Can All Serve The One.
© Josephine Laing, 2015
Quantum physics holds potential explanations for why our thoughts are so creative and how our psychic ability functions. Join Josephine Laing as she ties all of this together in just 6 minutes time.
© Josephine Laing, 2015
Today was a day in my life, not too unlike any other day and I loved it so much that I wanted to share it with you. I woke late after a good nights sleep relieved to find that my small fever of 101 degrees had abated after three days of bouncing around above normal. Also my intermittent dizziness and brief bout with high blood sugar levels had also resolved. I had strained my gut lifting something heavy, very awkwardly a few days prior and had probably give myself a small intestinal tear and a very mild case of septicemia. Some regular doses of proteolytic enzymes to speed the healing of the tear, lots of rest and limited activity along with green juice feasting and a trip to my chiropractor friend all brought successful resolve. Hooray! The first healing of the day done.
Before I even got out of bed, a friend of ours left a message that his mother was dying, inviting me to share in the emotional journey that lay ahead. It is a true honor to be asked and to be included during such a vulnerable time. We played phone and email tag throughout the day and he and I will enjoy our communications over the days and weeks ahead as we connect in that vast heart space together. Death and grief can be like a roller coaster ride. It has it's ups and downs. A time of deep healing is beginning.
Then, one of my best friends, who had just sustained a doozey of an injury called needing a reading. So I settled in to a deep long distance look. I was shown a lovely path for her to metaphorically walk along that would guide her back onto the road to health. As was the case for me, a little well placed self care along with a few supplements and a slight shift in the daily routines brought the balance that was needed. Healing number three.
Next my dear friend and former neighbor had come stateside to work on some pressing family needs and wound up exhausted and malnourished in just two weeks time by falling into an old family pattern of working too hard with poor self care. So, last night, after a good dinner at our house, he was much improved. And then he helped me with a little task that I badly needed done. So, I wanted to repay the favor and do something nice for him and headed off to the healthy food store and got him some very nice organic fruits and vegetables, a few organic grain products and some nice organic nut butter. Together he and I cleared out all of the pesticide laden, empty calorie white bread and other junk foods out of his cabin and sat him down to some decent nourishment with lots of fresh live food. He was so happy and it felt great for both of us. Healing number four.
After that I came home and made three clear broth soups for another dear friend who had just got out of the hospital. I had planned to bring her lovely vichyssoise, Julia Child's recipe. But her surgeon said clear liquids only, for a whole week. That meant that the leek and potato soup was off and coffee and jello were the suggested items on the menu. But sugar and caffeine don't make for the best nutrition, especially when trying to heal form such major wounds. So, while I was at our Co-Op, I picked up ingredients for bone broth, potassium broth and a chicken soup. I'm a vegetarian, but she is not, and her surgery involved lots of cartilage. So, I whipped up these three nice mineral rich organic recipes. Later I poured them through a sieve to make them clear. They should sustain and nourish her well for the first week of healing ahead.
To top off the day of healing, we headed off to a lovely all organic dinner with some very good friends of ours who live in a grove of trees. They are blessed each year by the return of the monarch butterflies who hang in lovely long strings while resting from their migration. As you may know, they have been in decline in recent years due to pesticides, GMO's and industrial-chemical-agricultural processes. Our friend has been filming the butterflies as they rest in the trees and has created an amazing piece of art, a prayer really, for YouTube to help increase awareness about these beautiful creatures who share our earth with us. It's simple beauty and grace moved me so deeply that tears were streaming down my cheeks and I knew that this work of true purpose, freely given, would help all of us and our world. It was a beautiful ending to a beautifully healing day.
© Josephine Laing, 2015
Hello everyone. I've just created this little video with my dear friend Einar Berg. It's called Fields of Energetic Knowing. Everything is not only composed of energy, but everything has an energetic field that extends well beyond the physical shell. Learning how to engage with this field is one of the most important things we do to increase our sensitivity to our world on all levels. Join me for this brief video on how we can learn about the energy fields that we communicate with.
© Josephine Laing, 2015
Years ago, when I was a child, I used to like to sneak onto the golf course that was near my home after the course had closed and no more golfers were around. My friends and I would roll down the hills and frolic in the sprinklers. Often I would go alone, just to spend some time amongst the trees, the grasses and the open sky overhead. It was wonderful and I enjoyed it deeply.
To get onto the golf course, we had to scramble under the chain link fence that bordered the course on one side. We had dug a hole using some sticks and it was just large enough for us to slip through. Since we didn't want our entrance to be discovered by the greens keepers, we located it underneath a large shrub that was growing along the fence. This bush had it's boughs on both sides of the fence, hiding our hole from view. Each time, after we used it, we scattered some fallen leaves and a few sticks over it to disguise it. It worked like a charm. And it actually was charmed.
That little spot helped me to discover something quite fascinating. I had long known as a child that I could hide quite easily if I was deep inside of a little stand of shrubs. But what I hadn't known was that I could actually nearly disappear if I shifted my attention right into the shrub. This came about when I was a little older. I had taken some classes in plant physiology in college. I became familiar with the inner workings of the cambial layer, or the vascular system, which is like the arteries and veins of the plant.
In an overly simplified description, the cambium moves water from the roots up to the leaves. There, the water interacts with sunlight and carbon from CO2 in a process known as photosynthesis to create sugars. Then the cambial layer transports those sugars down from the leaves to the roots for storage and as food for the plant.
Sometimes late at night, when I was needing some time to be alone out in the beauties of nature, I would go to my secret little entrance under the fence and slip on through, so that I could be with the trees and the open sky full of stars overhead. Usually, my little hidey hole would need some freshening up, as my childhood friends and I had all moved away from home. I would find a stick and clean and re-dig it a little so I could slip under again.
This was almost like a shamanic experience, entering through a largely unknown doorway. Occasionally folks, out for an evening stroll would walk by, some of them with their dogs. My shrub wasn't very densely foliated and from the right angle, you could see under it quite easily from the street which was immediately adjacent to my little entrance. Since I didn't want to be discovered in my clandestine activities, I needed to become invisible. So, instead of focusing on the people and the dog which would always reveal my presence to them, I learned how to slip inside the body of the plant, casting my full attention into the cambial layer and streaming with my mind and the water up into the leaves, which were resting from all of their daytime activities. I would slide back down to the roots and feel the moisture deep in the soil and get busy exchanging nutrients there. People could come and go, a mere three or four feet from me, and no one, not even the dogs would know I was there.
Years later when I learned of the concept of shape shifting, I realized that I was already familiar with the principles and had experienced a beginners version of what is needed to move into that best of all possible means of camouflage by using just my attention and the focus of my mind.
This coming weekend, on Saturday, in Morro Bay, at the Ruby Dragon, I will be teaching a day-long class on plant communication. With permission from the plants, we will be doing a similar exercise to the one I have described here, traveling in our awareness into the internal environment of the plant's bodies in order to commune with them and receive communications from them. I'm hoping that you will be free to join us. To sign up call the Ruby Dragon at (805) 772-1100. Blessings to you and see you there.
© Josephine Laing, 2015
We are often taught what to think, but we are not usually taught how to think. Please enjoy this short video on how to become aware of the different ways that we think.
© Josephine Laing, 2015
We live in a left brain dominant culture. The half of our brain that is located in the left side of our heads holds the perception of the analytical, linear, sequential and time-bound aspects of our reality. In this part of our brain our thoughts are filled with language and numbers, worries about the past and fears of the future. Our left brains like established routines and well-known solutions to our problems. Whereas, the thoughts in our right brain are much wider in scope. Our right brain thinks in terms of the whole forest rather than just the tree. The knowledge held in our right brains is way more astute in many ways, not only socially and emotionally but also psychically, being able to see the entire context, like the whole shoreline instead of just one grain of sand.
Dropping our left brain dominance and embracing the thoughts that we hold in our right brains has great implications for our collective and global good because our right brains are so much broader in perception. In the right brain it is all about 'We,' rather than 'Me.' And, when we enter into the right brain, we stop all our busy little left brain internal chatter, it just goes away, even if for only a moment and we begin to move into a consciousness that embraces more than just ourselves. We see that we are vast and a part of everything. Our right brains also hold the consciousness of peaceful euphoria and pure love. This is how we think while we are in the right side of our brains.
It is our right brain awareness that we are striving for and practice
achieving in meditation, but this quality of awareness can also happen
spontaneously whenever we are taken with the beauty of something, find
love, listen to a melody or move into the present moment. In his book, Polishing the Mirror, Ram Dass says that love is the doorway to
oneness with all things, to being in harmony with the entire Universe. He says that
this is what we all long for and that once we touch this state of pure
being, you can never completely forget it. He goes on to say that 'being here now,' which is the quality of our right brain awareness, is never more than a thought away. One of my
favorite ways to access my right brain is to step outside to listen for
the song of a bird, Here we find a calm, self-assured presence from
which we can access the state of oneness with everything. It is from this inner perspective that our inner guidance arises. As Rumi said, "Everything in the
Universe is Within, Ask all from yourself."
In her epic journey into the right side of the brain, Jill Bolte Taylor, who wrote My Stroke of Insight, found
the potential for a world full of beautiful, peaceful, compassionate,
loving people who knew that they could come to this space at any time.
She saw how we could all purposefully choose to step to the right side
of our brains and find this beautiful peace. This motivated her to take
that long eight
year journey of recovery from her stroke, so that she could share this,
so that we
could each see that all of us together, can embrace peace,
which I personally feel is humanity's greatest desire.
When we are in our right brains we know that 'All is Well, All of the Time.' It is from this standpoint that we can connect with spirit. It gives us access to our God Space or our Collective Love Consciousness. This is how we can commune with angels and nature spirits or deceased loved ones. It is our Higher Self, our Super conscious mind of compassion from whence we are totally interconnected with everyone and with everything through all time in the eternal moment of now. It is this aspect of our awareness that lets us receive inspirations that bring us into harmony and joy.
When we are in our right brain consciousness, we find that we are spontaneously fulfilling all of our needs while serving The One. This is our right brain. And I think it is time that we all start regularly practicing the fine art of freeing ourselves to step into the magic of the right side of our brains.
© Josephine Laing, 2015
