Thriving in the Worst of Times

Part One: Guidelines for the Spiritual Seeker

Your challenges do not make you stronger.
It is your ability to find resolution that does.

We are hearing about the direst of circumstances especially with housing foreclosures and the stock market instability. The stress level worldwide is possibly higher than it ever has been in living history when we consider the impact of economic issues and natural disasters. Regardless of the specifics of your unique personal challenges, there are certain steps the spiritual seeker can take to find resolution.

Here are the three quintessential guidelines for coping effectively in the worst of times:

1) Resist nothing
2) Trust everything is in Divine order
3) Act when Called to do so

Let’s first look at these guidelines in more depth and then at some examples of them in action:

1) Resist nothing
Be fully present in your life. This allows you to be aware everything that is happening. Be fully of the world and of the day that has been gifted to you. Allow every aspect of your life, whether you label it ‘positive’ or ‘negative,’ to be expressed. Listen openly to What Is.

2) Trust everything is in Divine order
If you are worried or stressed, you are resisting the Truth of What Is and attempting to control the outcome. You can not manage what you do not understand. It is most important to develop the wisdom that tells you when to act on what you are meant to manage, and when to let go. When you are not able to make a decision or fathom the complexities of a situation then stop, sit quietly and consciously let it go. Release your challenge to the Divine and Trust. If you are meant to manage the situation or have overlooked an aspect of it that you are meant to contemplate, it will stay front and center in your life and require your attention again. You can not make a mistake – as long as you stay open and Trust.

3) Act when Called to do so…not out of emotion or thought. Sometimes the world or your life is too complicated for you to understand. You can not manage any aspect of life without some basic information about the dilemma. When you do not have the knowledge you need to respond effectively, it is not possible for you to find resolution. Sit still until Called from a place deeper than thought or emotion. Do this until you have your answers. This could be a few minutes – or a lifetime. It is simply not possible for you to manage or correct what you do not fully comprehend.

Answering the Call is a spiritual mission.

How to Recognize a Call to Action that is from your Heart

• The Call will spontaneously come to you.
• The Call will seem to be from outside of your logical mind or outside of yourself.
• You will feel the need to speak or act in accordance with certain or specific information that is clear to you.

You can, of course, override an impulse that is pure and of Divine Inspiration. It is in your resistance that you bring yourself back to the beginning of your spiritual growth curve where you are unknowing, untrusting and suffering. You will be returned to the beginning of your struggle, not as punishment, but with the Loving intention for you to revisit your challenges and find resolution.

• Resistance impedes your ability to find resolution.
• Trust allows you to Listen Openly and tap into the Divine within.
• Acting when the Call is clear and meaningfully offers resolution, one that is both self-fulfilling and broader than self-fulfillment.

The action that serves self and others
is the one to embrace.

More specifics and examples of how to thrive in the worst of times in the next issue of The Wellspring. Not a subscriber! CLICK HERE and join an international community of spiritual seekers.

The more honed our plan and the deeper our Trust, the smoother we flow with the Call.

Next Posting: Thriving in the Worst of Times…Part Two: Examples and How To

Cancer: A Spiritual Perspective

Although I approach all subjects with an analytical, yet spiritual eye, there are occasions when I am called to be more esoteric and do a ‘reading.’

This time the request came from a psychiatric nurse who requested a reading of her gravely ill brother-in-law. Besides suffering from the complications of cancer, he had suffered a heart attack the day before and was placed on a respirator.

Here are the specific questions she posed to me and my answers to her about her brother-in-law:

• What does my brother-in-law need?
For all of you to come together as a family in a Loving way
• What can I do to be prepared?
Meet the challenge to see all of your family with unconditional, Loving eyes

I went on to make a further explanation about the energy of cancer. Here is that email:

Cancer is present to ‘right’ what is out of balance in the family. Your brother-in-law is the carrier of the message.

The higher wisdom of cancer intends to gather families together – and that is the entire point. Where Love is conditional, judgments exist and cancer will come forward to heal the dynamic. Your brother-in-law has been the vehicle to bring all of you back together.
Although other illnesses will bring people together, cancer does so on a cellular level. The cancer cell left to run its course wants to make every cell in the body a cancer cell. The goal of cancer is Oneness.

But much has to die in order for this Oneness to be present – the death of ways of thinking and emoting, the death of dreams, and the death of Loved Ones. All death leads to Oneness.

You can not stop the process by not gathering. The cancer dynamic is a Divinely Inspired message intending to bring all of you together beyond your dividing thoughts and emotions. None of you have realized how important it is to Forgive and Love. Being there for one another is as essential to you individually as it is for the very cells of your body.

Learn this now with your brother-in-law’s cancer. Learn to Love each other today, and then maintain unconditional Loving connections between all of you so no one has to get cancer again to gather the family.

Unconditional Love is speaking here very loudly.

As for the heart attack, his heart has made a last stand to gather all of you. I do not feel he is meant to come back. He may become more conscious one more time on a Soul level (but not on a physical level) to see if the ‘gathering’ has been achieved.

He is not meant to return. In this moment when I tune in, I see him being far away playing fetch with a large retriever-like dog. He has returned to a simple happiness he had completely lost track of in his physical life. I am sorry to say that he feels as if he is not in life or committed to it any longer. But then you already knew that.

Meet the challenge to come together as a family with unconditional Love for each other and free your family of the need for cancer’s presence.

(There is more I have written on cancer that I am including in a collection of stories and observations tentatively called “Living and Dying in the 21st Century.”)

...my dad has inspired my thoughts on the nature of living and dying. Yes - a weighty topic. Notes to be posted and shared with all soon.

...visited my dad in rehab. He talks about flying in his wheelchair through the air - in his dreams, in his imagination. Hmm...more soon.