What's Your Story?
Rebecca Traver offers a great tool for getting in touch with your mind's story line so that it doesn't distort your present-time reality.
"When you are out of power, you are playing a role and acting out the script of your story and your issues."
— Spotted Eagle
Our stories can help us maintain a constructive perspective and promote wisdom and growth, or they can be among our most difficult obstacles to move past. Storytelling at its best is an edifying endeavor, a living and evolving creation, sourced in a longing for genuine connection and a desire for meaningful contribution. At worst it serves to constrict the active imagination with our fears and fantasies - masquerading as insight and wisdom.
Vision
Jennie Marlow's spirit guide, Spotted Eagle, explores the principles of vision and how we can use its power to create a joyful and satisfying life.
“Vision devises nothing. Plans nothing. Designs nothing. Contrives nothing. It has nothing to do with what we hope will happen.”
— Spotted Eagle
Vision is a very misunderstood concept in Western Culture where it seems to be confused with imagining a future result. There is a visualization method which has received a lot of attention in recent years. This method is based on a premise that, in order to create what we want, we must picture ourselves having that thing “manifested.” We must imagine the form we want the future will take, and this clear picture of the outcome then becomes the basis of a goal for achieving that outcome, often by some arbitrary date made up in the Mind. In some models, absolute belief that the outcome will come about is also required.
Why Is This Happening?
Jennie Marlow's spirit guide, Spotted Eagle, delves into the spiritual questions raised by human tragedies.
“The forces of Nature have no compassion. They demand our absolute respect and care nothing for our sentiments.”
— Spotted Eagle
“Why?” It is a singularly human question, a peculiarity of our species. When we are faced with the question, “Why is this happening to me or someone I love?” this raises a much more provocative inquiry.
What Is Freedom?
Marvin Luzum offers his insights into how our fantasies and projections medicate our longing and regret, and take us far from the essential nature of emotional freedom.
“Many people confuse…freedom with being able to have whatever they want whenever they want it, in a way that allows them to leave their fears and issues intact.”
— Spotted Eagle
A few days ago, while walking home from the movies, I struck up a conversation with a young cyclist who stood next to her touring bike, munching on what is one of my favorite treats, a Snickers bar. She said she was planning to cycle from one end of the country to the other. Quite an endeavor! I thought to myself. We eventually said our goodbyes, and she pedaled off. I stopped and looked back, watching her for a bit, feeling a sense of longing.
How To Keep Your Power
Carol Aubrey explores the challenge of hanging onto our power in the face of so many powerful temptations to give it away.
“The spiritual path is a journey in learning how to actualize your potential to be powerful, creative and whole.”
— Spotted Eagle
Power is attractive and enticing. We all want to feel powerful, and we want others to see us as powerful. This is as it should be. Yet, we have an uncanny ability–habit?–to continually give our power away. Humans have been handing over their power on a silver platter for thousands of years.
Trust
Rebecca Traver gives us a way to ensure that we are placing our trust in something that actually warrants that trust.
"Trust that you have innate within you all that is needed to fully express your authenticity, and that this is what you came here to accomplish."
— Grandfather White Elk
I don’t know about you, but I have issues around trust. If I’m feeling too vulnerable, I tend to freeze up and withdraw my energy, block my authenticity, and generally slip out of the present moment and hide in the story line of my wounding.
Observe!
Carol Aubrey offers a humorous and insightful look at the process of self-awareness.
"Observe! Through observation, you discover how your thinking works. Observation allows you to maintain dominion over the anxious mind, and this will automatically give you more objectivity."
— Spotted Eagle
You can never do it enough. It will often bring surprises. Most times we hate to do it. We’d rather create our own fantasies. We’d rather swim in the pool of our own beliefs, and wrap ourselves up in the cozy blanket of our own opinions. We’d rather be in denial. We’d rather medicate. We’d rather run, or we’d rather stay and project.
Observing your thoughts, the way you act, and the choices that you make, is a skill, even an art, and it yields a very strange journey. Be prepared for the unexpected. In a nutshell, my own personal experience and understanding of self-observation looks something like this
Life Without Judgment
Carol Aubrey asks us to give life the freedom and space to be what it is.
"Judgment is an act of fear and an attempt to control what frightens us. Discernment sees what is so with neutrality and detachment. Discernment knows a truth to which judgment is blind."
— Spotted Eagle
We consume an enormous amount of energy judging others and judging ourselves. A day doesn’t go by when we do not pass judgment. This is no accident. We’re conditioned to judge. Judgment is encouraged because it oils the joints that support the status quo and the existing power structures. Like programmed robots, we dive daily and dutifully into the pool of judgment. Judgment is a habit, a conditioning, a pastime, and an obsession.
Overcoming Resistance
Gerry Connolly shows us how releasing our resistance allows greater emotional flow.
"When your emotional field is resistant to what is, the result is friction, the material force that resists flow. You can easily see from this metaphor that your ability to access the flow is inversely proportional to your level of regret and resistance."
— White Buffalo
Resistance is your struggle against the life and circumstances you have created for yourself. It can also take the form of resistance to what others have created, including conditions in the world. Whether the resistance is entirely evident or very subtle, at the root resistance is an obstacle to growth.
The Emotional Wave
Gerry Connolly encourages us to wait for our emotional wave to conclude so we can act, not react.
"Until you can detach from your emotional wave enough to keep it under constant observation, and can hold yourself back from acting it out, you cannot achieve neutrality and non-resistance, the keys to creating from your actualize-able potential."
— Spotted Eagle
An emotional wave of anger, guilt, sadness or excitement is just that: a wave! In the wave, you are ‘out of neutral’ and temporarily subject to emotional distortion in your thinking that may not serve your best interests.
