To Honor Life's Challenges

This day I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live.  Deuteronomy 30:19

What does it mean to choose life; to choose to live?  This has been a deeply personal question.  Perhaps it is the most personal question.  Every person's answer is different.   One answers by living.   This post is about one window on choosing life -- one way of saying one's own deep and powerful "yes!" to the full catastrophe of life.

Earlier this year, I asked my team of non-traditional "thesis advisers" for help in giving the gifts that come from this "World Prophet in Training" research program.   I sometimes get tongue-tied when I try to explain this research.   Much of the research takes place on inner levels; inner experiences are notoriously difficult to convey to others.  When one tries, one generally sounds both arrogant and flighty.  So, how can I be the benefits of researching what it is to be a World Prophet, in training, and give the gifts that come from there?

The team offered the following:

Challenge, Courage, Grace, and Will -- then Garden

Today's post is the first installment of this.   Let's start by honoring your challenges in life. 

This isn't a lecture, it is an exercise.

List all your challenges.   Go ahead.   You can do it right now.   It is not an infinite and unending list.   What are all the areas and circumstances in your life that you find challenging?  When I do this, I start by telling the truth to myself about what are all the circumstances that I don't like, that I am annoyed by, wish would go away, wish were already different than they are.   I sink into those challenging circumstances, looking past my reaction to the circumstances to see the challenge itself.  So you do that.  Look deeper into each one of your challenges.   Stay with it until you can see what about this challenge is calling on you to rise -- to become who you must become.  (It is in this sense that the challenge is something to honor -- your challenges can show you who you are.)

Let's try an example.   Today's annoying circumstance is that my lovely six-year-old dog (Dixie, a Golden Retriever Mix) is occasionally peeing on the floor.  Yecch.  I have an immediate reaction and annoyance to cleaning up the pee.  I have an annoyance that my "orderly routine" is ruined and that she seems to need a level of care and attention beyond what I am used to providing.  But what, specifically, is the challenge in that?   It is not all that challenging to stoop down and clean things up.  It is not even all that challenging to start a healing coning or to call the vet.   But the circumstance is not just annoying, it is indeed challenging.  So I sink down into that feeling of being challenged, and see and look and observe.   What is there?  

What arises is a question of, "Whom shall I trust and how far shall I trust them?"   Will I trust my Coning partners with this issue from the day-to-day world?  If it were my own health, I would not hesitate.  But now another being is involved.   And my daughter is involved as well, who cares for this dog as much or more than I do.   Am I willing to stake their health and their love on the same tools I use in my research?   Really?   That is today's challenge.  

There is no easy answer.   The challenge calls on me to rise to a new level.  It calls on me to take a stand about what really is the highest and best standard of care for this loving companion animal who calls my house her home.   The particular action I end up taking is less important than the question itself.  There is no "right" answer. The challenging question itself is what to honor.  It calls on me to choose.

Perhaps I will involve my daughter in the decision at a new level.    Perhaps I will invest several weeks or a month in exploring Nature Healing Conings at a new level, and only then involve the vet.  Perhaps I will involve the Coning partners in the decision about how and when to involve the vet.  It would of course be smart to involve Nature in this way. The Nature Intelligence side of the coning  are the masters of order, organization, and life vitality in any situation; the coning will generally be better than I am at determining the most appropriate means, once I have articulated the intention clearly.  But only I can (and must) set that intention.   That is my job and no one else can do it for me.

A challenge is not (just) something that is hard.  My daughter is now playing high-school field hockey; the practices are hard, uncomfortable, ugly, and long.   But what part of that is challenging?   Is it the sense of blowing past ones perceived limits?   Or is it learning to trust and work with coaches who are calling out the best in their athletes in a way that seems perhaps both supportive and also "mean" at the same time?   Or is it dealing with the grief of giving up other options for what to do this fall?  Only she can see.  Our challenges are as personal as our gifts and our joy.

What is there to honor about challenges?  As you might see from the example above, whatever it is that I find challenging shows me who I next need to become.   We normally think of courage as what helps us meet our challenges.   The challenge is there first, and then the courage helps us meet it.   But I suggest that is exactly backwards.   Instead, I suggest you imagine that your challenges are a direct window that shows you what your courage must be.   You have exactly the challenges that your courage makes room for.  But that is a lead-in to a future post.

So stick with it until you can list all of your challenges and find something to honor in each one.  This by itself is a worthwhile accomplishment.   Pat yourself on the back.  Then stay tuned for future installments.

Contegrity

Contegrity is a word, a made up word that is not yet in the dictionary yet one day will be.   Contegrity signifies a deep integrity and wholeness of Self and Others and Life and that which integrates and fulfills life, lived out across a background of time and circumstance.  Contegrity, as a word, was invented by my friends and mentors, Ken Anbender and Gail Cantor of Contegrity Program Designs.

The following words are my own.   Ken and Gail have not reviewed these words; I am sure they would say this all quite differently.  Yet just as I feel free to weigh in on Perelandra and the gifts I have received there, while still pointing people directly to the Perelandra material itself, so too I feel free to say in my own words the great gifts I have received and continue to receive from Contegrity.  The gift of gratitude works in the soul, and by the fruits of the gift, one, over time, comes to know what the gift must have been.

Ken and Gail are professionals who were interested in supporting all that goes in the direction of what integrates and fulfills life.  They needed a word to distinguish and set apart what is worth steering by and engaging with when the intention is to have life fulfill itself in and around you. 

There is something whole at the heart of life.   Whether one calls it God, Nature, the Beyond, the Inexpressible and Ineffable Wonder of Life, there is something about the way life is working itself out that is worth observing, cultivating, and in a Ken-and-Gail phrase, belonging to become.  Life is not (just) a bunch of bodies interacting.   Nor is life (just) a set of conversations, disconnected from the physical life that embodies them.   Life is whole.  It is as unsatisfying to be "all physical with no spiritual" as it is to be "all spiritual with no physical".   What is needed now, today, is wholeness, balance, completeness, integration, and flow, and the real-world A-class results that come from there.   Ken and Gail set out to determine what goes in that direction and what does not.   Nothing else would satisfy.  If you will, they simply observed that many, even most, of the approaches to "having a great life" did not offer this. They set out to find what does.

In my words, Ken and Gail started investigating how to garden wholeness.  What are the seeds to plant if wholeness is the intended crop?  What ways of engaging and conversing help the tiny seedlings of wholeness emerge and blossom, the way that water, sunlight, good soil and fresh air help the tiny plants become a bumper crop?  And, conversely,  what ways of conversing and engaging are like weeds that grow quickly yet do not satisfy, and will take over the entire garden if left on their own without being lovingly pruned and weeded.

And even beyond the means to do so, what is the crop itself that is being gardened for wholeness and fulfillment? What is wholeness and fulfillment, anyway?  Contegrity is the word for the crop of wholeness. Contegrity the word signifies the aspect of life that is worth planting and tending and caring for, and defending with ones honor and ones life.  Ken and Gail needed a made up word for this.   All the existing words already point at something and what they point at isn't working.

Here are some basics.    Contegrity is a different view of what it means to be a Self. To be a self is to be already connected, related, enmeshed, engaged. Contegrity, the crop of wholeness,  is relational, not thing-like.    To be a self has nothing to do with being separate, though it has much to do with being unique. Contegrity is discerned not invented.  There is that which goes in the direction of wholeness and that which does not. One can tell the truth about that but not determine it.  Right use of will is to will what works, not to will what one wishes would work.

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To learn more, browse the Contegrity Program Designs web page, especially their FAQ and the pages that are linked from the top right corner of any page.  Or consider participating in one of their programs.  One of the Contegrity flagship programs Life Design will be held in the Hartford, CT, area on October 21 to 24 this year.  Life Design focuses on what, uniquely, is your one wild and precious life designed for.  What is unique about you and what connects you with others and the world are one and the same.   Getting the truth told about what that is -- and what that is not -- is a key starting place for living with freedom, ease, and joy.   In a phrase I have used in the second post in this series, joy comes when you stop giving what you don't have, and start learning to give in abundance what you have in abundance because it is who you are.

A koan

Keep letting go of control; control is not what you want; you want love.

Keep letting go of love; love is not what you want; you want peace.

Keep letting go of peace; peace is not what you want; you want joy.

Keep letting go of joy; joy is not what you want; you want God.

Emergency MAP

MAP is the profound and simple health practice I have talked about in earlier posts here and here.   One of the best reasons for become familiar with MAP is to be able to set up an Emergency MAP Coning when you need one.   Chapter 6 of the MAP book describes this process in detail.  Read it. It is designed to be something so simple that you can do it even in the midst of a massive and sudden trauma.  Basically, you ask for an emergency connection to your team, and keep it open for as long as you are "in the hospital".

My MAP team holds a somewhat loose definition of what counts as an "emergency" and what counts as "in the hospital".  At times of spiritual emergence, when I have opened a new reality and am now stepping into it, I have several times tested to start an emergency MAP coning.   The team has asked me to keep the emergency coning open for several days, until the new energy from the emergence can be digested and stabilized.  This is not to be taken lightly.  Keeping any coning open is an energy drain.  Keeping a coning open for several days would never be suggested unless there is an extremely powerful and timely benefit to be received from it right now.

Using an emergency coning is the only time I have ever kept a coning open while driving.  The team has told me that in this special case, the increased clarity of having the emergency coning open can actually make me a safer driver than I would be without it.  Needless to say, I never trust my own good ideas about questions like when to start or continue an emergency.   The Nature side of the coning is responsible for matter, means, and action of any project or goal.   In particular, Nature is the expert in order, organization and life vitality. And this includes all questions of timing and appropriate means.

The most recent time I have tested positive for a several-day emergency coning was this week.  Over the weekend, I received initiation and anointing into a new role with new responsibilities and new challenges.  This was a tremendous expansion.   And as I said in the first post in this series,

Your health practice must meet and match and balance your expansion practice in every way.

So the emergency coning has been very appropriate.   After a few days of that, I have now graduated to "only" needing a Two-Week Intensive Flower Essence Process.  The two-week process is an incredible tool for allowing several layers of self-definition to slough off and be replaced by a new self-definition.  But that is a subject for another post.

Endorsement: Vittorio Passanante

This is my first endorsement post.  I plan to sprinkle in a few such posts over the next few weeks.  I wish to bring attention to healers and practitioners and approaches that reach the level of mastery.  

The first of these endorsements is for my spiritual brother and partner in healing, Vittorio Perri Passanante.

http://victoriouslight.com/

Vittorio describes himself as a healer and a spiritual intuitive, and as a channel of the Holy Spirit.  I say he is more like a Lion of God.  When he is in a spiritual session, he speaks with the voice of authority.  Sleepers do awaken; demonic energies do depart (and then submit to their own healing); new openings for healing do occur.

The deepest and most profound part of Vittorio's work is in the area of healing the holy inner Child.  At our core, each of us is a holy inner Child for we are all children of God.   Along the way, this holy inner Child often goes underground.  Then the holy inner child is commingled with the less than holy inner tyrant.   Here, there is both tremendous unshakable wisdom yet also immediate black and white reactions,  addiction and repulsion, and magical thinking.  The challenge is to awaken the wisdom, love and compassion of this inner Child and to make room for the strength of will that it represents and allow all the rest to gently disappear.

The holy inner Child cannot be commanded, for it is stronger than the Universe.  It cannot be coaxed, for it is wise in the ways of the world that has lured it and hurt it before.   Yet the holy inner Child can be loved, can be welcomed, can be spoken to in words of the heart.  The holy inner child will recognize one who comes in the name of truth and is willing to honor the truth.   The truth is not always easy; the truth is not always nice; yet the holy inner Child dwells only in the truth and will move for nothing less.

Yesterday, I had an experience that showed how much Vittorio has taught me through his example.  I had received some news that at first seemed like a disappointment, and this disappointment seemed to hit home at this inner Child level.   By giving "little Petie" a chance to speak in his own voice I could then hear his sorrow.  More important, he could hear his sorrow.  For just a moment, it was heartbreaking.   Without Vittorio's example in front of me, I might not have trusted this experience and stuck with it until the pain could let go.   But I did, and then the sun came out again.  Just a second later little Peter was laughing again.

Other approaches have helped me observe and upgrade the kernel of truth that may be shrouded behind early episodes.   This is different.  It can be a direct channel to wisdom that is beyond this world.  It can mean putting down the burdens of a lifetime.    Real freedom can emerge from sharing the burdens and dreams and loves of the holy inner Child, for it too can be a channel of the Holy Spirit.

Wednesday Holy Spirit Nights

I am hosting a gathering at my house in West Newton on Wednesday night to celebrate the Fall Equinox.  This will also be an opportunity to initiate a longstanding vision of mine.

The exact moment of the equinox is September 22, 11:09pm EDT.    We'll gather at 7pm, and continue until 11:30pm.   Some people may come later than 7; some may leave earlier than 11:30.  That's fine.   The point is to gather in company and appreciate the turning of the natural cycle.    It will be an organized evening, but informal. All who would appreciate this type of gathering are welcome.

I have a vision that Wednesday nights all year could be dedicated to being a home each week for the Holy Spirit Voice in each of us to thrive.   Not church.  Many of us already have church.  Not meditation.  Not a seminar.  Not boring. The intention is to gather together with joy-filled and wonder-filled activities that bring us closer to each other and to the Holy Breath. (Feel free to translate that name into something that works for you.) 

I could use some help fleshing in out this vision, and in hearing which part connects with your heart.  Here are some examples of activities I have imagined:

• Breaking bread together
• Studying A Course in Miracles together, or supporting those who are.
• Starting Soil-less Gardens for key areas in life.   A soil-less garden is a way of partnering with the supporters of human form and the supporters of human evolution to multiply the effectiveness, balance, and fun in any project.  Many of us have big challenges in life that seem stuck.  I envision that working together in this way helps all of us un-stick and have fun with these key challenges while moving mountains at the same time.
  
• Lifting our hearts together in praise-filled song

Of course, this coming Wednesday is just a one-time event, not the whole series.   Since the fall equinox is the start of the natural year,  I envision we could:

• Eat fun snacks
• Appreciate the year that is coming to a close. Take stock of what was planted, birthed, grown, and harvested over the last 12 months
• Listen (and maybe pray) together to see whether there is a core of people and a core of activities that might make Wednesday Holy Spirit Nights a reality
• And then, open our hearts to the moment of the equinox itself.

Intermediate MAP

I was talking with a friend yesterday about his business. He described a vision he has had for a long time. He mentioned his "resistance" that "gets in his way" of fulfilling this vision.  This is a job for MAP.  Today's post is about making full use of MAP.

MAP (the Medical Assistance Program) is a profound and simple health practice that is the subject of a previous post. Many people would not think of "resistance", "fear of failure", "fear of success", "resentment", "I want to get what I deserve", "I am set back by not knowing where to start",  and "I am afraid that I look at it, it will  get worse" as proper subjects for a "health program".  Yet MAP will go to work on any physical, emotional, mental, or spiritual block to health that you are willing to bring to the team.  So all of the above are fair game.

If this is not health, then this must be time for MAP.

Many people don't make full use of MAP.  The first impediment is that people haven't heard of it.  If you haven't heard of something, it is hard to make full use of it.

A second impediment is thinking that MAP is too strange and unfamiliar or too nontraditional to be helpful.  With a name like, The Co-Creative White Brotherhood Medical Assistance Program, MAP can call up people's previous associations.  Some people (even many people) would prefer to stick with the medical models that are used widely in our current society rather than branching out.

Others might be willing to experiment, but find difficulty in suspending their disbelief.  It can be tempting to think that believing in MAP is a prerequisite to exploring it. To experiment with MAP is to take it on its own terms -- Here, try this.  Even to try MAP, especially for the five-month introductory period that the book itself recommends, does mean a leap of faith and an entry into a different world.  But this is the leap of faith of the gardener who plants a seed in the spring never quite knowing what the fruit will be in the fall.  You don't need to believe in a garden for the garden to bear abundant and tasty fruit.  You just have to water and weed and tend and care.

Some people worry about MAP.  I am not doing it right. Or, I don't feel a thing. Or, it doesn't seem like anything is happening.  Or, the muscle testing thing doesn't work for me.  Well, how many people give up on their gardens sometime between when it is planted and when it is harvested?  I am certainly not saying that you have to wait "all the way until fall" for the results of MAP to show up.   MAP can have dramatic and obvious effects even in the first session.  But for many people and certainly for me, there has been a learning curve.  And it has taken an ongoing investment.

MAP itself is the most powerful tool for learning MAP.  If I bring to the team an issue such as When I don't feel anything happening, I get discouraged and want to give up,   or even I want to be better at learning muscle testing, I have seen dramatic and often instantaneous results.   At other times, a request such as I want to feel, see and hear more of what the team is doing when they are working results in a much more gradual and sustainable learning curve.  It is as if the team is saying to me, "Do you as a beginner really want to see what the surgeon sees when he is doing surgery?  Stick with your current work and eventually you can run the hospital."

Another area I have learned to bring to MAP is when I want to get better at something. There are health related aspects to any new challenge.  Here's an example with physical, emotional, mental and spiritual components. My daughter and I sing in a chorus.  Like many choruses, we were short on tenors, and I was asked to sing for a term at the higher end of my range.  At first, it hurt.  I asked my MAP team to help my voice feel better after a night of singing high.   It worked.  And then it branched out from there.  How about, help me prepare ahead of time so that I can sing high for a whole night without even feeling bad at the end.   It worked.  How about, help open up my vocal chords so that I can sing effortlessly at the high end of my range and the notes are clearer and purer and more beautiful.  It worked!  Now I love singing tenor.

I am sometimes unsure what it means when MAP talks about "spiritual health issues".   I am asking the team about this as I write this post. Here is an example, again from singing tenor, that the team is pointing me to. At first, there was a secret grief associated with what I had left behind as a bass.  Part of what I have loved about singing the base notes of a piece is that the bass part provides the grounding or foundation of the whole.   One knows ones place and ones value.  One can sing the whole piece from the bass part.  I missed this.

When singing tenor, one is "in the middle".  The notes can be harder to find, and it can be harder to distinguish what difference you are making to the piece.  I was singing tenor, and even enjoying it, but some deep part of my core wasn't yet aligned.   So I asked the team to help me find ways to enjoy being a tenor as much as I had enjoyed being a bass.  This might sound like an emotional issue, but the team is showing me that it is indeed a spiritual issue.  It is really about, How am I connected to the whole? and What is uniquely mine to do here?  And these are spiritual, not emotional, topics. Anyway, it worked!  I was able to feel my way into "singing the whole song from the tenor part" the same way I had done as a bass.  The secret grief was gone and had been replaced with a public joy.  Amen.

Why me? Why you?

This series of posts is dedicated first-among-equals to E because she needs the results of this research, she needs it all, and she needs it now.  Having her in mind helps focus and hone these words to what is needed this instant, here.  (And of course, it is all meant for me as well. It is ever thus.)  Although this post may sound very different, it is intended as a continuation of my love letter to E and to B and to myself and to the year that is passing.  To my ears, this post sounds challenging and a bit annoying.  Yet even that is not a bad place to start. I am happy to have written it at all.

Today's post is a chance to clarify who this research is for--who is the audience. Why you?  Why me?

First, let me start with that research phrase that my non-traditional thesis advisers gave me.  This phrase applies to you to whom I write these words, though others can listen in:

The world needs a world prophet and you are one, so get to work and learn as you go.

The title of "world prophet in training" is a job description.   The world needs men, women, children, and others who choose to inhabit this job description and learn to give what it requires.   The "job requirements" are individually designed and must be owned.  No two prophets are ever given the same.  No one else can take your part.  Are you willing to teach yourself to give what only you can give?

World Prophet is a joint calling.  We are called to join together.  There is work to do on both the outer and the inner levels that can be done only together.  As we each "be ourselves", we join together.

The "job" of the World Prophet, the job that can only be done truly by those who come together, is to set the Definition, Direction, and Purpose (DDP) of the world garden.  Even having one world prophet is qualitatively different than having none.  But when it truly "takes off" and becomes something unprecedented is when there is a large collection of "world prophets in training" acting as one within a single group Coning.  The coning has to be shaped when there is such a large group -- that is part of what the "research" of my PhD program with nature is about.  Not everyone need join this shape or this Coning.  There are many callings and many ways to say, "yes!" to them.  Yet my calling is to point in the direction of this shared shaped group coning and call together those who will.

Here are a few of the "articles of faith" with which I write these posts:

• You will be happy and joyous to the extent you accept and own your part in creation.   Engage.  You were built for engaging.  The results as such don't matter.  Just engage.
• For those who are called as World Prophet, true joy will come from getting to work as a world prophet, in training.  Some things are so worth doing that they are worth doing badly.
• Abandon all good ideas.   Good ideas will not make you happy.  If you are doing something because it is a good idea, you will disappoint it and it will disappoint you.   Good ideas are never who you are.
• Honor the challenges of life.  Let your challenges show you who you are.  Whatever the challenges you face, it is always your challenges that show you where your courage is, and then the grace beyond the courage.  Don't be distracted by your reactions to the challenges you face.   It is the challenges themselves that show you who you are.
• You are given by a Will which you did not invent and which you do not own.  Own this will by making it yours, complete and whole and free.
• Have fun.

The Lady Room

The next few posts will be a kind of love letter, not just to E and B, but to myself.  It is a love letter to the year that is passing. The new "natural year", which runs from from fall equinox to fall equinox, starts on September 22 at 11:09 p.m., eastern daylight time.  Here is what Machaelle Small Wright says about the Fall Equinox:

In nature, this is the new year, the day that begins the next year's cycle. It is the day when the call goes out for the new cycle to activate and begin its formation processes on the deepest of energy levels. At Perelandra, at the precise moment of the fall equinox I, as creator of this garden, initiate the call by saying aloud,
I request the next cycle and wish to assist its full unfolding.

This has been a year of Love and of Preparing for Love.  I am the same man I was a year ago, but in a new way.   Something is ready to blossom:  I have started to marry my own inner woman.

Starting this year, I have a room in my house I call the Lady Room.   It used to be my home office. And for right now, it is still where I sit to do my research, write these notes, and do many of my practices.  But now it is ready for something else.  Over the course of the last year I have moved almost all of the "office" out of it.  The books are gone, the file folders put away.  The MC Escher print of a head in ribbons that used to hang on the wall has been replaced by a print of Our Lady Queen of the Universe.  It is now a room that is dedicated to the inner and the outer "lady".  The "Lady Room" is ready for the lady.

The inner and outer women in my life have at times felt left out on their own, as if there is no partner here to partner with.  My emotional life is more like Earth and Air than it is Water and Fire -- at times dry, hidden, and even bare.  The mental life is more obvious, more flashy, more celebrated.  (Even here there is much to appreciate, as I learn to let go of trying to be anybody else than who I am.)  But this year of love has emerged quite naturally, like a flower after rain.  No "forcing", no "will power".  Just one simple prayer:

Trust Love.

Amen.

Challenge Courage Grace and Will -- Grace

The other day I was walking along a rocky headland close  by the ocean.  I came across a twisted pine of quite good size that had lodged itself in a crack in the rock.  It seems out of place, far from the other trees and completely exposed to the wind and -- in winter storms -- to the waves.  In a twisted and low-slung and bonsai-like way, this tree is beautiful.

A 500 pound rock sits on the roots of this tree.   The tree's roots emerge from the back side of this rock, bare and scraggly.  The roots barely make it the 12 inches from there to the tiny crack from which the tree draws its life.  This "poor tree" must deal not only with wave and wind but also with a huge weight on its back that almost chokes its roots out of existence.  Yet without this weight, the "poor tree" would have washed away 10 times by now.  Without this rock, the tree could never reach this size, this level of energy, or this beauty.  The 500-pound rock, the exposed location, and the tree itself are all examples of grace.

Grace means ease. Life has a gift of ease in seeming difficulty. 

Grace is ours to embrace.

To the extent that the tree embraces its location, the tree can live, and live well -- live with ease.

Why Start With MAP?

I dedicate these posts to you who can receive all the joy that is in them.  May your wholeness continue to blossom into light, and joy, and life.   Amen.

My first post set the stage for joy.  Joy comes when you stop giving what you don't have and start learning to give in abundance what you do have, because it is who you are. You need an expansion practice because you teach yourself how to be happy as you extend to give more of who you are.   And you need a health practice to balance that expansion -- breathing in after you breathe out.

Help abounds, but you have to ask for it.  Today is a post about what to ask and what not to ask, focused on health practices.  For expansion into real joy, it is helpful to start with a health practice called MAP. 

MAP stands for the Co-Creative White Brotherhood Medical Assistance Program.  At one level, it is a health practice that you do yourself in the privacy of your own room.  It puts your health into your own hands. There is no one to pay, no one to go see, no complicated steps to follow.   The steps are simple and anyone can do them.  You can do them, starting from where you are right now.  Sessions are relatively short (40 minutes) and yet they can have deep and profound effects. MAP is practical.

At another level, MAP trains you in asking for and allowing in the help that surrounds us all the time.  In MAP, you will be asking for the combined support of the supporters of human form and the supporters of human evolution.  The support of human form comes from the world of Nature and of Nature Intelligence.  The support of human evolution comes from the collection of helper souls of all genders, colors, backgrounds, and callings that is often known collectively as the White Brotherhood. Together, these different experts create a healing "room", called a Coning, in which all of that expertise, along with your Higher Self (i.e. your own pattern and timing and identity) can speak with one voice and work with one heart.   MAP is whole.

But what I love most about MAP is how it challenges us to ask for help at all levels by asking us simply to list our symptoms at all levels.  In MAP, the rule of the game is that your individual healing team, your MAP team, will "work on" any area you can bring to them.   The clarity with which you can bring your issue -- by articulating all the symptoms of the issue; by describing what you have noticed about it at the physical, emotional, mental or spiritual levels;  by stating and offering up your fears, suspicions, wishes, fantasies and hopes about what else your issue might be connected to -- all of this is what gives your MAP team "permission to go to work".   This is great training in surrendering your supposed certainty that you know who you are, that you know what you need, and that you know what should be happening right now. Where you cannot "offer up" your issue -- say if you do not mention it at all or if you make only blanket requests that try to handle all issues right away without taking responsibility for any of them -- they will wait.   They wait for you to ask.  They will not override your timing.  They cannot override your free will.  MAP is respectful.

The way to start MAP is to buy the book, read the first 5 chapters, and then set aside some time for your first few sessions.   (It is also helpful to buy a bottle of ETS+ at the same time.) The book recommends that you do MAP sessions on a regular schedule for the first 5 months. I recommend this, too.   It is enough time to learn the program, to work through many of your initial issues, and to determine for yourself if this program is something you want to make part of your normal routine.

50 posts in 60 days

This series of 50 posts is dedicated to my friend E, who is passing through a major health crisis.  And also to B, and D, and V, and many others.  These are people who have a deep love of life and a deep connection to truth.   Yet their circumstances are so painful that sometimes even to keep going seems impossible.  And yet, God put the joy where the pain is.   Healing is to be found there, where the sickness is, and not someplace else. To you, then, my friends, are dedicated this series of notes on finding the joy in the unlikely places where it seems to dwell.

I will also be discussing planetary healing.   When I started my "PhD program with Nature", the non-physical teachers who are my "thesis committee" suggested a research phrase:

The world needs a World Prophet and you are one, so get to work and learn as you go.

What I have learned from this phrase is that the world is changing out from us at an ever increasing pace.  The stress of technological and economic upheaval, of climate change disruption, of spiritual dislocation and beyond, keeps offering us a new world to live in -- every few minutes.  What kind of garden can we create from all of what we live in today?  What is our "home world"?  And how can we create our home world in the here and now?

The last two years have been the most joyous of my life. Not easy, but joyous.  I stopped trying to "fit in" to anybody's picture of who or what I am or where I could go.  I determined to do my own research and find my own pathway.  I gave up trying to be "normal" and I gave up trying to even understand all of what it is I am called to do.   I honor that which is mine to do and let go of all the rest.   And in that is the greatest joy.

Specifically, I set aside time to do research every day.  I set up a team of non-traditional "thesis advisers" to assist in the research, loosely following a set of suggestions from Machaelle Small Wright of the Perelandra Center for Nature Research on how to become a Co-Creative Scientist.  I use a Coning as the energetic structure to talk with the team. Kinesiology (muscle testing) is the tool for refining and developing the intuitive insight that is my major communication link with this team.

And I set up a series of health practices.   One of my maxims is

Your health practice must meet and match and balance your expansion practice in every way.

The expansion practice is where I train and develop myself to do that which only I can do.  To expand is an act of Will and of Courage in the face of life's Challenges. Healing is the Grace with which the universe responds.  Only one small part of what there is for me to do has never been done. For the rest, I can relax.  I can let myself receive healing as a gift. I can allow myself to see and feel and appreciate the multitude of things that happen every day to adjust the balance and the flow as the universe and I spiral around each other in our eternal dance.  And I can get good at it.

In this series of posts, then, I want to

Feel the joy. Write the joy. Live the joy.

I want to meet these friends and lovers where they need to be and where they are.  I want to give and love and serve, and to have that love show up in the writing.

And so, I leave off with a simple prayer.

I choose Life.  Amen.