Shift
Managing the Shi(f)t
July 30, 2021
Digital 3D visualization of a fractal structure.
The main theme for August is “Managing the Shi(f)t”.
The first part of the month requires great flexibility, acceptance, compassion, and resilience to deal with unexpected and sudden changes whether in yourself or in others. It may look grim at the beginning but we are moving forward into calmer waters that will provide more stability, inspiration, rational thought and clarity as we anchor ourselves into a brighter landscape.
Old emotional and habitual patterns are still bubbling to the surface for forgiveness and expulsion. We get to see where we have been wasting our energy on worry, regret and blame. Old habits of judgment, feeling powerless, victimized, and limited in what we can create have eroded our motivation and bred despair, anger, resistance and negative attitudes towards life. If you get stuck there, and are unwilling to let the past go and accept where the tide is moving, you will be miserable.
On the other hand, if you are willing to open to more trust in the positive and optimistic view of the big picture, you can completely turn anything negative and limited in your life around. The clearing of old trauma in any and many ways is a very useful practice this month. (There is a good exercise on the monthly support audio to help with the understanding and clearing of trauma or “susto”.)
This will require an open heart and the discipline of trust even though you may not have instant feedback from your prayers and intentions. There may be a lag time that tests you. You may not see or experience results that you are on the right track and you may need to go deep into your own intuition for confidence and confirmation. And, if you continue to come across obstacles and challenges along the way, look to what is not yet cleared in your field or where you are still holding on to something in your past, rather than how the universe may not be supporting you at this time.
Remember that in order to bring your vibration up and move to that next level, you need to make space. Creating space for the abundance available later in the month demands paying attention to your habitual reactions, habits and judgments so you can clear and change them to a better alignment.
The most important thing is to stay out of blame, especially when you are accommodating a change that you did not initiate. Acceptance and neutrality go a long way to ease the discomfort of this experience.
We are definitely in a transition time and a huge shift in consciousness and vibration.
Curiosity, optimism, creativity and humor should be a major part of the management team you build to navigate this month and the months to come. Take responsibility for your own shi(f)t, and stay in your own lane with regards to where others are in their own navigation. Once we get through the potentially cranky new moon on the 8th, we have our work cut out for us. If we do it well, there are many gifts awaiting us as we move into the last part of the month.
What is the “work”?
Courage to tell the truth. Courage to let go. Courage to forgive. Determination to trust. Discipline to stay out of blame. Compassion for yourself and others. Acceptance and cooperation regarding change not initiated by you. Keeping your vibration high no matter what through beauty, inspiration and strong spiritual practices. Staying in your own lane and out of other people’s drama and negativity. Trusting your intuition, your inner guidance, and having the courage to go for what is right for YOU. Taking full responsibility for your own shi(f)t.
How the rest of the month shows up:
We are re-arranged.
April 1, 2021
The following piece was written by Courtney Martin. She is a brilliant writer. I bought her yellow & blue book for my now young adult kids a number of years ago. Reading her words through our isolation continues to be a balm for my spirit.
“I was trying to describe the fog of emotions I’ve been feeling about society/school/life re-opening lately to a friend and realized that it was very similar to that study abroad malaise all those years ago. I’ve been through a thing. We’ll all been through a thing.” ~Courntey
How will be changed? Will we honor the change? Our personal paradigm shift? How, through this change, can we, will we, do better, be better, to ourselves, each other, our community, our country, our planet?
WE MUST.
Internally rearranged
A plea for reverence for what we have all endured
“Right before we returned from our study abroad program in South Africa all of the American college students started getting tattoos. We had lived with families in Langa township, grown accustomed to mealie sap for breakfast, learned the click of the Xhosa language, and watched emails to our boyfriends and girlfriends back home build letter by letter in the excruciatingly slow computer lab on the University of Cape Town campus.
We were, in short, not the same people as those who had boarded the airplane in New York City six months earlier. We were different people, maybe not new exactly, but internally rearranged.
On the outside, however, we looked the same. Thus the tattoos. It was a way of telegraphing to the world—but especially our family and friends, who we most needed to know—that we were altered. We had been through a thing. We had come out the other side.
I was trying to describe the fog of emotions I’ve been feeling about society/school/life re-opening lately to a friend and realized that it was very similar to that study abroad malaise all those years ago. I’ve been through a thing. We’ll all been through a thing.
Not the same thing, interestingly. Mine was euphoric mindfulness mixed with unfamiliar rage, little girls’ bodies all over me, all the time, starving for solitude, learning to cook and download audio books, falling in love with a hard hike, grief over losses unexpected and expected, alike. Yours might have been skin hunger and take-out, learning to drive and play the ukulele, losing a job, falling out of love with something core. We were not, as it turned out, all in this together.
But we were all in something. And I don’t know about you, but I want us to mark that moment in some way—maybe not with the unimaginative dolphin and butterfly tats of yesteryear, but something, anything, that might make this liminal space feel seen and acknowledged. That might help us say—with out bodies, with our spirits, with our people—wow, we endured. Through isolation and fear and grief, we endured. We honored birth and death in completely new ways. We stayed put. We stayed together. We stayed. We stayed. Not all of us did, but most of us did. We stayed.
As things open up, part of me wants to shout: “Have some God damn respect! Can you see what’s happened here?”
It’s not about physical safety. It’s about something else—reverence. I’m craving a sort of societal deep breath, a collective song of mourning and resurrection, a deep bow to the fact that we held it the f down.
It’s not that I can’t see the light down there at the end of the tunnel (call it herd immunity, call it 2022, call it whatever you want). Today my kid went to school for the first time in over a year in a real classroom with a teacher with a body and came home bouncing. She said it was “better than the beach.” I want her to run into that future full force, to enjoy every second of the visceral life she deserves.
But even as she crossed over the threshold into the school, part of me wanted to freeze the whole scene, to say something that would help her understand how completely awed I am by how she’s adapted. And that she’ll always have this—this year when she planted the doomed loquat and fell in love with multiplication and was mostly shockingly kind to her sister and the cat. The smokey skies and the talk of germs and the learning to ride a bike—it’s all inside of her now. It can’t be seen from the outside, but it’s hers forever.
I guess this is me saying that to her (hi Maya of the future, call me). I guess this is me saying that to myself. I endured. I was mostly shockingly kind. I learned a lot. And it’s inside of me now.
I guess this is me saying that to you, too. You did it. It’s inconceivable what you braved, what you remade, what you longed for, what you held on for. And it’s not exactly over, but it’s changing, and in this liminal moment, as we ascend into the sky, away from the thing that altered us, I want you to know that I see how you’re internally rearranged. You’re not the same. You’re even more beautiful.
~Courtney
♥
\ (•◡•) /
\ /
—
| |
“The spiritual journey is the relinquishment…or unlearning…of fear, and the acceptance of love back into our hearts.” -Marianne Williamson
“Behold, what I have seen to be good and to be fitting is to eat and drink and find enjoyment in all the toil with which one toils under the sun the few days of life which God has given.” -Ecclesiastes 5:18
Are we learning?
January 24, 2021
‘Knowledge was inherent in all things. The world was a library…’
-Chief Luther Standing Bear, Oglala Sioux
Are we allowing the whispers to be heard…
Are we shifting…
How much longer will the loudest most divisive voices continue to disrupt…
What can we do as a collective to gently encourage the shift, for our planet…
For each other…
We’ve been given a narrow space to breath, to decide, to listen, to learn.
We don’t have much time.
Chief Seattle:
‘There is no death, only a change of worlds.’
One precious life.
April 1, 2020
[Post by Robert Ellsberg]
‘She kept a diary, not simply as a distraction but as a duty, a responsibility to render her experience and her feelings in the most accurate terms. Along with the everyday experiences of a young girl confined indoors she recorded very unchildlike reflections on her perilous life.
“I see the 8 of us with our ‘Secret Annex’ as if we were a little piece of blue heaven, surrounded by heavy black rain clouds. The spot where we stand is still safe, but the clouds gather more closely about us and the circle which separates us from the approaching danger, closes more and more tightly.”
Nevertheless she believed it was her duty to maintain her courage, cheerfulness, and belief in the essential goodness of people, and to uphold her ideals,
“for perhaps the time will come when I shall be able to carry them out.”
While acknowledging the suffering that surrounded her “piece of blue heaven” and the approaching thunder “which will destroy us too” she thanked God for “all that is good and dear and beautiful” and maintained her faith in a better world.
Rarely has anyone so well defined the virtues needed in our age as this 14-yr-old already living under sentence of death. She was one of those in a dark age whose task is to maintain a candlelight of humanity as a guarantee that darkness does not have the final word.’
Roberts Ellsberg is publisher of Orbis Books. His dad, Daniel, gave us The Pentagon Papers. He knows a bit about patriotism, duty, and hope.
We need you.
“The world we want to make when we get out of this.”
-Krista Tippett, On Being
Who’s in?
#GeneralStrike
March 28, 2020The shift begins now.
Anand Giridharadas, political analyst and author, posted March 2020:
If we could come out of this crisis with a single widely shared belief, if some once-controversial idea could become a new consensus, what do you hope it would be?
Here’s mine:
COVID has revealed the U.S. Government is more harmful than helpful. We the people are the power. We can see the shift now. When the people stop, everything stops. And the billionaires panic. We choose. #GeneralStrike