To make your soul grow…

In 2006 a high school English teacher, Ms. Lockwood, had her students write to famous authors for advice. Only Kurt Vonnegut responded. (A fellow Hoosier, I might add.) Here is part of what he had to say:

Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.

Seriously! I mean starting right now, do art and do it for the rest of your lives. Draw a funny or nice picture of Ms. Lockwood and give it to her. Dance home after school, and sing in the shower and on and on. Make a face in your mashed potatoes. Pretend you’re Count Dracula.

Here’s an assignment for tonight, and I hope Ms. Lockwood will flunk you if you don’t do it: Write a six line poem, about anything, but rhymed. Make it as good as you possibly can. But don’t tell anybody what you’re doing. Don’t show it or recite it to anybody, not even your girlfriend or parents or whatever, or Ms. Lockwood. OK?

Tear it up into teeny-weeny pieces, and discard them into widely separated trash receptacles. You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what’s inside you, and you have made your soul grow.

I hope the students took his words to heart and that their lives became enriched because of it.

That stuff…

I believe that what the Universe wants is to create an interactive partnership that helps expand the energy of love, for as we grow in the consciousness of love, we nourish and grow the Universe!

What we can do on our end:

Practice simple acts of kindness.
Speak thoughtful words, perform helpful deeds.
Never forget that one smile, one happy hello, has the power to effect great change.
Be patient with yourself and others.
Grow love. Sprinkle that stuff everywhere.

Sun, moon, and earth…

This month we continue to share our new approach to understanding Universal energies as they relate to the story told in an astrological chart. Janae is calling this method “Transcendental Astrology,” as it offers a deeper insight into how our Identity is shaped by certain cosmic forces.


More from Janae:

In the same way we examine Mars, Venus, and Mercury as the Good, Beauty, and True link with our self-designed plan for this lifetime, we can examine the Sun, Moon, and Earth as how we configure their energies to work out Below.

We all know the name of our Sun sign. It’s called that because it is our Sun’s zodiac placement in our natal chart. The glyph, or symbol, of the Sun is a circle. It represents the energy of our full Identity, which is how we perceive ourself. Our Identity adjusts as we grow through the resistances that refine and broaden our personality. Who we are is constantly changing, and who we think we are is being challenged to catch up.

The glyph of the Moon is a partial circle, or crescent. The crescent Moon is thought of as our split identity. There is the part of the circle that is our Sun identity and radiates for all to see, and the part that is the Moon identity, hidden under the surface. When we come out in the night to honor the Full Moon, we’re acknowledging, or asking, to be made aware of our own deeper levels of consciousness. Moon energy reveals our unconscious motivation which we are either willing to know or not. If your choice is ‘not,’ start wondering why you’re reading this.

The Sun and the Moon become our identity growth partners by slowly bringing our hidden energies to the surface of our life. At some point we become aware of why we acted against our Good and put dents in our Beauty. We recognize what’s True at a broader perspective. As we move closer to our soul’s energy, the Full Moon’s mysterious work of active revelation drops off, and the opposing zodiac relationship of Sun and Earth steps in to reveal our deeper partnership with our Sun’s opposite energy.

Finally, we’re ready for the challenge that will reveal the Wholeness of our Identity.


See you next month!

Don’t panic…

When I’m trying to figure out something about life, the Universe and everything, I often get flashes of information, hints at a bigger picture, which I write down on a sticky note for future reference.

For a while I’ve been wondering about the real purpose of our personalities, in the Universal scheme of things. First, why are our personalities seemingly “designed” to be so disconnected from our Divinity? And, second, why do we tend to believe that we are not worthy of that Divinity?

When I start to ponder like this, when I want to know more, it’s as if I send invisible thought bubbles right up through the ethers. This desire seems to spark a magnetic call and response between me and Above.

This is what I had been musing about:
Is Personality just an innocent bystander in creation?

This is what eventually flashed in:
Purposeful mechanism for growth.

Aha! My working hypothesis now is that Personality is key to our spiritual quest. As we choose to learn and grow, through the thick and thin of everyday living, WE initiate the process and discover our worth by degrees. Personality, I wager, is the mechanism of evolution. Its inner alchemy is what calls out to Soul and allows the Divine to unveil itself within us.


To my fellow hitchhikers…
Don’t panic when the ride gets bumpy. And remember to bring a clean towel!

Looking back…

I have a 40th high school reunion coming up in a few weeks, rescheduled from last October, so it’s been on my mind for a while now. I’ve submitted the requested photos for the slideshow and have tried to keep up with posts in the Facebook group. I even got to meet with my friend Sandi earlier this month, who will also be at the reunion, and we enjoyed taking a few practice steps down memory lane.

Since I haven’t kept in touch with very many people from that time, I really do need to find my yearbooks to get my brain cells firing. As I have always been a future-focused person, the past has a way of fading more quickly for me than I would like. I’m sure that I had more fun than I can now remember, and I can’t wait to be reminded of that fact.

An unexpected bonus, however, resulted after I commented on a post in the FB group, where Lori mentioned her early life, the street where her parents still live, etc. I responded because we had grown up only a couple of blocks away from each other and had gone to the same elementary school, where my dad “Mr. T” happened to be her sixth grade teacher. (Yes, my dad was a teacher at my school. One of the best perks was that I was never without ice cream money!)

This bonus is extra special to me because in our back and forth Lori shared a memory about my dad. This is what she said:

Hi Lisa, Your father was one of my very favorite teachers and humans. I still laugh at the memory of him having me perform a funeral service as I buried my gum with the entire class in attendance. I didn’t chew gum in class after that!

I was so touched by this little anecdote that I asked others in the group who might also have stories about my dad to please find me at the reunion and share them. He impacted so many families through the years, even teaching the children of former students!

My father passed away in 2004, so I feel very lucky that I will soon have the opportunity to gather up some memories of him along with those from my high school days.

Looking forward to looking back…

I “borrowed” this from the reunion FB group!

More like a cha-cha…

Our experiences beckon us to travel forward, backward, jump up and down, zig sideways, turn in circles, and even stand still. How lovely it would be to view the purpose of each and every step as an integral part of our life’s dance. I’m partial to the Hokey Pokey! What say you?

This insightfully clever definition came across my FB feed the other day, and I wanted to give it a shout out because it’s so stinkin’ good! Kudos to those at GratitudeHabitat.com for being such smarty pants.

The planets of good, beauty, and true…

Now that you have gotten a good taste of the Universal energies of Good, Beauty, and True as well as how they relate to houses/quarters of an astrological chart, Janae and I want to take you a step further and introduce their associated planets. Houses and quarters and planets, oh my!

MARS represents the energy of GOOD. We of Earth were created by the action of Good; it is imbedded in our DNA. Good is the nature of the Universe, the action of our Solar System, the forceful forward energy that scatters all that stands in its way.

VENUS represents the energy of BEAUTY. Our Beauty is our love-light. Our love-light energy grows brighter as our emotional nature matures over time. Our light, our love, is an integral part of the Creative Principle of the Universe. We are mentally, emotionally, and physically the Creators of Earth.

MERCURY represents the energy of TRUE. It is our evolving spiral of thought, moving us ever closer to the True state of Universal Mind. It is the spark, destined to develop within each of us, that guides us to explore Universal meanings in our individual pursuits.

The positions of these three planets in our personal chart begin to tell the story of our Path to Love. They first communicate individually, then they work as a team, and ultimately they are meant to synthesize into a cohesive Wholeness. Understanding their relationships provides valuable insight into our process of spiritual transformation.

I wonder where we will go from here?
See you next month.

A different language now…

I love it when lines from a book or show captivate my attention; they are like little flashes of awareness gifting themselves to me. I typically jot the words down right away, because though their essence integrates instantly into my energy, I still need to translate their meaning into my understanding.

Last month I watched the show Foundation, based on the Isaac Asimov book series of the same name. I’ve got sticky notes of about five or six quotes that directly spoke to me from the season, offering themselves as pure manna. It helps to be immersed in the dialogue and plot, of course, but I still think these are delicious even on their own:

It’s confusing not to commit to one reality.

That prayer can’t endure without you.

A theorem so abstract, it might as well have been a prayer.

History isn’t fact; it’s narrative.

Here’s the one, however, that made the biggest impact:

The weight of traditions protects us; they can be a comfort in making a journey others have made before. Once I prayed in the words of my parents, but then my world expanded and the words fell short of my reality. I pray in a different language now.

When I heard the character Gaal Dornick utter those words, I flashed on a quote from the poem Ulysses, where Tennyson describes experience as being an archway wherethro’ gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades for ever and ever when I move.

As we evolve in consciousness, it is each step from the past that carries us forward. Traditions don’t leave us; they expand us.

The refresh button…

I got the idea for this exercise from Pam Grout’s book The Course in Miracles Experiment, though I cannot, for the life of me, find the page again from whence it came. Anywho, as I first read said page, an alternate approach flashed through my mind, after which I politely said “thank you,” as I do when I receive such insight, and then I just kept reading with no thought to reference Pam’s version somehow. (Since then I’ve flipped through that book more times than I can say – all to no avail.)

Here’s my take on Pam’s take, which, I believe, was meant to be used as some kind of an energy reset, which is also how I am offering it. So, when you’ve had a long day or feel stuck or upset or need to take a break before you lose your ever-lovin’ mind, you can hit your energy refresh button by following this quickie technique:

1. Take several deep breaths in through your nose and out through your mouth. (Just doing this alone propels your less-than-stellar mental/emotional/physical energies off of their less-than-stellar trajectory.)

2. Now, flip the energy switch by focusing on something that you appreciate or for which you are grateful or that you’d love to do or someone you love. (You know, happy feeling stuff!)

3. As you sense your energy lightening up, breathe in and out a couple more times while you use the middle finger of either hand to lightly tap right between your eyebrows maybe a dozen times. (This little trick that I learned from Donna Eden signals your nervous system to release the good vibes you’ve just set in motion to spread throughout your entire body.)

Your energy goes where your mind flows. It’s that easy. Give it a try.

Far and wide…

These exercises are from my last book “Did You Know?: forevermore,” which speaks to everlasting love. I wanted to offer a challenge in honor of Valentine’s Day, which literally takes less than a minute. In fact, I just timed myself at under 25 seconds!

Whenever you think about it (daily would be fantastic), follow the instructions below to radiate love, joy and connection far and wide! Start by bringing yourself to mind, a loved one to mind, the world to mind – one at a time or all together. Your heart has no capacity limits, and your return on investment will be mind boggling!

You can find “Did You Know?: forevermore” and my other books at:
amazon.com/author/whitelisa