"SO THIS IS CHRISTMAS..."

"...and what have you done?"

John Lennon asked that question in a song a few decades ago. Care to take a look?

A cop once told me that the highest incidence of sudden deaths from heart attacks occurs on Christmas eve. I've often reflected on that anecdotal stat. Why would that be?

Beginning with the lead up to Thanksgiving, and crashing to a throbbing halt and hangover on New Years Day, we are bombarded with messages about abundance, joy, giving and receiving, peace and good will, family unity, etc., etc. A good 6 weeks of intense feelings battering us - seeking expression through wishes, intentions, hopes, desires and disappointments - pushing energy up through our emotional bodies until it arrives... to a closed, guarded heart, and crack! Literally, our hearts break. Thus the heart attacks.

"And what have you done?"

And what can you do?

Well, have you worked at opening and unguarding your heart? Or are you still concerned about being vulnerable, afraid of being rejected, worried about being humiliated? These are the ingredients for the heart-attack recipe, folks. And I'm here to tell you on this holiday season that these fears are irrational. Completely. And here's why...

Being open is not the same thing as being vulnerable.

When we were little children, we were naturally open, born that way, but also, we were completely dependent on our caretakers for our well-being in every way - physically, psychologically and emotionally. The latter is what true vulnerability is. It just so happens that in childhood we are simultaneously open and vulnerable - because we are little - but unfortunately, we erroneously equate open with vulnerable.

In fact, the beauty of the way life works is that Nature takes care of the vulnerability problem - i.e. - We grow up!

In adulthood, we are not dependent on a caregiver to provide for our well-being. We are independent, self-sufficient, in charge of our own destinies in a way that a child is not. We delude ourselves into thinking otherwise, but this is just a remnant from those early "being little years" that we keep identifying with. But it doesn't make it true.

And rejection, humiliation? Same thing applies...

An adult can't be rejected, because an adult is always choosing when and where to be and who to be with. A child cannot make such choices. If a parent chooses to neglect or abandon their child, said dependent child is indeed rejected because it has no choice. It could even die in such a state.

Likewise, humiliation - the idea that somehow you have been made to appear unworthy, useless, foolish - is a state of being that can only occur in childhood, when you have no choice as to how to see your circumstances. A child is dependent for its self-image on what it sees reflected back from its parents. Not so for an adult. An adult can interpret any situation in a positive or negative light. In fact, one of the greatest pleasures of adulthood is enjoying being foolish! It is one of the greatest gifts of a solid, grounded, non-codependent self-image to laugh at oneself, is it not? I have often thought of entitling my first book: "The Joy of Being Wrong!"

Hey, everyone - this holiday season, give yourself the gift of receiving what has already been freely given to you by Nature - your adulthood. Congratulate yourself - you made it!

HAPPY CHRISTMAS (WAR IS OVER) - IN 5D!

"War is over... if you want it."

I thought about that lyric recently, from John Lennon's "Happy Christmas (War Is Over)" song. This week's celebration brings John's positive holiday anthem to mind. What is striking about the lyrics is not the hope or intention of the idea of war being over, but the tense in which John wrote the lyrics - present!

He doesn't say "War could be over" or "War will be over" if you want it, but rather, "War is over if you want it."

War is over. Get it?

Whether consciously intended by John or not, what he is saying is that somewhere, in some line of reality, in some time line, war is already over, and if you truly want that, truly desire to be in that line of reality, you can be.

I wrote about this 5D truth shortly after the massacre at the Boston Marathon in April of 2013, in a post entitled: "Boston From A 5D Perspective: You Can Change The World By Changing Worlds!"

Here's an excerpt:

"Since every line of reality that any of us can imagine can and does exist, then 5th Dimensional living becomes a matter of choice, choice, choice, and more choice. If you want to live in a world without crime or terrorism or war or poverty, do the self-work necessary to clear out your 3D beliefs in those things, as well as your personal investments in separation, fear, hatred and victimization, and then meditate on shifting to your preferred line of reality where such things don't exist. You can change the world, people, but not by force or resistance or outer-focused actions, but rather... by literally changing worlds!"

Happy Christmas... and thanks, John!

TODAY'S QUOTE ON "GENERATIVITY!"

"Generativity is primarily the interest in establishing and guiding the next generation, although there are people who, because of special gifts in other directions, do not apply this drive to having offspring, but to engaging in other forms of altruistic concern and creativity which may absorb their kind of "parental" responsibility. This is a stage of growth of the healthy adult personality, and where such enrichment fails, regression from generativity to an obsessive need for pseudo intimacy takes place, often with a pervading sense of stagnation and interpersonal impoverishment. The mere fact of having, or even wanting children does not itself attest to generativity."
Erik Erikson

TODAY'S "GREATEST GIFT" QUOTE!

"If you want to awaken all of humanity, then awaken all of yourself. If you want to eliminate the suffering in the world, then eliminate all that is dark and negative in yourself. Truly, the greatest gift you have to give is that of your own self-transformation." - Lao Tzu

TODAY'S "ZEN MEDITATION" QUOTE!

“You should sit in meditation for twenty minutes every day... unless you’re too busy. Then you should sit for an hour.” 

Are you...
                                This guy?
                       
                                  or....

                                              This guy?! 

TODAY'S "NEED TO BE RIGHT" QUOTE!

Ideally, the cost of having to be “right” is blatantly apparent when, in the winning, what may have been truly of value has been lost.
( From "Oneness" by Rasha)

THE TRUTH ABOUT EVERYTHING, PART FOUR: PARENTS ARE THE LEAST QUALIFIED OF ALL ADULTS TO RAISE CHILDREN!

"Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you."

The above quote from Kahlil Gibran's classic piece on children is well known to many, but ignored or misunderstood by almost everyone who has children. In fact, in over 30 years of working as a therapist with parents, children, prospective parents, and adults who once were children, I have yet to come upon a single case of someone who gave birth to a child from a self-actualized, egoless place, who could, in other words, understand and practice what Gibran is saying above. This is why everyone you know has a character structure that needs to be dismantled with arduous self-work in order to attain a decent level of happiness and self-realization.

Most people would agree that parenting is one of the most important jobs on the planet, right? Yet, think about this - you need to take a written test, a road test and an eye test to be allowed to drive a car. You need at least an undergraduate college degree, if not more, in order to get hired for most professional occupations, and you need some amount of time as an apprentice or trainee in order to obtain and hold most jobs at any level. But to become a parent, all you technically have to do is... well... fuck somebody, and voila - instant parent! With all the rights and privileges bestowed by our society upon you to determine a young being's health and well-being for the entire first segment of their life, and maybe for their entire life. Talk about fucking somebody!

Here's Kahlil Gibran again:

"You may give them your love but not your thoughts, 
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday."

Ready? Let's say it together: "Parents suck!" (or at least, they did in 3D)

Okay, now that we got that out of the way, let's consider how we arrived to such a state of affairs. Of course, it always comes back to "Soul Age" and the vicissitudes of 3D reality, the dimension we all just left over the last 2 years. The predominant soul age on 3D Earth was "young," and that meant that the pre-occupation here was with the development and exaggerated use of, and belief in, the ego and lower-self will. This dovetails perfectly with the 3rd dimensional beliefs in limitation, linear time and physical existence as all there is (as opposed to a 4th and 5th dimensional consciousness that operates outside the illusion of space and time, connected to All That Is.).

So, throughout what we thought of as our history, adults had rarely born children out of conscious inspiration from Source, or even from a place of deep love and Eros with a partner. Marriages had historically been formed out of tradition, convenience, financial need or in 20th Century western cultures, out of co-dependent disorders. Children had historically been seen in these scenarios as property (another body to work on the farm or carry on the family business) or as an extension of one's ego, a vehicle to extend lineage, blood-line identity and narcissism into another generation, the exact opposite of what Gibran was writing about. 

And even on those rare occasions that a child was born out of genuine love between two adults, said adults, having received zero training or guidance in child development or what it really means to be a parent, still remained unqualified to do an acceptable job of guiding a life to maturity.

Here's Neale Donald Walsch from "Conversations With God":

" No one is more ill-equipped to raise children than young parents.  Most of you gain the wisdom, the patience, the understanding, and the love to be wonderful parents after your parenting years are over. Child raising was mean to be an activity of the elders, whose minds are well developed and strong. The erroneous thought is that that those who bear children - the young adults - bear also the sole responsibility for raising them. But if the people who have children aren’t responsible for raising them in a Highly Enlightened Society, who is?  The whole community. With special emphasis on the elders."

Okay, time to breathe. Young adults having children, but elders raising them? What? "Those are MY kids!" Actually, they're not. But hey, just look around at the results of that kind of old thinking - children (unjustly) diagnosed as depressed, hyperactive, and diabetic, being raised by depressed, hyperactive, diabetic adults. Now, tell me: How'd that ego-driven, 3D approach to child-rearing work for you? And for all of us? (Of course, in the harmony of Oneness, the slings and arrows of being born to and raised by unself-actualized beings in an unself-actualized culture actually accelerated our rise up to 5D.)

So, here we are, another hard Truth About Everything: "Parents Are The Least Qualified Of All Adults To Raise Children."

Now, what do we do? Obviously, we are not set up as a Highly Enlightened Society, yet, and even if we tried to structurally arrange it, our current crop of elders are not only not equipped to guide children, because developmentally and soul-wise, they are children!

But... we are evolving, and accelerating the process of that evolution into 5D by... yes, here it comes... doing the focused, intense self-work necessary to mature ourselves at the deepest levels. We can become a mature/old soul planet in no time as we make the turn and do whatever it takes to expand our levels of consciousness and raise our vibrations.

In the meantime, as part of our ascension process into 5D, we are having less children, and when we do have them, we're doing do so at a later age after we've done some consciously-directed evolving. This is very good news.

Here'e the final passage from Kahlil Gibran.

"You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable."

Here's to all of you working to become stable bows. 

CITY ROCK ON KICKSTARTER!

Well, since life is about following your passion... we're raising money grassroots style to get CITY ROCK up and running!

Here's a video and link to a CITY ROCK Kickstarter campaign, put together beautifully by my wonderful personal assistant, Jackson!