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Each new paradigm births through its predecessor

Hello and Welcome!

Habits and paradigms are tricky.  A habit can be defined as something that guides you toward success or shifts you into a rut out of which you are always struggling to evolve.  Paradigms give you your first structure of morality, right/wrong stories, and modes to interpret the world.  Habits and paradigms work right up to the point they become obsolete.  When you feel stuck or clinging to a habit or paradigm that feeling may be a sign that you need to birth through to the next way.

Challenging your paradigmatic perspective including your habitual reaction patterns allows you to discover a deeper and fuller experience in your relationships and work environment.

Not long ago I encountered a dead-end on my path.  At least I thought that was what it was at the time.

I had gone as far as I could in the pursuit of something.  I had reached a stopping point but not reached the goal.  At least that stopping point didn’t look like my picture of the goal.  I felt discouraged.  I didn’t want to turn around and go back, but I could go no further.

So I sat down where I was.  I stopped pushing.  I looked around.  I looked within.  I began breathing and focusing on what I felt as well as what I saw.  With my breath and focus the energy around me shifted.  It was as if I was vibrating into a new level of consciousness.

As I sat there I felt inconsolable.  I had become attached to the goal I was pursuing.  At first my attitude didn’t allow for me to see anything positive.  I could only see through the eyes of my disillusionment.  Then I began to see through an attitude of gratitude.  I began to notice some wondrous things around me:  extraordinary relationships and family;  time and freedom to pursue my dreams; support; love; space; an inner awareness.  This awareness, breath, gratitude, and peacefulness filled me and opened up an inner imaginal world filled with plausible creations.

I realized the dead-end was a logical conclusion of my limited thinking and perception – an inner shifting of paradigms and habits.

It wasn’t that I hadn’t reached the goal, it was that my goal had transformed.  I had shifted from pursuing an independent, proving, route to experiencing and developing a collaborative, integrative, holistic, path.  This required me to shift my perspective, my habits, and my capacity to take in what was around me, to see through a different lens.

At once, with this realization, I noticed a beautiful path that veered off  just to edge from my sitting place.  It was a slightly elevated pathway that was not immediately noticeable, hidden from view when looking straight ahead or downward.  It was light and airy, covered in a material that was vastly different from the path on which I had been walking.  I could only see the way, through my new perspective of present moment now and receiving joy.

The hard work, perseverance, and hard choices, the trauma and difficulties of my youth had created a primary paradigm that anything of worth required this set of behaviors.  And that I had to prove who I was, a doing, rather than being style of living.  What I had endured to get to this point could only bring me this far on my path.

Only via these new lessons of ease, joy, laughter, love – that lovely concept of flow could I see the way through.  An evolution of consciousness was the action required to take my next step.  And this evolution comes from a releasing, a relaxing, and a letting go rather than a persevering, pushing attitude.  The shift in consciousness creates the new paradigm in a quantum-style movement, rather than a linear movement.  Each new paradigm births through its predecessor through a natural shifting of perspective.

If you are feeling stuck or clinging intensely to your habitual style of behaving, thinking, or believing; if you are feeling defensiveness, anger, anxiety or discouraged stop where you are, both metaphorically and physically.  Take the time to feel into your ideas, your habits, your goals, and beliefs.  Open yourself to the attitude of gratitude, notice everything that is working in your life, environment, relationships, and work.  Through this space you will find an evolution in your consciousness so that you can shift your perspective and birth yourself into a new paradigm of living and being.  in love and light, beth


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awareness and allowing give space to respond effectively and change your behavior

Hello and Welcome!

Following these steps to increase awareness and allowing creates space to respond effectively and change your behavior.

An easy way to begin is the  Stop, Look, and Listen method.

Stop multitasking or whatever action in which you are involved that may split your attention or where you feel you are being pulled along a track in an habitual thinking/behaving way; Look, or pay attention by bringing your attention to the situation at hand, pay attention to the actions of others and yourself and how relevant these are to the whole of the situation; Listen to your inner voice and the style, tone, timber of your and the other’s voice.  Stop look and listen is focus, see, and hear in the present moment, the now.  This is a simple unambiguous phrase that brings you into mindfulness.

It is a simple way to interrupt habit-reactive firing of behavior.  This method slows down your reactive-linking behavior. Through present moment refocusing of your attention you can gather information and then develop a response that meets the present moment situation.

This recovery process can be applied to any habit that has gone awry.  What’s really great about this set of actions and behaviors is how they help in every instance when a habit has simply overtaken your life as the driver of your behavior rather than the mechanism of your comfort or alleviation of difficulty.

Here’s how to decipher if you are dealing with a habit reaction pattern.

  • Check in with your senses and intuition.  If you feel that the experience is familiar or a pattern then you may be participating in  a habit reaction scenario.  If you feel that you have trouble trusting that things can/will go well for you, then your early history of having to survive is coloring your current day choices/actions.
  • If you have an immediate feeling of anger, like someone has crossed a boundary and your feeling is charged in that the level of emotion (intensity) doesn’t match the situation or boundary crossing, this is a sign that you have been triggered.

In this instance, proceed in your actions with thoughtfulness.  

  • Query yourself on whether your intense feeling is consistent with your overall experience of the person or the environment toward which you are feeling the intense reaction.
  • Stop, look, and listen – think caution in proceeding.
  • Invoke mindfulness and centered, present moment attention to the situation.
  • Work against the pull of the groove into the habit reaction pattern.

This is how you can engage the a more balanced attitude. Focus is the key.  If you are in danger, utilizing your reaction  skills to get out of the situation is paramount.  If you are not in danger but rather caught in a habit reaction pattern then focus your attention on what you want rather than what you fear as the best response.

Use mindfulness to re-view the circumstances in relation to your emotion.  This is the stop, look, and listen component, it will help you identify whether this is danger or not.  In example, if a stranger is doing something that feels dangerous allow your survivor reactions to move at lightning pace.  If however, the situation is with a loving partner, or friend – you need to view your emotion within the context of the relationship in present-time and with clarity and genuineness.

Awareness, Breathe, Wait it out, and Reveal.

  • The most difficult element of confronting a habit reaction pattern that is driving your behavior is the stopping part.
  • If your car is out of control, you need to stop its forward movement – this requires first, a recognition that you have lost control of the car, and then second, an action to gain control.
  • This awareness is key.  Once you are aware you can begin to take back control of your thinking and behaving/actions.

Stop look and listen focuses you on increasing your awareness.  Breathe, wait it out, and reveal focuses you on how and what to change.  It requires a shift in how, and on what, you focus.  It requires a re-view of yourself through a centered, mindful attention to yourself, your skills and limitations, what brings you joy and centers you in your best self.

Shifting perspective actually creates the power that you feel you have lost.  It is a relaxation of the struggle to survive or fight and a gentle movement into the mindful, balanced living of life.  Consider the simple action of relaxing in a hold, this action alone telegraphs to the holder to lighten his grip and causes laxity so that you can wiggle out of the stranglehold.

Lightening your grip, your need for habit reactive linking behavior allows you to move through situations and your environment in a mindful and relaxed way, still nimble in your attention and responses to act if necessary to a dangerous situation but not reactive, held or tight in your nature. in love and light, beth


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Anxiety and the development of ineffective habit reactions

hello and Welcome!

Having worked for many years with individuals struggling with various forms of anxiety I have identified a coping mechanism I call habit reaction patterns to manage anxiety.

This is a coping strategy that starts out creating a sense of control over their internal anxiety.  The individual will describe that indeed the habit reactive pattern in some way saved her from an extraordinarily stressful situation or circumstance.  Unfortunately this anxiety management method produces a false sense of security and overtime the habit reaction pattern serves to drive the individual’s overall behavior and results in a diminished sense of empowerment and a lack of security.

Habits are highly desirable to create structure in a meaningful way.  When a habit degrades into a habit reaction pattern it becomes undesirable .  Habit reaction patterns lack present moment authenticity.  These are reactive in nature, a set of unconscious, unthinking, unchallenged, automatic reactions.

The patterning pulls you into a specific way of behaving.  Think of how the groove of a rut pulls you around a circle.  It takes an extra exertion of energy to jump out of the rut and choose your course.  The habit reaction pattern acts like the groove or furrow, it takes you into the behavior Habit like any reaction in an automatic, non-present-moment-thinking-way (unconscious).

This reaction is not responsive to the present moment situation, it happens in a non-intuitive non-mindful way.  Habit reaction patterns can be triggered into reaction; where a trigger acts like the groove that pulls a person into a set of interpretations and actions (reactions) to survive, or to solve a historical problem, or quell anxiety.

Tied into the habit reaction pattern is a highly fine tuned trigger-detection mechanism.

  • This mechanism is super-sensitive to interpreting danger, hyper-vigilant, hyper-reactive.
  • The trigger may be linked to an earlier situation in which you felt in danger of severe harm.
  • The experience trips the trigger and then the habit reaction pattern fires into action – forcing you to behave in a specific way – even when you cognitively feel you do not want to or feel it is inappropriate.

When this set of feelings happen, the habit reaction pattern is now driving your behavior rather than your proactive spiritual-cognitive-behavior processes.  You are no longer in the driver seat of your life.  It is as if you are simply watching from behind a glass window, rather than responding to the specific, dynamic multi-level issues at hand.  You feel powerless to stop yourself from reacting in the manner prescribed by the habit reaction pattern.

In order to get out of the rut, groove, or habit reaction one has to invoke two things, awareness and allowance.   This allows for a sense of present moment empowerment and mindfulness.

The habit reaction pattern behavior may have been highly effective when you first developed it.  In fact it may be the best thing you could have done to respond to the original anxiety conflict that set of the patterning habit.  This makes it difficult for you to let it go.

You may feel like it is the thing that sets you apart in some way or gives you an edge in some way.  This internal feeling creates an attachment to that style of being in the world, such that confronting the need to eradicate the ineffective habit reaction pattern may be thwarted.  This sets up a difficult and challenging cycle, you continually, automatically, invoke the original survival mechanism without awareness that you are actually diminishing your power through the reactive mechanism.

The most healing thing to do is

  1. to accurately identify how the patterning was beneficial
  2. to accurately identify that the habit is ineffective in your present moment situation and management of anxiety
  3. to place the behavior into your past as a once successful, but not currently successful pattern of reacting to anxiety
  4. and disassemble the coping strategy and its automatic reactive power.

Habits are developed through a series of trial and error.  A need arises, a behavior appears to resolve the identified problem and viola a habit develops.  This is an excellent mechanism of comfort and structure or meaning-making in action.  It is a part of how we develop, learn and integrate, structure behavior.  It’s highly effective model to make sense out of the competing needs in society.

When this mechanism goes awry.  The insidious quality of a habit overtaking as driver of your behavior is subtle.

  • First, there is a sense of invention,
  • then a settling-in of success in using the habit to resolve a conflict.
  • After a time the habit begins to drive the situation.  The action becomes an automatic reaction of if this then that.

Once this internal directive becomes hardwired the habit drives the set of responses available to you in a given situation, so it becomes a reaction, like the jerking of your knee when hit by the doctor’s mallet – kick straight out.  This automatic reaction creates a hardwire rut that drives your behavior.

Any awareness process can assist you in getting out of a habit reactive pattern coping strategy toward anxiety.

  • Mindful meditation, 
  • the practice of Yoga,
  • Journaling,

are all excellent practices to increase centering, present moment focus, and balanced neutral response to anxiety. 

Use the stop look and listen method to increase your awareness.Once you have developed awareness, use the breathe, wait it out, and reveal process to increase your tolerance for allowance.

These two together, awareness and allowance, create space to respond effectively to your anxiety and change your behavior from ineffective habit reactions to mindful responsiveness.  You will move from a need for control and a sense of insecurity to self-confidence and a sense of inner empowerment and strength.  More on this is the next few blogs, in love and light, beth.


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5 steps to Healing psychological Wounds

Hello and Welcome!

Injuries heal through a set of layers and this occurs most fully and rapidly through these five steps.  The most important step being cleaning out the deterrents to healing.

Here using a focus on physical wounds:

  1. Evaluation of severity, depth, breadth, need for sutures, casting and bandaging.
  2. Cleaning the wound of fragments, foreign objects, dirt, and deterrents to healing – debridement.
  3. Careful observation and compassionate tending to the healing progress of the wound.
  4. Re-evaluation of the development in healing, re-cleaning, debridement, re-dressing the wound.
  5. A loving compassionate reintroduction of the use of the wounded area to avoid re-injury or trauma

The course for wound healing seems to take one of two branches.  One branch leads to further, deeper injury through infection and invasion into deeper systems.  The other offers a fuller evaluation at the fore to prevent a deeper infestation.

It is seductive to follow the first branch described – it is less work at the beginning and looks as if healing happens more quickly.  However this route results in a quick fix.  The rapid scabbing process covers a deeper problem that can result in an underlying infection and a resulting scar that stares-out at each person who passes, almost calling the passers-by to comment, and in some cases re-injuring the person.

The second route is more intensive at the front-end, however, once through the difficult evaluation and debridement process, and with proper attention to the complete healing process, this route results in an almost imperceptible scar.

Wound healing takes this same branched course for physical and psychological scars.

For psychological wounds forgiveness is an intricate component of the healing process.  The forgiveness has to be sincere, real, felt deeply, and thoroughly experienced.  From that whole-space, forgiveness can create an inner healing that results in an imperceptible scar.

  1. and 2. are interrelated for psychological injuries.  This is to say the process of evaluation of the injury, and the debridement work together – debridement is the process of removing foreign material and dead tissue from a physical wound to prevent infection and promote healing – debridement, then, with respect to a psychological wound requires mindfully releasing anger, vengefulness, and hate – and utilizes compassion, lovingkindness, and forgiveness.

A short-cut through the forgiveness stage results in an incomplete healing, a superficial covering.  This is when an individual chooses to transect the process without looking mindfully at the wounding experience.  This is a false covering-over, which allows for infection – underneath a festering will develop at an unconscious or conscious level which will interfere with a full healing of the wound.  This may result in deeper injury to spirit, mind and body or ultimately burst open in rage, shame and vengefulness, creating a crater of a scar that is seen in all your relationships.

If you use the tangible concept of a physical wound to guide you,

  • you can see the first thing required is to clean the wound…get out the dirt, the left over shards so that the wound is ready to create a healing scab. This washing process can sting, be painful, sharp, or uncomfortable.

From a psychological wound perspective the first step is the same,

  • clean out the wound, remove shards, that are going to impede healing or increase a chance for infection – this requires compassionate understanding and forgiveness, mindfulness, and paradigm shifting.  Wounds are often a result of a lack of understanding, a lack of restraint, or a placement of trust toward an untrustworthy person.  Going within to do the inner work required for this can be hurtful, sharp, or uncomfortable just like washing out a cut stings.

Forgiveness is tricky when you perceive that forgiveness makes the action that was harmful “okay”.  The trick to forgiveness is shifting paradigmatic perceptions and righting your own power in a given situation.  Forgiveness is letting go of the power the wounding has over you while simultaneously identifying what was harmful and what to avoid in the future – including the relationship or event in which the wounding occurred.

A common style of dealing with hurts is to remove yourself from the profound feelings that are attached to the pain you endured.  This keeps you stuck in the past.  This disallows forgiveness or creates unforgiveness.

Unforgiveness leads to a diminishing of your personal power, a rigid world-view, and a truncated personality in relationship.  It leads to the opposite of mindfulness and the opposite of empowerment.

  • In order to forgive, that pain must be felt
  • and then a resolution, an understanding, a paradigm shift needs to take place to allow the unlinking of the pain of the event; the event and the actor;  and the outcome of the event
  • so that it can be put into proper perspective and into your past,
  • freeing you to move on into the present moment of your life – a new stance in the world, strengthened via the complete healing of the wound.

To forgive another a deeply painful act, betrayal, or action is difficult.  To see, and accept responsibility for, how you have hurt another is also difficult.

Choosing to face this difficult task will allow for a real shift to take place, a full and complete healing that leaves an imperceptible scar, the mindful/spirit-filled inner search (evaluation and debridement) is paramount.  This action can result in transforming events, healing your wound and transforming your relationships.

How do you forgive someone for that act which in your mind changed you forever, that betrayed your trust or your sense of innocence?

Finding forgiveness requires grace.  It requires a willingness to let go of the thing that may define your stance in the world. It is fraught with deep feeling and an inner journey to your center.  Certainly paradigm shifting, figure/ground perspective, and the attitude of gratitude are helpful activities.  This set of actions is required to fully heal a psychological wound.

Mindfulness allows you to see a way to unlink the act and the person; the act and the circumstances surrounding the act; and the intention and the action.  And from this space forgiveness is possible and profoundly healing.

Severe wounds are difficult betrayals and experiences to transcend,  difficult to get to forgiveness even with these unlinkings, increased awareness and increased perspective. The process of debridement is most useful in this situation.

Healing your psychological wounds requires loving attention and compassion first toward yourself and then toward the cause of the wound.  Not unlike the treatment of a physical wound what matters is the healing of the injury and then release of anger, and vengefulness toward the cause of the wound.

Healing is me-first.  Not narcissistic or selfish but inner directed, looking inward to promote inner healing and release of the power of the wound over your future life choices.  This is true for physical and psychological wounds.  Allowing an injury to define you sets power where it does not belong.  Set your empowerment within, release the material that interferes with your full and complete healing so that the injury itself becomes imperceptible.in love and light, beth


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Listen without attachment, Hear truth

Hello and Welcome!

Listening is an active process.  It is active in that it requires focused attention and neutral or accurate interpretation.

Hearing is a function of this process of focused, unattached listening.  Meaning is the by-product – it is what you hear.

When you listen fresh, and without attachment, you free yourself to hear the meaning sent versus your internal negative dialogue or grandiose spin on either the speaker or your self perceptions.

What you hear reveals information about yourself when you hear through the filter of this inner dialogue.

In addition when information is heard through this inner dialogue filter, what another hears you say has more to do with him than with you.

There are levels of information sent in communication.  This can be clarified and understood in context when your own filter is removed.

Knowledge is not an inaccurate filter.  So that placing the message sent within the context of the sender allows you to accurately interpret the sender’s meaning.

The personal filter through which you hear can interfere with your capacity to do this, your capacity to be neutral.

Fears, misperceptions about yourself such as insecurities or historical relationship information that do not apply to the current relationship are all filters which will interfere with accurate hearing, and will result in inefficient meaning making.

Follow these steps to create clarity and move yourself into a neutral posture for active listening.

  1. Be open to clarity. Clarify what you heard – Repeat what you heard including the hidden message, and request if that was the message sent.
  2. Be neutral – face your inner fears, inner insecurities, and inner mis-perceived paradigms or pictures by questioning yourself about their veracity.
  3. Utilize an integrated listening and hearing system – integrated spirit, mind, and body.  Do this by paying attention to what you feel, sense, and experience when listening to the message.  Does the information feel right in your heart, does it cognitively go in straight, do you have a physical catch or block to the information?.

Your spirit, mind, and body sensory guidance system guides you to the truth – it cuts through the internal negative or grandiose dialogue and allows truth to be revealed instantly when you are willing to actively listen and remain mindful and present.  This is a type of listening with your third or inner ear.  It is a hearing, feeling, knowing experience.  It is multidimensional in that you know it in your mindfulness or unattached cognitions (understanding), feel it in your body (a sense of flow and ease) and hear it in your heart (a sense of ringing true).

Being present, connecting to listening, and the information, in a present-moment way that incorporates what you know (but discards insecurities, historical patterning in your relationships,  and what you fear) is listening without attachment.

This uplevels your consciousness, truth is revealed and you may take action from an enlightening and powerful place to create relationships and environments that are prosperous. in love and light, beth


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Model critical thinking, eschew propaganda

Hello and Welcome!

Having a long history in the study of human behavior I am intimately aware of the strong urge and pull toward following the group.  Simply observing toddlers in preschool, young children in elementary school or witnessing the popular movement of music, clothing, and behavior of high school and young adulthood results in the observation that the in-group in society telegraphs to the human psyche how to be, what to think, who to follow and what will keep you in the clique.

This is built into the developmental structure of humans.

This draw to follow the group mind and to be inculcated into belief systems is the basis of societal strength.  Unfortunately it can become the downfall of society over time and can become a tool to control people without their overt knowledge.

In the 1960’s psychologists studied university students to discover if an individual will follow the group and conform under various conditions.  It was called the Asch Experiment (Wikipedia).   And what they found was that when students were presented with a group of peers who offered the incorrect response they conformed to answer with the incorrect answer 75% of the time for at least one answer.

Also in the 1960’s psychologists studied whether a person would act against his or her own inner sense that something was wrong when told by an authority person or person in a position of power  that it was necessary to act in this way against that subject’s inner sense that something was wrong.  This was called the Milgram Experiment (Wikipedia).  This study’s results provided serious information that seemingly “good people” with reasonable skills to evaluate the serious negative effects of an act would still follow through with causing harm to another person when told by an authority person (person in a position of power) that it was necessary and deferred responses to the effects of their actions.

The best way to avoid this is to use critical thinking in all of your decision-making.  Critical thinking questions the basis of your belief systems and the underpinnings of powerful people’s opinions and positions.  Rather then saying I agree with that icon, hero, politician, or cool person, critical thinking encourages an inner dialogue that questions why do I agree and what does that statement, philosophy, or belief system mean down and up-stream.  This increases an individual’s chance to be congruent in his beliefs and it increases the specific individual freedom and empowerment that person can experience in his life course and development.

What is popular is not always what is best for a society.  How those in power get their message out is a through subtle coercion.  All groups have rules of inclusion and exclusion.  The human goal is to feel included, liked, accepted and specifically to be part of the cool in-group.

A great tool is to pay attention when you feel you are being pulled along a flow toward something as if it is the only answer and that feeling is a pressure from the outside, cool in-group, not from an internal sense of knowing from within.  This is a cue that you are caught up in something that may have propaganda in it.

When individuals become overly stressed or lack critical thinking they accept propaganda as truth, swallowing it whole.  This is a shortcut due to stress or due to an unearned trust toward the group or those in power, thinking thay are indeed going to direct the society to the society as a whole‘s best interest.

Sociological theory and psychological theory, both, have shown that under various conditions those in power want to maintain that power.  Power is the means to make money.   The place wherein there is little critical thinking with respect to how groups are using propaganda to promote their money-making opportunities is through marketing, media, and what is cool.

The best response to your environment is to use your own critical thinking skills to evaluate the truth of what is being said.  Examine how you know it is true, without accepting whole what someone says whom you perceive as a guru, leader, hero, or cool person.

There is power in being famous, this is related to the latent pull to follow the leader of the group.  Following what a famous person says or does gives your psyche the sense that you are somehow connected to them, which feeds that hidden inner pull to conform and align with the group.

This is precisely the process that allows for odd or different children to be bullied in school.  The cool person or the person perceived to have power, is followed, rather than an individual standing up and saying that it is wrong,  or simply standing with the odd or different child.  The latent quiet allowing of maltreatment for fear that the maltreatment may be directed at yourself is a way the in-group wields control.

There is a small set of individuals who choose to go outside of the norm.  Sometimes this is someone who is following his inner sense of what is right.  This small set of individuals can stem the flow of the propaganda.  There is risk to this individual as he is often attacked.  The first response of a powerful in-group toward this individual is to focus a spotlight on this set of individuals, to discredit them, and to divide and conquer the opportunity for like-minded people to collaborate or simply dialogue about other ways to behave.

Your critical thinking skills can best guide you.  And the more you use these and model to your child their use, the more your child will use these.  It is in this way that bullying, subtle power coercion, control through group-mind, and propaganda will be extinguished.

Innovation is a natural by-product of critical thinking.  It comes as a result of questioning:

  • is that statement true?
  • how do I know the belief or statement is true from my own experience?
  • and what is the other side’s argument and how is it true?
  • what might be the reward for the person in power to deny the truth?
  • what is wrong with a statement or belief?
  • or what needs to be changed in a situation or environment?

Critical thinking is mindfulness.

The force through which someone states a thing is not truth.  Truth is.  And truth can be felt as an internal alignment – not in the agreement to the belief – but in an integration of the truth of all the positions and how that truth lines up.  It is an internal heart sense and has a lightness to it not a loud booming voice.  The latter is just a technique of coercion.  The more punch and loudness in the argument the less critical thinking.

Critical thinking allows for the truth of all the sides to be accepted and incorporated into the solution or belief system.

  • Subjectivity is loud, forceful, emotional, and pulls to accept, it blocks mindfulness and the critical evaluation of all sides.
  • Objectivity is quiet, light, and non-emotional, it has an opening to reveal the truth of all sides.

Discover your truth through critical thinking and mindfulness.  Model this behavior and thinking style for your children.  This will result in bringing to light propaganda so that real solutions can be found to the difficult problems facing you.in love and light, beth


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on my way to enlightenment I discovered my flaws

Hello and Welcome!

Energy (read creation) follows vibration and intention.  This theory implies that if you think about something efficiently and powerfully you can create that thing.  When living by this theory it’s important to remember fears, worries, and habits are efficiently and powerfully energetic.  So that if You DESIRE to be A and you worry, fret or fear that many things may interfere with you creating A, then, you are actually working against your own desire via these energetic worries/fears.  In psychological terms, this may be called anxiety.  So that anxiety interferes with the process of creating A, whereas self-confidence enhances the process of creating A.

Self confidence enhances the process through vibration and intention.  When you are self-confident your vibration and intention are stronger and more clear so it directs energy to the creation desired.

The fear neutralizes your movement toward the creation of the thing.  Fear creates a current away from the desired thing.  In this way you are energizing two currents, one toward your creation and one away from your creation.  The result is either to move toward, and away from, in an alternating fashion or to remain stuck in place.  The pragmatic person says this recognition of problems is an important part of being responsible but the more effective concept of responsibility is the ability to respond.  Such that, although you may be aware and note through non-attached observation that there may be conflicts or bumps in the road in creating A, you feel that you can respond to these effectively and persevere to create A.

This behavior/thinking/faith is a current toward self-confidence and the desired creation and a diminishment of the current of fear or worry.

You can see this in  the process of learning Yoga.  Correct movement into the position (asana) requires a working with your body.  Your focus is in creating an asana that is correct and to get there you must have non-attached concentration, attention, and breathwork.  The non-attached component is the part that observes and corrects posture and placement without an evaluation of  good or bad (non-attached).  Focused breathing while attending to your posture and release of tension is the intention the energy follows, for the practice.  Being in the present moment, with your breathing and body, is the non-attached attention and concentration.

It is an accepting and allowing process of breath and movement. Fear blocks movement and binds the energy from flowing.  Deep, intentional breathing shifts the energy and releases blocks, both physical and emotional.

You can see this in the practice of mindful meditation.  Breath, non-attached observation, in the present moment expands your understanding and your access to fuller information.  It deepens and broadens your perspective.   So that rather than, proving your point and digging in, you clarify your understanding and deepen your compassion.   From this place you may focus your energy toward your desire and focus your intention and energy.  Breath, along with present moment attention, and non-attached observation, focuses intention and allows balance.

Since energy follows vibration and intention, creation of desires happens most easily and quickly when the desire is unopposed, which is to say clarifying your intention and vibrating in a space through breath of present moment awareness and clarity of intention, assists the process most efficiently.  Actions taken from this space will give rise to information about how you are interfering with your intended creation through fear, worry, anxiety and/or insecurity.

Standing in your center

  • mindfully through unattached observation and acceptance of truth,
  • spiritually through your faith and clarity in your capacity,
  • and, physically through breath and confident action

allows for energy to flow directly toward your intended creation and result in delivering what you seek.

This allows for enlightenment through the acceptance, reframe, and release of perceived flaws.  Energy follows vibration and intention so when you find you are stuck, look to reset your intention and your vibration through mind, body, spirit alignment and centering.

Visualize yourself in the intended creation.  Feel it, see it, accept it and stand in gratitude of it – this amplifies your vibration by removing the worry, anxiety, fear, and insecurity.  Once you allow the removal of the current which pulls you away from your intended creation, you will immediately observe an elevation in your progress toward your intended creation.

Being grateful for where you are and for the intended creation as if it has already taken place will serve to strengthen your vibration, and intention and your self-confidence.  BE the change you wish to see in the world.  in love and light,  Beth


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Know thyself, know your partner, use mindfulness

Hello and Welcome!  Partnering is one of the most important and trickiest of ventures.  I have been watching partners break apart for years but recently I have been noticing an interesting pattern.

Agreements are set down in relationship, I’ll do this for you, you do this for me.  This is part and parcel to developing partnerships.  These can be explicit or implicit but they are there.

Pay attention to what you agree to implicitly.  When relationships break apart the more the agreements were implicit the more there is disagreement about the agreement.  The less spelled-out, clarified, identified the equation of exchange,  the more each party puts his or her own spin on the particular exchange components/expectations.  This is especially true in partnerships where one party gets a lot of recognition for what perhaps both parties are doing.

This is usually a power exchange.  I will do this to promote you and you do this to promote me.  The one who doesn’t get the recognition feels betrayed but it is difficult to really get to what the true exchange was.

These agreements may be spiritual, emotional, or physical.  Problems develop on both sides, if the individual who gets more recognition is truly depending on the less-recognized partner to make it happen, that person stops doing what is required or leaves and takes that work with him, then, the person who is getting the recognition is left unable to move forward and looks a bit like a fraud.

From the less recognized perspective if the person getting the recognition is able to use that to move into another position and doesn’t take the less recognized partner with him, then, the person who has actually been doing the work may be left with nothing.

The place where this is most painful is when someone is exchanging his hard work to simply receive love.  This is a more spiritual agreement that is broken and injures the person who sees the love leave with the partner.

Identify what you see, feel, hear, want to give and get out of the relationship.  When creating partnerships, avoid making assumptions that you and your partner have the same understanding about your participation and outcome.

Know yourself, know your partner, use mindfulness.

  • Be prepared to have a full and complete conversation about what you desire from and give to the partnership.
  • Look underneath the surface of what your partner is offering – pay attention to what you see has happened previously with that person, in relationship.  Do not presume that if he has historically abandoned his partner that he will be different with you – unless you are aware of a fundamental experience in that person’s life that supports a fundamental change in relating.
  • Personally evaluate your true intention and agenda in the partnership.
  • Be open to the fact that you and your partner are dynamic and therefore your, or your partner’s, needs, expectations, and capacities may change over time.
  • Keep the conversation going, check in on a quarterly basis and make adjustments.

These actions may not keep the partnership going, but you will have a dissolution when and under circumstances that promote your and your partner’s health rather than injury.  in love and light, beth


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Visioning anew – developing your allowing muscles

Hello and Welcome!  Creating a new vision requires you have a sense of what you want.  This is a challenge if you have spent a lot of your life either swallowing whole what you determined other’s wanted for you or reacting against the image you perceive they wanted for you by doing/being the opposite.  Both lifestyles are without an internal connection to yourself.  Visioning is an active rather than passive (swallowing whole) or reactive (oppositional) process.

It starts within.  The trouble with focusing inward is there is no guide, no perfect step by step process that promises success.  It is a feel/know experience.

If you were one of the lucky people, who were modeled this activity by your parents (or grandparents) then you are in luck; you are familiar with what it feels like to trust your intuition and go with the internal flow.  Everyone else has to learn how to let go, release, allow, trust and go within to get acquainted with self.  In order to develop a connection to self, to your inner guidance you need to develop your allowing muscles.

These processes develop your allowing muscle.  Practicing some form of meditation, prayer, Toning, Tai Chi, Qi Gong, or Yoga allows for you to develop the integrated structure of breath and spirit to that mind/body movement, and the aha experiences of see/feel/knowing.  School, and general socialization patterning develops your working, focusing, and making things happen muscles – these are only mind/body integrated.  This integration patterning is useful in many ways, but is limited to movement within already formed structures, and already formed visions.

Visioning requires integration of spirit, and breathing to develop the allowing muscles.  These guide you through your heart center and allow your mind/body to integrate with spirit thereby strengthening you as a vehicle of profound creation.

Being a vehicle of profound creation means allowing your pure self to blossom and develop into your full potential and joy.  This active process moves your through all aspects of your life and relationships such that you can create precisely what you want and what you create integrates with your community for success.

Start today.

  • Breathe.
  • Check into your heart center, are you happy?
  • Do you bring the same joy to washing the floor as buying that new  _____  (fill in the blank)?

With every action have an internal dialogue of self-love and mindful connection.  The attitude of gratitude is great for getting you into that heart center.

  • Look underneath whatever ill feeling you have, tip the issue on its head you will find something for which you are grateful.  Use that as your single point of focus and joy will erupt through you and be transmitted through your actions.

~ie:  I hate washing the floor…  shift to I am grateful to have this home, to have the ability, strength and opportunity to be able to wash the floor…whatever is underneath the chore...

~ie:  I hate fighting with my child…  shift to I am grateful to have the child, what may be going on underneath these fights – from there you can look for ways to align with your child to be on the same side against the problem…. whatever is underneath the conflict – you will find something to be grateful for…

~ie:  I hate that everyone always pulls on me… shift to I am grateful to have so many people who love and depend on me… from there you can look to see how to shift the degree of dependency so that you can have more space for yourself…

Gratitude, Joy, and connection these are the feeling experiences that bring you into your center and integrate the allowing muscles, listening to your inner sense of pure love, joy, and gratitude, so that you can vision anew how and who you want to be in the world.  This will affect every one of your interactions and actions.

Obligation is a mind/body integrated muscle, it isolates and separates you.  Action through love, and joy includes spirit into that muscle to allow your actions to uncover a new vision and connection with yourself and your community.  in gratitude, joy, and love, beth


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Collaboration, coolness, and the evolution of consciousness

Hello and Welcome!  In Hippies, Hipsters and Hypnotic distortion, blog 6.11.12 two important tips were discussed in assisting your children by instilling your values and maintaining open communication lines,  the third tip is to consider how dynamic society is.  This means that as generations grow they effect change and are faced with different issues to tackle and work through then those previous.  So movement forward will be a multilevel combination of values, expectation, experience, opportunity, and survival/thriving requirements.

Because of the growing global interconnections of society, even basic ideas of how to proceed may require an internal focus within yourself, and your child’s environment, to uplevel consciousness away from the concept of competition for limited resources to a form of collaboration and movement through issues with a win-win perspective.

A shift toward collaboration isn’t taking something from the one who has it and giving it to the one who doesn’t but rather seeing our whole community as one world and each person finding his or her place within the teamwork and framework of collaboration and then working together to actually create equality and equity from an internally focused and guided collective of truth.

The next level of consciousness includes a re-invention of how Cool, and Hip are developed in society – a shift to placing this identification solidly  within the quadrants of what is valuable and valued – away from marketing propaganda, focus on materialistic, money and fame, away from the movie-star, rock-star, politician cool – to something that will increase the opportunity for your child to create prosperity that is based in an integration of spirit, mind, and body – rather than limited resources and winning the game.

This would shift the form and idea of coolness away from ways to be in opposition from the previous generation or others to form and ideas of ways to be in sync –   health, kindness, compassion, understanding, doing the right thing rather than getting away with something.  Actually living congruently, growing our communities organically not just with natural resources shared but with collaborative intention and attention to all aspects of our community.  Children would be the center not in the narcissistic, permissive style of earlier generations but in the solid growth promoting way of creating strength and stability through dependability, interdependence and trust.

For the continuation of our planet and community, mothering and parenting deserve a higher spot on the value ladder and a more valued place in the life of an adult. Caring, acting in a compassionate manner, forgiving and understanding through compassion – eating healthfully, exercising mind, body and spirit in a holistic fashion all ways in which the human race can increase longevity , uplevel consciousness, and work toward utilizing natural resources more efficiently and effectively.

These things have to shift – Escaping in alcohol, drugs, sex not connected to the whole human being, lack of self-care, and being taken care of , and a lack of moving through the whole life cycle and relationship interchange (or pushing children into the roles of parents and sexual objects.)  These behaviors need to be extinguished through a natural internal understanding that they are not productive and not in line with what is cool.

Right now an example of what is being encouraged through the hip movement is by the time a girl is in fourth grade she is talking about sex and wearing overtly sexual clothing, – music is about sex, drugs, and crime, grabbing power however you can; the goals of young people are to be like movie stars, make money quick and buy, buy, buy.

There isn’t a sense of what is my best skill or talent – what am I here to do; – spirituality and especially the Judeo-Christian religion is out and uncool.  Doing the right thing is seen as weak.  Being kind = weak.  Doing drugs, getting high, drinking too much = cool.  Getting in trouble with the law = cool.  This pressure to be part of the group is inherent in the human psyche – to create being part of the group as damaging to yourself and unfocused with a lack of spirituality is to deny two parts of the human condition, mind and spirit to be left with only one part guiding human action body through pleasure and pain.

We need a new vision, a new set of goals, new air to breathe and definitely a new generation to lead us out of the sixties and into a new collaborative, loving, powerful strong consciousness of health and sustainability.  Change, leaning forward, and evolution are all important foci for the future but the definitions must include integration of spirit, mind and body if we are to have a society that survives and thrives.

I am really excited to see how this unfolds.  We are on the brink of creating something truly beautiful – especially if we all work together in love with mindfulness, and with compassion, and an eye to collaboration.  in love and light, namaste, beth