the coal conspiracy - (don't blame me when this makes you mad enough to run screaming into the forest)

money does what we tell it to do (and how what it's doing lets us know what we are telling it) part III

locket wisdom: an open road is a good thing

Now the law of attraction is not the only law on our playground

(yes, we've gone from kitchen cupboards to playgrounds this month - can't wait to see where we end up in March)

The law of abundance is an important law, too.

The flow of abundance is always directed toward us (it's our birthright) - but our thoughts, beliefs, memories and levels of deserving-ness can create barriers.

This deservingness is rooted in self-care and is traditionally first (root) chakra stuff - the physical world - making our way, standing on our own two feet, handling life's changes, eating, addictions, anxiety, boundaries, money.  

This chakra is about presence - the be here now thing.

(with this shift we are living through money is moving into the 4th chakra (heart chakra) - so we'll focus on that one next time)

Imbalances in our root (first) chakra show up in our inner world as foot problems, legs, ankles, bones, blood, colon, immune disorders, spine, adrenals, etc. In our outer world imbalances here show up as fears, major changes in our safety and security (job loss, divorce), money problems, neediness, anxiety about the future, compulsions, addictions and eating disorders.

Now, to one degree or another because of this shift on the planet these last few years we are all a little unsteady and many people feel totally upside down - this probably is true for everyone except for the most extremely balanced and some who just haven't been that affected yet.

The root chakra is like a baby - feed me, take care of me, comfort me. Nourishment is a huge factor in the self-care of this chakra.

When I was a kid my mother always took the smallest, worst, most overcooked or undercooked piece of everything - when I became a mother I started doing the same thing. When hubs would take the last of the milk, it drove me crazy, I'd say "why don't you think about anyone else?" - he'd say, "well, someone has to drink it", and of course someone does have to drink it and why was I always making sure that someone wasn't me?

One day my daughter had a classroom party for one of her friends at school. When I picked her up at the end of the day I asked her how the cupcakes tasted (I had seen her eyes when we saw all the gorgeous colors when I dropped her off that morning)  and she said, "I don't know - they were short one cupcake, her mother didn't make enough, so I said I didn't want one." Now, I knew my daughter and I knew she had wanted that cupcake. I also knew exactly where she had learned to do this. Ouch.

I stopped doing it. So did she.

Nourishing ourselves properly, standing up for ourselves,

(I don't let people cut me in line, hubs cringes when I say anything - I'm very polite, mostly, and try not to go all Jersey on them unless I absolutely have to - I know, for me, I need to stand up for myself - for hubs, he needs to be able to get in the back of the line sometimes - we are not all here to experience the same things even when our experience is exactly the same)

barefoot walks in grass or sand, hiking outdoors, making our home inviting, clearing clutter, cleaning things, putting our hands in dirt, massages, baths, caring for a pet

(before I had a regular meditation practice and even now when I let it lapse, I used to have kind of anxiety/panic attacks when I got overworked and overwhelmed- I had one this past Christmas season on a crazy making/shipping day - it always helped me to sit with my back against a tree holding a dog, luckily for me even when my dog was an 80 lb Labrador mix, this somehow always works)

- all these things can help us get back into our bodies.

Many times we disassociate from our bodies when we are very young, girls especially do this.

I read recently that very, very young girls when asked what their favorite body part is will say anything - their stomachs, their legs, their butts - but by age 4 or 5 those same girls will instinctively answer - their hair, their eyes, their faces - their bodies are already starting to become foreign spaces to them, places that could be unsafe.

(when I had gone out with hubs a few times he said to me "there is one thing about you that is just perfect" I was thinking he would say 'your eyes or legs or hair' - well, I didn't actually think he would say my hair ... but he said ... "your teeth" - the better to chomp down on one of your main life supporting arteries I wanted to say - ugh)

Back next time to connect the law of abundance with money and the 4th chakra it's evolving into.

xo all

(a note about nourishment - I have been working with the Body Ecology Diet - diet meaning eating plan, not weight loss, it's focused on making our acidic bodies more alkaline and I have noticed some immediate good things - especially with the lemon in room temperature water which I drink all day now - no more headaches and my puffy eyes are much better)

what's good for you is good for your business (this is not always reversible advice) plus mercury goes retrograde

mercury goes retrograde - time to lighten up

I had some really good advice today from my accupunc-turist

(and yes, I like to say my accupunc-turist,
not that I own her or anything like that, although I've almost paid her enough by now to own her big screen tv, but it makes me feel important like I am one of those people who gets to say 'my accountant', or 'my lawyer' or 'my trainer' - sigh)

Anyhoo - she said, "what's good for you is good for your business."

It was like one of those Oprah moments, and then she laughed, "but what's good for your business

isn't always good for you."

I just thought I would pass on this little gem before it slips into the vast expanse of darkness I call my memory.

I had been relating to her a story one of hub's customers had told us about his business problems and how this was a dog eat dog world, and hubs and the other men present, I believe caught up in some kind of testosterone group hug, without any actual hugging, of course - boy germs and all, were all nodding and agreeing with him and going on and on about survival of the fittest.

And I was like, "Wait a minute, this isn't a dog eat dog world. This isn't even a dog eat squirrel world. This isn't a survival of the fittest world. This may be a non-survival of the very least fit (the one gazelle the lion is able to actually catch), but there is a whole lot of surviving going on."

This was followed by a lot of dead air.

(I mean seriously folks, if this was a dog eat dog world- do you think I would let Olive out of my sight for one single moment, no I didn't think so)

How this related back to the accupuncturist's words of wisdom I don't remember - it will probably come back to me when Mercury goes retrograde this weekend.

Yes, Mercury is retrograding for the next few weeks - during the retrograde period it is like Mercury has gone down into the underworld to play with Hermes and Persephone - it makes us more right-brain orientated, perfect for us crafty makers in winter. It is dark down there, so our other senses will be stronger. We will feel extra sensitive now, maybe even psychic and yes, even more thin-skinned at times

(personally if I get any more thin skinned, things are going to get ugly and by things I mean, my bones and veins and muscles, which will be sticking out all over the place, so unattractive, I hate when that happens).

Everything will seem hyper-real during a Pisces retrograde … we will start to notice things we had overlooked before.

This noticing will allow us to re-evaluate, renovate, re-charge, return, reinvent, just think "re" - all good stuff.

The things to look out for during a retrograde are miscommunications (the underworld has terrible mail service), gadgets malfunctioning (the underworld has terrible internet service, too) and it's dark so we are more likely to make mistakes - try waiting until you can see clearly to make important changes if possible.

money does what we tell it to do (and how what it's doing lets us know what we are telling it) part II

little known factoid: owls are very good with money

Now, we are on a mystical journey here and sometimes looking for logical reasons on a mystical journey is not totally useful.

In fact the very act of looking for the reason for a problem (for example a money problem) keeps us in the energy of the problem and leaves us stuck; firmly planted in that vibration.

Maybe we aren't here for the lesson - maybe we're just here for the experience. 

Maybe earth isn't a school (unless you think it's a school and then yes, for you, it will be a school and you will sit with your problem until you have figured it out or maybe until someone comes along and sees that you have solved this problem and reflects this back to you and gives you a passing grade or maybe you will sit and wait for an A+, and if this is the case, you may be sitting with your problem for a very long time) - instead of thinking 'school' - let's try thinking 'playground'.

(and if you're thinking now wait a minute isn't a playground a part of the school, but no, this is the playground on the other side of town by the soccer field and the basketball courts)

And not everything that happens on the playground is fun and games because yes, people get hurt on the playground and yes, people learn lessons on the playground - but ultimately we are all on the playground for the experience of being there.

There are some rules on our playground (beside no hitting and no name calling because those are the kind of things we have free will to use as we see fit and hopefully we will see fit not to hit). The real rules on our playground are universal laws and they do not require our belief or understanding of them for them to work. They are posted everywhere and they are posted no where.

When it comes to money and abundance everyone talks about the Law of Attraction and yes, this is one of the laws of our playground but it is not the only law and it is definitely not the most important law when it comes to money, but let's touch on it first anyway.

You probably played with magnets when you were a kid (or maybe yesterday if you have one of my lockets) - you were probably fascinated by the way some objects were attracted to them, others jumped away and even more things were just indifferent to the magnets altogether.

If I stuck magnets all over you (and I have the magnetic inventory to carry this out, so be nice), you would expect that some things would stick to you, others would leap away and many more would show no reaction. 

This is kind of the way

the law of attraction works. 

We unconsciously transmit our energy - some of our qualities are magnetic (of the same vibration) with certain people, places and things, some of our qualities are repellent (showers and deodorant will not help us with this) and some situations have no magnetic pull from our energy one way or the other.

(kind of like me and Downton Abbey - yes, I love Mary and it's great to see Elizabeth McGovern again, but must every storyline always have a happy ending ... of course I haven't seen season 3 yet)

Now we are not stuck with these unconscious transmissions we are sending out  (but remember they are unconscious and unconscious things don't get changed with our brains, they get changed with our hearts - we can't think our way out of this stuff and actually over-thinking, which women in particular often do, thanks in part to our large hippocampus - is a very big signal that we need to start feeling instead of thinking - we can't make the mind do the work of the heart) - just like a magnet that can be flipped over to a different polarity, we can flip our transmissions to attract changes, too.

The easiest way to get into our heart space is with gratitude - for what we have and for what the future holds - always putting our attention (the law of attention is another law in our playground) on what we want to feel and not what we want to have - connecting back to yesterday's post - we want oxytocin (love) not dopamine (ego) flowing through our bodies!

Part III - more laws and specific ways to make your money do what we want it to do

money does what we tell it to do (and how what it's doing will let us know what we are telling it) part I

everything is edible (sort of ) cufflinks

I've read money was invented as a way to get the things we needed without us having to barter an exact exchange and this makes sense.

(I've also read it was invented as a way to pay taxes which feels true, too)

Whatever money's origin, what was actually created was a barrier to exchange (giving and receiving) where no barrier existed naturally.

(kind of like those other made up barriers like intelligence exams, international boundaries and child safety caps)

Everything in nature has its own natural rhythm - an innate trusting of life and surrender to its flow. The natural world grows and produces through giving and receiving just by being.

We have manipulated this natural flow of giving and receiving - of feast and famine, of tides moving in and out - with money (you might think "of course we invented money, we couldn't very well have avoided it" and I would agree we would have a very different world if we had avoided it).

Researchers have shown that money has 3 effects on our brains:

(this is totally fascinating so stay with me here)

1. When money is received - the hormone dopamine is released in our brains. When kept in balance dopamine is a healthy stimulus toward positive experiences, but dopamine is also the hormone that plays a large part in addiction, as in give me more and more and more. It always relies on something outside of ourselves as a trigger. Dopamine doesn’t change the pleasure involved with a behavior, just how much we want to do it - it's the total ego hormone.

2) When money is released - when we use it to pay for needed/wanted stuff and services, pain receptors in the brain are triggered (probably why we complain stuff costs us an arm and a leg because it feels like it actually does).

So, when we buy something we want we get that little hit of dopamine to counteract the pain response when we have to part with our money and when we pay for things like internet service or insurance we just get the pain.

3) When money is allowed to flow - given to others without expectations of getting anything in return, it causes the release of oxytocin in the brain. This hormone is the chemical released when a mother bonds with her baby, when couples hold hands, when friends hug each other and when people smile at strangers. Oxytocin is an actual physical manifestation of love.

This research makes total sense because in a world where only love is real - releasing the love hormone when money moves the way it is supposed to or I should say - releasing the love hormone when energy moves the way it would naturally move makes perfect sense.

(some people like to quote the Course in Miracles as saying there is only love and fear and this is not what the course says - the course says there is only love and its lack. Fear isn't the opposite of love, fear is the lack of love - just like darkness is the lack of light - fear itself doesn't exist anymore than darkness does)

This may not mean that we stand on the street corner and give our money away without any expectations of anything in return - although this would be pretty powerful stuff - but it does mean there are ways to work with the natural flow of giving and receiving, especially when the old rules don't work anymore, to create more abundance in our lives.

Part II - money does what we tell it to do (and how to make it listen better than your 3 year old)

happy president's day (or we're evolving caterpillars into butterflies here)

climate change - keystone xl pipeline rally 2/17/13

Some days it feels like everything is just a huge mess. A mess that is so big and so multi-layered and so out of our hands that it is like we are all living in one of those hopeless hoarder houses with the newspapers and the cockroaches.

On better days we survey the world and say ok - this is what it is - we made this mess, we can unmake it - I wish I was starting from somewhere else but I can only start from right here.

Bruce Lipton (check him out if you haven't already, he connects the spiritual with the science in exciting ways) likes to compare civilization's current spiritual evolution with that of the caterpillar.

(and on days when we cannot imagine we could possibly get from where we are now to where we need to be, this little guy is our guy to think about)

Imagine for a moment we are a single cell among the millions of cells that make up a caterpillar. Our little world has been operating like a well-oiled machine and creeping along most predictably until one day the machine begins to shake and shutter. Systems fail. Cells begin to commit suicide. There is a sense of doom and darkness.

But, from within the dying population of cells, a new breed of cell starts to immerge. They are called imaginal cells (really how cool is that).

Clustering in communities they devise a plan out of the wreckage. They create a great flying machine - a butterfly - that enables the survivor cells to escape the ashes of the caterpillar world and experience the unimaginable (and yet not unimaginable because it is the imaginal cells that did it) beautiful butterfly world.

And the most amazing thing of all is that the caterpillar and the butterfly have the exact same DNA.

They are just receiving and responding to a different organizing signal.

This is where we are in the world today - all of us deciding which organizing signal we are going to tune into. The media is reporting a caterpillar world - doom and gloom with every man-made system in trouble.

And yet, everywhere, human imaginal cells are waking up to a new possibility. They are clustering and communicating and tuning away from the signal of fear and into the signal of love.

Love is not some mushy gushy sentiment reserved for Valentine's Day, but the vibrational glue that will help build us our new flying machine.

We are those imaginal cells - although it may not seem totally evident to us now - the future is literally in our imaginations; in our thinking.

Positive thinking isn't the opposite of negative thinking. Positive thinking is the opposite of wishy, washy thinking. Positive thinking isn't about flowers and puppies; it's the other definition of positive - the one that means certain. 

Yesterday I went to the largest ever U.S. climate change rally - tens of thousands of people (I think 50,000) marching and laughing and singing for change.

( I never sing in public, saving my Lucy Ricardo voice for the shower and poor Olive, but even I was singing yesterday, in fact my throat hurts today - I feel a little like Adele, well except for the genius and the millions of rabid fans)

On the one hand we were hoping to catch President Obama's attention regarding his upcoming Keystone XL Pipeline decision but we were very focused on what we were gathering for, not what we were gathering against (pushing against stuff only gets us to the place of more of this stuff we are pushing against - it puts us in vibration with it - when what we really want is to evolve higher).

Happy President's Day all - I'm off to accupuncture and then going to clean my messy house - the hoarder references have made me a little uneasy ....

Part III - Do I have to stick my tongue to a flagpole, people!

a little cork love from olive

Now, it is quite clear to me, through the liberal use of my Magic 8 Ball and a reader's comment (thank you Janell) that we are still not feeling it.

(and it is a proven fact that if one person says something, ten other people are thinking it, so I will trudge on here, plus I like to think ten people are reading this)

This word artist feels like something someone over there is doing - maybe someone with an art degree

(although I know many women with art degrees and some who teach art and call themselves teachers or art teachers, but still choke a little bit on the word artist)

maybe someone with a canvas and some oil paints

(although I know women who paint everyday and because they don't sell what they paint they choke a little bit - or a lot - on the word)

maybe someone with talent.

Gulp, yup, I think it's the "t" word that gets us.

(that little voice that says who do you think you are and not a sweet "who do you think you are?" like we are stumbling around with amnesia and a kindly little old lady asks us our name and hands us a cookie, but more like "who do you think you are?" as if the salesgirl at Bloomingdale's, maybe the one with the super elastic looking eyelashes - I just want to grab them and stretch them out and see where they end up - and the bottle of cologne perched in her hand mid-spiff - has spied us removing our coat with the saggy lining - wth has happened to my coat lining?? - and trying on that $800 leather jacket)

It's the talent thing.

Not, that we see ourselves as talentless, of course, we are damn good at what we do, we are makers after all - we are all in agreement on that one.

We make scarves and necklaces. We make e-books and soap. We make conversations and cookies. We make a business (maybe, maybe not). We make a life with our makings (always). Yes, we are makers.

In what way is a maker not an artist? Name one.

(I double dog dare you on this one)

I think we are I have been a little chicken to use this word. I think it is this little chicken part of me that keeps me from getting accepted into certain shows and certain categories within certain shows. I have been practicing though. I say, "I am an artist" and feel where the tension (block) is in my body and work on releasing that.

(a great release exercise, works for me with pain, too - based on accupressure points and psychology is the tapping solution - very easy to do, google it if you are interested, Cheryl Richardson has a video on youtube - I wouldn't do it in line at the post office, but it is strangely effective)

I say it in the grocery store.

"Paper or plastic?"
"I am an artist."

I say it in the restaurant.

"Lemon in your tea?"
"I am an artist."

I say it to hubs every night.

"Anything good happen today?
"I am an artist."

It's starting to work (I am an artist).

Anyhoo, if this is a conversation that interests you, Seth Godin has an excellent new book, The Icharus Deception, how high will you fly, that may get you thinking about "why we have decided we are not artists and whether it is worth considering why we made this decision and what it might take to unmake it."

No answers from Olive on this one, just more questions - I am feeling the need to relate the word artist to anyone living an authentic life and touching other people with their authenticity - someone focused on the journey and not the finish line - someone like us.

(I am an artist)