Author Archive for Michele McHall
Leaning into the Mystery
As my relationship with the Universal Intelligence, as I call it, or Source, grows stronger and stronger, I continue to realize how paradoxically small and yet significant I am—we all are. Our small selves want so much to control things and figure them out. Yet, the more I practice showing up and releasing my will to the breeze of the great Mystery, the more significantly I can impact my reality.
My favorite sandals were stolen last week at a lovely spa I visited while on vacation. The person who took them insisted they were hers. As I watched her walk out in my shoes, I didn’t want to make a scene and instead leaned into the acceptance that this was her karma to live out.
As it turned out, it was also my karma to live out. These sandals were sacred to me. They could have been any other pair of shoes and I wouldn’t have cared so much. What I realized as I reflected upon this experience is that I too often lean into the Mystery when it’s convenient for me because I’m afraid to stand up for what I know to be true, or to experience a loss of something sacred to me. In the past, I’ve allowed other “sacred” experiences be reduced to something less significant because of my willingness to accept, or because my fear of being inappropriate or hurt. In this case, I allowed leaning on the Mystery to be a crutch, and I realized a profound difference between leaning on the Mystery and leaning into the Mystery. I did let this woman walk away with my sandals, and in fact leaned on the Mystery rather than trusting my heartfelt conviction that this was not okay.
In trusting the Mystery and turning our experience over to it, we must not allow ourselves and our Truth be trampled in the process. Only when there’s alignment of personal Truth and being unattached to outcome can the healing and the magic begin. Otherwise the machinations of our desire to control look like Oz behind the curtain, and we live in a world in which we don’t truly understand our own significance in relationship to the Mystery.
Lean into, not on, and let go . . .
Finding Flow
Finding the connection to the energy desire we want to live in is something a lot of us are after; finding the flow between giving and receiving sounds nice, doesn’t it? And yet a lot of us have our needle stuck in resistance, distraction, or pushing.
My Con Artist gave me a nice cocktail of all three last week! I found myself in a zone all right, and it wasn’t the zone of flow! Given the work I do, I had these amazing resources to work with, but I still felt like a Stepford Life Artist on automatic pilot. It took me two days to break the spell. It takes willingness, courage, and curiosity for any of us to begin to recover our true sense of being a Life Artist; however, in receiving some guidance, I discovered that my Con Artist had hijacked my Spirit’s connection to receiving inspiration and dreaming. My to-do list was driving my life. Sound familiar?
When I finally shred my to-do list and asked for help, I opened to receiving the true energy of inspiration and found my flow again. Like finding several shiny pennies glistening in the least likely place, I began dreaming again—and bingo—the cosmic winks started coming. One of the biggest lessons I learned again this week is do not isolate. Do not find yourself in a Barbara Walters interview with the Con Artist being led to think this is your fifteen minutes of fame!! Wherever our the Con Artists go after hours, I can assure you they’re watching us on their version of Candid Camera and laughing their snarky little grimaces off their face.
Whatever you do this weekend, be in good company. Connect with the flow of inspiration and let it graciously guide you to the source of your highest dreams.
True Balance
We often see balance in our lives through the ways we handle the scheduling of our time: work vs. time with family, exercise, or chilling out. Too often we search for space in our schedule to do something we’ve always wanted to do and then just wait for room to appear in our busy lives.
This balancing act with time and juggling ongoing to-do lists, however, leaves us even more exhausted. One remedy I’ve discovered is looking at my life through the balance of giving and receiving. It’s allowed me to see different possibilities and experience greater flow in my life.
The balance of receiving and giving is not a perfectly measured art form. It can take a while to understand it and to cultivate it. What anyone can see quite easily, however, is that when you’re willing to receive energy, feelings, thought, and form which inspire you, you’re much more likely to be filled with energy, feelings, thoughts, and forms to give. I recently took a two-week vacation that made it easy for me to remember this true sense of balance and yet it takes awareness to implement this awareness at home.
In my work with the Mandala and guiding people to experience their Soul’s Dream, I’ve seen many great givers and not-so-stellar receivers. I’ve seen how often people collapse under the weight of giving, whether it’s providing, completing a duty, or performing some role to be liked. True balance and honoring the flow of receiving and giving is a step toward greater authenticity because it requires us to become present to what is true for us and to determine boundaries that are not about time or scheduling, but rather about the exchange of the energy, feelings, thoughts, and forms in our lives.
When we’re in the “zone,” receiving and giving can feel indistinguishable, and when we’re not, we’re gasping for that deep, fulfilling breath that comes with connection to ourselves, others, and the world.
Take a moment to reflect on the balance of receiving and giving in your own life. What are the energy, feelings, thoughts, and forms that you need to receive and how would receiving them shape the ways in which you give?
Security
There are so many circumstances in our world right now threatening our experience of feeling secure. What do we do when the cacophony of both the inner critic, or Con Artist, as I call it, is “shoulding” us and the outer world’s threats—the realities of financial calamity, political terrorism, environmental disasters—are weighing on our conscience so deeply that any or all of the following symptoms exist: our spirits are flatlined and anxious; our hearts are breaking; our minds are worried; and our bodies are exhausted.
Maybe the question we should all be asking ourselves is: “Who do I want to be during these challenging times?”
This is not a time of “don’t worry, be happy!” This is also not a time to let your sadness, anger, or despair turn into depression or bitterness. This is a time when we all may need to slow down to hear and see the truth, a time when we may need to ask for help. This is time when we must face the inner and the outer threats upon our security and see if it might be an opportunity for personal growth and character building.
My invitation to you is to begin within. Outer security will always be temporal while the internal security of our souls lasts for eternity.
The quest of becoming a Life Artist
In his poem, “How to Paint Sunlight,” Lawrence Ferlinghetti captures the quest of becoming a Life Artist in that, as I see it, Life Artists are committed to seeing their true colors and creating their lives from a place of greater authenticity and full self-expression from the light, or potential, within their soul.
How to Paint Sunlight
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
I asked a hundred painters and a hundred poets
how to paint sunlight
on the face of life
Their answers were ambiguous and ingenuous
as if they were all guarding trade secrets
Whereas it seems to me
all you have to do
is conceive of the whole world
and all humanity
as a kind of art work
a site-specific art work
an art project of the god of light
the whole earth and all that’s in it
to be painted with light
And the first thing you have to do
is paint out postmodern painting
And the next thing is to paint yourself
in your true colors
in primary colors
as you see them
(without whitewash)
paint yourself as you see yourself
without make-up
without masks
Then paint your favorite people and animals
with your brush loaded with light
And be sure you get the perspective right
and don’t fake it
because one false line leads to another
***
And don’t forget to paint
all those who lived their lives
as bearers of light
Paint their eyes
and the eyes of every animal
***
Paint the light of their eyes
the light of sunlit laughter
the song of eyes
the song of birds in flight
And remember that the light is within
if it is anywhere
and you must paint from the inside
Honoring Our Bodies
In the Whole IQ, Body intelligence governs all tangible forms and is the only multi-channel intelligence in that it is the conduit of the collective power of our Spirit, Heart, and Mind intelligences and the corresponding energy, feelings, and thoughts that these intelligences govern. With our culture’s intense focus on goals, results, and bottom lines, our body, as the most personal expression of this intelligence, is often run ragged under the demands of modern life. Like our earth that is hemorrhaging in the gulf due to a catastrophic manmade disaster, the body cannot sustain our excessive demands. We must take deep care of that which supports and sustains our ability to grow and thrive.
Listen to your body today and pay attention to what it needs in order to express a stronger alignment with your energy, feelings, and thoughts.
Reclamation
In guiding people through the Soul’s Dream journey, I am consistently in awe toward the end of the journey by what each traveler has reclaimed in the terrain of their Spirit, Heart, Mind, and Body intelligences. A definition of reclamation is: the reclaiming of desert, marshy, or submerged areas, or other wasteland for cultivation or other use. While our unconscious relationships to our energy, feeling, thoughts, and forms of our lives can create the desert, marshy wasteland, our earnest desire to awaken the submerged parts of ourselves leads to the recognition of our unique gifts.
When people courageously reclaim and integrate the brilliance of their innate gifts within their Whole IQ, they begin dismantling their addiction to reactivity and the illusion of control by forging a way of being and impacting the world that brings greater presence, accountability, and creativity to their lives.
Whether they are breaking up toxic energetic patterns, cultivating greater honesty to listen to and speak from their hearts, realizing that their thoughts have been geared to looking good, or seeing that the forms of their life are hollow and don’t express who they truly are anymore—all of them are reclaiming the GOLD of their true potential as they move toward the realization of their Soul’s Dream. When we don’t reclaim our inner truths, we end up betraying ourselves and others.
What may be a truth or passion that is submerged within you that perhaps, out of fear, is in danger of becoming part of the wasteland of unrealized potential within you? Reclaim its gift, and even it feels uncomfortable, express it.
Evelation
One of the outcomes of the Soul’s Dream journey is an energy upgrade that I refer to as evelation. Evelation happens when the revelations of our awareness quicken and synthesize together for the purpose evolving our consciousness and in doing so elevates the consciousness on the planet. It’s akin to an athlete being in the “zone.” There’s a flow and an elation that occurs when we feel in this kind of sync. Just as an athlete in the zone can lift their team to new heights of skill and excellence, we can impact our world with evelation. Yesterday I wasn’t feeling as “evelationary” as I did the day before and I wondered what had happened. When I thought about it, I realized that my Con Artist had made a rule that a state of evelation can only happen when I’m “up” and giving.
In embracing the energy of “low simmer” yesterday, and having the courage to stay there, I opened my curiosity to the passion of others and was inspired by so many magical moments. I was reminded that being in a state of evelation can simply be about being and receiving. Much to the Con Artist’s chagrin, it’s not a heightened or egoic state of high performance. It’s more about understanding how the ebb and flow of our energy nourishes a greater constellation of energy. I had forgotten that balance is all about nourishing the continuum of receiving and giving. Take a moment to ask yourself how you might you nourish the continuum of receiving and giving within yourself and the greater Universe. How might you lift your world to experience the magic of evelation?
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