Portland Body Mind Spirit Expo this Weekend

It has been quite a day, very surreal, as I followed intermittent updates from a friend in Watertown, MA who was directly impacted by everything that occurred there.

Tonight's post will be very simple and most likely tomorrow's too, as I'm preparing for the Portland Body Mind Spirit Expo this weekend at the Oregon Convention Center, Hall A.  I will be at Lighted Bridge Communications Booth #19 throughout the Expo.


I'm presenting two seminars over the weekend:

The Frontier Beyond Fear - Saturday, 11 AM, Room #1

 

Feminine Voices of the Divine - Sunday, 2 PM, Room #3

Unconditional Love: The Ultimate Commitment

"If you judge people, you have no time to love them." ~ Mother Teresa.

In my continuing commitment to blog every day, I had intended to blog tonight about the "We" part of unconditional commitments, and we'll see if I get to it, but right now I'm following yet another live story in the Boston area which is impacting a friend.  So I find the energy of my intended post interrupted.


I'll see if I can say it in just a few simple words despite my distraction.  The point is to have an awareness of the commitments we make before we make them, but sometimes it's really challenging to know all the conditions in advance.  When a commitment involves more than one person, this is when the concept of mutual respect comes into play.

Respect is not just a matter of honoring the commitment, although that is a part.  Of course, if we choose to be people of integrity, our first goal is to honor it, as that then honors and respects the others involved as well.

The real question is what happens when a commitment needs to bend or break.  That's when the need for respect shifts the other way.  If someone feels the need to change a commitment with you to preserve who they are, you can choose to be angry.  You can choose to hold the person in chains.  Or you can choose to work together to figure it out.  You can choose to forgive.  Honesty and authenticity lead to mutual respect, including having empathy for changing circumstances..

Could it be Unconditional Love is the only unconditional commitment we ever need to make?

Unconditional Commitment

Choosing anything other than empowerment is a contradiction in terms, for it enslaves choice itself.

I find myself beyond exhausted, after a very full day and a meeting most of the night.  Not to mention my schedule could not be more intense for the next 4 days, starting at 6 AM tomorrow.  Yet I'm here.  I'm here because I'm determined to be here.  Because I made a silent commitment to see what it really might be like to blog each and every day.  I almost wasn't here at all.  What choice would have respected my authentic self the most? 

This is just a small commitment really, but are unconditional commitments truly the ideal?  Conditions change.  We change.  Moments carry surprises, some greater than others.  The real question is usually not whether to break a commitment entirely, but whether to bend it slightly out of respect for who we are.  Most commitments are forgiving enough to bend, and if they are not, we lose the ability to live authentically.

Every moment is an opportunity to discover and expand our authentic selves.  If we enslave ourselves to an unconditional commitment, we may lose ourselves in the process.  We may lose our opportunity to grow.

We usually know when a commitment no longer serves us at all.  That takes more than a moment to know, and that's not the case here.  I must truly want to be here or I wouldn't still be writing.  But the real question is how we find the balance between the commitments we make and the deepest respect for who we are and who we are becoming.  That's not a function of unconditional commitment.  It's a function of Unconditional Love.

Mirror, Mirror

Love yourself enough to authentically BE who you truly are.

Somehow my morning posts transitioned to night, but I'm determined to do my best to keep writing even though it's late and I'm tired.  It seems the lesson to which I keep returning lately is simply Let It Be.

Tonight I find myself reflecting upon the topic of mirroring and authenticity.  I have a tendency to mirror people I'm talking with, and it's something that has been with me a very long time.

When in balance, I sense it's a form of empathy and understanding, a way of gravitating towards those things which mutually resonate, surfacing those aspects of yourself that genuinely overlap with another person.  They say when we imitate body language, for example, it can actually be a way of developing rapport.

I used to travel often to the Ozarks in Missouri, and before I knew it, I just couldn't seem to help taking on a bit of a twang in my voice when enjoying a conversation.

Yet how do we know when mirroring is out of balance?  How do we know when we are masking our authentic selves?

As I have been writing, I literally heard them say on the radio "You've got to love yourself."

That says it all.

The Path to Peace

True security resides within.

As I begin to take in what happened today in Boston, where I have more than one dear friend (thankfully ok), I don't need to know the how's or the why's, not tonight anyway.  There will be time later for better understanding how we can begin to heal whatever rift or wound was at its source.

In the old days, I might have allowed the TV or the radio to loop endlessly in search of more details.  But not tonight.

By its very definition, terror only operates in the fear space, not the Love space, except where healing may begin.  My heart goes out to anyone caught in fear, or pain, or despair.

We may feel many things today and in the tomorrows to come, feelings we must allow in order to heal, but how we ultimately choose to respond to fear in the long run is entirely up to us.

The Catalyst

"The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed." ~ Carl Jung 

"A catalyst is like adding a bit of magic to a reaction." ~ Chem4Kids.com

Today I'm in a state of Gratitude and Grace, and this will be a simple post. 

When I was young, I learned about the concept of Heaven on Earth.  The Divine spark within us is The Catalyst, yearning to activate Heaven.  True Heaven on Earth is not just about "I" or "me" - it has everything to do with "We".   
 

Of Mountains and Molehills

Perhaps it is not in releasing our memories, but in accepting them, that we finally find the peace we seek.

I had something come up in the past week that was intensely important to me when I was young, yet in retrospect, at least on the surface, seemingly should be quite trivial now.  It was resurfaced for me in an entirely new way, and then I found myself not only in a kind of obsessive mind trap regarding the topic, even mentioning it to an old friend, but then later berating myself for caring about it at all (and worse yet, giving it even more life by talking about it).

From afar, it looks like a molehill...

What it was exactly is of significance only to me, and I'm not going to get into it right now, but what I do want to get into is this process of coming to peace with those things that have troubled us, whether they be mountains or molehills.  And how do we know the difference?

From a higher perspective, it's so easy to say that everything is a molehill, no matter how daunting, and in a way, that's indeed true.  At that level, all of the concerns on Earth, trivial or not, are miraculously resolved.

But from the perspective of why we came to be on this Earth to begin with, if indeed we came from a place where every mountain is a molehill, could it be that we actually wanted to make mountains out of every single molehill so we could have the richest of experiences in exploring their intricate detail?