Category Archives: Live from the Heart

Live From The Heart: Dane

*** UPDATE: Sorry folks, the issue still exists with this video (the sound drops out half way through) – we are working on rectifying it! I’ll let you know when the video is reloaded properly. Thanks for your patience. M

AJ & I had never met Dane when he completed the following interview with the God’s Way of Love Communications Team.

I found his story both interesting and inspiring. Thanks Dane for sharing your journey.

Live From The Heart: Humility In Action

What I love about this speech is that Robert Kennedy is basically saying that each of us have a choice. We can choose to be humble to our pain and loss or to retaliate in hate and revenge, in avoidance of that pain.

I believe that humble hearts are the foundations of true and lasting peace on this planet.

Frankly though a problem I see at times is this:

People hear us say that humility involves an openness to every emotion within them.

People tryto focus on their emotions without a clear desire to change themselves, see their errors or their embrace their lives. This creates self-absorption. This is not humble.

In fact these people are overlooking the fact that humility also involves openness to every situation and person they encounter. Someone who is self- centered, self-absorbed is the opposite of this. They are actually self-interested. They resist life and those around them in favour of focus on their own emotions.

A humble person allows their own emotional experience without resistance, and without valuing it over another person’s experience.

Humility also involves honouring the truth that each of us are of equal value, as brother and sister, all children of God. A person spending all of their time and energy trying to manufacture humility is valuing their own pointless endeavour over the feelings and experiences of others.

The fact that a person must try to embody humility means that they are resistive to simply putting it into action. When we want a thing, we engage it. When we can’t, we find out why and take steps to change these blocks. But we never have to push or force ourselves into it.

Trying, as I have often said before, is lying*.

Sad Fact: By tryingto focus solely on their emotions people often miss the point. They become less humble and more self-involved. 

Often people try to be humble in order to gain approval, to feel they are ‘living the path’ the ‘right’ way. These people miss the point that ‘The Way’ is a journey, undertaken with the Father. He sees us and knows us but even the attempt to manufacture a facade of humility distances His Heart from our own. It is better to be honest about who we are and where we are at, than to push ourselves towards tears or to create ‘paralysis through intellectual analysis’** of our ‘issues’.

Indeed, being real and open about who we are, without expectation or demand for approval or reward, these are the beginnings of walking in humility.

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While people focus totally on their own emotions and try to access them (thinking that this is what we mean is the basis of a relationship with God) they miss out on understanding true humility. Ironically, I have seen people living in emotional addiction, avoiding the deepest truths about themselves, and hiding it all behind the banner of ‘humility’.

Such people become isolated and separated. They use a ‘spiritual term’ to justify pushing their emotions onto others. In this, they not only distance themselves from God but they damage others’ understanding of what it means to live humbly.

In contrast, true humility automatically creates connection, not only with self, but with others.  

The qualities of service, leadership, the willingness to confront error and bring about change, all flow from this magic quality humility.

To be humble we must stop trying, and begin allowing what God is truly telling us through our life and our feelings.

Recently I completed a series of interviews (no less than five) with Jesus surrounding the quality of true humility. I am inspired, as always, by the simplicity and power of what he spoke of.

I feel though that we all must be careful that simply hearing these truths does not lead us the arrogance of believing that we live them. That endeavor will take more of our time. The process of truly becoming humble is far more engaging, and beautiful.

Humility is the gift that we would offer our Heavenly Father in order that we would come to know Him and receive His Love and Truth.

It is the vital key to our homecoming.

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* This saying was told to me many years ago by a workshop leader. As the years go by, I see again and again, how true this is.

**The saying ‘paralysis from analysis’ comes from one of our dear friends, Susan.

Live From the Heart: The Power of Dreaming & Desire

Live From The Heart (LFTH) posts are all about things or people who share their hearts with passion and courage. They inspire me to be real, to live out loud and follow my own heart.
So far this year I’ve been focusing a lot on developing God Reliance. To me, we can never really realize a state of God Reliance unless we are first willing to act on our passions and desires in harmony with what we know is loving. This requires trust and faith in the Goodness of God and the reliability of His Laws. I’ve struggled with it for a long while. 
I’ve been shaking things up lately, taking some action, but I still know that there is a ways to go. There are fears that will only be proven unreal once I challenge them with actions that bear out their falsehood. I know it will take dissolving some more fear before I truly begin to live from the heart myself.
The people in the articles below inspired me. They are/ were young people who didn’t allow fear, ‘what-ifs’ or ‘not-good-enoughs’ to mar their desire. They took action towards their dreams without money, resources or external help. They got busy creating – something I believe God designed each of us to do.
They also reminded me that when we are truly in our desire and passion we don’t wait for others to join us, to be involved with what we dream, to make it right or to help us. We do it because it fascinates us, it excites us. When we are truly in our passion, our love for the thing we do is all we need to make it worthwhile. 
But usually – and it may take some time – that pure passion we display ends up attracting the hearts and attention of others. I just love that about passion. 
I firmly believe that God created each of us as unique individuals with unique personalities and passions, and when we discover and embody those things in harmony with love, whatever they may be – we end up serving the world – sometimes without even trying.
The story of Jadav “Molai” Payeng  (click on the name to view – thanks to Mon for sharing this one with us) and of Caine’s Arcarde (below).

Live From the Heart: Steve Jobs, You Are Already Naked

Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, passed away this year.  At the time Brene Brown shared a link to a speech Steve had given at a Stanford Graduation ceremony.

Steve is eloquent in his message. He needs no paraphrase. But his words caused me to reflect on so many things!

Steve dropped out of college but he hung around to learn.

I find this so inspiring since most of my life my sense of duty has stifled my joy in learning. I’ve mostly been  too concerned about doing what I perceived was ‘good’, passing the exam and making people proud to truly embrace the joy of expanding my mind and my horizons.

I landed at university, with one of the highest OP scores possible and an absolute bundle of emotional hang-ups. I immediately felt so intimidated by an environment seemingly full of incredibly smart, together and worldly people that I forgot that I actually seemed to do quite well with my own brain before then. I was so overwhelmed that I coped out and rebelled.

My allegiance to the call of ‘doing what I think is expected of me’ remained intact enough to keep me passing my courses but I skipped lectures, partied (far too hard) and tried desperately to avoid my extreme sense of insecurity about my brain and my worth by delaying all study to the very last minute.

My joy at learning often popped up during that final week of cramming when I would discover course content for the first time. My fascination for physiology, child development and the miraculous powers of healing and repair inherent in the human body had only minutes to be savoured before they were overshadowed by my intense panic at the lack of time to memorise these wonders and the terror of failure, which would cement in me the belief I was so desperately trying to avoid – ‘That I’m just not good enough to acheive anything in life.’

Steve did it so differently and his story opens my heart a little to my grief at how much my own hang-ups have prevented my child-like interest in discovering new things.

By staying open to learning for its sheer enjoyment Steve stayed connected to his soul and his story highlights the benefits of trusting the wisdom of your soul’s passions (even if you don’t quite know where they will lead you!)

When he dropped-in on a calligraphy course Steve had no idea how his fascination for the art would fit into his future life or career. He just did it because he loved it. Later his knowledge of calligraphy would prove to be extremely helpful in his lucrative career. But when he attended the course he neither knew this nor cared. He simply followed his passion.
I find that God is teaching us this lesson constantly. He can reach us when we live in our souls – that passionate, creative, desirous part of our selves. 
When we live in our soulful place He can Love us, Inspire us, and also Correct our errors far more rapidly. But when we hang back, always trying to get it right, to be perfect to figure it out before we begin, we lock up possibility, change and growth. 
Trusting our passions and following them towards a destination we can’t see right now can feel risky, and sometimes crazy, but Steve’s example demonstrates how beautiful the process can really be.
Steve simply suggests “Find what you love and do it” 
As I’ve mentioned my own life has most often lacked this kind of simplicity. Instead its looked something like this:
Find what I love -> Try to get everyone else to love it or at least approve of it before I’ll really go for ‘it’ -> Worry that I’m not good enough to succeed at ‘it’ anyway -> Try to find a small achievable version of ‘it’ so I’ll be ‘safe’ while I try to live a happy life -> Worry (some more) that no-one will get me or ‘it’ and I’ll end up all alone  -> Agonize  that I really want to do ‘it’ but I’m just not capable or good enough and so on and on… you get the picture..
I see now that there is so much power in simply doing ‘it’. Yes, sometimes my fears will be realized, it may not go perfectly, but I will be engaged in a thing I love. 
And besides, there is nothing like facing a few fears to change our perspective and help us grow!
All of my anxiety, self doubt and need for approval has limited my life so much. I have wanted to be perfect before I began (mainly so I could hold onto the false idea that that way everyone would still ‘love’ me).
Now it feels like such a waste!
 
So as this new year approaches, I’m trying a new tack. I’m finding what I love and charging towards it, full of the knowledge that this way God is going to reveal to me both my errors and strengths. So far its hair-raising but also, in sweet moments, breath-taking in its beauty.
As Steve suggests “You are already naked”
This past year I’ve focussed much prayer on a desire to become more real. But honestly I’ve still been grappling with the ‘good girl’ facade I’ve worn (with varying degrees of success) for most of my life. Its been tough to let go and see how much of ‘me’ I’ve generated in order to feel safe and ‘loved’.
What I’ve learned is that the biggest thing I’ve lost through investing in how I’m viewed, in trying hard to be liked, is my connection to myself.  
What I have perceived as the worst thing there is to loose, i.e. the approval of others, has caused me to loose my own perspective, my knowledge of myself and what I love and want. My life has been crowded with the desires of others and none of my own.
I’ve come to see that living emotionally ‘naked’ takes courage (at least for me) but that it is so, so worth it. There is rest to be found once we step off the fast-paced treadmill of always trying to maintain a facade. 
To me living ‘naked’ means no longer denying my desires and dreams in an attempt to avoid shame, fear or rejection. It means honouring my feelings and my self in my relationships with others, not suppressing them in order to make everyone happy or to avoid my own fears and embarrassment. 
In a naked life I am unapologetic in living in a way that I believe in. I don’t shy away from my hopes or disappointments. I don’t hide my light under a bushel, nor do I make out I’m prettier/ more accomplished/ more together/ wiser than I really am. 
The truth is that we are already naked in the eyes of the One Who Made us. There is no point in hiding who we are or what we really want.  Entering a relationship with Him requires our humility, our willingness to be ‘naked’. For only when we see ourselves as we truly are, in our truth and error, can we be Shown a way to grow towards Him once again. 
Bless you Steve, may your adventures in the spirit world (where we are indeed naked) be rewarding and full of new invention!

An End to Lollypop Love and the Launch of ‘Live from the Heart’ postings!

Just a quick note to those of you who wrote to me and said that you would like me to stop blogging:
I make no apology. I know that you aren’t into our teachings at all, but something we do talk about a lot (and I believe it’s a fairly highly valued feature of most people’s lives) is free will. Apparently some of you don’t recognise how this applies here, so I’ll try to break it down for you. Basically, you have and I have, this free will, which means – I am free to write what I want and you don’t actually have to read what is written here. I’m not spamming you with it; I’m not forcing it on you in any way.
Perhaps some of you are a little lost for other things to look at on the internet so maybe I can help you out.  I’ve posted some links that may be fun (don’t worry they don’t mention God, or the Divine Love Path… although I guess some of you just want to find more stuff about us so that you can rubbish us some more… and that, according to the free will concept, is totally up to you.. I must admit it seems like a bizarre kind of sport or masochistic pass time to find something you hate, but that doesn’t actually invade on your life in any way, and to then spend your days immersed in it, attacking the thing or person.. when you could just go do something else..?? logic anyone??  )
Hope you all can appreciate I’m feeling a bit light-hearted about this issue today – and my comments are made in such a spirit!
Mary
FB & Me
My short disclaimer to precede this post is that what I am about to share is simply my feelings about my injured relationship with the social networking phenomena called Facebook, often affectionately referred to as FB. It is not meant to be a damning commentary on its existence or a blanket generalization about how everyone uses it!
A few weeks ago I deleted my Facebook  account. Facebook seemed very concerned to let me know that I could simply deactivate my account and not delete it – and was I sure I wanted to delete my account? I gladly checked the little box ‘yes’.
When Facebook fever first seemingly struck the world I was living in Scotland and I remember saying ‘My gosh, I couldn’t have a page devoted to my ‘face’!’ But one thing led to another. I sold it to myself as a way to stay in touch with the faces that I had known in far-flung places and to those that I was once near to.
As time went by I began to love seeing everyone’s photos and days so easily. In general I’m so interested in people – I love hearing what makes them tick, what they care about and how they change – and Facebook helped me know more of those things (or so I thought). I liked seeing infants grow into toddlers, and I could wallow in nostalgia as I clicked through shots of old lives and escapades.
Since then however lots of things have changed.
I’ve learned a lot about nostalgia[1]. I’ve moved the landscape of my life to a remarkably different vista. I’m changing and what I want is changing.
Lately I began to think about fairly floss[2] when I visited Facebook. Each visit was full of lightness and colour and news that used to give me a little sugary rush like I was ‘in touch’ with others and their lives. But there was a crash following the sweet high. There was nothing in my belly, or heart, only my head was buzzing with text and image. Instead of feeling like I was adding to my life by visiting my account, I felt was loosing life, loosing energy, loosing time.
I was ‘keeping up’ with the lives of people I cared about but it sure didn’t feel like being in a real relationship with them anymore. I began to ask questions like: I know the details about the lives of people I haven’t spoken to in over a decade, but does that mean I know them? Why do I spend ten minutes looking at someone’s wedding photos without communicating with them? More than that, why did I spend ten minutes on this and not on responding to an email or not digging in my garden?
Having all these Facebook friends was a lazy way for me to be a voyeur. I could visit photos or status, I could see what my ‘friends’ had done on the weekend, just through the click of a button but where was my heart connection to these people? Did we still even want to know each other?
And if I really did love these people, why wasn’t I calling them or emailing or visiting? It began to feel very fake and superficial.
How much of me wanting to ‘know’ as these people and see their lives on a screen headed with blue was actually me wanting to avoid my own loneliness?

When we eat a lot of refined sugar, our systems become exhausted because sugar actually depletes the energy of our system. In that process our bodies often crave more and more sugar. We crave the sweetness with increasing veracity to help us avoid the crash that inevitably comes to signal the effect we have just created in our body. We are actually starving for real nourishment. Our body is trying to tell us something but if we aren’t careful we end up feeding it with more and more junk and avoiding our own sustenance[3].
My relationship with Facebook came to resemble this effect. It was the way for me to avoid my emptiness and longing for real relationship.
I believe that we live in a world so depleted by a lack of true connection with each other, that hitting the ‘refresh’ button can feel like asking for another ‘hit’ of sugar to avoid the starvation signal our soul is emitting. At least that’s what it began to feel like for me.
I look around me and I see that much of society seems embroiled in a fast paced life where we are all so crazed to avoid the ‘crash’. It’s gotten so bad that we now require a constant news feed, like super sweet candy, a string of endless updates on what Danni is eating for breakfast, what Mike is wearing and where Anna is at, all so that we can feel like we are in touch, involved and yes even that we are loveable. Somewhere in the generation of cell phones and tabloid media and oh so much immediate gratification we have lost what we are truly here for – that is, to connect to true ourselves, to live from our hearts, to dream big, to create, (and to use the gifts of technology and progress to serve us in these pursuits).
On Facebook it’s easy to put our ‘best face’ forward. It’s easy to look great and have it all together. But my life often looks messy. I realised that my heart felt tired from my attempts to look all witty and wise. I was still trying to be hip and cool in a status update. This wasn’t helping me to be true, to be real, or to connect to my heartfelt dreams.

The internet has long been a place where I ‘numb’ out and avoid the hunger pains in my everyday life.  I’ve had the opportunity to spend quite a lot of time alone lately, in a place without phone or internet connection. This has helped me tune into my soul starving for true connection.
 
I am famished for connection with God and my soulmate. But often the loss of these things as I remember them, in their pure state, feels too painful to face. So I’d surf the net or Facebook as a way to avoid the emptiness. It was all a poor substitute for the kind of nourishing, sustaining connection I truly desire for my life.
I want to know God and my mate. I want my feet grounded in the earth, I want to feel the salt of sweat and tears on my skin and taste them in my mouth. I want to be present in this body and feel my own heart. I want to feel the spirit and soul of the people in my life. Most often I want to look into your eyes when I share with you.
In my alone time much is happening. I feel there is an integration occurring, of all that has happened in my past three years, and I am opening up to what is to come. I am becoming more and more sensitive to where my life feels empty and what my soul truly desires. The beauty of having more tolerance and openness to my empty feelings, my aches and lows, is that I want less and less to fill them up with false connections and fairy floss. Instead of ‘lollypop love’ I want to love in a way that is grounded in a joy, which comes from embracing my passions here and now. I want a love that lives when I look others straight in the eye, being and accepting exactly who I am in that moment and encouraging them to do the same.
So in tribute to grounded joy and nourishing our souls I plan to start weekly ‘Live from the Heart’ posts – sharing things I see that inspire me to live from the heart, to dream big and be creative. There are so many people who do this bravely out there in the world, but there are also those who do it in the quiet of their own lives. I want to share some of that good stuff here!
To start us off (in a small way):
This post from Emily which reminds me that, no matter what your day job – when you live from your heart you make art.
This song that I often sing goofily to my man…

And this note written by Sienna, aged 6. Sienna’s mum came home from work one night to find it on her bed.

[1] Nostalgia no longer feels comforting or comfortable to me. When I really sat with my nostalgia I learned a lot about what it meant. Now my nostalgia says to me ‘I want to go back to a time that I thought was better or when I felt better or safer’. My next questions then involve ‘Why did I feel they were better?’ ‘What don’t I like about myself or what’s happening in my life now?’
If I live in nostalgia, I live in a place where I’m not loving or living fully in my present. When I go deep into what my nostalgia is about and resolve these things then I can look back easily and with fondness but I no longer have this burning sort of longing for times better or brighter. In the past nostalgia has helped me to avoid unresolved grief, conflict not dealt with in my present and fear of embracing my life in the present.
[2] We called it Fairy Floss when I was a kid so I’m keeping with my cultural idiom in the text! But for those overseas its also known as cotton candy or candy floss. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_candy
[3] I make no claims as a nutritionist here only as a reforming sugar addict… so I hope I’m ‘nutritionally correct’! …maybe one of you raw foodies reading can help me out on accuracy??