Re-Birth Day

It’s my birthday!

I’m 34.

I’m living my dream of living in Italy. I have a community of amazingly loving and supportive friends who are like an international family. I get to breathe fresh air and be in nature every day.

I’m healthy. I’m getting back in shape after the last two years of over-eating in an imperfect attempt to ground myself while leaping into the void, trying to figure out who I am and what I want, not to mention traveling and gorging on sugar and regional delicacies (medialunas, anyone??). I’m doing yoga every morning, meditating, journaling, visualizing, and affirming. 

I currently have 55€ cash, $19.23 in the bank, and about $50,000 in debt, mostly student loans, along with medical bills from the rabid bat attack of summer 2011, and the last of my credit cards, and as of right now no solid and apparent source of monetary income.

A week ago, during a life coaching session with my friend Lakshmi in Portugal, we determined that I should be a spiritual counselor, despite the terror that brings up for me. So I started the website The Divine Reminder-er. It’s under construction but I’d love your feedback.

I’m living at the Academy of Art, Creativity & Consciousness and I eat at Ananda in exchange for the work I do for the Academy – basically running it while the founder Dana’s away in the States, working on the website, organizing the calendar and communications.

Swami Kriyananda, the founder of the Ananda communities, flew in from India a few days ago, and I heard him speak for the first time on Sunday. He radiates love, joy and life. I cried through most of it. I also realized that this path, his path, Ananda’s path – with the gurus and Swami and Hong-Sau meditation and Kriya yoga – is not my path.

My path is to be as authentically me as I will allow myself to be. My path is to connect to the infinite divinity/my higher self within me, directly. My path is to follow my heart, my bliss, my excitement, my intuition. My path is to step into my own power, my own wisdom, my own divinity, and to share it with others. 

That’s why I cried when I saw Swami Kriyananda. I could feel the power of my own calling. It’s been getting louder over these past years, and it terrifies me. I’m afraid of being truly me. I’m afraid of standing up, standing out. I’m afraid of being rejected, abandoned, isolated. I’m afraid of being as weird as I know I am.

Weird.

Adjective: Suggesting something supernatural; uncanny; of, relating to, or caused by witchcraft or the supernatural: magical; of strange or extraordinary character; odd, fantastic.

Noun: fate, destiny, soothsayer.

Archaic: Of or relating to fate or the Fates.

Root: Middle English wird, werd, werde: fate, having power to control fate, from Old English wyrd, fate; akin to Old Norse urthr fate, Old English weorthan to become — word, worth.

“There is a weird power in a spoken word.” – Joseph Conrad

 

Today, I am the most authentic I have ever been – authentic, author, writer of my own story. I’m also physically authentic – no nail polish, no shaving or waxing my body (yes, I have hairy armpits and legs, for the first time since they began to grow in at puberty), and today I am cutting all of my dyed hair off – a practice I’ve kept up for the last 21 years, as I also started dying my hair blonde around puberty, when it went from white-blonde to ash blonde, and a brunette Jewish girlfriend introduced me to Sun-in. She ended up giving me her bottle as it only turned her hair orange.

I’m done with the violence against myself, done with the rejection and denial of who I am. I want complete and total love and acceptance for my weird, powerful, authentic self.

I feel like I’m coming to a zero point in my life, a complete destruction of the old in order to fully step into my … not my potential, as that word was used to punish me too many times when I was young, a ruler to make me feel guilty about the external expectations I wasn’t living up to. It’s in order to fully step into ME, who I truly am when in alignment with my heart/soul/authentic higher self.

 

Blowing Your Tiny Mind

Russell Brand belts out 38 seconds of beautiful truth.
Plus, the ending makes me shriek with laughter:

You cannot define yourself in reference to other external coordinates.
You must define yourself internally with you relationship with a higher entity.
Think of yourself as a manifestation of some higher thing
some higher frequency.
This is the visible realization
and you know that because you can’t see atoms, can you,
and you certainly can’t see the forces that hold the atoms together.
There, in the micro quantum micro world, Richard,
lie the answers to everything.

We can’t understand it with our logical rational minds
but we can feel it, intuitively.
Get yourself in alignment with that stuff
and you BEAM like the sun.

Jeepas creepas.

Yeah, man.

Yes, Russell Brand is a performer/comedian/actor. Yes, he’s a recovering addict. Yes, he’s a yoga fiend. Yes, he’s got long hippy hair.

But he’s also wise. Some people who’ve lived through much and suffered greatly have dug deeper into their souls, have gone through the fires that burn away the haze of normalcy, have moved beyond the assumptions that most take for granted and consider sane.

His crazy rant is a call to Wake Up.

To Wake Up from the illusion of physical reality to the truth of our divinity.

Random Thoughts on a Snowy Sunday Morning

Photo by Michelle Perry 2013 Montemezzo, Italy

It’s snowing.

You know what I find amazing? That during the darkest months of the year, crystals fall from the sky, turning everything a bright, reflective white, filling the space and sky with refracted and diffused beams from the low sun.

Balance. It’s so perfectly balanced. Summer: direct sunlight, lots of it, hot, dry, colorful life. Winter: indirect sunlight, lots of water in crystalline form, diffracting and magnifying the little light there is WHILE storing water to saturate the earth in preparation for the dry, hot, lively summer.

It’s like a purification, everything frozen and cleansed and simplified, reduced back to its roots, killed even. And then from that cycle of purification and reduction and simplification and death, new life bursts forth in spring, fed by the death of the old.

Fuckin’ incredible.

Totally unrelated – A question came to me this morning:
Why aren’t there different species of humans?
Why is there only one species?

There are different species of everything else. Insects: millions of species. Birds: about 10,000 species. Monkeys: somewhere between 230-270. (More on the lack of exact numbers later).

So why only one type of humanoid living on this planet today?

It seems a little weird.

I believe a lot of weird shit. Spiritual shit, divinity, channeling, the Law of Attraction, the effects of energy and vibration. I’ve been reading more into the fringe lately – ie about the the Pleiadians. I’m not entirely sold on the story that alien/reptilian beings that are messing with the earth, though I suppose I do believe in other dimensions and it’s kind of silly to believe in that and not believe there are other beings that I might not be sensitive enough/capable of seeing mucking around in the affairs of this little, ignorant planet.

BUT, I’m not entirely sold yet. I believe the things that resonate with me as truth, and for now, that stuff doesn’t really resonate with me. That we’re all divine expressions of creative consciousness, yes, that resonates. But aliens and reptilians who have sinister plans… I wonder if that’s just not our fearful ego-based selves projecting and giving form to things our limited minds can’t yet comprehend in a way that makes sense in our mythology.

Anyways, one species of human. I consulted google. Obviously I’m not the first person who’s wondered about this. BBC wrote an article about it, explaining in a rather arrogant fashion that Homo ergaster, Homo erectus and Homo floresiensis all died out between 30,000 to 12,000 years ago.

One thing that gets me riled up is how scientific theory and hypothesis is presented as fact. We don’t actually KNOW. I think that scientific writing should be presented as such: THEORY. We believe, we imagine, we theorize, it seems possible that… statements of possibility and imagination, not fact. We don’t have facts. We have imaginings. We have stories. We have theories. The understandings of science is continually in flux; it is not a stable ground on which to construct our imaginings of reality and of ourselves.

Science is a story we tell ourselves, a way to understand the mystery of reality. Much like religion. It’s a set of beliefs, of assumptions, of theories. I don’t believe it should be treated as something different than religion.

Definition of Religion: an organized collection of belief systems, cultural systems, and world views that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values.

Well, science is also an organized collection of belief systems, cultural systems, and world views that relate humanity to the physical world and the Universe; but in an attempt to separate it from spirituality and moral values.

There’s a fascinating course from UCLA called “Science, Magic and Religion,” 21 lectures given over the course of a semester that discuss how and why science, magic and religion were separated in recent history, and the implications. I found it on the on OpenCulture.com (fantastic for curious seeker gluttons like us). You can download the course for free from iTunes.

I won’t even get into the politics and economics of our broken scientific system, and the paradigm-shifting multi-reality particle/wave/observer effect of the quantum path. Let’s ignore the placebo effect, and I’ll just touch briefly on the problem with the scientific method: the decline effect, discussed in this article in the New Yorker, which posits that “many [scientific] results that are rigorously proved and accepted start shrinking in later studies.”

“It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable. This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology. In the field of medicine, the phenomenon seems extremely widespread, affecting not only antipsychotics but also therapies ranging from cardiac stents to Vitamin E and antidepressants: Davis has a forthcoming analysis demonstrating that the efficacy of antidepressants has gone down as much as threefold in recent decades.

“For many scientists, the effect is especially troubling because of what it exposes about the scientific process. If replication is what separates the rigor of science from the squishiness of pseudoscience, where do we put all these rigorously validated findings that can no longer be proved? Which results should we believe? Francis Bacon, the early-modern philosopher and pioneer of the scientific method, once declared that experiments were essential, because they allowed us to “put nature to the question.” But it appears that nature often gives us different answers.”

Let’s go back to species. Seems simple, right? Like something science comprehends, something we understand, something there shouldn’t be any confusion or mystery about. Species.

How many species on the planet? “This number is very difficult to assess, but the discussed range varies from tens of thousands to billions.”

Tens of thousands to BILLIONS!?! That’s a pretty huge fucking gap.
As I touched on before, here are a few numbers of currently identified species (this number is given to change: 9,998 birds, 5,490 mammals, as many as 10–30 million insects.

We can’t even scientifically assess and comprehend the species currently alive, dying, and evolving on our planet, right now; and we think we can understand and explain a few million years of evolution of the modern man?

Or the Universe?

NASA has a daily photo website. Oddly, the image they posted on January 20th 2013 was of an ancient chunk of something man-made, dredged up from a shipwreck in the Mediterranean sea in 1901. It seems to be from the ancient Greeks. And it appears to be some form of an early computer.

Where the hell did this come from?! Thanks for giving me more questions, NASA!

According to our society’s currently commonly accepted scientific “truths” (assumptions) about the linear history and evolution of man, it’s impossible that this technology existed when it did.

From NASA’s site:

“Explanation: What is it? It was found at the bottom of the sea aboard an ancient Greek ship. Its seeming complexity has prompted decades of study, although some of its functions remained unknown. X-ray images of the device have confirmed the nature of the Antikythera mechanism, and discovered several surprising functions. The Antikythera mechanism has been discovered to be a mechanical computer of an accuracy thought impossible in 80 BC, when the ship that carried it sank. Such sophisticated technology was not thought to be developed by humanity for another 1,000 years. Its wheels and gears create a portable orrery of the sky that predicted star and planet locations as well as lunar and solar eclipses. The Antikythera mechanism, shown above, is 33 centimeters high and therefore similar in size to a large book.”

This thrills me, because it brings the mystery of it all into sharp, real, in-your-face focus.

What if everything we think we know is wrong? Everything we assume we know about history; everything we believe about ourselves? All the stories that we’ve been taught are reality… What if they’re wrong? What would it mean for each one of us, individually, in our lives? I love this because it calls in the power of our imaginations. It begins to break through the limitations and boundaries of what’s accepted. Maybe what we all knew to be true as children but were educated out of believing is what’s really real – Maybe magic is real, and science is telling the lies. Titillating.

This kind of blog is what happens when I wake up early and decide to spend the first half of a Sunday doing whatever I feel like doing, which also included: yogaing, meditating, dancing around to the remix of Ascension by Maxwell, making some collages in my Life Vision book using images of Greece, Bora Bora, and pretty paper, drinking some yerba mate, listening to the Life Visioning techniques of Michael Bernard Beckwith, as summarized by Brian Johnson, and periodically stepping outside onto my front porch to be dusted with damp snowflakes and take deep fresh lungfuls of frigid, snowy Italian countryside air.

You Are Not Alone

‎”Isn’t it amazing how similar we are when we share our vulnerabilities? Our seeming differences get revealed for what they are – shared challenges that are intrinsic to the human experience. The TransformNation is built and fueled by self-revealing. The more deeply we reveal our pains, pleasures and challenges to each other, the more bridges form between our souls. Instead of walking the path alone, we realize we are walking side by side. We are in this together. We are THIS, together.”
- Jeff Brown

Inspiring Weirdos

The people at www.discovershareinspire.com totally inspire me.

“I mean, we live in our truck – with FIVE kids. Kids who have never been to a day of regular school in their lives. Kids who, by the time each of them were four years old, had traveled to 10 countries. That’s just not ‘normal‘.

We also hold ‘strange’ philosophies. We think the government school system sucks. We won’t eat white bread. We get up at 4 a.m. We don’t shop at Walmart (in fact we hate Walmart). We wander around the earth. We don’t own a mortgage. We don’t have a job. We place travel as one of our top priorities.”

Sounds like me (well, aside from the 5 kids. And I sometimes eat white bread, though I’ve gone lengths of time without it).

Are you ‘strange’ too?

Want to travel?

Make it happen. It’s YOUR life. You’ve only got ONE.*

LIVE DELIBERATELY.

 

*depending on your beliefs

Living Life Forwards

“Often people attempt to live their lives backwards; they try to have more things, or more money in order to do more of what they want so they will be happier. The way it actually works is the reverse. You must first be who you really are, then do what you need to do in order to have what you want.” – Margaret Young

This quote from www.TheDailyLove.com is just what I needed to hear today.

I was having doubts this morning about my recent choices in life, specifically the choice to end my work relationship with the business partner I moved down to Argentina to work with, and instead follow my heart and focus, really focus, on my own healing and creative expression and desire to live closer to nature.

With the business partner I was seeking to create a financial base to build my dreams on top of; but I’ve realized that that’s not what my soul wants to do. And I can’t compromise anymore, because my soul’s just too damn stubborn; it ends up refusing to participate at all and sabotaging me, manifesting in procrastination, anxiety, guilt, shame and broken commitments. I’ve come to the realization that nothing’s worked because I’m not “being who I really am”; even in this past year of freedom from a day job, I’ve continued to be who I felt like I should be. “Should.” The nastiest word in the English language.

So I think/hope/feel that I’m finally beginning to live my life forwards, rather than backwards – by being who I really am, figuring out what *I* really want, and from there I will “do what I need to do in order to have what I want”. Because I want to, not because I feel like I should.

Following my Inner Light - Río de la Plata

Empathy and Creativity

Eckhart Tolle and Sir Ken Robinson, two of my favorite thinkers, had a convo about creativity and empathy:

“Human beings uniquely have extraordinary powers of imagination, the ability to bring into mind things that aren’t present… we can enter other people’s consciousness, virtually, which is what we mean by empathy. And if we imaginatively engage with somebody else’s consciousness, if we’re empathetic, then we broaden our own lives.

It’s always interesting to me that in times of war and conflict, the first thing we try to suppress is our empathy for the people that we’re rising up against. It’s only when we suppress our empathy that we can do things that are literally unimaginable.

From that power comes all powers of practical creativity. There’s a literal sense… that as human beings we create our own lives. We create our own realities. We compose our lives. And we can recompose them, we can recreate them, we can choose to see things differently.

Often the most dreary circumstances can be transformed, not by the circumstances changing, but by our attitudes toward the circumstance changing; that in due cause may change the circumstances.” – Sir Ken Robinson

 

“The ultimate creative act is that – not neccessarily to create something, but not to be a reactive entity, to create your own life.” – Eckhart Tolle

 

By Marcelle at Dreamosity.com

Day 9 Sugar-Free

Somewhere between Argentina and Uruguay, Jan 2012. Photo by Michelle Perry.

Along with giving up sugar (and, I just realized, all other intoxicants, ie coffee) I’ve decided to give up commitments, obligations, guilt and shame.

It’s been magical. Yesterday was one of the best days of my life.

More to come – I’m working on a couple of drafts simultaneously – but I had to share these quotes I found on a website that details how to live on a boat:

One of the most tragic things
I know about human nature
is that all of us tend to put off living.
We are all dreaming of some
magical rose garden over the horizon
instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming
outside our windows today.
- Dale Carnegie

I like to walk about among
the beautiful things that adorn the world;
but private wealth I should decline,
or any sort of personal possessions,
because they would take away my liberty.
- George Santayana

 

Love, Truth, Fear, Dreams

Photo by Iain Crockart

 

“The key is to listen to your heart and let it carry you in the direction of your dreams. I’ve learned that it’s possible to set your sights high and achieve your dreams and do it with integrity, character, and love. And each day that you’re moving toward your dreams without compromising who you are, you’re winning.”

- Michael Dell – this quote was one of the awesome daily quotes on www.TheDailyLove.com.

“It’s simple – we were sent to GIVE the Love we think we missed or that we think we aren’t getting from someone else. We see where the Love is lacking and so it’s up to us to fill that gap! The same is true for you. You were sent to give the Love that you think it missing in your life and in the world. That’s why you’re here.”

- Mastin Kipp – author of www.TheDailyLove.com; subscribe for daily love delivered!

“Every day is a microcosm of the larger vision and macrocosm of your life. For us to really live our truth, we need to insert the activities every day that mirror our priorities and goals.”

-Ashley Turner – frequent blogger at www.TheDailyLove.com (every day, besides sending you incredibly wise quotes and his own daily blog, Mastin has THREE guest bloggers that share truth and insight).

 

How are you living love every day? Living love means doing what you love, loving what you do, AND actually being and doing love; which means giving. I’ve realized recently that love = giving. Giving attention, giving time, giving affection, giving compliments and kind words, giving energy, giving inspiration, giving another person access to your fears and dreams and truths. Love is opening, expanding, sharing, trusting. Love is the opposite of fear because fear is closing, contracting, taking, doubting.

In every moment, in every Now, we have a Choice between Love and Fear. That’s the elusive thing that separates us from animals. That ability to make a conscious choice between the two. Love or Fear.

Which are you choosing Now?

How about Now?

And Now?

Who Are You… Really?

So I’m still trying to figure out how to follow up the Death post… the response was incredible, and filled my heart with love. Thank you to everyone who sent love, I can feel it.

While wrestling with the draft for my next blog post, I came across this mind-blowing video:

This is pretty much the deepest fuckin’ video I’ve ever seen. I get the feeling I’ll be spending the rest of my life trying to live the truth spoken here.

And don’t you just want to BREATHE that air!?!

“You are free. You are whole. You are endless. There’s not bottom to you, no boundary to you. Any idea about yourself appears in you, and will disappear back into you. You are awareness and awareness is consciousness. Let all self-definitions die in this moment. Let them go and see what remains. See what is never born and what does not die. Feel the relief of laying down the burden of defining yourself. Experience the actual non-reality of the burden. Experience the joy that is here.”