Last Saturday a group of women came together for the second Soul Sisters Retreat in beautiful Cable Bay, near Nelson. My friend’s house backs onto the tidal estuary. Both the house and the abundant rose filled garden have been created with lots of love and care and as soon as you walk through the door your whole being sighs with relief. Aah, a place where I can rest and be renewed!

A retreat is a space outside our challenging lives where we can switch off the busy mind and dive deeper into ourselves to remember what really matters. When we become very present with our experience we step into a space outside time, a state of pure being. When we share from this place we easily create a deep connection with others, a soul based community. It’s amazing how just one day can stretch into a timeless island of sanity and self nurturing.

Participating in a retreat is an opportunity to remember that simplicity is the key to fulfillment. Everything we need for life to be a deeply satisfying experience is here, now, in every moment. Much of the time we forget this simple fact because we are so busy running around searching and trying to create it somewhere else! It’s the mind which makes life complicated. When we succeed in stilling the mind, even for a few minutes, or for an hour, we enter the most delicious freedom.

You don’t need to spend thousands of dollars going from workshop to workshop looking for the Holy Grail. Here are three simple practices you can use to make every day a treat.

• Take five minutes a day to be totally present with your breathing. Just follow the breath in and out and enjoy the sensations. As you do so everything else fades into the background and you experience oneness with life.
• Take another five minutes a day to connect with nature. I mean really connect. Go outside in a state of presence and come to your senses. Look, taste, smell, listen, touch. Allow yourself to drink deep of nature’s beauty. Give yourself this gift.
• Then take another five minutes each day to really listen to someone you love. Really listen from that place of silent stillness within you. Open yourself to hear, not only the other’s words but their emotional tone, listen to what they’re not saying, to the spaces between words, and to what wants to emerge. Don’t interrupt, and drop any ideas of wanting to fix, change, disagree with or judge them. Just listen with the intention of seeing the same perfect beauty in this person that you have witnessed in nature.

I guarantee that if you follow these three simple practices every day, your life will transform. Of course, it’s easier in a group because when we come together with a shared intention we co-create a more expanded energy field which amplifies the higher state of consciousness. Held in the loving embrace of the Now, healing happens spontaneously, everything magically shifts into a new perspective, we see that everything we’ve always wanted was here all along and we simply have to show up, open up, and allow ourselves to experience fully.

The next Soul Sister’s Retreats are in Cable Bay on Sunday 13^th March 10.30-5. And in Golden Bay on Sunday March 20^th, 11-6.  Since this is near the autumn equinox we will be focusing on Harvesting our Gifts.

Rose Diamond, February 19^th 2011

It’s the last day of January and this first month of 2010 has taken off like a space rocket. Here at A Whole New World a shift has happened.

It’s as if a sea of faces is emerging from the shadows. Can you see them? They have been there for a long time, only hidden in the background. They are the faces of people all over the world who are creating the new, bringing forth a new culture from their very being, transforming the world through consciousness and desire and inspired action; bringing down the music.

There are some wonderful opportunities at this time to connect, via teleclasses and webcasts, with big global networks of people awakening to conscious evolution and being co-creators of a New Story for humanity. I am convinced this way of meeting is going to play a crucial part in the linking up of the energy for positive change in the next years.

I’ve been participating in 30 days of Conscious Energy Shifts with Adela Rubio  and this has proved to me beyond a doubt that not only is it possible to do real, connecting, experiential work on the phone and through a webcast,  but it’s also possible to build deep intimate community this way http://selfcaremastery.com/

Women on the Edge of Evolution brings leading thinkers, scientists, spiritual luminaries and agents of cultural change to talk about women’s role in shaping the future. There are now 40,000 women participating in these calls. and the community has grown to this magnitude since November, 2009: only three months. I find it both exciting and reassuring to know there are so many of us and it is now time for gathering and I imagine this is just the tip of what is emerging. You can listen to back calls at   http://womenontheedgeofevolution.com Today’s call featured Rochell Marmostein, director of the forthcoming remarkable movie, The Shift, www.theshiftmovie.com

What is so amazing for me when I listen to these other spokeswomen for the new world is that it’s like listening to my own soul speaking: we speak the same language, we use the same words, we are living the same dream. I have been living and breathing A Whole New World for four years now; working away, getting ready, trusting, believing, intuiting and then again at times being overwhelmed by the destruction and suffering in the world, yet keeping going anyway because I knew this was what I was called to do, and even if it all proved to be futile there was no choice but to keep going and to give it my best shot. I knew there were millions of others like me out there, all over the world; I wrote about some of them in my book, “Living your Passion” and yet I often felt like a lone torch bearer trekking here and there in search of my tribe.

Now it is time for all the little lights around the world to connect into one big radiance: all the peace projects, all the environmentalists, all the conscious beings, all those working for social justice, will connect into a new organism: the New Planetary Cosmic Being. We are all cells in this organism, soul cells re-ensouling the world. This is happening now and if you are reading this you are part of this movement.

Since the Whole New World is in the process of becoming, an important question for each of us is: what is my particular unique part? What special and essential gift do I bring? How can I contribute? How will I serve this emergence?

We hope you will see our blog as a space where you can play with these questions and participate in community.

Namaste,  Rose Diamond

Photo by Henrique Araujo http://www.henriquearuajo.com

Each one of us makes a difference and together we can do what seems impossible

To find out more about our books, “Living your Passion: How Love-in-action is seeding a Whole New World” and “Dazzlephrenia” go to: http://www.awholenewworld.net/books.htm