Are you on a path of awakening?

If you are, you know that cultivating your consciousness is the most important contribution you can make. Maintaining a state of peace, openness, love and creativity, is the foundation for fulfillment in all areas of your life.

Those of you who have worked with me before know that my passion is creating safe and sacred spaces where everyone feels free to explore, discover and share deeply. I call such spaces, Soul Sanctuary , and I have been experimenting with different forms,both face to face and through telegatherings, over several years. By participating in such intentional sacred spaces, we connect at a heart and soul level and create a more powerful collective field of presence than any of us can alone, and discover our Oneness. Such experiences are empowering for all involved. An experience of Oneness is the key to transforming our world.

Soul Sanctuary is a weekly telegathering at 5pm ET,  10pm GMT, Sunday and 11am NZ time, Monday.   The first in the series is January 2^nd if you are in the States or UK and the 3^rd if you’re in New Zealand.

Each session will include:

• A relaxation and awareness process to bring you into presence.

• A sharing circle focusing on what you are currently aware of /focusing on  in your consciousness on a day to day basis.

• A Oneness Blessing.

The Oneness Blessing is a very simple yet powerful transfer of Divine energy which helps to balance the brain so that you naturally and easily experience more and more unity with all life. It is completely non-doctrinal and its only goal is to awaken as many people as possible to higher states of consciousness.

The Oneness Blessing provides different benefits to different people, depending on your particular needs. Here are some possible benefits when you receive the Oneness Blessing on a regular basis:

• More fulfillment, happiness and joy from within
• Less desire to seek for what you want outside yourself
• Deepening states of stillness and inner peace
• Less frustration, stress, overwhelm and disappointment
• Increasing ability to be free of drama, conflict and reactivity
• Ability to work with less effort and to naturally maintain a healthy balance
• Ability to let go of addictive patterns, alcohol, cigarettes, comfort food etc
• Growing sense of freedom, mastery, self worth, optimism and trust
• More energy freed up to focus on your creative passions and contributions
• Effortless movement towards what is health giving for your body and mind.

As your state of mind becomes more peaceful and positive, all aspects of your life improve: relationships, health, work, prosperity, service. Primarily, this is for the evolution of consciousness.

I am a trained Oneness Blessing giver and a committed member of a local group here in Nelson.

Recommended donation: $7 per session, paid through paypal.  I encourage you to see this as a tithe (a donation for spiritual service which prospers the giver as much as the receiver).

If you would like to join me on January 2^nd (US/UK) or 3^rd (NZ) please email me in good time and I will send you the access details. Please also forward this to others who you think might benefit. In time I will be putting up a webpage for this service.

Rose Diamond

December 29, 2010

Email: rose@awholenewworld.net

www.awholenewworld.net

Spring: Cultivating Balance and Harmony

Life isn’t a business to be managed; it’s a mystery to be lived.

Osho Zen Tarot.

Are you one of the fortunate people whose lives are perfectly balanced, so work, finance, relationships, health all dance together in a harmonious whole? If you are, then congratulations, you are a rare person these days!

In my own life periods of stress and harmony come and go. I see a certain amount of stress as being an intrinsic effect of choosing a life of spiritual growth and creativity which has cycles of letting go, deconstruction, creative tension and transformational leaps. Collectively right now we’re in a time of let-go-and-leap and the more sensitive we are, the more we feel the tension in this.

I’ve been noticing how, in these past few weeks, following the Spring Equinox, a number of women, including myself, have been unwell. The seasonal change and the surge into spring is calling us back to Source to be rebalanced and to come into a higher harmony.

I had an experience recently which showed me how much easier it is to say Yes to life, than to say No, and how this desire to keep saying yes can lead to over extension and burn out: to imbalance and disharmony. As women we’ve been conditioned to say yes, to be helpful, pleasing and nice, and I’m aware how many women suffer from chronic fatigue syndrome and similar illnesses, which point to some kind of habitual over extension and running on empty.

Shifts of consciousness and movement to new levels of integration are often accompanied by periods of confusion. For me, this confusion has manifested recently as difficulty in making decisions. I’ve felt that my plate was full and overflowing with creative possibilities and when faced with a decision I’ve often been unsure whether my motivation was coming from ego or Higher Self. Then I started to notice that there were some things to which I was getting an unconditional Yes and others to which I was getting a maybe. I noticed the Yes was a whole being response whereas the maybe was mostly coming from my head and from fear. Whenever I decided to go with the Yes, I met with success, excitement, renewed energy and flow, whereas if I followed the maybe it usually resulted in conflict, pushing and then feeling frustrated, depleted and resentful.

So here was a very simple answer to my question: a whole hearted Yes is a Higher Self response whereas a maybe could well be an egoic response. This may seem very obvious to you yet to me it revealed a whole new simpler and clearer path through life.

I was due to go to a Wellness Festival at Hanmer Springs last weekend where I was to give workshops and a talk. I was half way through preparations when my body protested so loudly I couldn’t ignore it. I simply couldn’t get out of bed. I lay there for 3 days while the rain poured down outside. Between sleep and more meditative states, my mind was working overtime. It was difficult to let the opportunity go, I was loathe to let others down, to be judged negatively, there were people I wanted to meet and I didn’t want to miss out on a good networking opportunity and an opportunity to be of service. I felt like a kid about to miss the party. Yet I couldn’t ignore my body and its insistence that this was not going to happen for me and eventually I surrendered. When it happened the surrendering felt like a homecoming to a deeper self.

Yet this showed me how difficult it is to say no and let the world go. To say yes, is to open to an expansion and delicious possibilities. To say no, is to close a door, sacrifice a possibility and face the unknown. Yet even when the initial choice is obvious, easy and flowing, real choice requires commitment, responsibility and effort to bring something to fruition. It simply is not possible to say yes to everything without becoming burnt out. Just as the gardener has to weed out the seedlings so some can grow into healthy plants, so too the garden of creative possibility must be weeded. Indecision and lack of commitment are draining too, the dance of will I? wont I? consumes energy.  Saying no means being willing to risk the void, to be empty, to not know, to be alone, to wait. Too often we take what is offered to fill an inner emptiness, a loneliness, a lack, a fear or a need for affirmation. Or we drive ourselves to prove our worth.

One of my former teachers used to say, “If you don’t have your No, then you can’t have your Yes.” I’m experimenting now with only doing those things for which I have a wholehearted Yes. No “shoulds”, no “maybes”; just Yes or No.  Some days this week Yes has meant leaping out of the door into the spring sunshine, today I chose to stay, finish this article and the Soul Sisters Newsletter. I am at peace.

Saying no means refusing what drains, depletes, overwhelms and robs us of energy. It means avoiding what poisons and pollutes us. It means being mindful of over-extending, doing what we think we should, acting from fear. Saying no can be an act of self love, self conservation and nurturing. Saying no makes more room for the Yes.  What are you saying no to in your life right now?  And what is drawing out your whole hearted yes?

Rose Diamond

EGO from h.koppdelaney, Flickr.com

Four weeks ago I joined a community from all over the world to explore the hypothesis that we are an aspect of an evolving universe, and our participation is essential in this evolution.

That’s a very big thought to wrap our minds around, and maybe it is just another way we humans make ourselves so self important. On the other hand, in the midst of a dysfunctional world, it is a meaning maker and motivator. At least it is for me and for hundreds and thousands of others who are waking up to this new story for humanity.

In the process of consciously evolving we discover more about how we resist our growth. In the 25 yearsI worked as a Gestalt therapist, with the whole person and the unfolding creative process, I never met anyone who wasn’t almost equally divided between the desire to grow and the resistance to growth; between the love of expansion and the compulsion to stay small. I came to the conclusion that this tension within the self is part of the human condition. It’s what defines who we are at this stage of our development as a species.

It is ego that keeps us small. And our collective challenge is to transcend the limiting cage of ego which separates us and keeps us self involved rather than focused on the greater good of the whole.

Psychologically, the ego has an important part to play in helping us grow an identity so we can function in the world, it alerts us to our boundaries so we can protect ourselves from intrusion, and it defends against pain. Yet ego also has a pompous and self deluding nature. Think about the typically strutting ego, the one who pops up when we’re hurt or upset about something: self righteous, self justified, blaming, judging, even vindictive. We quickly leap into blaming the other person, or society, or life, for not being how we want, or not giving us what we want. We’d rather be angry and self righteous than feel our pain about the way things are, or to empower ourselves to change what we don’t like. We defend against our pain so we can keep the status quo going, yet more of the same means more pain. Our culture is very intolerant of pain, there are few places to safely express it, let it go, and heal ourselves.

I saw this very clearly recently on my first visit to a chiropractor when I could no longer ignore the fact my body was out of alignment. I had no idea something in my body had been out of alignment most of my life, nor how the body valiantly makes adaptations so we can keep going and not have to feel our pain. We go on adapting and adapting and adapting until we literally fall over!

At the end of the treatment I experienced the support of my spine and skeleton in a way I could never remember feeling them before. It was a revelation to me. Ah, so this is how it feels to be fully supported from within! I had been looking to psyche and spirit for a support which was right here in my body all along!

I have found Eckhart Tolle’s term, the painbody, to be very useful in better understanding the accumulated emotional pain which plays out through our unconscious behavior. I’d always thought of the painbody as energetic or vibrational and knew it is carried as a contraction held in the body, but because I wasn’t feeling physical pain, I hadn’t realized it was right here in the physical body. I feel deep gratitude to my loyal body which has labored all these years to keep going and to protect me from pain, despite the fact it didn’t have the full power of alignment and flow.

We are creatures who expand and contract, expand and contract. Like a woman in labor, we are birthing ourselves into the next stage of evolution.

We expand when we open to the flow of divine inspiration and express ourselves, and yet self expression takes us into the unknown. When we fear the unknown, or when others around us fear our expansion, we contract again.  When we consciously choose the deeper archaeology of healing, we enter voluntarily into the contraction to release it. Ego, is frequently not very pretty: change is often inconvenient and involves loss as well as forward movement; stepping into the unknown can be scary. This process of liberation is not for the faint-hearted

Contraction is held in the body and we learn to adapt and live with pain by stuffing it down, with food, alcohol, tv, overwork, consumerism, or any of our other pain avoiding, self comforting strategies. We numb ourselves, fully encouraged by the consumer culture, and we adapt to greater and greater levels of pain, until something gives and we have a health crisis. When you multiply this into every person on the planet, you can see how the structures eventually collapse as they are now doing.

Most of us on a spiritual path spend years taking three steps forward and two steps back. We experience the most beautiful expanded state of consciousness only to return again to resistance. We want to grow yet we shun the labor pains which would open us to our fullest potential. We keep coming up against the wily strategies of ego which capture us into the safety of limitation and self delusion, again and again. We settle, we compromise, we choose the safety of habit. I can see how this has played out in my life, can you? It is part of the human condition; a cause for self compassion rather than self recrimination.

In these last four weeks, as part of the Integral Enlightenment community, I have been challenged to see ego everywhere and more clearly, in myself and in others. I see how it does its job of accommodating and helping us to fit in and stay safe. I see how it can capture me back into playing small and talk me out of fully taking responsibility for my liveliness, or full commitment for being an evolutionary agent of change and a vessel for divine creation. I see the self delusion and wily avoidance strategies in others too. It is like seeing through a mass illusion, whilst being still entrapped in it.

This is an uncomfortable process, yet it also has the scent of liberation in it. As soon as ego is seen in the clear light of consciousness, I am no longer controlled by it. There’s a space of awareness now which provides the opportunity to step out of limiting thoughts and patterns as they arise; to make transparent what was murky. I am my own liberator and I am the key. To hold this key is true freedom.

Imagine dropping the limiting patterns which are keeping you from feeling fully alive: a physical symptom, a self limiting belief. Drop them like the shell of the chrysalis which has done such a great job of protecting and nurturing you as you grew. Now you don’t need that old chrysalis any more. Imagine fluttering away as the beautiful butterfly you are.

You may enjoy the 22 Days of Transformation audios which are available now, or perhaps you’d like to join the next 22 Days of Transformation learning community which starts on May 31^st.  Go to: www.awholenewworldcoaching.com/22days.html

Rose Diamond, May 13th 2010

www.awholenewworld,net

http://magnificentbeing.net