You are a prophet.

Your imagination is the single most important asset you possess. It’s your
power to create mental pictures of things that don’t exist yet and that
you want to bring into being. It’s the magic wand you use to shape your
future.

And so in your own way, you are a prophet. You generate countless
predictions every day. Your imagination is the source, tirelessly churning
out images of what you will be doing later.

The featured prophecy of the moment may be as simple as a psychic
impression of yourself eating a fudge brownie at lunch or as monumental
as a daydream of some year building your dream home by a lake or sea.

Your imagination is a treasure when it spins out scenarios that are aligned
with your deepest desires. In fact, it’s an indispensable tool in creating
the life you want; it’s what you use to form images of the conditions
you’d like to inhabit and the objects you hope to wield. Nothing manifests
on this planet unless it first exists as a mental picture.

But for most of us, the imagination is as much a curse as a blessing.
We’re often just as likely to use it to conjure up premonitions that are at
odds with our conscious values. That’s the result of having absorbed toxic
programming from the media and from our parents at an early age and
from other influential people in our past.

Fearful fantasies regularly pop up into our awareness, many disguising
themselves as rational thoughts and genuine intuitions. Those fearful
fantasies may hijack our psychic energy, directing it to exhaust itself in
dead-end meditations.

Every time we entertain a vision of being rejected or hurt or frustrated,
every time we rouse and dwell on a memory of a painful experience, we’re
blasting ourselves with a hex.

Meanwhile, ill-suited longings are also lurking in our unconscious mind,
impelling us to want things that aren’t good for us and that we don’t
really need. Anytime we surrender to the allure of these false and trivial
and counterproductive desires, our imagination is practicing a form of
black magic.

This is the unsavory aspect of the imagination that the Zen Buddhists
deride as the “monkey mind.” It’s the part of our mental apparatus that
endlessly spins out pictures that zip around with the energy of an
agitated animal. If we can stop locating our sense of self in the relentless
surge of the monkey mind’s slapdash chatter, we can be fully attuned to
the life that’s right in front of us. Only then are we able to want what we
actually have.

But whether our imagination is in service to our noble desires or in the
thrall of compulsive fears and inappropriate yearnings, there is one
constant: The prophecies of our imagination tend to be accurate. Many of
our visions of the future do come to pass. The situations we expect to
occur and the experiences we rehearse and dwell on are all-too-often
reflected back to us as events that confirm our expectations.
Does that mean our mental projections create the future? Let’s consider
that possibility. What if it’s at least partially true that what we expect will
happen does tend to materialize?

Here’s the logical conclusion: It’s downright stupid and self-destructive to
keep infecting our imaginations with pictures of loss and failure, doom and
gloom, fear and loathing. The far more sensible approach is to expect
blessings.

That’s one reason why I’m reverent in composing my messages for you. If
I’m to be one of the influences you invite into the intimate sanctuary
where you hatch your self-fulfilling prophecies, I want to conspire with
you to disperse fear and invoke relaxation and joy.

Rob Brezsny

Very much hoping to study with this beautiful teacher soon….

Very much inspired by this warrioress!  Thank you Harpa.  Much love to you!

“For a slightly more sinister take on tribalism, Icelandic renaissance woman Harpa Einarsdottir (better known by her valiant design pseudonym Ziska Zun) is a wildly imaginative illustrator, stylist, fashion designer, multimedia artist and farmer. While her mediums vary, her cosmic style fascinatingly blends the Day of the Dead icon, La Calavera Catrina, and elements of a warrior princess.  Ziska describes her recent solo exhibition “Skulls & Halos”—a darkly psychedelic display of illustrations and painted bones—as “all about our endless inner fight between right and wrong. We all carry some old skeletons in our closet and some get too heavy, it’s my way to find inner balance and say farewell to the past, make peace with myself and carry on in my way to become a better person.”  [from behance.net]  CHECK IT 

Boom Shiva!

XB

Recently I came across Lucas Foglia’s work.  It speaks for itself.  It’s meeting me where I am at.  Thank you Lucas….

Please check out more of his work by heading to his website and also by checking out some of my other favorites here.

Many blessings

B

“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow. 

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life. 

A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail. 

A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live. 

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all. 

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother. 

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.”

— Hermann Hesse

“When the first chakra is disconnected from the feminine Earth, we can feel orphaned and motherless. The masculine principle predominates, and we look for security from material things. Individuality prevails over relationship, and selfish drives triumph over family, social and global responsibility. The more separated we become from the Earth, the more hostile we become to the feminine. We disown our passion, our creativity, and our sexuality. Eventually the Earth itself becomes a baneful place. I remember being told by a medicine woman in the Amazon, “Do you know why they are really cutting down the rain forest? Because it is wet and dark and tangled and feminine.”

Alberto Villoldo

Sun to skin, flowers to nose, seashore and soft soil to the soles of my feet, vibrant souls are all around.  Vancouver, you are good to me.  Since landing back down on home soil a couple weeks ago, its been getting better and better.  More and more alive and vibrant and full!  So many blessings to all…

And!

Julia Butterfly Hill was in town to host our fundraiser for Vinyasa Yoga For Youth.  She is the most fierce light…..

I really could go on and on about the entire weekend and I’m sure I will..only it will be evenly dispersed throughout the rest of..forever?  Here is a slice:  We cannot not make a difference.  It is impossible.  We have not been dealt that card in this life.  So, in thinking of terms of spiritual warriors that demonstrate how ‘yes!  one person really can make a difference!’ (how often do we hear that!?) well, it really is impossible not to.  Make a difference that is.  So, every single action that you take, every word that you speak and thought that you offer out into the ether….they all leave an imprint.  Little prints are left from every single moment that you live.  Yes, every single one.  

So this says a lot.  On every level and in every area..especially the areas that we so often choose to keep covered, paying little mind because they are a part of the ‘routine’ and a part of the way that ‘things just are’ in this day and age.  We cannot not make a difference.

No more paper cups with plastic lids.  Bring a mug.  If you forget your mug/reusable cup..no coffee for you.  This is my new deal with myself.  Its been written up and now its signed.  This is just one example.  I am taking a much closer look at how much paper I use (misuse) every day and how easy it is to simply re-route the little habits such as drying my hands with paper towel (pants work instead!) and oh the list goes on and on.  Maybe take some time to read up on the breathtaking (actually..they are breath giving seeing as trees are our lungs in many ways) old growth forests.  The redwoods for example.  Or check back here, as I am sure that some tree speak will be coming through in a big way.

I will be sure to share some of the footage from Julia’s ‘Spiritual Activation’ workshop as soon as it comes in!

With love and many blessings,
B