dailydatewithgod

I was reminded yesterday through a conversation I was having with someone how easy it is to focus on what is not going well.  The list of things that are not satisfying in our lives is often on the tip of our tongue.  Yet not even a few gulps of air after that is the same list of things we have to be grateful for.  That which I choose to focus on creates my reality.  I am not saying that I inauthentically ignore any dissatisfaction I have with life and pretend everything is fine.  However, it is more powerful to notice the dissatisfaction and investigate it, then just use it as a conversation piece that everyone joins in on.  Plus engaging in that conversation never seems to create change.  A strange sense of connectedness but not action to change or gratitude.  My prayer for us today is that we be open to looking for the satisfying elements of our lives and ask God for the courage to take thedissatisfying elements and either change or accept.  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

Life continually invites us to look within.  When we pause to look within we not only find our greatest connection with God but with ourselves.  Our world is constantly requesting access to us through things we need to take care of, people who literally ask things of us, obligations that we have to the roles that we play.  How often do you request access to you?  How often do  you hear God asking for access to you?  God will not go where there is no invitation.  Having a willingness to slow down long enough and grant ourselves access to the quiet places of our deepest selves is a gift that we can give ourselves and others.  It requires us to sit still long enough to ride out past the immediate noise that pops up and trust that there is a quiet that we long for on the other side of that.  We are so used to the immediate response of the world that often when we slow down and begin to take a look we take off the moment the peace and connection we seek doesn’t happen immediately.  Sitting and meditation when I first started was hard–my mind was really loud and it didn’t meet my expectations.  It was only after I was willing to accept it as is and be encouraged by the idea that God was inviting me to spend time with me and with Him that I stuck with it.  Now that time is more precious to me than anything even when my mind spends the whole time spinning about something.  I know that the commitment to accessing myself and God is there every day.  My prayer for us today is that we be willing to explore what access to ourselves might mean in this day.  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

There is nothing like a health scare to wake you up to your mortality and lack of power.  That is, of course, until one experiences the health scare of someone they love.  It is one thing to walk through the powerlessness that accompanies the unknown for yourself but to witness someone you love going through it ups the intensity.  I have been experiencing just that this week with one of my closest friends being in the hospital in a lot of pain and test after test coming up inconclusive.  It has been hard being in another state and not able to physically be there to show my support.  I found myself walking through all the stages of grief–even though she isn’t dying–it is an element of loss or intense fear of loss that triggers the grief.  I laughed at myself at one point because I heard myself having a conversation with God that I hadn’t had in a long time. I was reminding God that the plan we have in place does not involve her leaving this world anytime soon, so whatever is going on, he needs to take care of it.  It has been almost a week and the doctors still don’t know what is going on but she is getting morphine every couple of hours and will most likely need to get IV feeding because she hasn’t been able to keep anything down.  The one good thing that has come out of this is I am reminded of how precious time is with the ones we love and we never know when it might come to an end.  I am grateful that whatever she and I have gone through in the course of our 30 year friendship there is nothing left unspoken or that has not been dealt with.  I am reassured by the fact that she has family close by who is with her and watching over her and communicating with her doctors.  It is out of my hands, all I can do is keep turning her over to God and sending her love.  I guess in the end that is what we are here for anyway–to love.  That is the only power we have–to choose love, to be who we are at our core and trust that the Great Creator of all love is overseeing it all.  Love takes courage, coming to terms with my powerlessness to do anything other than that takes courage.  Interestingly, if I stay in the space of who I truly am–love and focus on that, then I have all the power that I need for today.  My prayer for us today is that we find solace in knowing that though we may lack power, it is in our acknowledgement of that lack that we are able to be who we are=LOVE.  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

It is amazing to me how much my perception effects what I am seeing.  Perhaps this is a “duh” idea but I begin to clue into the power of my mind when I own up to the fact that I create my own reality.  All kinds of things are going on all the time and they just are.  There is no good or bad, right or wrong, it is only the meaning that I place on things that makes them so.  The catch for me is remembering that when I am in a stew of negativity that I cannot pull myself out.  What I sometimes do is make myself wrong for not being able to see the gratitude or the gift of the situation. Then I am even worse off than the original thoughts I started with.  It is kind of like trying to get rid of a headache by applying a hammer to my skull.  It is a great relief to me when I remember to bring Spirit back into the equation. The simplest way for me to do this is to take a deep breath.  I call it participating in respiration–re introduce spirit to my mind and my body.  Amazingly it works so much better than the hammer for my aching head or stinking thinking.  My body is grateful because I have brought new life into it, my heart is grateful because I invited the Spirit of life into the equation and God smiles because I am

reconnected.  My prayer for us today is that we seek the relief that comes with the simplicity of our breath as often as possible (and remember that our bodies prompt us to do it all day long even when we are not paying attention).  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

For a long time I thought it was me against the world.  I had some experiences and as a result I created a wall of protection around me.  My belief in my story caused me to create a literal wall of protection in an extra 160 lbs of weight but that was just one element.  When I lost the weight I discovered that I had built an emotional wall of steel and ice around my heart.  Losing the weight was a matter of letting go of the foods that I was addicted to and dealing with the feelings that I had been running to.  It was not easy but it was simple.  Facing the ice and steel around my heart was another process altogether. For that ice to melt and be freed from the prison in which I had created, I had to turn to God each day and ask God to be the protector of my heart.  It is a daily process of turning over my ideas of what it means to live in the world in which I now believe is not out to get me but rather to teach me how to become more myself which is love.  God is very gracious and I have been given lots of teachers along the way who continually guide me to see the blocks around my heart and be willing to let them go.  My prayer for us today is that we be open to seeing the softness that is deep within our hearts and trust that for today we have what we need to live from that softness.  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

Many years ago I had the privilege of seeing the show at the planetarium and I was struck by how there are galaxies that are continuing to form.  Way beyond our life experience creation is happening moment to moment.  And yet I think there is a limit to everything.  Clearly this isnot a universal experience or truth.  In my mind there is a deadline, a finishing line, an end, a limit, a moment of make it or break it.  But in God’s world there is love, learning, abundance, growing, creation, andlimitlessness.  The Spirit within me recognizes it but my eyes deceive me because when I focus on the physical world I do not see abundance. I see lack, limit, competition, deprivation and survival.   There is probably some reason for that but the reason is not important.  What is important is that I begin to be open to the idea that the Great Creator is just that–always creating, always making new, always expanding.  If I want to be in alignment with that then I am invited to witness it in my world each day.  Just because it doesn’t show up the way I expect, doesn’t mean it is not present.  After all, I live in Los Angeles-there is an abundance of people, cars, and freeways–why not start where I am, right?  My prayer for us today is that we be open to seeing the abundance that surrounds us in all forms so that we can begin to witness it within.  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

The law of inertia states that an object in motion stays in motion and conversely, an object at rest stays at rest.  At that is needed to make a beginning and keep moving is to take the next indicated step.  Once we take the first step, we cannot help but take the next and then the next.  We begin the process of progression forward and our intention and attention is to keep going.  Life is about showing up and taking the next indicated step.  Sometimes we know exactly where we are going, sometimes we know where we want to go. Ultimately it is an agreement between us and God to keep growing and keep learning and becoming more and more attuned to our truest spirit. It is not about how our journey compares to another person’s, although the world we live in is all about comparison.  That idea comes from a universe of lack–which exists only in our minds.  The Universe is Abundant and is always expanding.  My prayer for us today is that we acknowledge in what ways we are progressing in the direction of our hearts and spirits.  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

It is amazing to watch children’s eyes.  They look with such abandon at everything around them.  The world holds such wonder.  The littlest ones are so fascinated by their hands and their feet and the first time they recognize themselves in the mirror.  I can’t remember the last time that I saw myself or anyone with that kind of awe.  Actually, that is not entirely true.  I have more moments of that in my life these days then I remember having as a child.  Since walking this path of consciousness with God one day at a time, the whole world has opened up and I feel like I have new eyes.  That sense of wonder that I don’t even personally remember having as a child has been restored but I can quickly discount it because it doesn’t seem real. You see my head will try to convince me that I am not connected to that sense of child-like awe in little moments throughout my day because it is not rational.  Yet my heart and my spirit jump for joy when I find myself, like I did last week, looking up at the full moon and taking a deep breath and wanting to be absorbed by the bright light that was emanating all around it.  Sometimes we have these experiences and we chalk them up to nonsense or being childish. Maybe if we instead shared it with excitement like children do, we would find ourselves more and more conscious of it every day and see more of it.  What we focus on expands and the world is never short of things to be in awe of, God makes sure of that.  My prayer for us today is that we have the courage to acknowledge to ourselves and maybe others the things that we find wonderous.  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

There is this thing called chaos theory that scientists study and though I do not understand it well, what I have come to learn is that what often appears as chaos is actually order.  The universe has this way of being in which everything flows and expands.  If I am a part of this universe and God’s plan, why would my life be different?  Just because I experience disorder does not mean that is who I am.  I know that when I have moments in which I am experience this disorder of life, I want to cling to what I think is certainty and order.  That is the element in my spirit that want to cling to God but out of fear I go for the first thing I can get my hands on which could be an idea, a person or a thing.  My prayer for us today is that when we have our moments of disorder we take a long enough pause to look up and see the order of the universe that we are a part of as well and relax with the exhale of our breath.  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen

I sometimes wonder what it would be like to feel what it was like just before I became a conscious human being in my present body.  I am not sure if that would be in my mother’s womb or even before that.  What it was like when I was so close to God where there was no barrier of ego or body or human story.  At time when the energy of God and I flowed back and forth with no interruption.  I experience that sometimes in my meditation or when I am so filled with a sense of love by witnessing something in nature or in human interaction.  I have had enough of a sense of that “feeling” to know that it was once a fuller part of my experience.  I guess that is what spiritual writers/speakers are talking about when they describe  the God-size whole that is within us.  The one that I have tried to fill with many other things over the years.  Nothing has ever fit.  But when I have those moments, there is a remembrance that occurs on a deeper level that reminds me that I have been here before.  There is a knowing that this connection I sense is part of a fuller experience with which my heart and spirit are very acquainted.  It is the experience of these sentimental moments that give me the courage to move forward in those in-between times.  The times when I feel so disconnected from anything greater than myself.  The moments when darkness, discord and dis-ease are my reality and there is little or no light that is shinning through.  Equally important is the fact that God has placed in my life people to remind me of those moments of intimacy with God.  The people who always seem to be able to see the light within me even when I cannot see it.  We are all here to encourage one another to keep moving forward and keep searching out that experience of God. We can remind each other when we have lost that sentiment that it is not lost,  just momentarily forgotten.  My prayer for us today is that if we are having a day of strong connection with God that we share that with another and if we are having a day of disconnect, look for the God within others.  Make it a great one!  Peace~Colleen