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One of the turning points of my life happened more than 20 years ago, when I went to sit with an almost unknown spiritual teacher and writer. There were just a few people gathered together meeting with her. This was the late 80’s, when “manifesting” was the latest greatest thing. So somebody asked the question, “Do you think that we create our own reality?”

There was a pregnant silence. Finally, this wise woman answered.

“Yes,” She said. “But I also think this is a disease which is curable.”

Stunned silence.

Her answer reminded me at the time of one of my favorite poems by Sosan, the third Zen Patriarch:

“Like a fish in the water, crying out “I’m thirsty,”
Like the son of a rich man wandering begging door-to-door…”

Most of us live in various states of semi-discontent. Not enough love, so we try to figure out how to look more beautiful, smell more beautiful, act more beautiful, to attract the right kind of love into our lives. Most of us feel that we don’t have enough money, enough stuff, so we try to learn the habits of success, hang with the right crowd, discover the magic formula, so we can attract more for Me. And most of us feel, in some way, that we suffer from a feeling of powerlessness: insufficient control over our lives. So we learn how to boost our self-esteem, make the right decisions, win friends and influence people, so we can have more power.

Unfortunately, the endless race towards more of everything for Me allows little opportunity to stop, pull over by the side of the road, and ask ourselves, “Well, honestly, how’s it all working out?”

That, of course, is the benefit of going on a retreat, or even just taking a long walk on the beach. It allows you to contemplate whether the ladder you’ve been enthusiastically climbing is actually leaning against the right wall.

There is another possible way of living this life, which is exactly the opposite. Instead of manifesting more, we learn to recognize the ways we were already creating stuff, and how to relax that pesky little habit. Instead of using the law of attraction to try to magnetize the right stuff to Me, we learn to relax more deeply into the essence of that Me and discover what we’ve already got, and who we already are. We learn the practice of unconditional gratitude. Instead of setting intentions for how to clarify and implement My agenda, we learn instead to recognize that there’s a bigger plan than was concocted in the little mind of Me.  We learn how to align ourselves with that bigger plan, how to surrender to it, to be available to it.

Dr. Keith Scott-Mumby is an unlikely character to write an insightful spiritual book. He’s a medical doctor and researcher. But nevertheless, his book, “To Fly Without Wings” is packed full of really great insights, written from a scientific perspective.

One of the little jewels in the book is called “The Three Wishes,” where Dr. Scott-Mumby recognizes that we are already Love itself. We are already abundant in nature. We are already at peace. That is the original wish: the first wish out of which we are born. The second wish is unconscious, and created by negative conditioning, and so we try to cover it over with a third wish: the wish to create a new reality.

Dr. Scott Mumby’s book offers us practical tools to relax backwards: back into the first wish, which is to desire that which is already here. Which is already true.

You can grab yourself a copy of Kieth Scott-Mumby’s book here.

I wl be joining a line of of stars:  Lynne McTaggart, Rupert Sheldrake, Gary Schwartz and Albert Einstein  ( well, ok, one of those was a joke!) to talk about the awakening of consciousness from a scientific perspective.  Make sure that you join the fun here.  It is free!

See you then!

When you notice yourself needing to be right,
When you notice your mind is strongly attached to any conclusion,
Stop and ask yourself, “is it true?”
Do I really know this?
Is this an absolute, objective, unchanging fact?
Would every sane person in the world agree that it is so?
Or is it simply opinion?
When the mind says, “there’s not enough time,”
Ask, “is it true?”
Do I really know that?
Can that be nailed down as a fact?
Would everyone agree?
When your mind says, “No one likes me,”
Again ask, “is it true?”
Would everyone agree?
Does everyone feel that way?
When that which had been taken as fact is seen as merely opinion,
And when that opinion is seen as an optional extra to this very moment,
Discover what remains true beyond dispute.

We carry so many unexamined assumptions in the mind. The challenge for “educated” and “cultured” humanity is that we easily confuse conclusions arrived at through thinking with reality itself. To examine and question the mind is freedom from the mind, and freedom from the mind, even for a moment, is to discover reality as it is. Pay attention to everything your mind puts forth as fact. Question everything you believe.

Once you recognize that the mind’s assumptions are not absolutely true, please be aware that this does not mean that the opposite is therefore true. When the mind says that there is not enough money, you can ask, “Is it true?” and realize that this was only a belief. This does not necessarily mean that there definitely is enough money—that would also be a conclusion of the mind. Neither assumption can be taken as absolute. Questioning belief allows us to drop out of mental conclusions altogether, and to experience things just as they are. This is the way that small babies know life, and how great sages know life, and it is the way that we also can know life—if we are willing to question the mind.

You can do this practice alone or with a friend. If you do it alone, use the practice for a specific period of time, perhaps five minutes, and then relax for a while. If you keep it up for too long, you may start to feel a strain. You can also make an agreement with your partner or a close friend: any time that either of you hears the other state an opinion as if it is absolute fact, you can ask this question: “Is it true?” In this way, you support each other in freedom from the mind, and the relationship itself becomes a means of liberation.

This is an excerpt from my book, “Leap Before You Look.” You can purchase the book on Amazon or in the Awakening World Online Store.

Photo Credits: mpocares.com, lapaine.com

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My 19 year old son  Abhi Ardagh just sent me a paper to look over that he’d written for a class at San Francisco State University. The paper was about whether or not there may be life on other planets. He went into a fairly well-researched account of the various attempts that have been made to send signals into outer space, hoping to connect with extra-terrestrial life. And then he went on to say this:

“Even though these messages have either not been received, not been understood, or just maybe the ETLs just don’t have a way respond, I do believe that attempts to communicate should still be made. However, knowing the human population and that fact that we are still constantly growing, and the fact that our leaders would simply only be thinking of greed, I can also see  that attempts should not still be made. My message would probably be simply “For your good, stay away.”

Looking back at history when Europeans first landed in America, you can see how the greed of man overpowered anything else and the natives were murdered or enslaved. I believe this to still be the basic mindset of our leaders. I think that Avatar, while fiction, really shows how man thinks, that even though there are some of us that want what’s good for both species, the leaders with the money and the power want to use what they can for themselves.”

I wanted to share this with you, because my son is a fairly optimistic, motivated 19 year old boy. He’s ambitious, highly disciplined, and generally optimistic about his life. But this view he expressed here sums up what a lot of people feel.

We live in a world out of balance, dominated by greed and acquisition. We recognize that the miraculous natural rhythms of the planet: the tides, the seasons, the migration of birds and animals, have all been thrown out of balance by human behavior. The very fact that we are aware of this balance means that we are also aware of the natural state of things. We are aware of what life on this planet could be like if it weren’t for…(you fill in the blank)

When I was back at University in the 1970’s, everybody was looking for a way to make a difference. A whole bunch of my friends became vegetarian, because they saw that as a more conscious way to live. Huge numbers of my friends got attracted to Marxism, and went off for the weekend to demonstrations in London. One of my friends even dropped out to volunteer full time for Green Peace. I also felt hugely motivated to make a difference, but the solution I was attracted to was a little different. I trained to be a teacher of meditation and yoga while I was still completing my undergraduate degree. When I look at economic imbalance in the world, or political oppression, or even child abuse or spousal abuse, or the way we treat our planet and it’s natural resources, these things always seem to me to be more symptoms than causes. What do they all have in common?

Imagine a man at a party. He’s talking very loudly, knocks a couple of things over, and then insults the host. When he’s asked to leave, he falls down the last few steps before getting to the front door. Driving home, he’s lucky to avoid getting into an accident, and scrapes the side of his car trying to put it into the garage. The next morning he wakes up with a terrible headache. Now tell me, how many problems does this man have? Talking loudly, insulting a good friend, difficulty with balance, driving badly, damaging his car, headache. Does each one require a separate solution? I’d say not. When you recognize that this man had too much to drink, everything else is a byproduct. Change his drinking habits and everything else cleans up on it’s own.

In a much deeper, more all-encompassing way, I’ve always felt that the essential challenge we feel as a race at this time on the planet is not so much to do with our actions: those are symptoms. It has much more to do with our collective state of consciousness. And if you feel inspired, as I have most of my life, to make a contribution, to help people, to be more a part of the problem than the solution, what are you going to do? Change political structures? Lobby for economic reform? Clean up toxic waste in rivers? Those are all absolutely good things. And, in a way, you could say that they are all dealing with symptoms.

“You cannot solve any problem,” said Albert Einstein, “in the same state of consciousness in which it was created.”

How can you show up in the world in a way that powerfully helps people to change their state of consciousness from one of separation to one of connection?

Please join me this Thursday, April 12th, to go into this in more depth.

So many people feel this calling to be of contribution in this way, and that’s why we developed the Awakening Coaching Training, so that anybody, just as they are, can find ways to help other people change their state of consciousness. On the teleseminar we’ll go into this in much more depth, and explore how easily you, just as you are in this moment now, can become an instrument of planetary awakening.

Register for the Tele-seminar here

Photo Credits: theblaze.com, jimstrutzin.hubpages.com, bestforbeginners.com, obviousmag.org

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Consider the sad and ominous story of JasonRussell. His name may have already flashed past you by now, in the whirlwind of current events.

So let me remind you:

Along with three of his buddies, Jason created the film Kony 2012, which attracted more than 80 million hits on Youtube a few weeks ago. I don’t want to have a discussion here with you about Ugandan politics, or about accuracy in journalism, or about the finances of his nonprofit organization. All of that has been discussed ad-nausium. I want to talk to you about vision. Here was a young film maker who traveled to Africa many years ago, initially to make a documentary about the war in Darfur. There he met a young African boy, named Jacob Acaye who had been commandeered by Joseph Kony and The Lord’s Resistance Army to act as a child fighter.  Jacob’s brother had been killed by the LRA.

Jason Russell got fired up about this. As a young man, he started to feel a sense of vision. I don’t think he’s ever claimed that bringing Kony to justice would solve all of the world’s problems overnight. He wanted to shine a spotlight on one of hundreds of thousands of things which are out of balance on our planet: the thousands of African children who have been coerced into violence by this organization.

As is often the case with underfunded nonprofit organizations, it took him a while to make his film, which is why  some questions have been raised about whether it is still relevant. But still, they did it. He took a stand for what he believes to be right and true. He put his film up on YouTube, just like anyone else does, with no way to know just how many people would watch it. The rest, as we love to say, is history. With the help of celebrities like Rihanna and Oprah Winfrey sending out twitter messages, Invisible Children got 40 million hits on that movie within a week.

“Great,” you might say. “Mission accomplished.”

But Jason Russell offers us a moral tale that every silver lining also has a cloud. Getting a lot of attention about anything you feel passionate about will also bring you detractors, and these days, with the comments box available to anybody on YouTube, most blogs, and Facebook, people can get nasty. Very, very nasty.

Jason Russell’s little video drew out intense personal attacks on him, on his marriage, on his child. Three weeks later he suffered a complete breakdown, and was apprehended by the San Diego police, running naked on the streets. He’s now in a hospital, where it’s expected it will take him several months to recover his balance.

As you might remember, I had a similar experience, although my little town is so small that running naked in the streets doesn’t really get you the same kind of publicity.

Dr. Gay Hendricks and I made a little video about a year ago called “Dear Woman.” Just like Jason Russell, we didn’t expect to solve the world’s problems overnight. We just wanted to highlight one piece, which is that we’ve lived in a global culture mostly dominated by masculine energy for thousands of years, not really giving the feminine a full opportunity to express itself. We thought it would be a good gesture to acknowledge that, to offer women an apology for men being a bit pushy, running on testosterone, and to celebrate the possibility of co-creation. Just like with Invisible Children’s film, there were a few things to like about what we did, and there were plenty of things to dislike too. In our case, for example, we did it in a hurry, and on a zero budget. We grabbed a few people at Gay and Kathryn Hendrick’s Christmas party, a few more at my men’s group, and finished it up at our local food co-op. So of course all the men were living in California, they were mostly white and middle-aged, and probably looked a little bit “new agey,” (all though in fact there were many very straight and highly successful professional people among the group.)

Despite the fact that the film, granted, had it’s pros and cons, no one would anticipate the deluge of hatred that it generated. More than 5,000 comments (which we did not publish), simply accusing us of being fa**ots. Seven emails came with people saying they knew our addresses and were coming over to put bullets through our heads. Thousands of comments were unbelievably derogatory to women, along the lines of “make me a sandwich, b****ch, and then spread your legs.” And let me tell you, it’s really not as easy as it might seem to take all this with a sense of humor.

I’ve written a few blog posts on Huffington Post, which also got a lot of comments. I was sitting down last Christmas with Coleman Barks, the celebrated translator of Rumi, talking about blogging. “I love to write,” I said to Coleman, “but sometimes the comments can be really vicious.”

“What?” said Coleman, in his thick Tennessee accent. “You mean the things people write underneath? Nah. You don’t want to read them. That’ll ruin your whole day!”

Which brings me to the moral of the story, dear friends. We live in extraordinary times. Some people see this time as one of breakdown, others see it as one of breakthrough. If I had to summarize everything I’d learned, I’d say this is the Age of the Unique Gift. This is the time to find what you were born to give, to harness that energy, and to give it fully and generously to the world. And if you do so, just like Jason Russell, and Gay Hendricks and myself, and just like many other people, you may, whether you like it or not, “go viral,” sometimes. Whether that means a lot of views on YouTube, or hits on a blog post, or anything else, you may find that your unique gift touches more people than you imagined.

And then, inevitably, you’re going to be celebrated by some and hated by others. If what you have to give is well tried and tested, and already familiar to the world, you may not ruffle too many feathers. If your gift is new, and unusual, and groundbreaking, you may find yourself having to deal with division, hatred, ridicule, and maybe even death threats, if you’re really controversial.

I think it’s important for all of us, whether we’ve been through this process or not, to realize that we have a gift, and we also have a huge resistance to giving that gift as well. Somewhere inside of us we know that success could be more difficult to deal with than failure.

Dropping into the infinite source of creativity and intelligence, discovering your unique gift, and giving it fully to the world, is the subject of my new Living Awakening Course. I’ve prepared a free 10 day free “mini-course” for you to get a taste of what it’s all about.

You can register for the free mini course here.

This Thursday, April 5th, at 6pm Pacific Time, I’m going to talk about the 5 keys to Living Awakening, and what it takes to overcome your fear of being judged and shine as the magnificent sun that you are.

Register here for the free tele-seminar.

Picture Credits: People.com, lewwaters.wordpress.com, drk-shannon.blogspot.com

The very fact that you’re reading this article right now, on “The Translucent View,” rather than scanning YouTube for videos of kittens, or the latest round of mud-slinging by GOP candidates, means that you probably care. You’d probably love to make a difference to the world. You’re probably aware of the enormous and growing disparity between the wealthy and the poor on this planet, you’re probably aware of the huge impact that human beings are having on the environment, and you’re probably aware of the control of the media by huge corporations.

If you’re really paying attention, you may be feeling frustrated and even angry.

You’d probably like to make an impact. Maybe, like me, you’ve also come to recognize that it doesn’t help a whole lot to rearrange political structures or change the people in command. “That,” said the philosopher George Gurdjieff, “Is like rearranging the furniture in a prison cell and calling it freedom.” Perhaps, like me, you’ve realized that the most important thing for all of us is to change our state of consciousness, from one of separation, from me-based thinking, where I take care of my needs and the rest is somebody else’s problem, to we-based thinking, where I can feel my connection to everything.

You may also, just maybe, perhaps,  be wondering how you can make the greatest impact on the greatest number of people with the skills and the motivation that you have.

People are bombarded with information these days. Your email inbox, Facebook messages, every corner of your computer screen, is crowded with people trying to persuade you to pay attention to something. So if you’ve got a real contribution to make, how are you going to let people know? How can you take the difference that you have to contribute, and make it public? The science and art of reaching the public is called “publicity.”

But here’s the rub: Check out a few of these words and phrases and see what they do to you. Be honest!

target audience
marketing campaign
bonus offer
time-limited offer
discount deadline
affiliate merchant
super affiliate
conversion rate

I’ve noticed that most people who are highly motivated to create a better world find this kind of language, and way off thinking, off-putting, to say the least. Many people have the feeling that if they really have a contribution to make, it should be naturally passed on by word of mouth. Marketing campaigns can smell of the old state of consciousness that we’re ready to leave behind.

This is the dilemma that many generous, inspired, and inspiring people find themselves in today. The choice seems to be either to hold to higher ground, be restrained, and “conscious” about your gift to refrain from aggressive marketing, and also perhaps find that nobody knows what it is you’re doing. Or to jump in headfirst, launch campaigns and get the word out, and risk being dragged into an ocean of commercialism.

I’m going to be talking this week with Chris Williams and Martha Hanlon about the possibility of marketing with integrity. They are the founders of  “Wide Awake Marketing” to support people with contribution, and who want to make a huge difference to the world, to get the word out without selling their soul.

Please join us for a free tele-seminar about this refreshingly new approach to marketing.

I’d also love to get your feedback on a video we just completed. We’re going to be offering our Living Awakening Course to a wider audience now, and we created this video to give people a “guided tour” of the course. Please go take a look and tell me what you think.

Do you think we found the right balance in informing people of what we have to offer?   Did I sell my soul and get too enthusiastic?  Is it straightforward, or sneaky and manipulative?  Am I holding back from the great gifts this course can offer?

Tell me your thoughts!

I’m looking forward to seeing you on the tele-seminar on Thursday.

Register for the free tele-seminar here.

Image credits: popularconduct.com, unitybz.com

I wonder if you’ve ever had the experience that you had a really grade-A, fantastic, unbeatable idea? Maybe it was the best screenplay ever. Period. Maybe you just got the download for the greatest novel of the century, while you were laying in the bathtub. Perhaps you just figured out a completely new way to plan your garden, or to organize transportation in your neighborhood.

You and me and everyone we know are having ideas all the time. Now sometimes, (and let’s face it, less often than we’d like), everything just goes magically on it’s own. You have your idea, but you need an engineer, and Wham-Bam!, the next day who do you meet on a bus, or a train, or an airplane, but an engineer with time on their hands? Maybe you need some extra cash to implement your plans, and the cash just comes on its own.

When your ideas work out spontaneously like that, it’s a bit like surfing, where your idea is the board. You jump up on top of the board at just the right moment as the wave is approaching. It carries you, fast and easy and fun, to the destination, along with many other enthusiastic surfers by your side. When things go like that, we feel divinely inspired. We feel we have guardian angels watching over us. We feel that the idea came not from us, but through us, and you find yourself laughing all the way to the completion of your project, and sometimes all the way to the bank as well.

And then there are those other times. Yes, you know what I mean. The times when you don’t meet the engineer on the plane or the bus or the train. In fact, these are the times you discover that even the most advanced engineer in the world could never implement what you conceived. These are the times when you get an endless stream of rejection letters from publishers. Or where the great financial planner you had in mind to help you turns out to be a crook. I know you know these times too, because we all do. Now you don’t feel divinely inspired. You lose trust in your own mind completely. Now there’s no guardian angel watching over you. In fact, if anything, you become worried that you’ve been jinxed or cursed. Everything feels disconnected and frustrating, and like you’ve got to start over again, and again.

So what’s the big difference? Everybody has ideas all the time. Some people, like Jack Canfield, got an idea for a book when he was meditating. “Chicken Soup,” the idea said. “Chicken Soup?” He thought to himself, “That’s not a very good name for a book.” And then he saw a hand in a vision, writing on a blackboard, “…for the Soul.”

Jack didn’t have to do much after that. He bumped into an acquaintance from his local church, by the name of Mark Victor Hansen. Mark said, “Hey let me help you out with that book. I know more about marketing and promotion than you do.” Jack thought, “Well, that’s probably true. Most people know more about marketing and promotion than I do.” So they teamed up.  They sent their book idea out to every publisher they could find, and got hundreds of rejection letters. “People don’t buy anthologies.”  Finally, an infinitesimally small publisher called Health Communications Inc. picked it up, on the condition that there was no advance, and Jack and Mark had to put up their own money for the printing cost. The rest is history. On the last count they have sold 250 million copies of Chicken Soup books, and they’ve just implemented a deal in China, which will push it up to about 400 million.

I could tell you endless stories like that, of people who had an idea, followed it through a few ups and downs, and then sat back and let the rest happen. And of course, we could all tell each other times where things didn’t work out so well at all. 

So what’s the difference? That is literally a billion dollar question. What’s the difference? Why do some ideas and some people go nowhere time after time after time, and how come sometimes things are  so easy? Some people will tell you it’s just luck, and maybe that’s the truth. But what is “luck”? Have you ever asked yourself? Why are some people so lucky, “born under a lucky star?”

Some people will tell you it’s astrology, or karma, or genetics, or the right use of willpower, and they’ll even sell you a DVD set to teach you how. There are definitely elements beyond our conscious awareness which influence the success or failure of the things we try to do in life. And, of course, to a large degree it’s our willingness to accept these forces as they are that brings us peace of mind.

“God grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change;
Courage to change the things I can;
And wisdom to know the difference.”
Reinhold Niebuhr

There is no question that there are ways to get in tune with life, in such a way that a lot more happens with a lot less effort. I’m sure you remember from your childhood the idea of a fairy godmother. She waves her magic wand, and everything’s okay. You find some equivalent of that idea in almost every culture on the planet. It’s the magic guest at the party. If she shows up, everything’s cool. Everyone has a great time, and “lives happily ever after.” If she fails to show up, the outcome is more dicey.

She’s not quite the way she was described in the children’s fairy story, but she’s real all the same. Her name is Grace, although no one seems to know her last name, email address or cell phone number. There are many ways to connect with her, however. Enter the company of someone who is closer to her than you are, and it becomes infectious. Learn to drill deeper than the habitual layers of thought and reactive motion, and you connect with her there too. Make small shifts in your life that bring you more in tune with the natural balance of things, and she takes another step towards you. Find the unique way you were destined to give your unique gift to the world, and now she’s almost standing by your side.

This Friday, February 17th, at 6pm, I want to talk more with you about this subject. I want to pass on to you some tried and tested ways to invoke Grace in your life.

Register for the free tele-seminar here.

In honor of Valentine’s Day next week, here is a passage about sex from my book The Translucent Revolution.

All sex, in fact all life everywhere, is about the meeting of masculine and feminine energy, the meeting of consciousness and light. This does not mean that men always represent the masculine, or that women always hold feminine energy. It means that sexual union is always about a more conscious presence penetrating a more yielding, loving surrender. We have worked with translucent gay couples, male and female. With some, one partner holds more masculine energy, and the other holds more feminine. And in many cases, they alternate who is the leading, masculine polarity and who is the surrendering, feminine polarity. For any couple, these polarities can sometimes be reversed. This has less to do with physical position than with disposition. As soon as a man relaxes, waits, becomes soft and vulnerable and yielding, and as soon as a woman becomes more assertive, initiating, and penetrating with her presence, you have reversed polarities. This can be a great thing to practice intentionally, for a few minutes at a time, to experience more deeply the opposite sexual essence.

For a translucent couple that has learned both to polarize and merge, sex is transformed from a personal act of intensified pleasure into something of quite different proportions. Orgasm is a glorified sneeze compared to what is possible when we step out of the small box of physical pleasure.

When partners are willing to practice with translucent sex, they both come to the sexual meeting from a physical fullness. The man has not only realized himself as empty consciousness, absolutely present and able to contain all movement, but he has also brought that realization down into the body. The woman has not only experienced the essence of love, but she has also practiced opening so much that she emanates that love itself, from her whole body. She becomes an embodiment of the divine feminine paradox: the supreme strength of absolute yielding, vulnerable surrender. This is not a matter of imitating or acting out certain qualities but of relaxing into your natural essence, which takes no doing or effort at all, only conscious practice.

A translucent couple is not meeting to get something from each other, or for themselves, although they will both be blessed. They are not meeting to get off on waves of physical pleasure, although their bodies will pass through those states as a result. They are not even meeting to love each other in a personal way, although they will know that love more fully than they could in any other way. They are not actually meeting as Hank and Loretta Higgins of Marigold Lane anymore, although that will be the point of departure. Sex is now being offered at the altar of translucence itself.

Translucent sexual union is what David Deida calls “the human realm replication of the union of consciousness and light.” This union can, and often does, occur within an individual. Tantric art shows us the union of Shiva and Shakti as the melting and merging of the inner man and inner woman. In hyper-masculine traditions, this was as good as it got, finding this union of the inner masculine and feminine, then meeting the world without gender.

With translucent sexual practice, we consciously choose to embody the great union of consciousness and light. The more masculine person (usually, but not always, a man) embodies consciousness gifting through the body, and the more feminine person (usually, but not always, a woman) embodies light and love in the body. Both partners are allowing a gifting that is universal, rather than personal, to pass through them. When a man and a woman meet in this way, the two polarized offerings become a full circle, and there is a fusion of consciousness and light, of yin and yang, much greater than could ever occur within an individual. The masculine essence gifts the feminine so deeply with trustworthy conscious presence, through one partner’s body, and the feminine essence gifts the masculine so deeply with love and light, through the other partner’s body, that the boundaries of fullness meeting fullness finally break, and they pour into one another.

Without this full circle, a masculine person’s disposition is to feel, “I want to get back to that nice peaceful emptiness; I don’t want to deal with all this stuff of life. It’s a burden, a hassle.” Through the completion of the circle, through giving the gift completely to the feminine, he realizes that that “stuff ” is not a problem at all; it is all made of consciousness anyway. He can surrender into life. He becomes uncollapsible, free in the midst of the swirling of form. No matter what, he can still fully give of himself. He is no longer afraid to open into life and finds the marriage of consciousness and form.

Woman is freed of her longing to be fully penetrated by God when she opens her heart way beyond the known and allows the Big Love to move through her. She realizes, in the undefended giving of everything, that her world of form is already fully penetrated by divine consciousness all the time, and always has been. She is no longer just Loretta Higgins; she has become Kumari, the Divine Goddess. She has become the feminine principle itself, opened in radiant undefended love. She allows herself to be completely penetrated and taken in a conscious act of surrender and devotion to the masculine principle, which is entering her and filling her with its consciousness. She is transported beyond her longing to be loved into being love itself.

To read more, purchase my book The Translucent Revolution HERE.

We all know that when there’s a crime somewhere, the police come as quickly as possible to take fingerprints. If they can get a good print off a door handle or a glass or something, computers can compare this print to every fingerprint that’s ever been taken, both from people alive and dead, to see if there’s a match. Now in order for this to work, it means that no two human beings have exactly the same fingerprint.

I know a man who is a detective with our local police force. I talk with him sometimes in the sauna at the gym. “Not only,” he told me, “is it true that everyone has a unique fingerprint, but it goes back historically as well.” It means that the unique fingerprint you have is not only different from the seven billion people alive on the planet, but it’s different from any human being who has ever lived.

Of course, the same is true with your DNA and many other things about your body as well. For example, have you ever met two people with exactly the same face? Even with so-called “identical” twins, when you put them side by side, you usually know who is who.

I’ve come to discover that exactly the same is true about less physical and tangible things. Just as no two human beings have exactly the same physical makeup, no two human beings have exactly the same psychological characteristics either.

Over many years of coaching and counseling people in all different ways, I’d say that this simple discovery is the most reliable indicator of deep fulfillment and well-being.  When you have the recognition, the appreciation, and giving of the gift that comes uniquely through you, all else falls into place.

Before we can really connect with this deepest gift, it’s important to recognize the difference between “natural character” and “the conditioned personality.” They easily get mixed up with one-another. Natural character is the way you are when you relax from every possible “should” or “shouldn’t” that’s been imposed upon you. It’s the way you were as a small child. You probably come back again, close to your natural character, when you feel vulnerable, when you get sick, or when you become very closely intimate with another human being. It’s you without the makeup.

The conditional personality, of course, is the face that we present to the world. It’s the habits of “not love” that we’ve inherited from our parents, our school teachers, and from all of society in a broader sense. It’s who you become when you get “bent out of shape by society’s pliers,” (to quote Bob Dylan).

Over the last many years, I’ve been developing a very precise, easy, and graceful way to uncover your unique gift. Once you understand the underlying principles, it’s very simple. I’m going to present you here with a few key insights to chew upon.

If you’d like know more, please join me for a free tele-seminar this Thursday, February 9th at 6pm Pacific time, and I’ll go into much more detail and answer your questions.

1. Your unique gift is not the same as what you do for a living. If you’re lucky, your work becomes an expression of your gift, but your gift existed when you were very small (before you had a job at all) and the gift flows in every aspect of your life, including when you’re not at work.

2. Ironically, the more awake and conscious you become, the more you feel “I don’t have any gift.” This is because the gift flows through you, not from you.

3. The gift you were born to give is not for you. It flows out through you to other people. It may not always feel good or even be what you want to do, but it was what you were born to do.

4. You may have more fear, nervousness, and shyness about your unique gift than you do about many other activities you perform. It’s more intimate, real, and authentic.

5. When you give your gift, even for short periods at a time, a muscle of effort relaxes completely within you. Even a few minutes of allowing the gift to flow can compensate for hours of other things you may find boring.

There’s lots more we can say about this topic. During the free tele-seminar this Thursday, I’m going to tell you about a 4-part series I’m going to offer in a few weeks, guiding you in how to discover, express, release blocks to, and make a living out of your unique gift.

You can register for the free tele-seminar here.

We’re coming up on Valentine’s Day, which is a time when all of us give a little extra nurturing to intimate relationship. If you’ve been married for 40 years, this might be a time to express your gratitude for all that’s been shared. If you’re newly together, this is the season to commit more deeply. And if you’re single, Valentine’s Day often prompts us to think about who we’d like to draw in as a lover.

There are many ways to dedicate an intimate relationship, and this is a great season to stay with the question, “Why do I want to be in an intimate relationship with another person?” It’s a question we don’t always ask ourselves before we jump in.

You probably know that the divorce rate stands at higher than 50%, and even for those who stay together, relationship can be fraught with misunderstanding, hurt feelings and unmet needs. So for most people, this is not an undiluted joyride. The highs and the lows fall into place when we really know deeply why we’re together, and have a clear and shared understanding between us.

One very real reason to share your life with another person is to avoid loneliness. Human beings thrive on touch, connection, interaction, even if it’s sometimes laced with conflict. At the end of the second World War, hundreds of thousands of babies in Europe ended up in camps. Their parents had either been killed in the war, or separated from their children. Initially a policy was introduced not to touch the children, for fear of infecting them with disease. The small babies didn’t grow well, had little appetite, they were floundering. Then, as an experiment, the policy was reversed: “Touch, pick the children up, hold them as much as possible. Give them human touch and we’ll take the risk.” The same babies were now thriving. So that’s a good and real reason to want to be in a relationship: simply to have contact with another person.

A second reason many people choose to be in a committed relationship is to raise a family. As many of us know, there’s a tremendous fulfillment in pouring the best of what you have into your young children, and watching them flourish and grow, perhaps beyond the ways that you’ve been able to do yourself. We’ve raised two boys. My oldest is now off to University. It’s probably the greatest sense of fulfillment in my life, to see these two young men as healthy, capable and creative. It takes a team of adults to pull that off.

And the list goes on. You could want to be in a committed relationship so as to have regular sex. For sure, that’s also important, but probably not enough to sustain a relationship on it’s own.

I met my wife, Chameli, 10 years ago. We met in Sweden when I was over for a visit, and then we didn’t see each other for many months afterward. We had contact by email and phone, and slowly began to realize that we had the possibility for a deeper kind of relationship. But these few months really gave us the opportunity to dive more deeply into the question, “why do I want to be in a relationship?” It was actually a great benefit to us to be separated in this way while we could each get clear about this question.

To break free of the automatic habits of distraction and emotional reactivity, so as to live your deepest nature in an abiding way, can be very challenging. Mainstream culture doesn’t really support it very much. For this reason, some people have chosen to live in a community with a teacher, or to be frequently on retreat. We came to discover that intimate relationship, or a marriage, can, if it’s dedicated in the right way, become the ideal context to support living awakening.

So this is another possible way to dedicate a marriage, one among many. You come to discover that you can be more honest with yourself, that you can drop deeper in yourself, that you can discover your unique gift and give it more courageously in the world, with the support of a fellow traveler by your side. Of course, we’ve raised two boys together. Of course we enjoy our sexuality and sharing good food and friends. But it’s this deepest dedication of transforming marriage into a spiritual discipline, that has brought us the greatest fulfillment.

We’ve been supporting couples and singles for many years now in this approach to relationship, which we call The Deeper Love. Please join us for a tele-seminar this Thursday, February 2nd, at 6pm. We’ll be delighted to share more with you about The Deeper Love, and to enter into a dialogue together.

Register for the tele-seminar here.

We are offering our Deeper Love Retreat-at-Home, a complete course for couples and singles, which you can do over 30 days, for 50% off, up through Valentine’s Day. We have 50 sets available at this price.  If you’d like to grab one, you can do so here. Enter the code “valentine” for a 50% discount.

Here is a passage from my book The Translucent Revolution.

People who live translucently enter into an evolutionary process of feeling more and more, while becoming less and less reactive. They can feel without a story, without justifications. Usually, we need to say: “I am angry because of what so-and-so did.” Most of our energy then goes into changing so-and-so and very little into what we feel. It is very, very rare for anyone to be willing to feel without a logical cause:

“How are you doing?”

“I’m so mad I could kill with my bare hands.”

“My God, why?”

“No reason, it’s just a wave passing through. Feels great, actually. I love it!”

Translucents can be with feeling as a vibration, just as one might listen to a piece of music. If we are deeply honest, we have no clue about why we are feeling what we feel. Is it really the parking space? Or was it that funny remark in the elevator last week, or the promotion last January? Perhaps I am actually angry with my father. More likely, that extra glass of cheap wine last night is the culprit. Most of our stories are inaccurate, and in the final count there is no one reason for any specific feeling. The more stirred up you become, the more complicated things get and the more you are pulled into reactive behavior and disconnected from your depth.

When we feel without a story, our feelings become less distinct, more a part of one another. They defy labeling. Let’s look at an example. You are on a first date. You feel a quickening in your heartbeat, a tightening in your belly. Label it fear, and you have the beginnings of one story: I might get rejected. I know I’ll say something stupid. Label the same feeling excitement, and spin a different story: Maybe he’s the one. But if you leave the sensation undefined, and just feel it as a mystery, you discover that fear and excitement are a hairbreadth apart, separated only by a different explanation. They easily change into one another.

Try this the next time you feel afraid. Ask yourself if you know, for sure, that what you’re feeling is fear. Could it equally be labeled excitement? Can you leave it without any label at all? The same is true of grief and gratitude. The next time you feel deep grief, see if it is possible, just for a moment, to feel it more deeply while thinking less about why. Then look around at anything, a flower, a color, a bird, and see if your tears are only of regret or also of thanks. Fear and excitement, grief and gratitude, anger and power, sadness and vulnerability: they are all separated from one another when we make them into an emotional drama but one when we feel them as pure energy. Chameli talks about how our feelings shift:

Stay alert to changes. Be aware that your feelings might change any moment. When you say “yes,” but not just to make it go away, you will very soon discover that it is changing all the time. The story, the explanation, keeps it going on a track that would otherwise change very quickly. When you are present with feelings, they are just waves arising and changing into something else. Just to be in that flow brings you into the present, which can be very light, or may become anger, or change into sadness, and then change into laughter. It changes so quickly. The Big Love is right here, all the time, it is the medium in which all the waves are moving. It is always right here. If we are not following the addiction to a story, feelings change quickly.

The more we become emotionally reactive, the more complicated things get, and the more we are disconnected from depth, and from the present moment. The more deeply we can feel, the more at peace we become and the simpler outer situations become. We can really give the gift of pure response to the situation instead of reacting to it. We can express what we are feeling, in tune with the present moment. We are no longer carrying any resistance. Now grief or anger or overwhelming affection can all be gifts to enhance the world, to bring to it more color, more aliveness. Feelings become a form of honest gifting, a generosity of spirit.

To read more, purchase my book The Translucent Revolution HERE.