Cara Lumen | Sing a Deeper Song

Sing a Deeper Song

positve change

Play Your Body Song 

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Play Your Body Song
An Inner-world Exploration

In Qi Gong, there is a lovely practice called cupping. You cup your hands and “cup” your body in light taps along your meridians.  Up your arms, down your legs, on your torso.  It’s a lovely way to wake your body up from its night’s rest and get your circulation going.

I also use drumming as a vibrational healing practice.  I drum whatever rhythmical patterns come from within me.

It happens to be an interesting pairing – play rhythms on your body with the palms of your hands in order to stimulate the circulation and the meridians.

If you play your Body Song right before you step into the shower you will find that your bare body has different sounds in different places, which is a fun discovery all in itself.  Using your body as the drum, play some rhythms and enjoy the sound and the sensations. Remember to also swing your arms so you can tap on the organs closer to your back. 

I call this my Body Song because it offers rhythmic patterns to my ears and gets my body all primed for the day. 

Will you play your Body Song today?

Deeper Song Affirmation

I play my Body Song every day. 

Deeper Song Process

  • Using your slightly cupped hands, begin to beat a gentle rhythm up and down one arm.  Do the same to the other arm. 
  • With this same slightly cupped palm, move over your legs and torso. 
  • Swing your arms so you reach your back and give it a tap.
  • Experiment with rhythms and length of time and notice how alert and energetic you become. 
  • Repeat as many times each day as you wish.  (Perhaps not right before bed!)

To Sing a Deeper Song, Consider:

The Intentional OM HUM  

The Light Vibration of One 

The Pillar of Light Process

Energy Cannot Be Destroyed – Only Re-Purposed 

Raise Your Vibration With Serenity

Raise Your Vibration Through Visioning

Raise Your Vibration and Change the World. 

I help transformational thinkers raise their personal vibration so that we, collectively, can raise the consciousness of our planet.

To receive our weekly
Deeper Song Insights and Applications
Join the Deeper Song Community.

Individual Curiosity and a Willingness to Change

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Individual Curiosity and a Willingness to Change
An Inner-world Exploration

How unaware we were when we were young.  How much we didn’t know.  How much we have learned.  Just how willing have you been to let go of how it used to be or how you thought it used to be in order to deepen and broaden your experience of life in the present moment?  

When I think of the really unaware choices I made along the line, it makes me cringe. When I think of the brave and unusual choices I made, I am a bit in awe.

What makes you do what you do, make the choices you do?  Is it the lesson you need to learn? The opportunity you need to take?  Both the opportunity and your choices are lessons and guidance from within.

Don’t focus on the less than clear choices

There was so much I did from a lack of awareness.  And so much I did out of not thinking of the consequences.  Sometimes my choices worked out. Sometimes they didn’t.

What we have is now.  What we have is the opportunity facing us and the choices we make – in this moment. 

It doesn’t help to look back because the past is long gone.  No regrets.  No should-haves. What is left are the lessons learned – the wisdom, the ever-increasing self-awareness.  Use that accumulated wisdom to recognize, examine and make the choices offered to you today. 

Choose from the place of who you have become

You can’t go back.  You only have now, so use what you have learned along your journey.  

Become aware of your current choices and how they are working out. What is the place of illumined service you are cultivating for yourself? What actions inspire and motivate you? How do you feel about the choices before you? If what comes up is an emotion or belief you don’t want, see what needs to change – you or the choice. 

Where will this choice lead me?

What will this choice teach me?

Who will this choice affect? How many? How deeply?

Make the choice that resonates deeply within you in this moment that will guide you further along the path you have chosen to travel.  

If it’s a sheer joy and pleasure to take the action, repeat it. Become aware of how your choices resonate within you and let that be your guide. 

Expand your level of curiosity

I stay open to where my mind leads me. I am constantly surprised and excited about where I’m taken.  I journey to the 95% that is the Unseen World and get ideas that stretch me here within my body suit.  I bring those ideas, experience, and lessons back and work to figure out how to apply what I’ve learned into my life and take time to show others what I’ve discovered.  I explore, I share.  I explore more – and am always surprised. 

Encourage your willingness to change

What I discover in my inner journeys raises my vibration, gives me new insights and I always return from these contemplations with ideas on how to change and a desire to change. That’s why I keep seeking these inner insights. 

Question everything

Question your choices.  Question your motivation. Question the opportunities that present themselves.  Be curious and be willing to change.

Deep Song Affirmation

I am curious and
I am willing to change.

Deeper Song Process

  • Look at an area in your life where you are stuck.
  • Close your eyes and picture that area becoming unstuck – floating away or dissolving. 
  • What takes its place?  What idea floats gently in? 
  • Consider that.
  • If it calls to you, do it.

To Sing a Deeper Song, Consider:

Have You Raised Your Sails?

Believe In The Power Of Your Own Ripple 

The Packed Potential Before the Beginning  

Life Messages from a Potter

How to Weave the Sacred into the Ordinary

Raise Your Gaze

Broaden and Deepen
Your Personal Journey 

I help spiritual adventurers explore the Unseen World so that we broaden and deepen our personal journey and learn to share our discoveries with others.   We are guides and way-showers with our light held high.

To receive our weekly
Deeper Song Insights and Applications,
join the Deeper Song Community.

 

The Packed Potential Before the Beginning 

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The Packed Potential Before the Beginning
An Inner-World Exploration

Wuji means “no limits.” Wuji is at the center and the beginning of our pilgrimage.  Wuji is essential stillness, the packed potential before the beginning.  It is the beginning of the beginning. – I Ching, Deng Meng Dao

Imagine yourself in deep, deep stillness.  No ideas frolic through your mind.  No emotions nudge you for attention.  You are simply there.  At the beginning.  Filled with packed potential. “Packed potential!”  What a fabulous idea! What does that look like?  Feel like? Can I truly be so still and present inside that I can feel the wuji, the center at the beginning of the next step of my personal journey?

I would like that.  I would like to be so present and still and centered that I am like a bird sitting on a branch prepared to fly but not yet doing so.  Simply being present and filled with the potential for movement.

How else can I experience wuji?  How might I think of packed potential? How might I cultivate it and use it to move into whatever form I take that creates change? 

Part of wuji is about waiting

Wuji is how you feel before you take action. For instance, I wanted to write this article in order to figure out how to apply this concept of packed potential. There are, as I write this, organic pauses that allow new thoughts to emerge for consideration and clarification.  But underneath it all is that deep, deep, deep sense of permanence, of a part of me that is always present, the wuji, the packed potential that is me. Here in my body suit.  Living my body suit life.  

“Wuji means “no limits.”

I have to get out of my body suit in order to understand the concept of wuji – no limits – because my body suit is full of limitations. I have to journey to the unseen world of my inner knowing in order to even begin to conceive of “no limits.”  That’s not a body suit concept. It’s an inner world concept, an unseen world concept.  That unseen world is within us, open to us, beckoning to us to come explore.  We can simply close our eyes, turn off our minds and fly. With no limits!

When we use our body suit minds, we cannot conceive of limitless potential because we can’t get there in our body suits.  But our inner self knows and can take us there. 

Perhaps all we need is to know wuji, “packed potential”, exists and that it is possible

If I sit here at my desk and go within, there’s a stillness.  My body suit disappears and I’m left as an energy floating in the present moment.  When I release my body suit, my inner self moves softly into the Great Nothingness where everything is potential, where everything is evolving and changing and shifting shapes and direction – constant unfolding and evolving movement.  I become part of that transforming energy and I, too, change.  I become presence.  I become potential.  I simply am.  

And that’s where we begin to let our lives unfold.

Make time to unpack your wuji, your packed potential

You may find this wuji awareness of packed potential in meditation.  You may find wuju in nature.  You may find it in an action that you take.  

I am changing my spiritual practice to include smaller but more frequent moments in my day. That gives me the opportunity to be still and silent and present more often.  I pause to examine and evaluate where I am and where is calling me, deepen my spiritual connection and then make an aware and aligned choice. I will expand my midday shamanic journeying to include meditation with a crystal and more drumming and singing of power songs.  I will pause again as the sun sets to be with nature and to begin to close the cycles of my day.  At night I will drum my power songs to guide my dreams in the night.  You get the idea. Create small moments of spiritual practice and inner awareness at various points in our day, then make that a habit.

How will you unpack the packed potential that awaits you? 

Wui means “no limits.” Wuji is at the center and the beginning of our pilgrimage.  Wuji is essential stillness, the packed potential before the beginning.  – I Ching, Deng Meng Dao

DEEPER SONG AFFIRMATION

I sit in perfect stillness and experience the packed potential
that awaits me at each beginning.

TO SING A DEEPER SONG CONSIDER:

Another Part of You-The Unseen World 

How to Interpret the Messages from Within 

Do You See and Hear and Walk in a Sacred Manner? 

Unleash the power of your Sacred Garden

How to Be Nothing

Raise Your Vibration and Change the World.
I help transformational thinkers raise their personal vibration so that we, collectively, can raise the consciousness of our planet.  

To receive our weekly
Deeper Song Newsletter
with Insights and Applications,
join the Deeper Song Community.

How I Found Connection – The Visionary Harp

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How I Found Connection – The Visionary Harp
An Inner World Exploration

It is rather tricky to be an 86-year old woman watching the world collapse around me and feel like I have the power to make a difference.  

But I do have that power.  

And you have that power. 

Together we really have the power.

And, I have recently figured out how to increase our collective impact. 

The Metaphor of the Harp

A shamanic journey is a meditation that provides us with metaphors in the form of helping spirits, animals, talking trees, reflecting pools that offer suggestions – all manner of metaphors that we are to interpret. It’s a message from our deepest inner self.  We just have to learn to listen.

In a recent journey, I was handed a golden hand harp to play.  And a golden feather pen which, as a writer, has been on my logo for 25 years. 

And I got the message. 

First, we learn to play our own instrument

So here I have this lovely golden harp which I really don’t know how to play.  I simply begin.  I pluck a string and see how it resonates.  Then I pluck another string and see how it resonates with the first string. I may look around at other people playing harps and learn from them. I keep practicing and my playing improves.

The harp represents me as an individual in a body suit and the strings are my inner vibration – how I interact with the world. The music I make. 

I begin my work there. 

What is the sound I am making?

We have a choice of the type of music we play in our lives. Am I creating a soothing sound or a screeching one?  Am I playing a rock tune or a symphony?  What are my preferences? What are my gifts?  What are my skills? What’s my passion? Those are the stings of my Visionary Harp, my “me” harp. 

Practice to increase your skill

Our job in life is to develop our gifts.  To hone our skills.  To find our place of illumined service.  Over the years you’ll develop several skills, just as your harp (which represents you) has various strings to be played at various times, in different rhythms and harmonies. 

You’ll explore many types of music. Some you’ll play better than others.  Some you’ll enjoy playing more than others.  Find your preferences.  Find your individual voice.  Find the music of your soul. 

It’s fine to sing your own song by yourself.  

However, playing as part of a group is exceedingly empowering. 

Look around for the orchestra you are to join

Now that we’ve figured out how to play our own tune, we want to participate in a larger venue.  We want to help our community or the world.  We look around for the other harpists who are focused on the type of music that calls to us.  We join them.  It can be a small ensemble or a full orchestra. Whatever fits your calling. 

Your first step is to allow yourself to feel a part of this group you’ve chosen.  Not to lose your individuality but to feel empowered by the mere act of belonging – the power of combined energies being able to create an experience that you alone cannot do. 

The intertwining of your melodies and harmonies enhances each of your individual sounds as well as your final collective impact.  It strengthens and supports you as a musician.  Playing together creates a greater impact as you also support each other. 

This was a huge realization for me. I work on the inner planes.  It’s not that it’s lonely there, far from it, but I didn’t feel very powerful working to lift the vibration of our world by myself.  It was then that I realized all I had to do was find the right orchestra and join it. 

Now my focus is on keeping my instrument tuned and playing in harmony with others to create a greater whole.

You experience the feeling of inclusion

In my journeys, I have attracted what I call the Circle of Light Beings. They have made themselves known over a series of journeys and they have evolved as I got to know them. I see them as other light beings like myself, who are in deep service to the universe.  In the beginning, they simply came and surrounded me to offer support. I still experienced myself as standing apart from the group. I was being helped and healed by them, but I was still separate from the them.  I did not yet belong.  

Holding myself apart has been a life long pattern.  I do not know who was keeping us separate, but I lay odds it was me….!

The gift of the Golden Visionary Harp in my journey changed that, however. Although I hadn’t experienced this before, the Circle of Light Beings turned into an orchestra of Visionary Harp Players and I was now a member!  I belonged!

I felt included.  I felt part of a group working for the same goals.  And I felt my individual impact greatly increase because I was now part of an active group and my voice was enhancing the power and purpose of the group voice. 

Learn to play in harmony with other members of your light orchestra

When you join with other players you create a much larger sound.  A much deeper sound.  A much richer sound.  Because each of you is playing his or her individual part with an open and generous heart. 

In my journey, I asked if there was a leader, a conductor. And the answer was “No. You play by listening to each other.”  Sometimes we play the melody, sometimes we play the rhythm, sometimes we simply deepen the overall sound.  It depends on the song and the purpose of the composition.  It depends on what is needed. We learn to be adaptable, to listen carefully to what is called for and then choose where we fit in. 

Being a part of a light orchestra is exciting, empowering and amazing. 

The collective passion is boundless

Every member of an orchestra is necessary.  Each transformational thinker in the world is vital.  As we each play our part with passion and commitment, the sound deepens and enriches and touches the hearts and lives of more people.  Being in a “Light” orchestra is a very powerful way to feel and know and experience how your individual voice makes a major difference.  How your individual participation adds greatly to the whole. 

We can play our own instrument in harmony

As individual as is our instrument, as unique as is our sound, we must play our tones in harmony with the other instruments of the orchestra we have chosen to join. We learn to listen, to align with the overall goal and support it with our own voice and actions. 

The major gift of playing your Visionary Harp in an orchestra is a feeling of belonging

For me, the greatest gift was to find other Visionary Harps, all playing in unison, all looking to raise the collective consciousness of our planet.  

I am bolstered by the other light instruments focused on the same goal.  I feel aligned with vibrational beings working to raise the collective consciousness.  I feel I’ve finally found a place where I belong. 

I’m no longer an old lady sitting alone, working on her spiritual practice and feeling isolated.  I have found my orchestra and I have joined in!

Begin your own musical journey

See yourself as a stringed instrument that’s in the process of tuning yourself to play the sweetest music possible.  Like heartstrings, perhaps.  

Listen closely to each string and tune it so it is in alignment with the other strings of your life

Is there an out-of-tune string in your Visionary Harp that is you?  Adjust it.  Whether it’s a job or a relationship or your spiritual practice.  You are the musician. And you are the instrument.  Tune your strings so they play in harmony with each other. 

What kind of music do you want to play?

I’m deep into shamanic exploration music, and spiritual exploration music.  What kind of music do you want to play on your Visionary Harp that is You?

Find others who are playing your kind of music

I am a perennial student and online learning makes it easy for me to “tune my strings” with a teacher that calls to me.  I play in that orchestra for a while.

I have a Skype friend I talk to weekly who shares a similar path.  We inspire and encourage each other.  We are an orchestra of two. 

I explore the unseen world and I write and journey.  That seems to be the major orchestra of Helping Spirits that I’m playing in who support me in bringing my ideas into forms to share with others here on the planet. 

There are ideas everywhere. Online is a huge resource. You simply have to decide what orchestra you want to play in and how you want your harp to be tuned. Then tune it. And start playing…!

Join those that resonate with you to create a larger impact

Now that I feel I am an active participating member of the Circle of Light Beings (all within my inner world) I feel empowered by their presence and positive that our collective focus can indeed  help lift the vibration and therefore the future of our planet. I’m no longer alone – I’m in a collective group of higher consciousness that’s focused on the higher good. 

That’s how you become a Visionary Harp. 

Deeper Song Process

  • Give some thought to the various strings of your “harp”.  Are they in tune with each other?  Do they play well together?  Is your tone balanced? Work to learn to play your individual harp well.
  • What type of music do you want to play?  It will be a calling of your heart, a cause that you care about. 
  • In your inner world, feel the vibration of the “orchestra” you want to join.  Feel it empowering your own intentions.  Raising your own vibration. 
  • When you find the right orchestra in your inner (or outer) world, join it and make your Visionary Harp a valuable contributor. 

Deeper Song Affirmation

I am a member of the Inner Light Visionary Orchestra.

To Sing a Deeper Song, Consider:

When I See Myself As Light

How to Interpret the Messages Within

Do You See and Hear and Walk in a Sacred Manner? 

Journey of a Spiritual Heart

Expand Your Spiritual Heart

Unleash the power of your Sacred Garden

Life Messages from a Potter

 

To receive our weekly
Deeper Song Insights and Applications

join the Deeper Song Community.

Messages from a Snowfall

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Messages from a Snowfall
An Inner-world Exploration

The snow fell thick and heavy and wet and built up on the branches of the trees, bending them into positions of servitude they had never before experienced.  They whispered – “Learn this lesson, when it feels heavy, bend. When it melts it nourishes the roots.”

The world was different.  Each branch  of every tree I could see bent under the weight.  It was magical, the ice glimmered in the sunlight and the world was transformed. 

It was a beautiful snow, thick and silent and glistening. It was a heavy wet snow. It built up on everything. My empty flower pots looked like they were topped with frothy white layers of whipped cream snow.  The sun behind the clouds caused the whole world to look like a fairyland.  It glistened.  It sparkled.  It sat silently in its breathtaking beauty. 

The lesson of the heavy snow

I looked for the lesson in the snow – the heavy snow that made everything bend and simply wait patiently for change to gradually come.  Sometimes life is like that, it gets heavy and we feel bent over.  And all we can do is wait patiently for change. The tree branch bends gracefully.  I wonder if I bend as gracefully when the load seems heavy.

There is nourishment in change

As I looked at the heavy snow, I knew that it carried the water that was so welcome in the earth and eventually, one small released drop at a time, it would nourish and nurture where it was needed. 

Do I give time and space in my life for events and circumstances to nurture me?

There’s stillness in change

There’s a serene stillness in this glistening world of snow-bent branches. No place to go.  Nothing to do.  Simply sit there in beauty and with for change to gradually occur. 

There’s a leveling that takes place. Everything looks the same – white.  Just as we are the same.  No differences.  Simply nature in a blanket of white so there’s no longer a notable difference.  There’s a lesson there. We get lost in how we look on the outside. When we know ourselves as light, we sit in the stillness of a quiet moment of simply being present and experience the oneness of all of nature. 

There’s cleansing in change

There’s cleansing in the snow.  When it melts it’ll wash away what’s no longer needed.  We must be ready to make room for and accept the fresh new beginning that comes when the storm passes.

There are lessons in change

The trees have to adapt to the heavy snow by bending and changing form.  The earth, although frozen hard now, will need to thaw and absorb what is offered.  Eventually, the roots in the ground will be nourished and in turn, support the tree in growing taller and broader. 

But all in good time.  All when the cycle moves forward.  

Change is like that – unfolding stages Always in a cycle of beginning, middle or end.  We have much to learn from nature. 

Allow yourself to absorb the change

If I were a tree, I’d bend with the unfolding change.  If I were the ground, I’d wait until it was time to absorb the change.  If I were an animal, I’d burrow in the proffered change and wait for the warmth to return.  

Be like snow – fall softly and cover everything

Feel the stillness.  The peace.  The simple act of being present calls deeply to me.  Perhaps I can learn to live like snow, resting patiently on a branch, waiting for the sun to help me change form so I can move to another level of my calling.

Patience and a willingness to change. I can do that. 

And that’s the message I received from a beautiful, very wet heavy snow. 

DEEPER SONG PROCESS: 

  • In a quiet place, feel yourself as a snowflake, forming in the sky, falling gently to earth to land. 
  • Notice where you land. You look around and there are many of you – many snowflakes, many points of light covering the world so that what’s underneath is hidden and our wholeness begins to be more evident – covering our world, our earth. 
  • Be with that.  Feel yourself being included in and absorbed into a greater whole – a whole with great power to make change.
  • When you’re ready, allow yourself to melt, to change form, to move on to the work you’re called to do, taking with you the stillness and peace and oneness that you felt when you were simply snow. 

To Sing a Deeper Song Consider:

Can You Let Your Life Unfold? 

Do Not Conform to the Ways of the World

When I See Myself As Light

Life Messages from a Potter

The Power of Non-doing