positve change

Magic is Simply a Change in Consciousness

July 18, 2017 By Cara Lumen

Have you ever wished you had a magic wand you could wave to make something change or disappear? What if it was as simple as making a change in you? That would make magicians of all of us.

The power in a shift in consciousness

You instantly become happy when you stop being angry. You instantly stop pulling when you let go. When you look for the positive, you no longer see the negative. Yes, magic is all up to you.

Magic happens when you shift your consciousness

Let’s consider heavy duty things like judgement and negativity and anger and stubbornness. Feel the energy of those emotions for a moment. Now exchange those for acceptance, positivity, joy and inclusion. Can you feel the difference in the way you feel? Magic? Yes. And you did it to yourself – all by yourself.

Magic and a change in circumstance

Everything that happens to us is a gift. Although it may not seem like it at the time, it is a gift – of a lesson, a change in direction, an insight, an awareness – even when we’re reluctant to accept it.

When you learn to simply let life unfold, you’re no longer attached to a particular outcome and are more flexibly receptive to what shows up.

Remember, sometimes things don’t manifest because it’s not time for them or because something better is on its way. It’s not really a roadblock, it’s a pause to reflect and allow circumstances to unfold.

Magic is in new insight

You know those moments when something suddenly becomes clear? That’s magic. Magic happens when you get the “ah-ha” that identifies the best pathway forward. It’s in the new opportunity that unexpectedly presents itself. Magic is in the ceasing of all effort. It’s in acceptance. And expectation. Magic comes from you.

Your consciousness can eliminate worry and fear

When you deepen your spiritual connection, you increase your trust – trust in your safety, your well-being, your next steps. Tension leaves your body. You sit there in stillness, listening to your inner wisdom and knowing that the perfect next steps will appear. That’s pretty magical.

Let go. Trust. Expect. Interpret.

What kind of a wizard are you?

Now that you realize you have this unstoppable power to shift your consciousness, what are you going to look for, focus on? Perhaps you start looking for only good in others. Perhaps you quieten your mind and allow your inner knowing to direct you. Perhaps you observe more, listen more, allow life to unfold, and then respond from the depths of your inner self.

Magic is simply a change in your consciousness. What kind of magic will you create today?

To Sing a Deeper Song Consider

Abracadabra! I Will Create As I Speak

How to Nourish Your Inner Fire

The Shedding of Your Skin

How to Hold the Space for the New Vision to Emerge

VLoga; Deepening Our Connection

Podcast: 35—How to Hold the Space for Change.

To Survive, We Must Evolve

July 13, 2017 By Cara Lumen

Animals who adapt survive. Animals who survive evolve. Are you, as a human, adapting as rapidly as you need to in order to evolve during this human lifetime?

Survivors adapt to their skill set

If you can’t sing, you won’t seek a career in music. If you love technology, that’s where you’ll go for your profession. If you love to be with people, you’ll find work among them. If you’re not a detail person, you won’t choose a detailed activity. If you’re a loner, you’ll develop your work alone.

As you mature, your skills and passion become more apparent. You’ve been drawn to your gifts all of your life. Look closely at the places you shine. Define your subtle skill sets, not just the obvious one. It took me years to figure out that one of my most special gifts is the ability to see the overview and show others connections they don’t immediately recognize.

Look closely at your skills. The most unique ones may be the ones you take for granted. Observe your unique differences and build on them.

Survivors either adapt to their environment or move to a more suitable one

As I grow older, I welcome a smaller space to care for. I have released several levels of belongings in order to do that. If you dislike the cold, move to a warmer climate. Or, if you like outdoor physical activity, move out of the city.

What environment do you need to be in for the most support at this point in your life?

Be flexible in your choices. Be open to supportive change.

Like the animals, we need to adapt in order to evolve

In nature, the animals who are the strongest and most adaptable not only survive, but they pass on their skill sets and strengths to their offspring, who are then better equipped to adapt and thrive in their environment.

That also holds true for people. A prime example is technology. Those who have the ability to understand and use technology will be in demand for jobs. Those who prefer more physical jobs will have a more difficult time since that same technology is gradually replacing the more repetitive physical work.

How adaptive are you? How are you honing your survival skills?

To survive, we need to evolve

I’m very far behind in the use of my mobile phone because I had a landline for years. But I’m way ahead of the majority of people my age in the use of a computer and software programs for communication. Focus on what calls to you and get really good at it.

Look at how the world is changing and let go of the familiar in order to move forward

It does me no good to wish for or hang on to the way things used to be. That time is never coming back. I have to grow to keep up. I have to keep learning and changing my beliefs. I have to let go and embrace the new. Keeping up with constant change can keep you very busy.

Everyone can grow

It would be easier for me to master my phone if I were around young people who were better at it that I am. That’s how I got comfortable with Skype – a younger person helped me make the first call.

But I also go adventuring. I now have a vLog. I learned two new programs that simplify my book production. I know more than I think I do and with persistence I’m moving forward and owning it.

But you have to be willing to press forward and through.

How are you adapting and evolving in order to enrich your life experience? Make more positive, concise forward-moving choices and watch how easy life gets.

Embrace the inevitable constant change

The truth is that the world is changing so rapidly that we have to keep exploring in order to even keep up.

My current focus is participating in group energy meditations.

I’m also evolving my inner work to embrace the unseen world, looking for ways to explore and understand and report back.

Don’t dwell on the past

Whatever is familiar, whatever we think we cherish, is either gone or going. There’s nothing to hold on to, nothing to go back to. We must embrace the present, adapt as much as we can, and allow our personal evolution to do just that – to evolve. Emerge, change form, go with the flow and respond with a clear heart to what shows up.

Life is about adapting. But the most exciting part is about evolving.

To Sing a Deeper Song Consider:

Our Work in the World

How to Walk Beside Someone in Service

We Are Part of a Larger Spiritual Order

16 – How to Find Your New Direction

20 – Why Are You in Service?

What Seeds Are You Planting For the Future?

July 11, 2017 By Cara Lumen

We are constantly cultivating the Garden of Self deep within ourselves. What we say and do affects the growth of our inner crops. What we plant is what we harvest. I paused to look more closely at the seeds I was planting for the future.

What are you growing in your inner garden?

Any good gardener knows you have to prepare the soil. That means weeding out the old, the unusable and that which is no longer needed. Begin there. Examine your beliefs and expectations to make certain they’re aligned with your dreams and desires.

Taking a reality check includes knowing what you love to do, what you’re willing to do and what you keep putting off. That self-awareness will help you plan a balanced garden.

What do you want to grow in your inner garden?

Good gardeners have a plan. They look at color schemes, bloom dates, and their local climate. And they choose the size of the garden they plant based on the crops they want to harvest and what they can and are willing to care for.

Do the same with your inner garden.

I have let some things go fallow but I don’t want to weed them out. I just want to let them lie dormant for a bit. For instance, vLogs have taken over the space once occupied by my podcast. Short booklets have taken over from longer projects. I allow more space in my inner garden for meditative journeying to explore my invisible self. These choices will affect how much I plant and what crops I’ll harvest.

As there’s only so much time and space, plan your garden to accommodate your time and attention.

Expand the skills you need to cultivate your inner garden

When I learned how to make a vLog, it opened up a new way to communicate and a new audience to reach. The new skill nourishes me both inside and out. What new skills do you need to acquire and plant in your inner garden of the future?

Expand your knowledge of how to grow your inner garden

Growing your inner garden is a personal journey. With each new choice, each new awareness, you’ll need to make adjustments. You may need new skills. You may need to weed out an old pattern. Be fluid and flexible when cultivating your inner garden.

You may explore new spiritual processes and figure out ways to incorporate your version into your practice. You may deepen your understanding by reading a book or taking a course or watching a video online. You may acquire a new skill that creates new opportunities. Use your intellect to explore and your heart to choose what to keep.

Interact with people who make you think in order to nurture your inner garden

The more specialized your crop, the further afield you may have to go to find people who are cultivating a similar crop.

I have developed a small circle of friends who are on paths similar to mine. I speak with them individually on monthly Skype calls. We encourage each other and talk philosophically and in depth about our mutual interests. Each conversation nurtures the seeds of ideas that we are cultivating within each of us and cross-pollinates our ideas.
Who would you like to connect with monthly for a conversation that would enrich and expand you both? Make that connection happen.

What new crop do you want to plant in your inner garden?

You can’t grow everything in your garden. You have to be selective. What crops are you growing that bring out the best in you – your passion, your sharpest skills, your most eloquent self-expression? Do more of that.

Be realistic about your choices. I love to learn and am forever exploring new ideas. But it can become overwhelming. So much so that I sometimes end up doing nothing.

Be realistic about how much time it’ll take you to cultivate and harvest the crops you choose, and adjust your planting selection.

Cultivating your inner garden requires new self-awareness

Not only do we need to be aware of what we plant but we also have to be aware of what we allow to grow in our inner garden. We need to weed out any doubt or idea that doesn’t support our journey.

What do you need in your life? How do you need to change your work habits in order to find balance?

Know what you want to grow and how much of it you’re willing to cultivate. What do you need to change about your inner garden that will increase your value and your impact?

Plant new seeds in your inner garden

Select the seeds that offer the most impact.

As the world moves into the need for a more aligned group consciousness, I’ve become more active in group meditations. I’m more aware of and active in supporting the causes I hold as vital to our planet. I plant the seeds of subtle activism.

The more I read and listen and exchange ideas, the more opportunities I find to explore, the more seeds I want to plant, the more crops I want to harvest. The seeds I plant and cultivate in my inner garden are changing my inner landscape, and that affects my outer world.

What new seeds have you found to plant in your inner garden?

Choose your crops of the future

You have to adjust your crops. I prefer to let my life unfold, but I am actively selecting and planning new seeds that call to me. I allow time for them to ripen so I can see how best to use them. Those ideas that don’t resonate are not tended and they go away. Those ideas that call to me are explored and expanded and shaped into alignment with my passion and strengths.

Whether you’re planting a new crop for the future or weeding out things that you don’t want in your future, tend your inner garden in a manner that nurtures you. Thin out your ideas. Prune overgrown concepts to allow for greater growth. And fertilize and water those ideas and concepts you want to bring forth into your future.

Become a master gardener of your inner self.

To Sing a Deeper Song Consider:

The Guardianship We Hold

The Three-Year Promise

What Do You Need to Leave Behind?

Your Body Suit and Invisible Self

40 – Who Do yo Want to Serve?

The Resilient Entrepreneur

June 20, 2017 By Cara Lumen

When I came across the phrase “resilient entrepreneur”, it resonated deeply. Resilience is about flexibility. It’s about being strong, supple, hard working, tough. I wondered just how flexible I was.

How flexible are you?

Being flexible is probably the most valuable quality you can develop in both your life and your work. Life is made up of one cycle after another and that means we must adapt to continuous change. Unexpected change.

It often means finding yourself unprepared for change. You must learn to be flexible in order to grab the new opportunity and be self-aware enough to know if you want to take it. Flexibility is about making decisions on the move, being willing to try out something new.

Flexibility is full of adventure.

Not everyone likes to do that. Or can do that. Some people prefer to stay in the comfort zone of the familiar.

How supple are you?

Supple means to be agile. That’s akin to being flexible but its focus is on being nimble, limber and being able to change course quickly. Supple means you can easily evaluate an idea and make aligned decisions.

Your agility, your resilience, depends on how well you know yourself

Do you take time to reflect? Do you thoughtfully sort out your ideas and meditate on the various possibilities? What are your values? How do you prioritize them and which of them guide your decisions? You need to know so you can make rapid decisions that stay aligned with your overall purpose.

That takes some inner reflection.

Take a close look at how you operate

I kept putting off the completion of projects. I had a ton of mostly finished books. I spent many hours trying to figure out why I kept putting off this last step. Eventually I found out what beliefs were in the way, what habits were stopping me, and what I could do to make myself more productive around the areas of completion.

I experimented. I adjusted. I figured out the unfounded fear that slowed me down and made small steady changes that helped me move forward. But it took a lot of introspective work – and a willingness to change.

Do you take time for that kind of inner exploration?

Are you adjusting with the times?

Technology is moving rapidly. And, like it or not, we have to keep up. If we work with our minds, we have to keep up or become outmoded. If we work with our bodies, we may have to be willing be retrained, as technology replaces some of our work opportunities. We cannot hang on to the past, the familiar.

We also have to resist being caught up in social media and make the choice to purposefully and consciously arrange time for the introspective work that makes us resilient and open to change.

Develop your personalized introspective method

It makes no difference what form you use to truly know yourself, it only matters that you find a way to know your desires, your gifts, your values, and your passion. Then consistently use that awareness to make choices that are aligned with who you are.

You may explore your inner world through visioning or journaling or meditation. Mind-mapping (with a pencil and paper) will help you figure out the overall connections. Let your feelings guide you. How would that feel? What could it look like? Would you like that?

Find your stumbling blocks and figure out creative ways around them. It helped my productivity when I began to work in batches – edit a group of posts at one time over the course of a few days. Record a few vLogs in a week.

Examine your working style and adjust it to become more productive. Change your approach.

I’m a natural organizer and a master list maker. Until I chose to embrace the concept of “unfolding” in my life. Now I approach each day as an adventure and am prepared to explore whatever path calls to me. My life experience is now quite serene.

I found theme days helpful – write, video, books, outreach, etc. Each day a different focus. That helps avoid overwhelm.

Explore your opportunities through meditation. Take an idea or opportunity and move into meditation with it. Explore whatever shows up. How does it feel? Inwardly explore several scenarios of what it might end up looking like.

See how flexible and adaptable you can become as you move forward.

To Sing a Deeper Song Consider:

What Life Decisions Changed Your Direction?

Find and Use Your Power Within

How to Pull Forth Your Strength From Within

How to Nourish Your Inner Fire

Vlog: Your Body Suit and Your Invisible Self

Podcast: 32 – How to See Your Work As Art

The Three-Year Promise

May 18, 2017 By Cara Lumen

We overestimate what we can do in one year and underestimate what we can do in three years. What do you want in three years? Are your goals about work, or relationships or health? Are you thinking big enough?

What do you want to have accomplished in three years?

Stop. What just popped into your head when you read that? What do you want to have accomplished in three years? That thought you just had. That’s it. That’s what you work on.

It doesn’t need to be particularly specific, but keep that goal in mind as we explore some ideas to make your goal a reality.

I was totally surprised to find that my three-year goal was that I wanted to recover some of my physical ability. Being a metaphysician, I don’t want to buy into the common idea that as we age our body becomes less effective. However, that’s hard because I live in a senior facility filled with walkers and stooped-over people on oxygen.

I work to see and feel my body as strong and supportive. But I have both inner and outer work to do and beliefs to change and things to learn. So I choose as my three-year goal that my body will be stronger than it is now.

What did you choose?

What would that look like?

What would that feel like?

You gotta have a plan

The first thing I realized was that I need to have a plan. A plan that I’ll stick to and improve on for three years – steps I’m willing to take, goals I truly want to achieve. I need to formulate a plan that’ll help me achieve the desired results.

You gotta have determination

You need to want this goal – a lot.

I have a friend who is sick. There’s stuff wrong with her but she is not helping. She’s not eating. She’s not moving her body. She’s not helping herself. This passiveness has been a pattern in her life. Not pushing through. Not taking charge of her own destiny.

I can’t help her. No one can. She is totally responsible for the outcome of this opportunity in her life.

As are we all.

What your life looks like now is a direct result of your choices and actions. What choices are you making in your life that are manifesting in what you see before you? What do you need to change – about yourself – about your actions? What choices will you make in order to achieve your three-year goal?

Make a plan you can follow

I gave this idea of a three-year goal a lot of thought because my natural tendency is to work my mind rather than move my body. So I had to create a plan I would follow, either through determination or trickery.

I choose the number 21. It takes 21 days to change a habit. I would do whatever form of movement I chose for 21 minutes. I don’t think I’m going to do 21 different forms of movement, but you get the picture.

Trick yourself. I can add 12 (the number 21 reversed) leg lifts every time I stand at my kitchen sink. I watch The View every day and for one 15-minute segment I will stretch and move. I walk each day but may count 210 steps or walk for 12 minutes. I could climb 21 steps 21 times. (Doubtful). There are 16 steps in the hall by my mailbox so even one trip up and down would be a positive move.

Dancing is a sneaky way to exercise. Turn on some music and sing and dance with great enthusiasm. Get creative. Sneak in small steps.

I have discovered that the most productive time to sneak in a new habit is during television commercials. When I use that time to move my body, during one hour I may get as much as 15 minutes of movement tucked in. I could also use commercial breaks to dust or put stuff away or tidy my kitchen.

Whether you sit in your chair and stretch, or get up and lift some weights, or take some other action toward your goal, look for the hidden down-time moments that are organically built into your day.

If my three-year goal was around relationship, I would work very hard on changing me.

If my three-year goal was focused on a project, I would mind-map broad steps, divide them into manageable segments and begin.

Listen to your inner voice

As I make these physical choices, I have to learn to listen to the messages of my body. I have to learn to give it what it needs in the form and amount that it needs. And I get to notice whose voice it is that says “do three more steps” and to ignore the voice that says “too hard.” They are both me, but I need to find the balance between pushing too hard so that I get discouraged and pushing just right so that I feel and see progress.

Check your progress

The only way I know to track my progress is to record my starting stats. Then I record my progress monthly. That progress may be in mental attitude, or in actual physical change. Decide upon the signals you can read that will let you become aware of your progress. Take time to reflect on this progress and make adjustments that will help you get more results.

I do a self-awareness check on my birthday. I check in with myself at the end of the year. I am also reflective at the time of the New Moon and at Full Moon. Pick what works for you but do record your progress so you can see it and you can tweak your plan.

Visualize your results every day

Each day in your quiet inner time, visualize how you will feel at the end of the three years when you have surpassed your own expectations. It’s awesome for me to remember the freedom my body used to afford me, the adventures we went on together. I want that back. When I visualize, I feel that way again and it inspires and motivates me. Your emotions are a better indicator of success than what things look like.

Allow room for change

Your goals may change as you change. As my body improves I may change my vision, my goals, even the action steps I choose.

What is your three-year vision? Will you begin working on it today? What’s your plan?

To Sind a Deeper Song Consider:

My Three Words for 2017

What Do You Need to Leave Behind

What Seeds Do You Allow to Grow in Your Garden?

The Shedding of Your Skin

Clean Your Inside Home

Why We Are Afraid of Change

Be the Story you Want to Tell

VLOG: Insights of a Deeper Song