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Video Summary: I want to continue with the theme of offering an intention for the things you'd like to awaken in yourself and create in your life during this coming year. Another way to think about intention is to let the universe or spirit know your preferences about what you would like to have in your life. The spiritual premise is that the universe is abundant and naturally wants to provide the things that we would like to awaken. So if we communicate and express our prefe

Video Summary: I suspect a lot of you watching this video have worked with being more authentic, true to yourself, and speaking your truth. When you're true to yourself and what you're feeling, you can act from that place. It takes a lot of courage to be yourself, especially in our culture, where it's not always honored. But here's the thing: when we are more honest and authentic, people are going to have issues with that. Why would that be? When you're more authentic, it may

There's a practice in my tradition of shamanism and spirituality that I refer to as “I am nothing. I know nothing.” It is a way to go beyond your preconceptions and intellectual knowledge about what's going to happen in the experience you are approaching. You may have heard the expression, "Check your ego at the door." This practice prompts you to “check your preconceptions at the door.” When we bring our preconceptions into an experience, ceremony, or relationship, it greatl

Video Summary: A couple of weeks ago, I talked about receiving your vision for the new cycle of your life, and last week about offering an intention to initiate it. When you offer your intention, it creates a partnership with life or Spirit, and then Spirit will open doorways for something new. But how can we work with that? One thing we can do is make room for something new in our lives. A great way to create space for the new thing is to suspend the old. We can suspend the

Video Summary: Happy spring! This is the second video of a two-part series that I'm doing on the Spring Equinox. While this video stands on its own, if you do want to go back and check out the first one, you can go here. Springtime is in the east in the Medicine Wheel, which is where we create our new lives. It is a dynamic time. Moving into the Medicine Wheel is not a passive thing. We're intentionally creating a new life. And this creation of the new is the most important t

Video Summary: Happy springtime and happy Spring Equinox. It's a really sacred time on the Medicine Wheel and on the planet. In my tradition, the spring equinox is the east gate on the Medicine Wheel. It's where we enter the Medicine Wheel to begin a new cycle in our lives. If you look at nature in the springtime, animals are being born, plants are sprouting, and new life is happening. It's been dormant in hibernation for the winter, and now it's coming to life. Since we are

Video Summary: Today, I want to talk about spiritual discipline, as you would use it in a spiritual practice. If you've been studying spirituality for a while, at some point, a spiritual or meditation teacher, yoga instructor, or book may have suggested having a spiritual practice. I have found this to be beneficial for a couple of reasons. When we do something that connects us with our spiritual nature and to the universe, it gives us this point of reference as we go through

Video Summary: I was at a spiritual retreat given by the spiritual teacher, Adyashanti, about five years ago. Somehow, when you're in retreat, the spiritual truths get in at a deeper level. Somewhere around day three or four, Adyashanti spoke about all spiritual teachings being either ascending or descending in nature. Adyashanti describes the ascending energy as awakening energy. It ascends out from us. In a spiritual awakening, we’re breaking out of our box, moving beyond t

Video Summary: I want to talk about authority in the sense of where we look for direction in our lives. Where do we look for decisions and how to live our lives? My observation is that we tend to look for authority outside of ourselves. In our culture, authority is often a relational thing that gets established between people. So relationships have degrees of authority. We learned this at a young age, ultimately from our parents and other adults, such as teachers and coaches.

Video Summary: You’ve probably experienced both sides of judgment: judging others and being judged. Today, I want to focus on us judging others. Judgment, in the context of this video, is projecting something that you're not able to accept about yourself or the world onto a person, situation, or group of people. Most of you watching this video probably notice times when you judge other people. And cool for you, that's not an easy thing to accept in yourself. You're owning som

Video Summary: Individuation is a concept that Carl Jung brought to us. Here, I’m using individuation to refer to when we're making something ours. During the development of the independent personality, which begins at six or seven years old, we're primarily learning things by watching what our parents, teachers, and coaches do. And then somewhere in adolescence and then into early adulthood, we start finding our own way to do things. We might say, “My dad did it this way, bu

Video Summary: I want to talk about personal ethics. My premise is that our ethics are personal in that they're specific to us. And not only that, they're specific to how we are right now. My ethics are different now than they were 20 years ago, or even five years ago. The first way this shows is that expecting another person to have the same ethics as you do is unrealistic. Our Judeo-Christian culture sees ethics in an absolute, right-and-wrong way. What’s really going on is