Create February Fabulous! - The Wealthy Life

Day 6

11 Suggestions for Abundance Consciousness 

Life is literally bursting with abundance. It is flowing from every corner of time and space and if we notice it then we take part. Each orange tree produces a plethora of leaves and a bounty of oranges. There are millions of orange trees on this planet and billions of oranges! Then there are myriad other plants, vegetables, species, animals and insects. That is just the stuff that lives on top of our beloved Earth.

Check out the grains of sand, the molecules of breathable air, the amount of life-giving sunshine that reaches us. We are in the midst of a reality so fantastical, it is laughable to think that we feel that we are lost, lonely and poor. We couldn’t be further from the truth. That is why it feels so weird and wrong when we contemplate such limiting beliefs. Our emotions are literally screaming at us that our thinking is not up to speed with reality. That is why sadness and desperation and despair hurt, because they are telling us we are in the wrong place in our minds.

This life is wealthy beyond belief. This life is filled with endless abundance and opportunities yet we have to switch on to them. We have to lift our eyes from our pain and shift our perspective. No longer should we continue to bang on about how shit things are because life emanates from the core of us. The 'shit' is created by how we perceive life to be. The more shit we see… the more shit we get. That is the basic law of karma, or resonance or attraction. It all has the same name. See shit, get shit; see love, get love. Very simple, very basic yet we have grand and strange structures of thought living in our heads, put there by generations of souls before us, by skewed education systems and archaic religions.

We can empower ourselves and let go of those old patterns. There is no point waging a war against old things, they are what brought us here but we can choose to let them go and move forward into a new paradigm of thinking and being. It doesn’t take much. Just a little adjustment here and there.

1.  Breathe – Calm your body and mind down with the most effective stress management tool you have. Your breath is directly linked to your autonomic nervous system and when you consciously step in to slow it down, your body begins to relax and your heart beat is reduced which will send calming signals to your brain. A ton of information flows from the heart to the brain all based upon your rate and depth of breath.
2. Be present – Use your senses to feel your current reality, smell the air, look at the shapes of things, the colour, the textures, listen to the sounds around you, feel the wind, the floor, the temperature. But more, be present with your emotions and thoughts. Don’t try and fix or push your emotions away. Just sense them in the body and breath into where any tension lies.
3. Sit – Learn to sit and watch. Watch your breath. Watch your thoughts. Watch life come and go. Watch how nature just flows. Watch yourself and how you are connected to everything. Allow yourself to just be, no distractions, no media, no activity, no television. 
4. Let go – Let go of judgement, especially of yourself. Let go of the need to fix everything. Let go of the worry about tomorrow. Let go of the pain of the past. Let go of the anger. Let go of the need to do something with your emotions. Let go of blame. Let go of criticism. Let go of ideas of lack. Relax. Breathing helps with this.
   
5. Meditate – Find the silence often. Especially when you catch yourself judging, criticising, or focusing on shit that pisses you off. Use all of the above to help find that silence in between thoughts. Don’t try and stop thinking, just start breathing, being present, sitting, watching and letting go. 
6. Appreciate – Look at what works in your life. Find joy in the moments you have, in the blessings and support that surround you. Find things in your life to feel good about. Friends, family, sunshine, drinking water, children, lovers, material blessings. All are things to appreciate. Even if it is just one thing, search for it, hold it close.
7. Fan the Flames – Make good feelings bigger. When you feel great, take note, explore it. Notice your thoughts. Remember it. Revel in those good feelings. Just because the world is full of things that are unpleasant it is not a good enough reason to not find things that feel great in this world. There is far more good than bad anyway. That doesn’t mean we should ignore problems, but rather, it means we begin to frame things differently and bring a different energy to problems so that we become solution orientated, able to find the gift in each moment.
8. Imagine – Use your greatest gift. Imagine solutions. Imagine well-being. Allow yourself to play again and imagine what you want in your life. Feel the changes in how you feel. Imagine your dreams come true. Imagine the person you would be when your dreams are alive. Imagine your joy, imagine your peace, your creativity, your light, your wealth, your health. Imagine what you would give and do for others. 
9. Trust – Your desires lead you directly to your purpose. Trust your heart. Trust that you are worthy. Trust that you are loved by so much more than you know or can see. Trust that well-being flows to everything. Trust that nature thrives and wants you to thrive. Trust that you are a powerful creator and your thoughts become your perceptions and beliefs and create your life. Trust in the power of your heart and what it truly loves - that spine-tingling, unity creating, present moment, deep breath flowing passion. Trust that when you feel it. 
10. Act – Sometimes you have to start in order to kick-start the flow of passion. Take baby-steps toward your dream or desire. If you don’t know what your dreams, passions or desires are, then act as if you do. Move toward clarity. Find a way to start acting as if the answers are there. Do what you need to in order to move one step closer to your visions, abundance and dreams, however humble or small the step is. Show up every day. 
11. Have fun – Most importantly, life is not a big serious thing. It is for loving and playing. Forget about the whole growing up thing. You are allowed to play. You are allowed to have fun. You are allowed to express love as loudly and as raucously as you want. Play, love, and have fun, even if for just one moment!

Experiment with this, see where it leads. See if you begin to feel better, more connected, more abundant with health, energy, life, ideas, love and wealth.

Love, love, love...

Matt Rivers

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Create February Fabulous! is an idea or challenge to try and show up with your own creativity every day for the month of February. It is a simple idea. The creativity can take any form, and take any amount of time. Any media, any discipline, the only condition is to have fun. No critics, no judgement, just a celebration of our own unique human quality of creativity. You are encouraged to share your projects anywhere you like (only if you want) using the hashtag #createfebruary. Join the Facebook group, share on Instagram, blog about it, invite friends to some daily creativity. Let's see what we can create together. 

Matt is a singer/songwriter, musician, poet and writer of words. He is exploring the forests of consciousness, time and space, and surfing the waves of thought, love and being. Getting lost and wiping out are adventures in themselves!

The Forty Pilgrims Project - Stormy Clouds

Day 3 and 4

Today was one of those days we have all had. It starts off great and gets a little more frustrating along the way, maybe it bounces back, maybe it doesn’t. I am currently wondering how Simon’s last few days went, up there in the north. Did he experience some frustration today and how did he handle it? I watched a video of him marching up a rather steep hill having just confronted some deeper aspects of himself. Such is a journey of the heart and soul. We have to keep taking the next step.

Lately I’ve been surfing my frustration with a growing skill that I have been slowly developing over the last twenty years. Before that, I was just another angry teenager with no wish whatsoever to curb my tempestuous temper. Back then I felt justified in my angst and heroic in my anger as I slayed my foes in a righteous quest for freedom, truth and justice. I think we all know the pattern. Life was unfair, people greedy and horrid, and school completely sucked.

Nowadays, I tend to listen to my emotions and try and make decisions based on acknowledging my feelings as guides. I then attempt to focus my thoughts in order to arrive at new actions and greater possibilities. Sometimes I win, sometimes I loose. The last few days have been tricky. It is a work in progress – a grand experiment into conscious creation that has picked up speed over the last few months. Perhaps I have always been at it… perhaps we are all at it, for it is always hard to pinpoint when one begins this quest - if at all we were never at it!

Anyhow, before I completely walk in the wrong direction, let’s get back to the Pilgrims. As I said, my experiences and experiments in conscious living have accelerated since I experienced the completion of an attunement of a new facet of myself. Just a few weeks ago I read a book by my reiki master, detailing the process of awakening the violet flame chakra within our bodies. Through her, I began the attunement to this energy and chakra centre over a year ago. Around about the same time it reached its completion, I began reading about Simon’s project. But more on the Violet Flame in the coming weeks as I don’t feel that now is quite the time to go into it. Suffice to say that I feel that this new energy drew me toward The Forty Pilgrims Project as a resonance of my concentration of focus upon potential, possibility and creative spirit. There are lots of resonant factors between the two. But what has all this got to do with experiencing frustration in our day to day lives?

Part of conscious creation and living is becoming self-referring. It is understanding that the life you experience is a reflection of your own mix of perceptions, ideas and thoughts. More than that, we draw to ourselves a specific mix of co-created events that help us to let go of the old patterns that no longer serve us so that we can move into higher paradigms of expression and creativity. We work in groups of family and friends, helping each other grow and expand. Sometimes we fall back and sometimes we suffer. Sometimes we hold on to the past or fear the future. Yet here we are, experiencing and creating life.

Put more simply, we have desires and dreams and fears and preferences. All of us are different and have a different mix of these things. Even trees and crabs and dogs and worms have preferences. Our fears and blinkered views can hold us back for a time whilst we can also be switched on, open and fruity! We can embrace life and expand, or hold onto limiting beliefs and stunt our growth. Today and yesterday were some of those days when I witnessed, from outside of my usual self, a whole bunch of those factors. I was subject to a very clever play of interwoven moments and consciousness.

I am beginning to get the idea that if you start the day with a more positive feeling then you can roll with that feeling. Waking up on the wrong side of bed, grumpy and rumpled often produces a day of similar qualities. The opposite is also true. A day begun with a positive outlook has more chance of staying on track and revealing rainbow in the sky moments!

Well, I continued with my new daily habit of yoga, meditations and guide prayers specific to the Project. I walked to work, feeling good, but slightly conscious of knowing that I was holding onto a few thoughts based on someone else’s opinion plus some of my own shadowy aspects. We are hosting a new group of people at the retreat I work at and had been informed from various sources what this would be like. The outlook was less than positive.

We can be influenced by other people’s opinions and actions when we let them in – whether the words of our parents, teachers, well-meaning friends or glossy magazines. Over the course of the day, I watched the play of other people’s words upon my mind. I watched how some things slowly got me stressed and how sometimes, instead of brooding and growling in my head, I focused on breathing into my heart. I watched myself growing in frustration and then letting it go as I decided to make my own assessment of the situation. Sometimes I didn’t make it and found myself barking in a corner of my head, cursing the world and all who stand in it! ‘Breathe… come back into me’, said my heart.

Part of conscious living is also taking each moment as brand new. So I watched my mind throw up old reactions to dramas that were thrown as me. I paused to listen rather than reacting. I embraced my crazy mind. Gave it an inner hug. Then I moved on. I stepped out of my frustrations with work, people and life. I focused on the things in front of me. The music that was playing, the vegetables I was chopping. Dramas seem to fade away when we immerse ourselves in the moment and then seem trivial after all.

It seems that dramas create dramas, even before you get to the drama. The opinions of others playing on your mind will tune you into that opinion if you let it, leaving you looking out for the pitfalls and foibles of other people’s woes.

If you take life as fresh, and each moment as individual, then you can shift your relationship with old patterns of thought, allowing space for solutions and insight to enter.

We each have a unique and individual relationship with every facet of life, whether it be a concept, a person, an animal or a thing. When we take on board the ideas and opinions of others as our own, especially before the moment we have experienced that relationship for ourselves, we are not truly living our own life, but the ideas of another. This serves us of course, because our life is our life and our experience is our experience and we bring ourselves to things through our choices and grow as a result of them. Yet it is useful to recognise that embracing the opinions and ideas of another is a choice as well.

We could just as easily let those opinions and ideas go and choose to experience now - fresh. Just for ourselves. As if nobody had ever been there before in that way… which is true.

No one has ever been you in this moment.

Love, love, love xxx

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'The Forty Pilgrims Project' series is a blog inspired by a journey. Simon Welsh, poet, writer and new paradigm adventurer is walking the Camino de Santiago - a simple mission to put one foot in front of the other. Carving out a journey over 1000km of trails, roads and pathways, he is heading for Santiago, and further yet to Finisterre, the ‘End of the World’. He carries with him 40 prayers, one for each day, one for each pilgrim that is energetically walking with him. He is supported by 12 guides, energetically supporting him from afar. 

This is my journal of his 'Forty Pilgrims Project' - an observation from the outside, as one of his guides and friends. An exploration of my own journey by his side, as we connect in the quantum field.

Matt is a singer/songwriter, musician, poet and writer of words. He is exploring the forests of consciousness, time and space, and surfing the waves of thought, love and being. Getting lost and wiping out are adventures in themselves!

R.I.P.

Death is a strange old thing. We love to not talk about it yet we glorify it in movies. We make it acceptable in video games and invent a million ways to portray it on screen. A violent death is more acceptable to watch than a steamy bedroom romance. One scene creates life and one ends it but in their own ways, both subjects have become taboo over the course of history when, at various points they were celebrated, revered and respected. Why do our entrances and exits into life cause the modern human such pains to consider and talk about freely and openly? I think a healthy dose of frank exploration into our endings is in order, without morbidity, doom and gloom.

Death came to my family early in my childhood. My grandfather died when I was just 15. This impacted my life quite heavily as he was my surrogate father and the rock of maleness that I depended upon. I was the son he had never had. It was a special relationship. Having such an experience at such a young age got me thinking very early on about death and what it meant.

At first of course, there was denial, guilt, pain, grief and a very large dose of abandonment. Being just a teenager, I masked those feelings with drugs, sex, alcohol and music. It took me a long time to begin to talk about it - 2 years in fact. Before I had moved much further in my life, a few other family members decided their time was up and off they toddled. Perhaps the greatest shock to my system was during University when 3 friends died in three successive years.

After all this time, I have come to some conclusions. Some are based on direct experience and some are based on the experiences of others. Some are based on the intuitions of my heart and the things I have read. Some are based on my meditations, and some based on my study of yoga. You may find these ideas soothing, cathartic and full of hope. On the other hand, you may think I am a crackpot - good luck to you either way. Test any idea in your heart for validity. If it appeals and feels good, then take it on board for as long as you need to. If it does not resonate and feels bizarre, then you can let it go. We never need to hold onto things. I have let go of things I held to years ago because they no longer applied. Such is the way of consciousness. Be brave...

The human spirit is unlimited and has a soul. Actually, more accurately, it is the other way round. The soul is a grand being that manifests a human body in order to have experiences in material reality. The soul is pure consciousness and exists in a greater amount of dimensional reality than that which our current perception experiences. We are far bigger than 4D time and space. 

We are interconnected to all things through our soul. Our soul is part of a grand field of pure potential and love. This field is everywhere, connected to all time and space. There is only one moment. Within this field, we are 'born' and 'die' in countless lifetimes in order to experience the joy and bliss of living. Some call this process reincarnation yet it is more than the limited ideas we might have. We create our lives, awake or not, in order to express and remember our true nature. Our soul is dancing within a grand playground and when we die, we return fully to this multidimensional field that we never actually left. From this field arises an unlimited amount of phenomena, realities, galaxies, and laws of physics, defined and undefined, imagined and unimagined. Anything is possible!

Our soul exists in many dimensions - our lives contribute to the expansion and experience of the Universe. Each of us matters. Each of our lives matter. Every thought, word, experience and action matters and we are loved because we are love and we come from love. Love and bliss is the core of our being. Our soul loves our bodies and lives, our hopes and dreams, our pasts, futures and presents.

We choose our parents and the conditions of our birth and death before we incarnate into our human bodies. Our soul has an overview of our life from the unique vantage point it has and knows what kind of experience it wants next. It has desires just as we do and those desires are the life force which drive the Universe.  In fact, our desires in each lifetime are simply an extension of our soul's desires for we are inseparable. When we begin to listen to our heart's yearnings, we are acknowledging our soul's voice. What you love most is what you are here to be...

Our bodies and egos are the vehicle through which the soul drives in material reality. It is a rush and a ride. When we decide to incarnate, we agree to forget the true nature of who we are so that we may experience time and space. We are locked into an illusion of limitation and duality yet we are unlimited and can create our lives. We begin creating from the very moment we are born and have the ability to draw our natural qualities of love, gratitude, abundance, peace, unity  and compassion through us using such tools as attention and meditation.

When the soul incarnates into the body, it forgets that it is connected to all things. We begin to think we are individual when we are really just individuated clouds of energy within a grand sea of energy. We are connected by our breath, by our bodies, by our electromagnetic heart fields, by our atoms, molecules, the Earth, the stars! We are connected to the infinite field where all souls reside, where past and present lifetimes collide and all wisdom is held. We can access this field of wisdom and love at all times. No one is lost. No one is left out.

We can begin to remember who we are in our lives, honouring our soul voice, living with love, enjoying each moment and trusting that the field of pure potential will provide for us because it responds to our thoughts. Our emotions tell us where we are in relation to our soul voice and help to guide us back to our centre. We can begin to remember our unity and connection to the field. To all things. To each other. We can begin to remember that love, bliss and happiness is our true nature and resides within us. We can contact those who have gone before. Souls simply step in and out of material reality. Death is just an illusion.

In our current paradigm, we seem to often forget who we are, living in an illusion created by others, told to believe truths that do not resonate or apply to us. We give away our power, follow directions we do not like, hold onto emotions that feel terrible and edit ourselves into acceptable but diminutive versions of our true self in order to be approved by a society that has forgotten it's own unlimited potential. This hurts. The longer we keep ourselves in the darkness, the more unbearable it gets. We stay in downward spirals, negative loops and addictions and all the while the reality of life lies just on the other side of our hearts. Life seems hopeless, empty and pointless. We suffer and punish ourselves or others - not knowing that we had the power to shift ourselves.

Sometimes the pain becomes too much. Sometimes the pressure of holding onto the past or future becomes too much. Sometimes the focus of forgetting who we are is so unbearable we come to a point of choosing. The soul chooses - we choose. We let go and return to the field of love.

I like to think that R.I.P. means Release Internal Pressure as our soul explodes outwards from the limits and pressures of being in an illusory state of duality back into pure consciousness and bliss. There is nothing wrong with this. It is the default setting of love. The soul decides the ride is finished and we return home. Life is a journey. Death is just a transition. Sometimes we 'die' because the journey became unbearable and sometimes we die because we have stopped summoning forth life force. Sometimes there is no more desire for life and sometimes the answers to the questions we seek lie beyond the veil.

Yet R.I.P. is a state we can achieve without dying. We have the option to explore our emotions - to own them rather than to lay blame at others feet for our states and tantrums. We can choose to embrace our darkness rather than hide it. We can choose to begin focusing on things we love and things that work in our immediate reality. We can choose to begin to listen to our soul's voice and start doing something we really want to do. We can choose to forgive others. We can choose to play instead of be serious. We can choose to praise and compliment instead of judge and criticise. We can choose to look on the bright side. We can choose to let the laughter out...

We are safe. Our soul and our consciousness goes on forever. Who we are now will remain forever in the grand memory of our soul and the Universe. No one we have ever loved is lost. They are here, within the infinite field, loving and supporting us, talking to us in the wind, the words of a song, the call of a bird and the play of light on the water. Dare to dream and laugh at death!

Release Internal Pressure!