THE INWARD OUTLOOK

“It is possible for people to see what has been obscured from their awareness.

It is possible to step from the invisible to the visible.

We are so afraid that we cannot be what we dream ourselves to be,

That we stay hidden inside of a persona that we ourselves created for our survival.

Bring the invisible to light so that you can begin to see your own beauty and claim your wholeness and your true voice.

When what has been obscured is illuminated, you remember who you truly are.

The result is an inherently synchronized person inspired to learn and grow,

Who is infused with the vitality of self-actualization.

Such self perception cannot be overestimated in terms of its capacity to produce positive extraordinary results.”

~ Laura Basha, Ph.D.

Please do check out my newly published first book: "The Inward Outlook"!

And many many thanks to all who have supported me, both literally and figuratively, through this last year of writing, editing, and publishing!

I hope you enjoy! xoxo

http://bookstore.xlibris.com/Products/SKU-000760068/The-Inward-Outlook.aspx

Theo

THE SIXTH SENSE

"There is no logical way to the discovery of these elemental laws. 

There is only the way of intuition, which is helped by the feeling for the 

order lying behind the appearance."

~ Albert Einstein

So I was going to put a gorgeous photo of the sunrise up on the blog for this month, as here in northern California we do have an abundance of them, and they are always an inspiration. But I wanted to make more accessible and pragmatic and obvious the seemingly intangible topic of this blog: Intuition.

Last weekend my husband and I took a class on “Communicating with Your Animals”. We have two Tibetan terriers that we adore, and often feel that they are trying to tell us something … sometimes we seem to catch on, sometimes they walk away from us, generously loving us yet crestfallen as they tolerate our dullard sensibilities. The class basically pointed to the fact that animals communicate through the faculty of intuition, which we could translate into words that make sense to us. We just need to practice listening to them through our intuitive faculty, and validating whatever we “hear” through the translation that occurs to us as our own thoughts.

Hence scratching the sunrise and posting the photo of Theo, a master of the sixth sense; our Sixth Sense Sensei.

We talk about our 5 senses, but there are really 7 - The 6^th one being Intuition. Like, no kidding, we all have access to Intuition as easily as we have access to touch or hearing or seeing with the physical eyes. We just don’t think about it that literally, so we don’t pay attention to it, so we don’t develop an affinity with it like we do, say, with touch. Scorch your hand once on that burner and you know that touching it again will produce a real and similar result.

Intuition is a realm of communication, a very real sense available to us, which requires that we stop listening to our familiar daily thinking, and quiet down what occurs to us as logical, enough to hear the sixth sense of insight.

What if we practiced our intuition with as much attention and pragmatism as we attend to the sense of touch?

I have a friend who made 40 cupcakes for her son’s school party, which was happening on the next day, and she left them out on the counter overnight to pack up in the morning. She woke up in the middle of the night and had a “sense” that she should go check on them. Now the real accomplishment here is that she actually LISTENED to this prompting and GOT UP to check on them!!

When she got to the kitchen to check on the cupcakes, she saw a line of ants heading straight for them! She moved the cupcakes just in time to rescue them for the morning!

Silly you say? Well, that’s the thing – notice how much we invalidate the sixth sense of intuition. We would not invalidate a burn from the stove. What if we took the “feeling” about something as being just as valid and tangible as being scorched by the flame?

Hmmm … I think will go ask Theo ….

"Silver Savvy - 'Gettin' Old Ain't for Sissies'"

Silver Sass!

So You Want To Be A Change Agent?! ...

~ from: "The Far Side" by Gary Larson 

I am a change agent. 

I call myself a consultant, but, I am a change agent, an agent for change. I have always loved the Gary Larson cartoon that you can see above, because, in being a true change agent, there will be a colluded understanding, though maybe not conscious, that you are out to transform the status quo. And, no matter how much confirmation you hear from the people who have asked you for your transformational vision, be it corporation, executive, friend, family member, or even your own excited self who has just registered in the next transformational weekend huzzah!, there will be what I like to call "kickback".

So here's a tip, offered from my own getting-up-from-my-face-in-the-dirt experience: practice listening. Like, no talking. Complete authentic facination with the other's point of view, with no attention to your own thinking from the past. Let it all be said, from them to you. All of it. 

The only question you might ask is: "Anything else?" And then: More listening. Eventually, when the person has emptied their world-of-issue into the clearing space of your profound listening, the only thing that will be left is what is truly real: love, affinity, and brilliant insight into the solution.

Anything other than this profound listening brings a world of drama - including our own personal drama - into the mix. Bull's eyes appear all around, visible targets for escalated dominating monologues, designed to take someone down, to protect the righteousness of our own positions.

Well, true interested listening will act as a calming buffer against all that cacophony of verbal insecurity. No kidding. Try it. It's a practice. 

And if you still choose to be a change agent, the bull's eye will be there, a magnet for resistance to change. But if you listen deeply enough, thereby acknowledging the speaker for the validity of their point of view - which you can honestly see if you are willing to stand in their shoes looking at life from their vantage point - you will deflect and dissolve any arrows or barbs coming your way. And they will see something new that frees them up from a previously constrained way of perceiving life experience.

As a true change agent, the bull's eye will always be radiating from you. But deep listening is like, well, the cool tee shirt you wear that covers it from their view.

Onward!

The Birthing of a Book

My Writing Desk, April 2014

I will be completing my first book and sending it to the publisher this month. It has been a long process! I find I struggle with writing in a very similar way that I struggle with painting, yet also the fulfillment from a writing session well done is the same deep satisfying fulfillment as a good afternoon in the painting studio.

But here’s the thing – a frustrating session is actually also fulfilling. Perplexing, doubts can creep in, yet there is a give and take in the creative process that I find missing in some of the other professional work I do, even though the other work is good work and makes a difference. The form that is being created through the tempering process of my own creative machinations looks back at me and we are in partnership – symbiotically corded together. I get up and walk away, but it works me and I work it until the next sitting. Such intimacy.

The give and take, the working through the possible creative choices, of color or word, activates the muse. The creative muse is the whole realm of inspiration and chaos and possibility. And such vastness of possibility of course could result in making choices that don’t quite harmonize – but you know you will eventually discover the right harmonics as they are thriving in the Eternal somewhere!

Sometimes one feels “stuck”, yes, and we get frightened if we think that we are then blocked. Yet we are freed when we realize that these are the essential periods of waiting, of letting the field of creativity lie fallow to replenish and reorganize from the realm of All Possibility, settling into just the right alchemical mix to produce the gold.

Birthing is the result of creation, which has its own timetable, the mystery of which is perhaps its protection.

“Okay, now here’s a question. Why do we think that being ‘stuck’ is a bad thing? What if ‘stuck’ is what you need to experience in order to be creative? Being stuck, there’s an assumption that there’s no movement, nothing’s happening, you’re in trouble, but maybe it needs to be rephrased. Maybe being stuck is churning and activating and bubbling and growing. … When we say we’re stuck, then … there’s got to be a better way … But you are finding that everyone gets stuck, so maybe we need to have those moments of just not doing anything.”

~ from The Captive Muse: On Creativity and Its Inhibition, by Susan Kolodny

Muir Woods 2014

REVELATION

It was my birthday last month, and I wanted to spend the day with my husband, simply, in the quietness of a nearby majestic grove of redwood trees, followed by dinner at a favorite restaurant overlooking the Bay.

When we arrived at the redwood grove, throngs of people were there, talking loudly, talking on cell phones (what?!), babies crying, teens running around showing off to their crushes. I was very annoyed! It was my birthday and I wanted to be in the quietness of the Ancients!

It was then that I realized that the complaining in my head was as loud – or louder – than the outer cacophony of other people’s conversations! Humility emerged …

As we walked more deeply into the forest, the crowds thinned, and I stood in front of these elegant nobles, listening to the Silence of their timelessness. One thousand, two thousand, thirty two hundred years old … how many histories had they seen come and go?

As I listened, the question arose in me, “What must it be like to stand still for one thousand years?” The silent thunder that emerged from listening that question from the inside out, expanded within me with velocity, such that I had to turn my attention away in less than a couple of minutes. I was taken aback at the limits of my ability to be present to such Silence, such profound presence.

No wonder we make noise, to distract us from the discomfort of profundity, of the timeless eternity of the unknown, the Absolute.

I finally stepped into the world of the great naturalists who have sung the praises of our stunningly beautiful Earth, privately sheepish that I had not previously been as intimately awake to this great sacredness. And yet, now powerfully inspired to cultivate as a practice being with the omniscient emptiness of Nature.

Birth Day indeed!