​I get to work with people from all over the world, and many of you live in places where there are lots of options for spiritual community.

Some places in the world, especially cities, are brimming with yoga classes and meditation groups and community healings and lovely workshops and so on.

If you live in this kind of place, you can wade in knee deep: you can go to ecstatic dance on Sundays, yoga on Mondays, talk circle on Tuesdays, mindfulness on Wednesdays, and so on.

And wow! You can create quite a spiritual practice, and have the joy and support and fun of spiritual community, easily available to you.

If you’re someone living in this kind of place, I do hope you are appreciating where you are!

Because more of you don’t live in these kinds of places. Lots of you live in conservative towns where it’s frowned upon if you’re not part of the dominant religious affiliation or political culture.

In these kinds of places, it can be really scary to say you might be interested in spirituality or psychic opening or past lives or meditation or anything other than what the main culture is doing.

In fact, you might be in hiding: you might feel like you have to keep your beliefs secret, or you might not want to mention your beliefs to your family, friends, neighbors.

Many of you have written to say that you can’t talk about your beliefs with your spouse, partner or friends, and most certainly not your family of origin.

Many of you have written to say there is community in your area: there is no wellness center down the street, no lovely workshop you can easily attend.

And this is not just in America, but all over the world.

Which makes me incredibly grateful to be doing this work at this time. One of the most important aspects of what I offer is my courses, books and podcasts, and the reason these are important, is because they allow you to create your own personal spiritual practice and be a part of spiritual community, no matter where you live.

You aren’t alone, even if you’re living in a place where you feel your beliefs aren’t accepted or recognized. We’re all this together, and there are many, many of us, and it’s still early days.

My work is just one tiny piece: there are so many beautiful teachers, bringing Oneness and Light to the world, and moving us to next stage in human evolution.

The darkness will eventually give way.

Until then, let’s hold Light together, and connect in all the ways we can, from wherever we are.

If you’re in a place where you can open the windows and let the breeze in, where you can wander outside frequently… do this!

Being outdoors changes us.

In summer for example, when we are up and out more: walking, biking, swimming, getting up early with the birds, staying up late and watching the sun set…. all of this expands us.

Our skin needs to breathe real air.
Our bodies need to be in light.

We need to feel the diverse and diffuse vibration that only nature can create.

With the longer days of summer, we experience pure delight, and this is because we can be outside more and more hours of the day.

We do better, as humans, when we honor our bodies, our true animal selves: when we can be in extended periods of contact with nature.

That’s because we are nature too.

Not separate.
Not different.

We are also nature.

Decades ago, when the building I worked in was one of the tallest and newest in Seattle, I was a file clerk for a big insurance company.

My sole duty was to push a metal cart around the office, stop at each of the endless agent desks haphazardly scattered in one enormous room, collect all the files stacked in their out box, and then go file them in the dozens of metal filing cabinets that filled the back room, in alphabetical order.

Arthur comes before Atura
McNab comes after Macnab.
Brighton comes before Broghten.
Calumus comes after Caluminus.

I became an expert alphabetizer, during the nine hours a day, five days a week I did this job.

The work days were all the same: the agents yakked on their phones, and clattered on their typewriters and pounded their staplers and smoked up a storm of cigarettes. Back then, almost everyone smoked, everywhere.

And then, after exactly three hours and forty five minutes, the round, white clock on the wall would do that little clicking sound, and everyone would stand on cue and file out for their break.

15 minutes.
Every four hours.

We punched out with a little card.
Then everyone herded over to the break room with its metal chairs and one free phone, and proceeded to smoke as many cigarettes as they could in 15 minutes.

I lasted about two breaks in that room, yellow with smoke and depression just as acrid, and then I started sneaking away: misfit, miscreant, I hung back from the pack and rode the elevator down to the ground, where I stepped outside and turned my face up into the Seattle rain.

I didn’t last long at that job, expert alphabetizing skills notwithstanding.
I wish I could say that I quit, but I didn’t: I needed the money too much.

Besides, that’s what most jobs were like back then.

But I didn’t go back in the break room, and soon after I did get laid off. Thank you, Universe.

It was decades ago. Those were different times.

But it’s good to remember how silly we were, how stunted, how numbed, how unaware. How we’d put up with something like sitting in room smoking our entire break, our entire life away.

It’s good to look back, and see that we have made some progress.

A while back, I was at my doctor’s for a checkup, and because I have a tendency to show for appointments early, I got to hang out in the waiting room.

Over the years, there’s been a steady upgrade to more comfortable waiting room chairs, better magazines, a complementary coffee bar along the wall.

There’s even music piped in now: it’s not quite country, not quite pop, a soft and steady stream of almost Christian-but-not-quite rock that suits the demographic of our region perfectly.

Just enough to distract you.
Just enough to uplift you.

We all know how music heals, and while this particular music was not the most healing I’ve ever heard… it was better than nothing.

I choose a chair in the corner where I could carve out a little private space, and I settled my body in a relaxed position and closed my eyes and started meditating just a little bit. Whenever I find myself in a situation that has a good chance of being chaotic, such as going to the doctor or the Department of Motor Vehicles, meditation can really help.

I simply detach from outer distractions and pull my awareness in and connect with my guides.
It is a beautiful thing to rest in their steadfast support!
It is wonderful comfort, to connect in!

For here is where we can always find Light, levity, the opposite of gravity, and when you are in a place where things are a little dingy or darker or harder, it’s a great comfort.

So, there I was, in this slightly radiant state, when a man shuffled in.

I say shuffled, because that’s the only way he could walk: his hands were shackled in front of him with handcuffs, there were chains going around his chest, chains around his legs, and he wore an orange T-shirt that read Oregon Correctional Institute and flimsy bedroom slippers: the kind of thing you couldn’t run in, if you tried to run.

On either side of him were two burly security guards, armored up with bullet-proof vests, visible guns, bully sticks and tasers.

Whoa.

The man sat down a few chairs away from me, a guard on either side of him, and immediately, the energy changed in the room.

A titter of shock and fear and disgust rose up from the other folks waiting in the room, and this energy gathered like a wave, building momentum as each person noticed who was now amongst us.

It built and gathered and rolled over to me, the person sitting closest to him, and I just looked at this man who was a convict, and these other two men who were guards, and I just let all that energy go.

I’m not saying I wasn’t a little bit unnerved, because I was.
I was a little bit scared.
I was a little bit worried.
I didn’t want him there.

But I rejected those feelings.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t have room for low vibration in my life.

I most certainly have not cracked this code.

But at the very least, I have been working on, and you also have been working on, this idea of rising up out of low vibration and expanding our Soul selves.

And this means that instead of contracting down into shock and fear and disgust, we expand out. Beyond fear. Into compassion.

Well, as I was thinking about all of this, the man started to bounce his foot in time to the music.

He connected to the music as a way to pass the time, and I went right back into meditation and I connected in to all the Light I could find, and asked it to come into the room.

I wasn’t trying to fix anything, or heal anything, or shift the energy in the room. I just connected into the Light, and hoped the Light would do its thing.

And what happened next was really pretty simple: the energy seemed to smooth out, and when I opened my eyes, I saw that the man now had his eyes closed, and he was in a relaxed state, and he was listening to the music streaming in to the room.

And the other people had gone back to their devices or whatever. And one of the guards picked up Outdoors magazine, and started leafing through it.

We all relaxed, when the Light came in.
We all just calmed down.
We moved out of separation, and back into Oneness.

I want to point out, I didn’t do anything special: I just called upon the Light. You can do this too: anyone can.

We all share energy.
We are all empathic to each other.
When one of us gets upset, the others feel it.
When one of us remembers we are Light, we are all lifted.

We have more control over our shared energy, than we often remember.

​People say to me “I know you’re really busy,” and I have to laugh, because I don’t feel busy.

In the last few years, I’ve committed to living a life in which I don’t feel rushed; I’ve committed to doing my work in a way that feels spacious, unhurried, calm and most of the time, enjoyable.

I have gotten to this place, by letting go of my schedule.

If you looked at my calendar, you’d find I keep my schedule much emptier than most.

There are core things that I show up to: writing and teaching and recording.
There are family things that I show up to: taking care of my kids and kin.
But the rest of it?

In the desire to live in the spacious, unhurried, unrushed way, I needed to let go of a lot of busyness and distraction.

As I stared to pare down the “shoulds” on my calendar, I found that most of the “shoulds” weren’t important.

They were someone else’s idea of how I should fill my time. They reflected what mainstream society said I should do. They stemmed from some old guilt I had about needing to be busy all the time.
I let it all go, and I haven’t missed any of it.

Instead of being distracted, rushed and exhausted by all this constant transition of one thing to the next to the next, I now have big blocks of time in my schedule in which I can have intensive periods of concentration and focus. Intensive and complete attention to what matters most, which right now is my clients and students.

I’m working incredibly hard and with incredible attention.
And at the same time, there’s…

No sense of rush or hurry.
No sense of plowing through a to-do list.
No overwhelm at trying to be in seven places at once.
No slavery to calendar or clock.

If you know what you really want to do in this life, paring down your schedule to nothing else except that, can help you begin to live that life.

If you don’t know what you really want to do in this life, paring down your schedule might help you figure it out.

Several generations ago, the normal route was to get married to one person very young, have children if possible, and stay together until death.

There wasn’t divorce.
There wasn’t living single.
Heck, there wasn’t even birth control.

Back then, our life expectancy was shorter, so we started earlier: we got married young, and had families, and we died young, too. There wasn’t time for more than one partner.

Besides, the survival of the family as a unit depended on staying together; the survival of the tribe, of the lineage, depended on marriage, procreation, monogamy.

So that’s what our ancestors did, faced with the realities they had.
But were our parents, grandparents, great grandparents happy?

Well, from the look on my great-grandparents faces in the one sepia photograph I have of them… well, let’s just say they were scowling.

They did not look happy.
They looked committed.
Not to each other, necessarily.
But to the future generations that they would see to survive.

Nowadays, we’ve got a really different set of evolutionary needs. Overpopulation is real problem in many areas; under population is a problem in others. We’re living longer than we even thought possible in some regions. We have more literacy than we ever had.

We’re opening up to all kinds of new possibilities for gender, sexual orientation, childlessness, single life… many all different ways of living.

So, the question remains: when we take all the restrictions and reasons for marriage and monogamy out of the question, does it still makes sense for humans to go that route?

I think we’re in the process of figuring this out.

For some people, finding the true Beloved isn’t the priority. They prefer a single life that’s fulfilled and rich.

For others, one person also isn’t the path. They may be in several or lots of love relationships over a lifetime.

For others, the deep soul mate is the priority in their lives, and they will move heaven and earth to find that person. It is their quest, their desire and their raison d’être to be with that one true Beloved.

The rules have change, because the reality has changed.

How you live has become a personal choice, with only one thing clear: Your grandparents aren’t going to decide for you.