If you get to a place of abundance and peace in your life, you know two things.

One: your situation could shift at any time, and this is okay and you’re okay with it.
If you get to abundance and peace, you’ve moved beyond the understanding that we can ever be truly “safe” or “secure."
Life just isn’t like that, everything is always changing.

Two: you’re going to be asked for things by victims.

To be a victim is to think that the world owes you something, or that other people can have it but you can’t, or that you can’t create it on your own.

It’s being a victim of your own mental state, regardless of the particular situation you’re in.

When you’re dealing with victims, there are a few things to consider.
If the victim is a child, or a person who is hungry or abused or mentally ill, of course you’re going to help. This is basic human compassion.

But if the victim is a regular person with regular opportunities, who’s decided to be a victim because it’s less scary that trying to make his/her own way, you might decide to not help.
Depending on the situation, this can also be a compassionate response.

We cannot fix another person.
We cannot help another person see the Light. 
Each soul must walk the path of their own awakening. 

Sometimes we have to get out of the way, so the Universe can do its work.

You probably know the old wive’s tale that if you hang garlic around a baby’s neck, that vampires, or illness, or whatever kind of evil, won’t bother it?

It feels like much of the time, we’re still holding on to a lot of old superstitions and misbeliefs, today.

The 60s and 70s were times of great expansion for the new age movement, but much of what was touted as real during those decades, was over simplified, or just plain wrong. A lot of it was just plain superstition, created by people where were coming out of the 50s into a more free era, and needed something to hold on to.

If you’re still reading or following folks who were popular in the 60s, 70s and so forth, you might check those belief systems, and see if that’s what you really think, now. We’ve been evolving pretty fast.

There are lots of new voices, and new ways of thinking that are well beyond Law of Attraction, the Secret and so forth. There are lots of new ways of thinking that aren’t fear based, or based on a need for protection from evils spirits.

Take a look at what you’re reading and following, and just seek the fear: of there’s fear there, of doing it wrong, of being in lack, of succumbing to mysterious forces… you might want to let that belief system go.

We’re in a different place now. The old rules, the archaic superstitions of the early new age, useful as they were for that time… they no longer apply.

We’ve moved beyond. 

I read a lot of surf magazines; I always have. I did a lot of boogie boarding as a kid, and I love to read about the ocean, and waves, and I love the way surf culture is so fearless in this very humble way.

One of the companies that runs ads in the magazines is Outerknown; it’s run by Kelly Slater, and it’s about creating men’s fashion in a truly sustainable. Kelly talks about how he didn’t know how hard it would be when he started; this true sustainability.

It’s about doing something that’s not at outer limits, or that pushes a known edge, but that’s at our outer known limits: the limits we don’t even know we have yet. And pushing that boundary.

I like to think of working in spiritual intuition that way, or working in creativity, or working in invention, or all the ways that we can be original, and see things in a new way.

We’re working in the outerknown: that place where we’re pioneers not just heading out west, but pointing our wagons to the west that’s beyond the west; the destination haven’t even dreamed of yet, and maybe doesn’t even exist.

We don’t know we’re headed. And yet we’re still going. 

When I was a kid, we lived in Hawaii every summer. My dad worked there. At one of the places we lived, there was a group of elders who met every morning in the park by the ocean, and did exercises in a big circle.

I could see them from our lanai, and to my young eyes, they were the most leathery group of old people I’d ever seen. Most of them were over 70, a lot were over 80 and they did this exercise circle that involved stretching and clapping and singing and shouting, and something that looked like the hokey pokey, but it probably wasn’t.

At the end of the hour, they all whooped and hollered and took off their workout clothes and ran into the ocean. I’d like to say that they were wearing bathing suits, but I’m not sure they were. Some of them wore their underwear, and lots of them wore nothing at all. So it was, in Hawaii in that decade.

I’d like to suggest that those “old” people were a whole lot younger than I was then, or than most of us are now.

Age isn’t a limitation; it’s the gift of the time we need, to learn how to live without self consciousness.  

If you live with others, either in a family, extended family, with roommates or a partner, you know that there is a delicate dance between independence and expectations.

It’s interesting to take stock now and then, at how things are set up: what the group expects, what the group likes or doesn’t like, what individuals in the group are more similar in personality style, or more different.

Looking at everything, not just the division of chorse or expenses, but everything, right down to who’s inhabits what room and how the furniture is arranged, can be eye-opening. Sometimes there is more private space for people who need private space, just by shifting the way your space is organized. Often getting rid of things that don’t work, opens up possibilities for living in a new way.

Especially if you’ve lived in a space for a long time, it’s easy to get habitual about things; but if you start by looking at your house or apartment as a new space, a fresh slate to work with, then you begin to see new possibilities.

Take a look at your living space, and imagine how you might do it differently, if you were just moving in.

Think about how you want to live, not about how you’ve been living out of routine.