Until we meet again.

YES, I am quitting, I have to walk my talk.

Life for me is being Love-in-Action. Life for me is being in-integrity and authentic. Life is about paying attention and adding value. Life for me is being congruent and doing what I love. Life for me is connecting with Source and all that is, which includes you.  
WomenLikeMe is about all those things as well.

I have spend 7 years cleaning up my environment so my conscious and unconscious mind with all its unserving beliefs had a chance to align and I had time to learn to act from Love and integrity in all things I do.   
In those years I focused on the incongruencies in my life and the toxins of my own mind that had me behave in those out-of-integrity, destructive and fearful ways.

I learned that unconscious minds do not give up that easily and that we all have an incredible invisible power steering our lives without us knowing. Our unconscious mind is an incredible amount bigger than our conscious mind. Our conscious brain is the size of a pea in comparison with our unconscious mind. 
The fact is that we all need our huge unconscious mind, we cannot function without it. It let us drive the car far more effectively than our conscious mind can; just remember how difficult it was when you were consciously learning to drive one. 
Our unconscious mind in and by itself is not wrong though; it would have worked fine if it was programmed in a non-toxic environment that had pristine original divine thoughts about life as a foundation. Unfortunately it is not, it is programmed with a whole lot of crap that unconsciously steers me the wrong way on many many occasions.

The fallacy of changing your beliefs is that you cannot change anything when you continue to live unprotected  in the very toxic environment that made your unconscious ’sick’ in the first place; hence my interest in detoxing my mind AND environment together.

So far so good, I have come a long way and living in Nature as I now do has accelerated the process hugely. 
BUT … in comes cyberspace. For the past seven years John and I have keenly worked on the WomenLikeMe project. 
We have gained quite a wisdom of what is going on, we live it.
We took our time and the result is a huge understanding. Non toxic places do that to you, expand your conscious knowing. 
WomenLikeMe went on line fourteen months ago to add value to everyone who felt life could be lived differently. 
Wilma’s blog was born with the intention to give you a taste of what WomenLikeMe, John and I had to offer and inspire you to make changes to your life in the non-toxic environment of the program.
Hopeful that we would change our code of conduct to a respectful one, to honor our heart-centered selves in this new environment, I set out to connect with other people.

I am sad to say, I only have been able to do so with a pitiful few. 
For two years I have spend most of my days behind the computer, to find that the brave new world of cyberspace is not any different from the old one.
It appears to me that most connecting happens at the level of swapping business cards at networking events, I give you mine if you give me yours. Nobody pays any real attention to the messages or makes real connections for other than the WIIFM reasons. 
It is all about quantity and very little about quality.
People read posts, leave appreciative comments but very seldom actually share in their comments about the changes they have made, leaving me wondering what actually happened. 
On my own blog very few people took the trouble to contact me personally and clarify further what I was saying. Very few people actually showed any interest in themselves, took their growth or what was on offer serious enough to further explore what was shared on the blog.

It made me pay attention. It made me feel uncomfortable because I noticed cyberspace started to have a toxic effect on me. I too even have left comments that were meaningless, I always left my computer after each day with questions about my motives and the quality of what I was doing.

Despite years of working on congruency, cyberspace in its quest for quantity and superficialness had me go backwards in seconds, leaving me at the end of the day out of sorts and unhappy with myself. 
How to stay congruent and grow the blog?

I have not found an answer. I don’t know.
What I do know is that I do not like who I have become in cyberspace as I set out to grow the readership and to make WomenLikeMe a thriving business and a vibrant community.  
What I also know is that I do not like what I see in cyberspace. Most bloggers are meaninglessly socializing, hardly going for any depth and hardly paying any real attention to sustainable change. 
All I see is a lot of noise.

I have to protect myself; I have come too far to contaminate myself again with toxic noise and little congruency.  
You, me and our hearts are too precious to me.
So as I do not know how to do it in-integrity, I quit blogging and John and I have closed WomenLikeMe.
I continue to live in paradise in peace and love, looking after my conscious and unconscious mind and being careful what I am feeding it. I trust that the vibes will reach you that way.

The time for our solid self development program is obviously not yet come. 
I admired the success of Leo Babauta, he is apparently genuinely getting through and yet his online course is NOT about self development and living congruently but how to make money with blogging. Go figure.

While I quit being present in cyberspace, I extend an invitation to all of you who did touch me and whom I have touched.
I am grateful for your sharing and connectedness. I am still available if you have any questions about my blog posts or for me personally; I love you to write me an email.
I invite you to read my blog posts again as they have a lot of content that can support you in your confusion about the toxins in your life.

Until we meet again, may you know that you already live in heaven on earth. 
May you know all is well and that you are provided for.
May you know we are all connected and safe.

May you know we are in transition and we are to fulfill our role as powerful collaborative co-creators with Nature, Nature whose role we have grossly ignored.

May you be Love-in-Action always.

Much Love.

Courageously choosing for this environment has done miracles for me. Pukeko birds on our driveway.

Learning to live a sustainable different  lifestyle is a scary business and paying attention to the environment you are in, is imperative if you really want to learn and become the change you want to see.

Why am I saying this?
Because we all have book cases full of books with exciting content about how we can live a joyful and healthy life; so why then are many of us NOT living that promised healthy and free life?
Or when we are seriously trying to change are we having a joyful exciting ride or do we find ourselves engaged in a fearful and difficult business,  often taking one step forward and going back two?

So what is going on?

To explain that let me introduce how learning works based on ‘The Biology of Belief’ by Bruce Lipton Ph.D.

Bruce explains that our environment is crucial to learning and he developed this concept from his work in cell biology.

Lets see how this applies with a story about my learning and my environment. 
Here I am, 15 years ago, wanting to change my life because what I see around me no longer feels that good.
I do a self development course at Landmark Education and learn to observe my dramatic, victim stories I create about my life. The environment on the course is lovely, everybody is open and willing and supportive. It feels great and the course content makes a lot of sense. I feel excited and I am determined to apply the learning in my daily life and change the relationship with my then husband. I can see what a difference it would make. 
After the course I drive home to my husband who is  very hostile towards these self development courses. I arrive all delighted with the prospect of a better relationship but do not get a chance to share. He complains about what happened during the weekend while I was ‘having fun’, the kids played up and before I know it, I am uptight and irritated and reverting back into my dramatic story that life is hard and nobody understands me. 
I know that I am not saying anything new here; we all have had these experiences of getting excited about something we ‘learned’ only to have the balloon deflated before we have even paid off the course costs on our credit card.

Despite my desire to make a difference in my life and my relationship I couldn’t and here is the biology explanation that shows how come me and my learning had no chance.  
According to Bruce Lipton our body is a community of cells whose functions are influenced by stimuli from their environment.   
During the course, my community of cells (my body) was responding to a very nurturing and friendly environment and therefore very receptive to taking information in. As I was relaxed, energy was available to the cells in my forebrain to process this information.  
After the course I leave that optimum environment that stimulated the information receptive cells in my forebrain and on the drive home I cannot help but start to anticipate with dread the welcome I expect I am going to get from my husband. 
These anticipatory thoughts are influencing my cells. My cells respond to the thoughts of an anticipated hostile environment by going in defensive mode to survive the onslaught, like they would do on a battleground. They take the energy away from my forebrain as the stress hormones get ready for battle by stimulating the blood flow to the hindbrain where the life-sustaining reflexes to deal with fight and flight behavior reside. 
While it is useful that stress signals in real life emergency situations repress the processing conscious mind in favor of the survival reflexes of the hindbrain, in this type of daily life ‘battle’ situation these reflexes come at an unwanted cost . . . they diminish my cognitive ability to retain and communicate my new learned insights. 
While the stress hormones are doing their job, they rob ME of  MY ability to think about my insights and how to apply them when I come home. Thus within a few hours of leaving the course I am back to behaving as I did before, reacting to my environment and with the cognition of my new learnings quickly fading from consciousness.

That is why it is important to notice that most of our daily environments do NOT support us to retain and apply new insights; as a rule of thumb when doing things differently we find ourselves on a battlefield of resistance with the status quo.
That means to learn and to do things differently, most of us have to deal with the scary business of facing our battlefields and that is where courage and programs like WomenLikeMe come in.

To have learning be effective means that you have to get up the courage to move on from those battlefields, your current hostile environments and who wants to do that?
Addressing hostile environments is very scary and difficult and therefore I have seldom seen anybody courageously change their life from choice, have you? 
But I have seen plenty of stories in the blogosphere about woman getting a kick in the backside by a life threatening or life altering circumstances such as cancer, relationship break-ups that does act as the catalyst to change their lives for the better.

Once John and I understood this connection between environment and learning, we have been quite radical with our change of environment and reducing our stress hormones. But I must admit that has not been easy. 
You all have read about my struggle with voluntarily giving up my work environment and a stressful marriage. 
The cold turkey shift from the city to rural living also had its moments for me.
When I say environment I do not only refer to toxic relationships, work environment and food though. I also refer to our own internal Little Voice, our beliefs about money and our out-of-integrity way of being. Most of my blog posts are pointing out the diversity of the toxic environments we need to pay attention to.

Because understanding the tension between learning and environmental stress is so important, our first concern at WomenLikeMe is to create awareness that learning requires you to look at the wholesome ‘what is so’ of your circumstances. Courageously taking action based on what you observe is a must for developing a strong basecamp.

When learning you have to, like Tess says, be fearlessly bold.

As Gloria Steinem said; “Any woman who chooses to learn to behave like a full human being should be warned that the armies of the status quo will treat her as something of a dirty joke . . . She will need her sisterhood.”
I agree and I would add; ”as long as most of our environments are hostile to change, learning takes courage but you knew that, didn’t you.”

Only courage will bring change.
Only courage will allow you to face your environment and its hostility to your learning.

Choosing supportive environments like WomenLikeMe is key here.

Learning to do things differently is YOUR responsibility,
MINE is to support you.

THIS is the food nature provides for us, if we let it. Our broccoli.

Last Monday my post was about how; ‘I believe in the power of the individual, YOU‘ where I suggested that “Our current crisis was created by each of us acting independently and establishing a personal and professional lifestyle that was environmentally deaf, dumb and blind.”

Change is upon us, the Aquarius era is dawning, there is no stopping that but Erin observed;

We are in transition, yet we don’t want to be. It seems safer if everything remains the same and we know what to expect.

Evita Ochel too can see the resistance to change;

I know that our world does not support “different” – in fact it doesn’t just ignore it, it makes whoever is trying to be different and enact a change know that it is not welcome.

I agree with Erin and Evita that the status quo is making change most unwelcome, however that doesn’t stop any of us from taking our own responsibility and acting as Evita does;

I have found that what has helped me the most is establishing personal standards. I know what I can do and want to do to help myself and the Earth, and I intend to follow through no matter what the occasion, no matter what others say.

Sure we can go off the deep end and take things to the extreme level, but it is not about that. As long as we silence the noise and listen within, listen with our hearts, our actions will always be for the good of all.

Megan Bord too is in action;

But it had to start with each of us first.

The same goes for being the change we wish to see in the world. It can seem daunting at times, but I know that the journey of a thousand miles begins with one step. ONE STEP! I can do that.

I can eat less (leaving a smaller environmental footprint). I can love more (causing love to multiply and spread throughout our world). I can laugh, dance, forgive, and do all sorts of “one step at a time” things each day to initiate change on a global level. And when people see me living successfully in a more enlightened way, they, too, want to follow suit.

Yes Megan, we can all do that; in fact that is the greatest thing we can do, take the next step, set an example and be in action for the good of all.

In my Monday post I also said;

For a human soul to function on earth, it must unite with Nature -in essence our soul forms a partnership with Nature. … we have a sacred mutual partnership.

In spite of the disconnection and alienation with Nature that the status quo currently practices, many of you already know of Nature’s intelligence and how you get your questions answered in the company of Nature. Tess agreed with what Joy had to say;

Every door has been revealed to me through my time in solitude in nature. I may sit under a tree and breathe in its essence, walk along a path, sail the ocean, explore an island, walk near the surf; if I have only a moment I may sit outside and look at the sky. The Answer is within, always, and my time in nature allows that to be revealed to me.

I am thrilled to see how we are all working towards change, one step after the other. I am also becoming aware that our context is very important and I’m realizing this more and more especially now I currently learn to work with the techniques that Machaelle Small Wright teaches on how to communicate directly with Nature’s intelligence. I’m actively and consciously co-creating my life with the Nature Spirits and I have created a context that is allowing and supporting that, how cool is that.

The power of good food. Nature provides, believing in us. Some of our winter lettuces.

When I say that we and the earth are in transition, I am not telling you or myself anything new.
I have NOT resisted the words below BUT instead of propelling me into action, they had always left me confused, frustrated and guilty because what was I supposed to DO?

These are the words that used to get me so worked up;

I believe in the power of the individual and I believe in the importance of our acting responsibly as individuals without waiting for the right leader or group. In actuality, it’s the power of the individual that leads the way.
Every one of the current critical problems has been created by us humans over a relatively short period of time. By “us” I don’t mean large groups or global populations acting in concert. This disaster has been created by individuals acting independently. By “us” I am referring to you, me, our spouses, each of our children, our grandfathers, our grandmothers, our cousins… Our current crisis was created by each of us acting independently and establishing a personal and professional lifestyle that was environmentally deaf, dumb and blind.

You can stay deaf, dumb and blind or become open to the many wonderful new things that are here for you to hear, talk about and see.  
(Quoted from Perelandra; Garden Workbook II by Machaelle Small Wright.)

Okay, I get from these words that I have a part to play but the frustrating bit was always; “WHAT WONDERFUL NEW THINGS AM I SUPPOSED TO BELIEVE AND HOW DO I IMPLEMENT THEM WITHOUT BEING LOCKED UP.” The world I live in, my current context sure does NOT encourage new beliefs or new behavior.

Like many of you shared in your comments, I too was at a loss how to strengthen my backbone and how to apply all this new knowledge in a consistent and sustainable manner in my daily life. I do want to become the change I want to see in every area of my life. I do want to fearlessly follow my desires and never worry about money ever again, to be the Love that I AM, but how to do that consistently and intelligently in a world that is NOT supportive was the biggest mystery to me for many many years. What do I DO in my daily life and where is it all heading to? How does a transformed world look?

I have found the doorway I have been looking for. I have received a peep of what is possible, what a new world can look like and how the new beliefs and new behavior fit into that.

This full explanation is thanks to ‘The Ringing Cedar‘ books which by revealing the ancient Vedic Culture show me what a transformed world can look like. The ‘Perelandra Co-creative Nature Science‘ books explain the role of Nature in all areas of our life.

In the words of T.H. Huxley, to find the doorway it takes this;

Sit down before fact like a child and be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss nature leads or you shall learn nothing.

One incredible new thing I believe and that makes so much sense once I had  learned to sit down like a child is this . . . . . .

For a human soul to function on earth, it must unite with Nature -in essence our soul forms a partnership with Nature. 
Nature is intimately linked with us when ’souls and matter unite in Human Forms’ and we as Human Beings are intimately linked with Nature; we have a sacred mutual partnership. 
For at least the last two thousand years we have betrayed our sacred covenant with Nature and in doing so we have betrayed ourselves.
As a result we are no longer living in Form how we are intended to, we are grossly out of shape.
We are out-of-integrity, we are dishonest, we are fearful, we are enslaved to money; we pollute our physical and mental environment and we are in danger of taking Nature down with us. 
To get back into shape we need to re-establish our partnership with Nature and learn once more how to become equal, reliable partners.
As long as we are out-of-integrity, we cannot form a partnership, clean up our current mess or enter the Aquarius era gracefully as dignified adapters.
The planetary shift is going to happen, we cannot stop the change but if we resist rather than collaborate, we will be suffering as we kick and scream every inch of the way.

This is not necessary, we can handle and even support the collapse and subsequent change of our current reality with dignified action. We can strengthen our backbone so we can do what we know is right while changing our current out-of-integrity behavior into one that makes us equal partners in the clean-up and change.

For months I have subtly invited you to join WomenLikeMe to get back into-integrity but I am compelled to take a bolder stand.
We women need to learn how to take responsibility for the change. We need to learn what to DO.
I cannot let you be deaf, dumb and blind; in the context of WomenLikeMe you can sustain the change to the new reality with dignity and know-how. Therefore . . . .  I shout

Registration to WomenLikeMe is now open and if you are serious, fill in the form and join.

Start this week.

For $3 a day, the price of a latte, learn to sustain your heart.

I am fine with you ignoring me but I am NOT fine about the consequences.

My daughters, your children, grandchildren and I need to see change, sooner rather than later.

Therefore I will keep inviting you to use WomenLikeMe to sustain the change you want to see.

Register, be Love-in-Action.

I believe in YOU.

This adventurous stray rooster following his calling for a new home, obviously has faith.

In Monday’s post; ‘Having faith to LET GO‘ I  suggested that pursuing our desires was more than our childlike desires of wanting new things for Christmas or a romantic holiday in the sun, but something as Megan Bord and Jan Lundy recognized; it is our soul calling us to act, calling us to have the faith to LET GO and LEAP.

Aysel in her usual eloquent way named the dilemma for many of us when she explained her situation;

I loved the “half-pregnant” analogy – and that’s exactly my problem. I long for change yet I am terrified to leave the security and comfort I currently have. Happy or not – as long as secure….this life stance implanted in me by my parents is not easy to outgrow. So I set one foot towards change but the other foot stays motionless until I feel it’s absolutely safe to take this step. Waiting for the right circumstances which might never come. We can engage in this self-deceit that we are in the preparation stage, keep finding excuses for delays, but the sad truth is many of us never have the guts to complete the step. Defeated we crawl back into our dark cave thinking “maybe next time…” And of course there are always “circumstances” to blame, never ourselves.

Deborah Wall too identified this issue of testing the waters with one foot but not jumping in;

I’m sloshing my toe in the well of change,

However suZen is quite clear;

I don’t think they [taking leaps] are optional. What kind of journey would you have when your days are done if not for the markers of a leap here and there?

Good call SuZen, not leaping is not an option if we pay attention to the emptiness of the ’safe’ alternative. The Exception came through with a very practical query;

I am not sure how we learn to quiet the noise and hear our calling – and then find the backbone to live that path…

Both the question of how to find your calling and the backbone for living that path is what is on offer at WomenLikeMe. One thing is for sure as Belinda Munoz recognizes; we won’t find our calling as long as we keep looking outside ourselves and desire to copycat others;

It’s funny that you mention copycatting someone else’s steps. It’s an alluring concept if you believe that life can be boiled down to a formula; a one-size-fits all mold of sorts. But we all know deep down, even if on a superficial level we’d like to believe otherwise, that each life is unique. Each calling is unique. We each have to figure out what works for us, regardless of what so-called experts say will work for everyone.

So to get back to TE’s query, I agree with Belinda that; “we each have to figure out what works for us”. This is where WomenLikeMe is uniquely different from learning from “so-called experts”. You are your own expert and WomenLikeMe gives you a framework for experiencing your own ‘calling’ and the backbone to keep going when it gets tough.

Look how it is for Peggy;

I’ve been so busy following my calling that I’ve lost track of time…even now, I’m up and wide awake because being, doing, and creating the rest of my life is not tiring.

As I leap into the great unknown, I have no sense of “fear” ~ those niggling thoughts of self-doubt and anxiety are no where to be heard from right now. Maybe I scared them away?

Yes Peggy, there may be considerable truth in what you say; you scared your fears away with your unstoppable love for what you are doing. Fear cannot survive when love-in-action is what you do.