On the road to an unknown future.

This Monday’s post; ‘We are looking for our new home the WomenLikeMe way’ was a little different from usual. I took the opportunity to report on how John and I are getting on with living our daily life differently.

It seems like a straight forward exercise, reporting; I’ve written lots of reports on people’s lives in my former work as a Careers Consultant.
But I notice that it is not easy at all to report what is going on for me behind the scenes, about the bumps and hurdles I experience along the way, especially as I have not yet safely reached the harbor yet and I have certainly not reached all the wisdom of hindsight yet either. I am still in the middle of the storm so to speak, oscillating between feeling confident and being totally freaked out. I did notice while writing the post that fortunately my confidence is becoming stronger by the day.
However it is still so delightful to have your comments support me in this as you too are honestly addressing your ‘behind the scene’ dilemmas and hurdles.

Joy opened up the inquiry with;

My question of the day to God/the Universe is: where is the love?…

Exactly Joy, you talk a lot about love and yet you are honest enough to share that you still have this question popping up, a question many of us ask often.
And you too oscillate between doubt and the confidence of knowing as you then go on to say;

the Love is right here, within, in Faith, in all that I know…

We have the words alright regarding love, but the hurdle is; are we allowing ourselves to experience this on a daily basis? We obviously are still sabotaging ourselves to fully and always experience the knowing we have.

SuZen shared this hurdle;

…we don’t HAVE problems, we CREATE them – with our fears, insecurities, egos or baggage attached nonsense.

Spot on SuZen, it takes rigor and honest observations to see how I am the obstacle in doing it the WomenLikeMe way and how I am creating the problems. Annoying as it is for both of us; it is good to see I am not alone in this. I hear myself sigh with relief.

Maryse too could see that there is a significant dilemma to address first;

the hardest first step? Figuring out what I really wanted. The ‘intent’ you talk about here.

Oh Maryse, I so agree with you; for so long I could not figure out what I really wanted. Something had to give way first. In two weeks I’m publishing a post on ‘honesty’. I now realize I didn’t have any chance of figuring out what I wanted till I got honest with  myself and my life.

Evita brought up the dilemma of ‘trust’, we all know to trust but as she says, do we really believe that all will work out?

Trusting Source, is an amazing process. It seems like the “right” thing to do, and yet so many of us have trouble doing it. At the end of the day, do we really believe that all will work out?

Well at times I am really hard pressed to belief that WomenLikeMe and getting our piece of land will work out and yet we know the answer to this too, as Evita reminded us;

But there is that space – that place, where we can get to and just let go and trust. And then lo and behold things start to flow, and move at indeed a jaw-dropping pace

The secret to all this – we simply have to be aligned, and listen to all those fine tuned messages that nature/our environment/Source gives us.

And just as with love, are we experiencing alignment and listening on a daily basis? I am getting there but I still have to pay attention because I am still so wired to force, to feel solely responsible to make things happen and to have all these old blah blah blah conversations in my head.

You can see how I appreciate your input for the ‘behind the scenes’ details of my ‘report’. Living my life the WomenLikeMe way has not been that easy. I’ve had to resolve the dilemmas, jump the hurdles, get honest and own up. I’ve had to find out what I want, stop creating problems, learn to trust that all is well and experience love in my daily life; all these huge new learnings took a lot of patience and courage to apply and implement.

Jillian can see the opportunity;

It would so help me calm down and take it easy on myself,

I agree Jillian, I am slowly but surely seeing the huge advantages of becoming congruent in applying these new ways into my life. There is no comparison with how I used to live, my efforts are paying of.
What I do know is that I could never have done this on my own, the power of status quo is huge, the scaremongery that is going on is sometimes too overwhelming, the invisible pull towards the old ways so strong at times.
Only with support it is possible to live life in a different way that is so much more authentic, it is that knowing that is giving me the confidence and the courage to keep inviting you to join me on WomenLikeMe. It is so easy :~) .

Here is the Alpaca jersey /jumper /sweater /pullover

I appreciated all your lovely support from the comments to this week’s post; Love is the real Father Christmas.

The big realization for me was that I find it easy to be love-in-action when I’m not attached to the outcome, when it is something  like working with natural fibers which I innocently love and delight in.
I agree with Megan and Nadia:

We can manifest more easily when we are coming from love and being relaxed.

However have you too noticed you stop being love-in-action when you are not relaxed?
Have you noticed too that when you desperately want things to happen, when you deem it to be an important area of your life; for me they are areas such as money, relationships, and business, being relaxed and love go out of the window and so do the miracles?
Or am I and Megan the only ones?

Megan shared that:

When I’m conflicted, though, and can’t get out of my head, everything is a struggle. Manifesting goodness feels like work.

If I truly love something like my spinning, I can not be dominated by it. But I am dominated by cyberspace and my blog, I am dominated by making our business a success. I am attached to the outcome and fearful of it not working out. As soon as I’m fearful, I’m feeling dominated and I disconnect from synchronicity and the miraculous. Everything becomes hard work and force and I totally lose any sense of ‘when enough is enough’.

For me love is letting go of my Little Voice’s stories about how it never will work out and that I have no idea what to believe.
Love is allowing; allowing things to reveal themselves in the moment. I think this is what Robb is referring to when he writes:

…it was not till I trusted myself to feel love in Nature that I could begin to trust my instincts out here.

Nature is the perfect place to let go of our stories that overshadow love and give ourselves over to feelings of wonder and innocent perception.

I am learning like you that when I listen to my fearful Little Voice that overshadows my love, I make dumb decisions, like deciding to work harder in order to get a result or that driving uninvited onto private property is wrong and I have to get out of there as fast as I can as I am such a fool.
I know like you that when I approach things, people and tasks in my life coming from love, I am able to see the wholesome ‘what is so’ and work with the flow in a very productive and constructive and miraculous way.
My next assignment is to be love-in-action in the areas in which I am seriously attached to the outcome.
Those are the areas that need me to be the change I want to see.

.
I am good most days, I really am.

Most of the time I peacefully accept that there is an invisible bigger plan and that all I have to do is trust. It will all work out so long as I am doing my bit by being love in action.

And then WHAMOO, out of the blue comes my mind, like a screaming banshee to shatter all this peace.

Like it did this week.

Waiting for the next miracle.

For 2 whole days this screaming banshee of a mind would NOT shut up and its voice successfully jolted me out of my peaceful state.
What was the cause of this entire racket?
It suddenly realized that our time here in this glorious Garden of Eden might be coming to an end. The lease ends in September and we have no plans as to what to do next. Not yet anyway.
So all hell broke lose; my mind became totally consumed by the want to have a linear plan about what’s next.
It just wouldn’t stop.
It called me all sort of names; stupid, ignorant, a dreamer and it brought up every weak point that it could possibly find.
Most of all it completely went to town about miracles; it sure had a lot of negative things to say about that.

This tantrum took me completely by surprise, although I do know that the mind tends to do this when it feels insecure. All it seeks is reassurance that all is well and that I CAN perform miracles. Knowing this didn’t make it any less annoying though.
In the past this would have resulted in a number of weeks of upset, nagging John about what we were going to do. I now, thankfully have ammunition to overcome this mind attack on miracles and put it to bed, pronto!

My effective arsenal consists of . . .

Hindsight. I realized that I have hindsight to prove their existence, as the post on miracles shows. It’s hard to deny how miraculously that story unfolded.

Then there are the books.
‘Love without End’ especially, explains intent and miracles in such a way that the mind cannot help but agree and therefore relax. It also works because the explanations speak to the heart as well as the mind.
In this book ‘Love Without End’ which I have mentioned before, Jesus explains many things however I’ll use this particular explanation to make my point.
He uses the life of the author, Glenda Green as an example of how intent and miracles relate to each other.
To give you a bit of a background . . . The book begins with Glenda Green, a well known painter being given the assignment to paint a portrait of Jesus. At first she refuses; who would sit for her as a model of Jesus?
Jesus himself appears to her and offers to be the model himself. So while he patiently sits for her and she paints, they talk and Glenda finds the answers to all her questions and more. I know this might sound a bit far fetched, however the book is a worthy read and very revealing.

Back to my point, which is to explain to you how both my mind and heart can together accept this take on intent and how miracles happen.
In the book Jesus uses Glenda’s life as an example.
Her story unfolds spectacularly similar to mine. In short it goes like this…
Jesus asks Glenda when a real intent for painting showed up in her life. She answers that when she was 3 years old she would simply drool over the books of famous painters.
Notice the similarity here; I drooled over gardens.
Then Jesus continues, did you know there and then that you were going to be a painter. Glenda said; No, I did not.
At a young age I didn’t know either that I wanted to get out of Holland to live closer to nature, I just liked gardens.
Then he asks her to observe what happened next in her life.
Glenda tells him that her mother, having noticed her interest and enthusiasm, organized art classes. Consequently at school she won awards for her art although at that time she had more interest in horses. She still did nothing to intentionally pursue a career as a painter. She just went along living her life; mind you she did NOT refuse the art classes nor deny the affirming comments from others regarding her talent.
Jesus points out that the Universe was responding to her initial expressed intent; her interest in paintings by ensuring that her mother send her to art class and ensuring that she was awarded at school for her art talents.
The Universe too responded to my great interest in gardens by showing me the one on the way to school, by having me experience long camping holidays in nature and by having that picture of New Zealand appear.

Jesus goes on to explain that your intent or your dreams are like seeds, planted at some point in your life.
All you have to do is, every so often acknowledge them and water them.
In the meantime other people and the universe will contribute to their growth as well.
And there you have it. That is it in a nutshell.

Looking back on what has happened to me, there are striking similarities to the book.
I too had a dream and intent as a little girl.
I must have unwittingly kept the seed alive by having long holidays. However during the rest of the time it was buried while I was busy with other things like studying, then earning a living, getting married until the Universe put that photo of New Zealand right under my nose.
I have been lucky though.
I insisted, each year on at least 7 consecutive weeks camping. Spending this amount of time in the outdoors must have kept my heart strong enough. It meant the universe and others were still aware of my passion and I was able to recognize opportunities when they came along and to go for them.

The book made it very clear that once the seed is planted, we don’t need external forces to make it grow.
When the seed is a desire straight from the heart and fuelled by love, it will always be aligned with God’s will. It will always fit into the bigger plan and bingo, a miracle will occur, in its own good time.
Once it is planted, all that needs to happen is to jolt that desire awake every now and then by either being still enough to have your emotions be touched by a visual image, music or a movie or by choosing to do an activity that is fuelled by that desire such as me and my camping for example.

My mind absolutely went quiet when once, yet again, it had been reminded of all this.
The explanations in the book are so good.
They certainly help me bridge the gap between the knowing and the do-ing; to have life happen in a way that is joyful, peaceful and free from fear, struggle and force.

Once more I trust that another miracle is just around the corner while keeping my mind’s tantrums at bay.
It is also encouraging to have more and more people telling me I am not alone in this. So when you do, it certainly makes a difference.

.
I am sick of the world’s boom and bust way of operating and these stupid recessions.

Let's go for life and dare to live; like this sailing I did in the Southern Ocean on a replica of an ancient Pilot Cutter.

Just look at how this recession paralyzes everybody with fear and look at what it is also doing to us as a whole.
We have become fearful at work AND slaves to the money for goodness sake. Our personal greatness and indigenous power is constrained by our preoccupations with meager survival issues. Surely we can do better than that!

Marianne Williamson keeps stressing too, this is NOT us, this is not how we are meant to be living. We are powerful co-creators, capable of living magnificent lives; with a partner like God we don’t have to be restricted by fear or smallness, playing a game of just surviving.
With the mighty God in tow or with God leading the way, we should be in for the ride of our life and not on this piddly little path we are presently on.

But the problem that’s hung around for a long time now is ‘I would really like to but I can’t’.
Given this problem there was NO way I could co-create with God or anyone else for that matter because . . . I could not trust.
I could not trust things to work out, I did not trust things I couldn’t see like God and I could not trust  other people.
I actually did not trust anything or anybody, God included, who or whatever he, she or it was.

My mind always went to ‘Give me one reason why I should trust this?”
Big corporate bosses turned out to be liars.
I’ll let the holy churches’ skeletons speak for themselves.
I have never seen politicians do anything, even the well meaning ones.
My mother could not prevent me from being used by that selfish mean girlfriend.
The so called trustworthy banks lose your money just like that.
Even past partners did not always have my best interest at heart.

I couldn’t even trust my own mind; it used to fall for every advertised mental gimmick you can think of.
It greedily and ignorantly latched on to those passive income schemes.
It would rather choose denial when companies promised life-balance options to their staff and it refused to see that these options only worked for people who didn’t have a life to balance.

So it is no mystery why I did not know how that alien thing called trust tasted, how it felt and how to do it. But I did trust one thing. To become like Marianne Williamson, a co-creator with God, I’d need to actually give it a go and suss it out.

I figured I’d start with discovering ‘Why’. Why trust in the first place.
Apparently, there is this ‘invisible bigger plan which I am part of but will never see’ that requires me at certain times to stop interfering, to sit back knowing that all is well and that everything will work out just fine. All I need to do is trust and let God and the universe do their thing.
I wouldn’t dare think of interfering with a top chef cooking his signature dish, would I?
And I wouldn’t dare spoil a surprise get away weekend, would I?

So trust is vital for a new way of living. Living a life
. . . that will let me override the recessions and live abundantly and prosperous regardless;
. . . that will let the mighty God be my partner;
. . . that will let the Law of Attraction go to work and create a new, peaceful world order where there will be enough for everybody.

Oh boy, was it hard to learn to trust the unknown.
It was like asking me to jump out of a multi-story burning building, unsure as to how I was going to land.
Necessary but oh so frightening.

No wonder my mind went looking for assurance. It just refused to let me jump that easily, even after finding out all the Why’s.
It kept searching for more and more explanations that could appease it, that could make sense of this trusting and attraction business.
It simply wanted a very reassuring knowing before it could even begin to consider any do-ing.

I am ever so grateful for ‘Love Without End’ by Glenda Green, ‘The Trance of Scarcity’ by Victoria Castle, ‘The Science of Getting Rich’ by Wallace D Wattles and ‘The Ringing Cedar Series’ by Vladimir Megre.
The writings in each of these wonderful books, deeply touched my heart and made it rejoice, shouting, ‘YES, YES!’
Their content fuelled my heart, made it strong and confident, but more significantly they spoke to my mind as well.

In short here’s what all these books say;

I can finally begin to bridge the gap between knowing and do-ing.
I can finally dare to ignore recessions, to live rurally while building a brand new internet business and to live ‘full out’.
It is with my present knowing born from the explanations I’ve read that I can trustingly dare to egg on my youngest daughter to stand firm, and not give up on her aspirations even if appearances would imply otherwise, with this recession, job scarcity and all.

Yes, I dare to do it.
I dare because I am finally learning to trust God, the Universe and the invisible plan. And I also have John and Ann-Marie to back me up and anybody else who dares for that matter.

.

I often wonder if we are all children of God.
If Jesus is one, then I am one too.

Then . . . if he can do miracles I can too, right?

Well let’s see if I have?

I grew up in concrete-ville; no garden, only apartment buildings. And I hated it. I remember vividly that as a child I often drooled over gardens.

I did that from a very young age and haven’t stopped since.

If eating flowers is not a miracle, what is?

When I was 9 years old my walk to school took me through a more affluent area where the houses had gardens. There was one particular garden that stood out from the rest so I always stopped by to take a good look at it. I had to stand on my tippy toes so I could peek over the hedge and when I had, there it was my beautiful garden!
It had a white house with a straw roof and a lawn sprawling all the way to the waters edge.
If I close my eyes now I can still see it. Surrounding the grass was this band of color, a whole border full of blazing flowers.
In those moments I entered a magical place; I just stood there dreaming until I snapped out of it and then I had to run to catch up with the others.

When I was an adult I drooled over nature when on holiday in France, Spain or Italy.
Their fields of sunflowers and lavender still transported me into another magical world.
As I still lived in an apartment building, I’d quench my thirst for a garden at home with an indoor forest of house plants but that somehow didn’t do it for me.

Then one day I heard a knock on the door and there stood two men. They enquired as to whether we would consider selling the house. I was ready to move on yet I had not started actively looking for another house.
This is the stuff you dream off and it was happening to me.
A petrol company wanted the two corner sections to build a petrol station. So I said sure if you give me two weeks to look around so I can set a price. They agreed, so I went looking for a place that I loved, that would be in the right price range.

No.
That 9 year old little girl’s vision to live in a magical garden must have remained embedded in the universe somewhere.
By chance we found out that friends of friends were looking to rent out their amazing property, as they were going overseas for a year. This was totally unexpected and it turned out that the property was just right for us. So we now get to play in this huge garden with its little orchard and fresh water river that runs alongside the house. And we can even swim in this one!

From our city garden to ......

.................. this.