By Their Fruits…

I lived in England at the time of Princess Diana’s death. Before she died, it seemed the majority of the country loved to criticize her. The daily newspapers in England are classic for being bitchy about everyone and everything, and Princess Diana was always the target of their toxic affection.

It seemed she could do nothing right in their eyes, and even on the morning of her death, there were papers printed and out for sale that weren’t quick to the mark reporting on her death. Instead they continued to slag her off, making her out to be so terrible because she and the Prince of Whales weren’t together and she had a boyfriend. (They seldom cared that the Prince carried on a relationship with another woman throughout his marriage to Diana. -Yes, the one he later married after her death.)

That morning, August 31st, I bought two papers. One slagging her off, and the other reporting her death as a tragedy. I have never been so bugged in my life by kind words, as I was in the weeks following Diana’s death. The newspapers did an about-face, and all started reporting how wonderful Princess Diana was. They spoke of the good she did in the world, they shared stories from her friends and how much she was adored. They reported on her volunteer work sharing her beautiful spirit with children. Even stories that had always been absent from the papers about intimate encounters she had with hospital patients were shared.

The hypocritical nature of the papers annoyed me as much as if she were my family. This woman who oozed classiness and a beautiful heart, was only finally acknowledged as a huge loss to the world AFTER all the years of belittling her publicly.

I saw and heard many times how the general public took the view of the media, and then did it again after her death. They just repeated what they were reading and being told as though it was their own opinion.

I sat and watched one of the most viewed events in history: her funeral procession the morning of September 6^th 1997. I was completely unable to contain my tears of sadness and anger as I watched her two sons walk following her coffin for one hour and forty-seven minutes through London. Someone who did so much good in the world, and was unjustly vilified at her every turn, was now gone. Every forked tongue suddenly turned to velvet hands, caressing her memory in total hypocrisy.

My point is slightly overshadowed by my opinion and the details of these events. So, I have to be overly clear.

I have only one point to make.

By their fruits ye shall know them!

Make up your own mind about people. See them for who they are, not for who you are TOLD they are. Watch their fruits, don’t follow the crowd, allowing yourself to be led without real knowledge. We are given plenty of fruit to go by… Pay attention to the fruit.

What is Brave?

Sometimes I have so many things to write about, I have no one-thing I can concentrate on. I’ve written numerous blog posts over the last couple of weeks, and nothing seems finished enough to share. With this being the case I thought I would share something from a book I’ve written that still needs an ending.

I think this short excerpt is worth sharing because so often we feel that being “brave” is some magical state that we wish we could attain, but tell ourselves it’s because we are weak that we can’t reach it.  I had my own experience with “being brave” in deciding to divorce; which meant being alone and feeling nothing like brave. Here's what I wrote:

            Everybody kept saying to me “Wow, you’re so brave”. I was like, “Brave? Really? I don’t think so.” Every step was only a baby step, so what I was doing didn’t feel like brave. Because of this, I’m going to redefine it.

            Brave is not the bare-handed lion-fighting battle where you sense no fear. It’s not the determination to conquer and clash, coming out on top victorious. What I felt as I decided to make life altering changes, was weak.

            These changes left me vulnerable and alone, experiencing feelings of loss, guilt, selfishness, emptiness, neediness, and thoroughly incomplete. Brave is not what I felt as I struggled while friends and family called it that.

            If doing what you feel you have to do, while surviving as a blubbering mess who can’t feel enough hope for the future to get out of bed and be cheerful, or successful in anything more than a cup of coffee, well then I guess I am brave.

            My new perspective on brave is allowing yourself to feel it; feel everything. Cry your heart out. Sit on the floor in a pathetic ball of mess. Wander your house in pajamas trying to think of something you can concentrate on for more than 5 minutes. Make two cups of coffee in an hour and eat spoonfuls of peanut butter if that’s all you can manage for food.
            Swimming in it, dealing with it, LIVING through it, is what brave is. Brave is just surviving and coming out on the other side. It’s nothing to do with standing tall or being strong. I’m getting to that form of brave, but really, once all the hard part has passed, standing tall and being strong doesn’t feel like brave either. It just feels like me.

I’m Giving Up…

…on things I should have given up on long ago.

If you read my last post, you heard me say that I’m noticing a lot more about energy. I’m looking at so much around me these days in respect to energy, what people are doing, whether they are giving or taking, and whether or not they even realize.

I’ve seen energy has the power to help, hinder, harm, and even create happiness.

What I’m starting to give up on could kind-of be labeled worry, it could also kind-of be labeled caring, and yet neither of those sound right… What I mean is I’m giving up on worrying about or caring when other people have bad energy. Bad energy is like a blanket label too… energy that is upsetting them, upsetting others, energy that is just plain not uplifting or helpful to anyone. How do I give up on caring or worrying what they are doing, EVEN IF their energy affects me? I have to consciously acknowledge that I can’t control how people want to feel or act. If they want to do something like, blaming others for how they feel, I have to look at my part or lack of part, and see they are choosing the way they feel.

My finally accepting the need to give up is also realizing that when I worry or care about somebody doing their negative energy thing, I am putting myself in their negative energy. It’s like watching somebody paint themselves in black paint, and then letting them come rub their black paint all over me and my favorite hoodie. Why would I let them do that? They can ruin their favorite hoodie, I can’t stop them, but I CAN stop them from putting black paint on mine!

Someone insisting on having bad energy can totally affect us if we don’t consciously acknowledge we want to keep our energy in a good place, remaining happy. I for one have learned how great happy is, and I know it only comes with positive energy. So, BAM! I’m giving up!

One of my Dearhearts shared an article with me, in it is a concept I really like the idea of. I’m going to start envisioning this, and maybe I can meditate it into existence.

Bubble Technique

The most basic technique for protecting oneself energetically is to simply imagine yourself inside a ball of white light that turns away any energy before it can touch you. When you visualize this ball of light around you, you want to make sure it appears opaque and solid in your mind’s eye. This bubble should extend about a foot above your head and at least 6 inches below your feet. It doesn’t have to be a perfect sphere; just make it fit around your body in whatever shape seems most comfortable or appropriate. You want to enforce the energy in the areas above and below to be just as strong as the areas in front and behind you. Rest assured that even after you come out of your concentrated state, this bubble will move with you without hindrance. Any vibrations that touch it will simply pass over and around your shield like the wind moving around a mountain. In the rare circumstance that your shield comes up against someone else’s, it will bend to compensate, but not break, much like two balloons pressing together. You need to hold the image of an impenetrable force field in your mind for at least a good solid minute or two, before returning to your everyday life. 
From this link: http://beforeitsnews.com/celebrities/2014/05/basic-psychic-protection-techniques-2-2461994.html?utm_term=http%3A%2F%2Fb4in.info%2FeXH8&utm_medium=verticalresponse&utm_campaign=&utm_source=direct-b4in.info&utm_content=beforeit39snews-verticalresponse

Ya, some of these ideas I’m sharing as of late sound so hurdy-gurdy, hippy-fied, or just plain silly, but what I’m realizing, is that if I stop trying to label everything as strange or weird, and I look at it as something that is sensible, even if not totally tangible, I only benefit from its concepts. (It, being anything that I’ve labeled as too strange in the past.)

What others do with their negative energy should not harm you, in fact it should only teach you… Teach you by being a really good bad example -of what you don’t want.